Introducing Gretchen, My Inner Censor and Critic

It’s been nearly two years since my Muse, Sarabelle, introduced herself to me. Those of you who have read my occasional reports of Sarabelle’s influence know that she tends to be a bit feisty at times.

This morning as I sat musing about some seldom visited memories from long ago, Sarabelle tapped me on the shoulder and delivered some surprising news: She is only one of the entities on my Inner Writing Team. In short order she introduced me to Gretchen, my Inner Censor/Critic, and Betty, my Inner Editor. Then, as suddenly as she appeared, Sarabelle vanished, leaving me to my own devices to get acquainted with her colleagues.

With a bit of trepidation sparked by her forbidding appearance, I choose to begin with Gretchen. I’m immediately transported to the hallway of a prison, in front of iron bars across gray cells. The cells are surprisingly bright, lit by a small barred window, high on the wall. Despite the light, there is no color in this scene.

Gretchen stands before me, a study in black and white herself. Her austere black leather outfit and knee-high boots match her stick-straight, raven tresses, in sharp contrast to her pale complexion. Her eccentric outfit bares her right shoulder for ease of motion as she keeps unwanted memories and stories at bay. Measuring no more than five feet in height, and wiry in build, she’s surprisingly small for someone who appears so menacing. She stands facing me, silent and staring, with arms tightly crossed, black whip clenched in one hand, and a huge ring of keys on her other wrist. She is not the sort of person I generally care to deal with, but I must get acquainted. The significance of her sudden appearance is immediately apparent.

“Gretchen, I’m pleased that we are finally meeting. I appreciate all the fine work you’ve done over the years guarding my darker memories. Now I need your assistance in visiting them.”

“That is forbidden!” she barks in reply. “They are locked in here for good reason. They will make you unhappy and hurt you. They can hurt other people. It’s for your own good that I do this!” Her earnest fierceness is almost comical in its intensity.

“I understand. I have no intention of opening the gates and letting these monsters run amok, but I need to talk with them to gain some important insights. I’ve been getting appeal requests from several and need to evaluate their cases.”

She responds with a long string of admonitions warning me of dire consequences, questioning my motives, my judgment, even my writing skills, and generally tries to scare me off. My resolve begins to weaken, but then I recall why I’m here. Those memories are part of me, and I’m determined to know them better, liberating the ones that can be absolved. Many have served their sentences and are due for release. Others may have gotten a bum rap to begin with. I realize that reason will not work. I’ll have to pull rank to get past her.

“Thank you Gretchen. No one can fault you for lack of dedication. Here is a list of four memories I wish to visit today. Please bring them to me in my study. I’ll expect them to arrive in five minutes. That will be all.” With that, I return to my study, settling into a comfortable chair with a cup of fresh coffee and a pad of paper, ready to proceed with the interviews.

Right now I have my work cut out for me dealing with those old memories. I’ll find Betty some other time.
Write now: about your muse, Inner Censor, or Inner Editor. Do these entities have names? What do they look like? How do they act? What do they say when you talk to them? If you’ve never had a conversation with any of then, do some writing practice in dialog form and see what emerges. You are bound to be as surprised as I was at what emerges.

Writers Must Read

Writers must read.

Writers must also study what they read. Few writing workshops can surpass the value of careful perusal of the work of other writers. This is true whether the writers have received the Pulitzer prize or deserve to be pulled from the shelves of their own local library. I can learn as much from poor writing as excellence.

For several decades of my life, way beyond academia, I read with a highlighter and pen in hand. I highlighted key points and made interpretive notes in margins. As far as I was concerned, books were designed with margins so I could write in them, and my annotations contributed to my mastery of their content.

In the last many years, I abandoned that habit, for two primary reasons. One is that I turned largely to libraries to supply my reading material. Beyond the obvious economy of this move, my shelves are full. I’ve reached the point where “no net increase in acquisitions” has become mandatory. If I buy a new book, I must donate an old one. Who wants to buy a book that’s been marked up? And who wants to donate a book with personal thoughts inscribed in the margins, no matter how neatly?

Another reason for my recent laxity is a fear that if I pay too much close attention to what others write, I could inadvertently stumble into plagiarism. My belief along these lines has been that I can read things and think about them, but if I focus too intensely, my thoughts will cease to be my own.

Not long ago a light went on. I realized that I’ve been throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I’m missing a lot by leaving my books in their virgin state! Part of the credit for this conclusion rightfully belongs to Jerry Waxler, author of Memory Writers Network. Jerry posts some phenomenal analyses of memoirs. He has never stated that he marks up books, but I know he buys a lot, and I can’t believe he can come to the deep conclusions he reports without careful study and ... writing on the pages.

Jerry is not the only one who inspired me. I’d already made this decision when it was reinforced by QuoinMonkey in her most recent post on the red Ravine blog about the value of reading.

I’ve made a fresh vow: I shall start writing in books again. However, I do need to qualify this statement: I still believe in the “greenness” of libraries, and I’m not about to buy more bookshelves. I’ll still rely on public libraries, but I will read with paper under the pen at hand and make a lot of notes. I may photocopy key pages — that’s legal if the intent is personal study. And, I’ll alter my beliefs about people purchasing marked up books. I’ll autograph my scribblings and adopt the philosophy that my annotations add value to future readers.

Basically, I’m going to do more than read. I’m going to return to my earlier habit of studying the books I read, with the occasional exception of novels read purely for escape and pleasure. I challenge you to do the same. It's guaranteed to add punch and vigor to your writing, and you are bound to find new inspiration and ideas.

Write now: about a book that’s been especially significant to you. Read a new book and underline key phrases. Write your own inspirations in the margins. If it’s a library book, keep a journal of your thoughts as you read.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Great Pelican Rescue Adventure, Part 2

In the last post I wrote about the “Great Pelican Rescue Adventure” and the advantages of sharing stories like that in an e-mail or other written form to get them recorded while the detail is fresh in your memory and passion still high.

Using e-mail to record stories is especially effective, because you'll probably write in your most natural voice that way, and you can immediately share your work with family and friends. I strongly suggest you save the story in some other format rather than leaving it solely as an e-mail. E-mail is probably the most fragile or volatile form of digital information storage I know of. I've lost large chunks of e-mail at various times, but never lost a word processing file. Some of the e-mails have been lost when changing from one e-mail management form to other. Through the years I've used Industry Net, Juno, AOL, Adelphia, Comcast, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and a few others. It's not easy, and sometimes impossible, to go back and find old e-mails, especially with the online varieties.

If you write in an e-mail program, copy the story text and paste it into a Word document for long-term storage. Eventually you may want to remove the formatting that e-mail programs often add. I sometimes stumble into story writing mode without intending to, but if I plan to write a story as part of an email, I'll start in OpenOffice (my preferred free, open source, Microsoft Alternative), then paste the story into the e-mail.

Once you have your story saved, you can let it sit for days or ages to mellow before you do anything else with it, if indeed you ever do. Eventually you may think of other ways to use the material in other stories. For example, I may use my pelican story as an element in a larger account of contact with wild life in general. I may link it to memories of the chickens we raised when I was very young, and duck and geese that hunting neighbors used to share. I could use it in an essay about the perils mankind poses to wild critters, or I could go off on a tangent about the spiritual nature of encounters with wild animals. Most likely it will simply fit into a comprehensive account of the Everglades Elderhostel we were attending when this adventure took place.

As you can see, the opportunities for expanding stories and putting bits and pieces of them to other uses are limited only by your imagination. You can string stories together like beads on a necklace, nest them, or segue one into another. For more information about these various methods of combining stories, see an earlier post, “Like Beads on a Necklace.” You'll also find a more complete explanation in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing.

Write now: think of a lively story or story idea of your own. Make a list of all the various associations you can think of that relate to that story. Select at least two others and incorporate them, together with your original story idea, into a more comprehensive account.

The Great Pelican Rescue, Part 1

Have you ever had something happen that is so exciting you can't help telling everyone you see about it? These are events that deserve to be memorialized in story form. You may eventually want to embellish the written account with metaphor, dialog or other literary devices, but the most compelling account may be the one you spontaneously dash off at the first opportunity, without any editing. In fact, an e-mail account can serve nicely, at least as a first draft, to the memorialize such an event.

Last week I had such an experience during an Elderhostel about and in the Everglades, and this is the account I sent:

I'm so excited — we helped rescue a pelican that had a large fishing plug stuck in the tendon along the front of its upper right wing. We were walking along the boat slips behind the hotel, and a fellow was casting bait in the water. A pelican was lurking around, eyeing the bait. As we took pictures, we noticed something in its wing that we thought was a wildlife marker. The fisherman explained that it was a plug, and that he was trying to catch the pelican so he could get the plug out. Unfortunately grabbing it with bare hands hadn't worked, so he was switching to a hook baited with eight ounces of raw fish. Of course we hung around to watch, along with another couple from our group.

The pelican swooped down and bit at the bait he was teasing it with, but the hook didn't stick. Just then a ten-foot alligator glided over under the water. The second time the pelican swooped for the bait, the alligator leapt out of the water, with jaws wide open. The pelican took off, evading the alligator's snapping jaw by a couple of feet. That gator had its whole head out of the water — about three feet.

The gator disappeared, and the fisherman kept toying around with his bait (a large hunk of fish, not at all subtle). Finally the pelican got brave and swooped back in. This time it worked. He was hooked. The fisherman reeled him in like a huge fish, reaching down to grab him by the head to pull him up out of the water. The pelican was scared silly and flapping all over. The fisherman held the beak shut and covered the pelican's eyes. That's when we sprang into action. We each held a wing tight while the fisherman tried to work the hooks loose. Two large hooks were caught in the front area of the upper wing. They were really stuck. He couldn't get the job done with one hand, so another Elderhosteler held the beak and eyes so the fisherman could finish the job. He said he's worked on bird rescue for a long time, even handling bald eagles. If he didn't get the plug out, it would get infected and the bird would die. He finally did work it out.

Then he took the bird again. He folded the head in close to the body and held the wings tight, then tossed it into the air toward the water. The bird took off, but didn't go further than the dock about fifty feet away. It was joined there by another pelican that seemed to be its mate. They stood there longer than we did, basking in the sun. I'm sure that bird was happy to have that nasty thing out of its wing.

What excitement! Seeing that gator jump for the pelican, and then getting to actually hold a wild pelican. Nobody ever gets to do that!

I may eventually rewrite this story, incorporate it in a larger account of the trip or some other piece, or expand on it in a personal essay, but if that never happens, at least I have this much. I'll write more about this in my next post.

Write now: about some exciting event that recently happened to you. It doesn't have to be high adventure involving wildlife or wild life. It may be as quiet as seeing the first daffodil pushing its head above the frozen ground, bringing hope and joy after a difficult and depressing winter. The important thing is that it had meaning to you, and was something you felt like telling people about.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The City That Glows in the Dark

Ties to places can be surprisingly strong. Although this wasn't news to me, my understanding of this fact was recently deepened. At one point during a program I attended, the speaker got into a short interchange with an audience member about the evils of Los Alamos, New Mexico. “... glows in the dark ... all those toxins ... total denial ... doesn't it just make you shudder?”

It certainly made me shudder, but not for the reasons they were discussing. My family moved to Los Alamos the day I turned seven. I left when I went to college, and my parents moved elsewhere within five years. Over the past forty some years, I have been back only four times, and briefly at that, but Northern New Mexico in general and Los Alamos in particular will always be “home” to me.

Although I've always felt a special attachment for Los Alamos, I had not realized how deep it ran. As they rained invectives on a place so dear to my heart, images of golden aspen groves dotting the panorama of the Jemez mountains rising above the town floated through my mind. I could hear the wind whisper through pine boughs, smell sun-warmed, vanilla-scented pine resin, and taste the slightly acrid tang of pine gum. I thought of riding my bicycle out to the next mesa for a picnic with my sister, or hiking alone through the canyon behind our house. That canyon was my favorite spot for introspection and licking wounds.

How could I explain to them that although I understand their horror about decisions made by people there, and although I might be one of the activists pressing for accountability and responsibility if I still lived there, the place itself is an innocent victim of mankind's sometimes misguided efforts to protect our nation and the human race?

I was momentarily stunned, at a complete loss for words to defend this place I love so dearly. I sat in horrified silence feeling as if they were desecrating the temple of my youth. I knew better than to take their words personally. It seemed preferable to let the moment pass than to prolong it.

Regardless of what others may believe or say, Los Alamos will always remain a place sacred to my youth; a place where I was safe and free to roam at will, exploring the wonders of nature, dreaming dreams and hoping hopes. There were many other aspects of growing up there that were truly special, and I often written of them in family history stories for my descendants.

Perhaps it took this shocking experience to fully focus the extent of my fervor and connection with this unique place where I came of age. Now my challenge is to find a way to pay tribute to the soil that nurtures my roots.

Write now: about a place that has been especially influential and special to you. What does (or did) it feel like to be there Describe the sights, sounds, tastes, scents and other aspects of the place. What happened there to make it special to you? Do you return there often?

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The End of the Beginning

Today I had the strongest sense of the end of a beginning. While I was in Austin for the Story Circle Network conference, I also got to spend some time with my youngest grandchild and her big sister. Anna is still a baby, cuddly sweet and always smiling. I swear, this baby smiles even when she's crying. She is so amazingly happy!

As I held her extra tight this morning, for one last time, breathing deeply of her sweetness, I realized this is probably the last time I will see her while she is an infant. Next time she's likely to be toddling around, trying to keep up with everyone and everything, with little interest in snuggling against Grannie's shoulder.

But this wasn't about the end of Anna's infancy. This is about the end of the Grandbaby era. One can never be sure, but I suspect our quota of grandchildren has been amply filled. In truth, each time I see any given one of them, I enjoy them a little more, and it's exciting to notice the way their minds and personalities are unfolding like beautiful flowers.

And yet, as I held Anna, although the context of the song and my situation were quite different, I heard a snippet of Roger Whittaker's song, The First Hello The Last Goodbye, “...the end of the beginning is the beginning of the end.” This was such a poignant moment, one to be much savored, and commemorated in writing.

Write now: about a sense of impending endings. Have you ever said a last goodbye to someone you know you'll never see again? How did you feel when your last child began school, or your nest was empty?

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Inspiration in Numbers

Writing groups and writing buddies are among the most powerful incentives to keep writing and to find inspiration for new stories. I've belonged to many writing groups over the last dozen years, some short-lived, and others have endured for years. I've never left a group meeting without inspiration for dozens of stories, and a warm satisfied feeling from listening to the stories other members read, and some of my dearest friends have come from writing circles.

Right now I'm attending the Story Circle Network Conference in Austin, and finding a tremendous inspiration and guidance from the presenters in the sessions, and from talking to other members who are writing their own stories. Not surprisingly, each approaches writing in her own way. Some are just beginning, and experimenting with various forms and types of topics. Others have been writing for years. Some write daily, others when they have a Story Circle (writing group) meeting, and a few are feeling stalled out, hoping to find energy and inspiration from the conference to help move them forward.

Perhaps our greatest inspiration will prove to be the moving message from Nancy Aronie tonight as she encouraged us to get in touch with our sorrows, and the way we "see life through the prism of our wounds." This sort of deepened insight will empower us to become alchemists, spinning our sorrows (she uses a different "s" word in speaking) into gold, on paper and in the way we experience life.

Susan Albert's session on the importance of emphasizing place in our stories was a powerful nudge to me to explore this aspect more deeply in my own writing. Who knows what additional riches await in the rest of the sessions?

If you want further information on finding or starting a writer's group in your area, check The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. If you want to attend an inspiring conference, do an Internet search for writer's conferences. There are dozens of them every month, in all price ranges, all over the country.

Write now: about the power groups have had in your life, about pain and sorrow, or about transcending pain and grief to create gold in your life.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Writing groups are powerful, and writing conferences even more so.