Write From Your Own Experience

When you write memoir you can only directly describe your own thoughts and sensations. If you are writing a scene that includes others, you are limited to writing what you can observe or what they tell you.

For example, it’s entirely appropriate to write “The air was precisely skin temperature, and I was tempted to run naked to celebrate the return of summer, but I was afraid old man Jones would peak through a knothole in the fence, and I didn’t want to be sullied by his eyes.”

You can write that about yourself, because you know your own thoughts. You can’t tell us that Janna was tempted to run naked unless Janna told you that herself. In that case, dialog would be a good way to put those words in her mouth. Let her tell her part of the story herself. For example,

“What a glorious day!” I said, raising my arms to the sun and raising my face.

“Oh yes! It’s perfect!” she agreed. “The air feels like it isn’t even there. I’m tempted to peel off my clothes and run naked, but I’d die if old man Jones looked through that knothole.” She looked around warily. “I’ll bet he does when he hears us out here. I don’t want that old lech looking at me even with my clothes on!”

There are other ways you can maintain the integrity of your story if you don’t have first hand knowledge of someone else’s experience or thoughts. For example, in her memoir, Sixtyfive Roses: A Sister's Memoir, Heather Summerhayes Cariou writes about a home visit the doctor made to her sister: “He took Pam’s temperature. Gently, he folded back her nightie, slowly moving his stethoscope over her emaciated chest and across her bony white back. I wondered if it felt cold.”

Heather tells us what she saw the doctor do, then she tells us what she didn’t know. That’s powerful. She maintains her credibility. We don’t actually know. If it had been in the doctor’s pocket, maybe it wasn’t. Heather wondered, and so do we.

In other circumstances, you can speculate, “He must have felt like he’d just walked on water.” Or you can substitute your reaction, for example, “If I’d been in her shoes, I would have screamed bloody murder. It just didn’t seem fair.”

Remember, this is your story. Tell it like you saw it, felt it, heard it, smelled or thought about it. Always keep your supporting cast inside your own vision and head.

Write now: write a scene involving someone else who had an opinion, reacted to a situation, or otherwise had something to say. Use dialog or your own observations to convey that person’s experience.

Draconian Measures

Turn off the Internet. Unsubscribe from all your mailing lists (well, okay, you can keep the one or two most meaningful). Close your e-mail window and only check e-mail once or twice a day.

These draconian measures appeared on a list of advice for writers who were having trouble getting to their writing.

Are you one of those people? Have you ever kept meaning to sit down and write and then realized that days or weeks had gone by without having touched paper or opened your story file? And it seemed like just yesterday that you ...

If you haven’t had that problem, please get in touch with me and tell me how you do it. You are probably a professional writer who makes a living by tapping on your keyboard and have deadlines to meet.

Most life writers and memoirists are not in that situation. Neither is this blogger. It’s not that I haven’t been writing. Indeed, I’ve written dozens of e-mails, many dozens. I’ve written program descriptions and course materials and written Morning Pages nearly every day. I’ve written meeting minutes.

But alas! My blog and my memoir-in-progress are sadly behind schedule.

So what’s a person to do? What if you’ve been to your last two writing group sessions empty-handed, vowing to have something to read by the next one and that’s tomorrow? The advice at the top of this column is a good place to start. Those seductive web links are one of the most potent time traps ever devised. (Of course you should always click on any link to this blog!)

Another thing that helps me refocus when I’m overwhelmed or blocked is to take some time — a couple of hours or a day — and clean my office. Maybe I need to take a couple of days and clean the whole house. I simply cannot think clearly when I’m surrounded by an abundance of clutter. Clutter tolerance is a very personal thing. Mine is low. That does not mean I’m a tidy, orderly person. Au contraire. But I do need to stop and deal with it now and then.

But bottom line is that when we get behind, when we miss self-imposed deadlines, we need to get back in our chair and get our fingers moving, ASAP. Write something, anything, just write. Now. And refocus on why you are writing in the first place. The important things in our lives always get done, so remind yourself why writing is important.

Write now: a journal entry or story about why your writing matters — you to, and or to others.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I’m proud to have Irish ancestry on my mother’s side of the family. One branch left as recently as the Potato Famine, the other left earlier. I know quite a lot about the more recent immigrants. They were coal miners, arriving first in Braidwood, Illinois then moving down to New Mexico where the family dug in.

Maybe it’s that Irish blood in my veins, or maybe not, but Celtic music is among my favorite, and I feel most at home on earth in summer, surrounded by green. Perhaps those roots explain the dreamer part of me.

Three years ago my husband and I spent ten glorious days rambling wild Irish roads in the southwest corner of the Emerald Isle. For reasons of economy we reserved a subcompact car, with a trunk so small that it wouldn’t hold both suitcases and carry-on luggage, and the choice was serendipitous. Many of those roads are paved over cart paths, with lanes only inches wider than that mini-car and stone walls tight beside. Hubby is a veteran left side driver, but our nerves were taut as the natives careened along at twice our pace.

I was able to verify that Ireland really is as green as the pictures, and unexpectedly sprinkled with jewels. Especially in older parts of towns, houses are vividly painted in all colors of the rainbow, perhaps to offset the frequent grayness of the sky that provides the mists and rains to keep the isle emerald. I couldn’t tangibly verify the spirits that lent mystique to the misty Cliffs of Moher, but I felt their presence before hearing the legends.

It was a long way, but we did get to Tipperary, and we kissed the Blarney stone to boot. We stayed in the countryside rather than exploring cities. We saw sheep, sheep and more sheep, and almost as many ancient ruins of castles, churches and cottages. Some were old when Columbus sailed. We got tipsy on mead and ate with knives and fingers at a medieval banquet in Bunratty Castle. We saw seashore, rivers, and plants with leaves that made me feel leprechaun-sized. We discovered that Ireland has mountains! We visited a couple of “living museums” with villages and farms demonstrating the old ways, making it easier to envision the Spartan conditions my ancestors lived in.

We visited a famine museum that explained why they left. From the exhibits I learned that before the famine, the average male Irish peasant ate eleven pounds of potatoes per day. The women ate eight. They had a few wild berries, greens and fruit in season, and some buttermilk now and then, but their primary diet was potatoes. Historical studies show that those potato fed people were stronger, taller and healthier than their counterparts on the Continent who primarily ate wheat in the form of bread and gruel. Imagine that! My respect for the potato soared.

Yes, especially now that I’ve visited my Irish homeland, I’m proud to be at least part Irish, and drink a toast to St. Paddy.

Write now: about your roots. Where did your ancestors come from? Has your ethnic background influenced your life in any significant way? Did your family observe ethnic traditions? Do you continue to keep those?

Copyright, by Me

Nearly every time I speak to a group or teach a class, someone asks about copyright:

“Aren’t you afraid that someone will steal your ideas or posts and use them somewhere else?”

“How do you protect your work so nobody can copy it?”

“If I read someone else’s story and subconsciously copy something they said, can I be sued?”

“If I want to include something someone else said, how much can I use without violating copyright?”

Like all authors, I put a lot of work into what I write, whether that’s a blog post, a book chapter, a program description or handout, or an e-mail. I freely admit that I’m influenced by the work of other writers, and I often write on topics I’ve recently read about. However, I don’t write about anything until I’ve mulled it over enough to develop my own thoughts and opinions and can honestly say that what I write is my unique perspective because that’s how I learn and grow. And, it keeps me out of court.

That gently modified perspective is what sets my work apart from the work I read earlier. I’ve taken a concept and given it a slightly different twist, as the person who inspired me did in her turn. We are each part of a chain of literary and philosophical evolution. At the risk of sounding like I’m inviting people to snag my work and repost it, which I most certainly am not, I will say that I don’t put anything on the Internet that I’m deeply attached to.

Please respect the work of any author and use it to develop your own message. Write about the topic your way and add your voice to the choir. But don’t copy my work or anyone else’s verbatim, especially without giving us credit. That’s both illegal and unethical.

Anything anyone writes, even a note on a napkin, is copyright by virtue of having been written. Many of us include a copyright notice on our stories and other work when we distribute it publicly. That is as simple as placing a line at the end or some other suitable place saying copyright, (current year) by (Your Name). Or you can use the copyright symbol to replace the word: © 2009, Sharon Lippincott.

For the greatest legal protection, register your copyright. You can do this online. The fee is currently $25 per item, so I reserve this for the most important documents, like book manuscripts.

The chances of subconsciously recreating the words of another author closely enough to put yourself at risk are slim. If you have questions or doubts, reread the original, and change yours if need be.

If you want to quote someone, you can use short excerpts without permission, according to Fair Usage laws. But anytime you quote the work of others, directly or indirectly, you should credit the author. Ditto on graphics. Don’t swipe graphics from a website to slap onto your own. Graphics are covered b the same copyright law as text. Noting in print today will be in the public domain within our lifetimes. If you ask permission, you’ll often get it, and sites like Flickr have photos available for your use under what’s called a Creative Commons license, which generally stipulates that you are free to use the photo as long as you cite the source.

If you have further questions about copyright, check these links:

A brief intro to copyright
Ten Big Myths about copyright explained
United States Copyright Office
Some Observations on Copyright Law

Bottom line: Keep your eyes on your own monitor and don’t copy the work of your neighbors. Stealing stories is bad form and bad karma.

Right now: a short essay an your thoughts about copying. Did you copy on tests in school? Did you ever turn someone in? How do you understand the difference between inspiration, adaptation, and stealing?

Growing Up in the Texas Panhandle

Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat (or so I’ve been told — I’ve never met anyone who claims to have skinned one), there is more than one way to kill a chicken. This is but one of the many fascinating pieces of trivia that I learned from reading the memoir, Growing Up in the Texas Panhandle by Pat Flathouse, who also writes Pat’s Place, a Blogspot blog. Pat describes the way her grandmother wrung chickens' necks. This added a third alternative to the two decapitation methods I knew from my family.

Many other tender memories are included in this collection of stories intended primarily for Pat’s family about the years she spent growing up in Pampa and Amarillo. She tells of roller skating on uneven sidewalks, walking alone to the grocery store when she was only seven or eight, and the family’s electric train project. We read of family vacations all over the west, and visits to grandparents in Amherst. We follow her progress from grade school through junior high and high school. She tells of her early jobs and earning money.

Most women who grew up in the fifties will relate to Pat’s stories of making craft items with her mother, playing tag, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians and spending long summer afternoons at the swimming pool with friends. We’ll remember learning to drive and old clunky first cars.

Stories that introduce her parents and grandparents lend depth and richness to their names, breathing life into what may otherwise become just names on the family tree. Pictures of family members are interspersed with pictures of significant buildings and items all through the text to make it easy to visualize her stories as you read.

Pat had a double challenge with this book. First she wrote the stories, then she compiled them and did the layout and formatting to prepare it for publication on Lulu.com, which she used to self-publish it. Switching to a non-standard page size, inserting all the photos, and ensuring all the header formatting and other layout elements were consistent throughout was a new challenge for her, and she came through with flying colors. The book looks professional from the front cover that sports a picture of young Pat on her tricycle to the back.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this compact collection of stories about what seems to be a relatively happy and ordinary girlhood. It’s a great example of how fine story telling can make the ordinary seem extraordinary and fascinating. It’s also a great example of someone using Lulu to generate personal books of stories for family members in a way that also makes them available to friends, distant family members, and interested strangers. Bravo Pat!

Write now: gather a selection of your stories, string them together and try your hand at creating a POD volume of your stories using Lulu or CreateSpace.

Hitting the Bullseye

For most of my life I’ve thought of my father as a background person in my life. He was always around, eating dinner with the family every night, taking us on picnic and camping trips, and occasionally directing my sister and me to clean up the kitchen on nights my mother may not have bothered. He was handy to have around for help on math homework in high school.

But he was not much of a conversationalist, and much of our interaction took place through the filter of my mother. For example, she would tell me, “Your father doesn’t like thus and such,” or “Your father thinks you should do this or that.”

As I wrote The Albuquerque Years, I recalled all sort of things I did with my daddy as a very young girl. I “helped” him irrigate and tend the garden. I watched as he killed chickens for Sunday dinner. I rode in the basket of his bicycle to get fruit from the stand up the road. I rode on his shoulders. I learned how to take pictures. I tricked him with a fake yoyo on April Fool’s Day. I regretted that these memories of direct involvement seemed to taper off as I grew older.

A few minutes ago I began skimming a free pdf version of Paulo Coelho’s book The Way of the Bow that I downloaded from his website. As I read the description on page nine of Tetsuya stringing his bow, I recalled the long-forgotten yellow bows and arrows my father gave my sister and me when I was nine or ten. I don’t remember the occasion, but I do remember spending hours and hours over a period of years trying to perfect my aim.

With that memory dozens more came pouring forth, and suddenly I’m suffused with the most delightful realization that although he may not have shown it openly, he always loved me more than I would have imagined. I never doubted that — I was just not fully aware of the extent of it. This memory hit a bullseye in my heart! I’m simply aglow with gratitude and joy.

I doubt I ever would have stumbled across this discovery if I hadn’t spent so much time writing and thinking deeply about various memories. Individual stories were a good way to start this process, and I’m finding that going on to the next step of integrating those vignettes into a more comprehensive overview is deepening the results and insights.

When I first began what I now recognize as the practice of life writing, I had no idea that it would be come a lifelong pursuit. I thought I could just write a few stories — maybe even one hundred — and be done with it. I can no longer count the number of stories I've written, but the last time I did, the total exceeded seven hundred, and I've just begun to write. Now I realize that the longer I stick with it, the deeper I write and see, and the happier and more peaceful I feel. The positive effects reach every corner of my life, and I can’t imagine not spending time at least several days a week on this ongoing exploration.

Write now: make a list of memories of happy times spent with a special person in your life. Use this to write a paragraph or two or longer story about each memory, or as journal prompts.

Digging for Gold

I didn’t intend to go so long between blog posts, but life happened. I’m writing this on the plane on the way home from a week-and-a-half of emergency Granny Duty in Austin, helping our daughter tend her tots after a serious knee injury, while her husband was out of town.

Chasing up and down endless flights of stairs after an 18-month old streak of greased lightening and her 3½ year old big sister is enough to fill nearly every minute, but I did manage to squeeze in some precious family history research time in Austin’s magnificent history centers and archives, and in my last hours there, I hit a vein of pure gold.

I’m blessed with a number of colorful ancestors, but the story of my mother’s mother’s mother Tilly has especially caught my fancy. Two months before she turned sixteen, Tilly married Robert Roberts, a thirty-nine-year-old widower with two young children. She bore him five more children before he died ten years later at the age of 49. Four years after that, she married my great-grandfather and her life underwent a radical change, sadly not one for the better.

In the past I’ve left the research on such matters to the team of cousins who have been doing genealogy research for decades. They have documented most aspects of her life with my great-grandfather. This time it was my turn. We’ve always known that Robert was the son of Texas Governor Oran Roberts, but we didn’t know much about that family, or about Tilly’s life during her years as part of the Roberts family.

I began by reading up on the Gov, finding him to be a remarkable man who instituted a “pay as you go” policy in Texas, restoring (or perhaps establishing) fiscal responsibility. He was instrumental in founding the University of Texas and vastly improved the state of education at all levels throughout Texas. When his terms were over, he founded the Law School at UT, and for ten years he served as one of the initial two Law profs there.

It’s easy to find out about the Governor, but his son Robert has always remained obscure. For decades the only information anyone could get was derived from his absence from the Austin City Directories and a couple of obscure news clippings that turned up in online searches.

This time I began searching indexes to find the record of a property transfer a cousin mentioned in an email. To my amazement, I learned that Robert was an active real estate trader. He bought and sold dozens of parcels, and he did it as R.P. Roberts and wife. As recently as the 1960s a married woman in Texas didn’t even own the clothes on her back, so the fact that he included his spouse, who was not yet legally an adult, is truly amazing.

I was not able to retrieve all the property transfer documents. That will have to wait for another trip. But I am totally hooked on this new level of mystery and piecing together her history from these obscure tidbits of information.

As I ponder the clues, I can’t help but think how thrilling it would be if she had left behind a journal, a collection of letters ― anything to give insight into the nature of her life and thoughts. It wouldn’t even need to be a polished story. Anything at all would be treasured by all of us. Please use this account of my search to encourage your family members to join you in creating a legacy of life history for your family.

Write now: jot down the facts you know about one of your favorite ancestors and make plans to acquire more information so you can write about this person before every information source is erased by the tides of time.