Writing Resolutions

Happy New Year, one and all. It’s hard to believe this century is settling in so fast. I recently realized that when I hear the term “last century,” I now think of the 1900s rather than the 1800s. That means the collective memory I’ve acquired from my family (things I know of great-grandparents and their adventures), together with my personal memories, spans three centuries. That gives me a lot to write about!

Speaking of writing, I hope that sometime today or tomorrow, you’ll have a few quiet moments to join me, at least in spirit, with a pad of paper, your favorite pen, and maybe a cuppa whatever to jot down some writing resolutions for 2007.

I managed to squeak under the wire on one of my 2006 resolutions: the manuscript for The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing is ready to go to the printer on Tuesday for galley proofs. Talk about cutting it close! That’s the power of a resolution, backed up by a deadline of commitments. No formal release date has been set for the final copies, but I’ll keep you posted.

One of my resolutions for 2007 is to fully participate in the Story Circle Network. I’ve been receiving the monthly Story Circle e-mail newsletter for quite awhile and finally decided to join. I had no idea this would be such a thriving and active on-line writing community! I’m putting a link to the website on the blog here, so anyone can refer back.

Perhaps some of you out there would like to join me at the Story Circle sponsored LifeWriting Retreat at Round Rock, Texas, March 16-18. It’s led by Susan Albert, author of the acclaimed China Bayles mystery series among other things. I love mysteries, and China is one of my favorite characters, so I'm dying to hear Susan's writing secrets!

I’m including a resolution about getting stories and articles published this year — pursuit of publication is something I’ve let slide, and I want to get back to it.

You’ll surely resolve to do a certain amount of writing this coming year, perhaps by schedule, perhaps by numbers of completed stories. Now I’m encouraging you to “think off the paper” to find writing groups, workshops, books of writing tips, and anything else you can think of to lend sparkle and zest to your writing. Stick your list somewhere you’ll see it often so it will keep you on track. I think you’ll be delighted with the results.

Don’t forget, writing should always come first. None of the rest matters if you aren’t writing! Keep those fingers flying.

Here’s to stacks and piles of scintillating tales accumulated over the next 365 days.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Christmases Long, Long Ago

As I sat wrapping gifts this afternoon, I thought back through several decades to Christmases Long, Long Ago. When I was growing up we nearly always wrapped gifts on Mother’s bed. Don’t ask me why we used that unstable location — probably because their bedroom also served as the family room, with Mother’s sewing center and Daddy’s desk located in there.

Today I pulled out some ancient ribbon I’ve had stashed away for decades. Readers over fifty may remember the kind that had glossy fibers bonded to a duller base. In the olden days we formed our own bows from loops of this ribbon. We cut notches in the center, tied a thin ribbon tightly inside the loops, then pulled them out, alternating sides and twisting to create a full, puffy bow. These were far more elegant than the preformed plastic decorations in common use today.

I took pains with the wrapping, turning edges under to make crisp, straight seams, and folding the ends with origami precision. The finished packages are so lovely, it seems a shame that they’ll soon be ripped open.

Then I remembered the thrill of crouching beneath the tree, pondering each new gift that appeared, wondering what treasures it might hold. Unfortunately most were generally a disappointment when the day arrived. Wondering was the best part.

Thinking of the tree, I remembered various trees through the years, and the ritual of decorating them. First the lights were strung, then the various ornaments carefully placed. That involved lots of discussion to ensure that the colors and shapes were nicely distributed and balanced around the tree. Finally, we fastidiously placed silver icicles on each and every branch tip. It was a point of honor in our family to place no more than three strands at a time, spacing them carefully to give a uniform shimmering coat to the tree. “Some people just toss them on by the handful!” Mother disdainfully reminded us to reinforce the proper attitude in her young assistants.

Stockings, various candles, table adornments and wreaths followed the tree decorating. We even put up green fishnet draped along the staircase wall, decorated with shiny Christmas balls. Turning the front window into “stained glass” with poster paint powder mixed with soap flakes or something like that was great fun!

Today as I wrapped, this time on my kitchen table, the fragrance of Date Nut Loaf wafted from the oven, turning my thoughts to Christmas foods. We didn’t do cookies, we did candy.

Suddenly I thought of stories. I might have dropped everything to come to the computer and write, but I didn’t have to. I’ve already written these stories. How about you? Have you documented Christmas Long Ago for your family? If you don’t have time in the next few days, perhaps you can use the lovely glowing days after Christmas to do some writing.

Some of you may not celebrate Christmas, but you can’t help being impacted by it. How about some stories for your family about Hanukah or your holiday of tradition, and stories about your experiences as a non-participant in the major holiday of the year.

Have a blessed Christmas. I’m taking a break for a few days, but I'll be back soon.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

How Did You Handle It?

One of the blogs I keep track of is Soul Blessings, written by Tara, a self-described eclectic thinker. Her most recent post posed a puzzler. A friend is engaging in risky and rebellious behavior at work and reporting on it in detail to Tara. Tara is puzzling over her most honest and appropriate course of action. I’ll leave it to you to read the post and to make your own decision.

I include the link here because sooner or later everyone faces a similar dilemma. You may not have had to decide about ratting on Bill Clinton’s equivalent, but you may have known that someone is abusing public or corporate trust in other ways. Perhaps you knew a friend was cheating on a spouse. Perhaps you covered for someone.

Would you respond the same way again, or has your point of view changed with age? Stories of your experience with situations like this are self-instructive, and potentially a great way of conveying a value to others. These stories are also a powerful way of gaining insight and clearing the way for forgiveness and understanding.

Your situation may not involve ratting on behavior that’s specifically against the rules. You may have dealt with unfair treatment, or other distressing conditions. Perhaps you worked for the Boss From Hell, or worked with the Client From Hell, as I did at one point. I’ve written stacks and piles about that period, and added nearly as many afterward notes as original text. Rereading the stories always provokes new insights for me. I will not ever share these stories publicly.

Whether you share them or not, I urge you to write these.

The end of the year is an especially powerful time to write stories like this. For many of us, the last week in December is a time for reflection, self-assessment and planning. It’s a time of making resolutions of both physical and spiritual nature. Stories of conflict, with yourself as well as others, can be a powerful part of this process.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

All My Little Teapots

The other day a friend gave me a guided tour of her collection of teapots that fill several shelves in her dining room. This one was from China, and another was over a hundred years old. She found a fancy one with a rose pattern in an antique shop in London. An exquisite Belleek pot occupied a special place. As she showed me each one, she took it from the shelf and fondled it like a pet while she told how she came to have it.

“These teapots are like windows on your life. Each has quite a story to it. Have you written them down?” I finally asked.

“No. Now and then I think of it, but I just never seem to get around to it.” She paused. “I think one of the reasons I’ve delayed starting is not knowing how to go about it,” she finally admitted.

“Don’t try to do this all at once,” I cautioned her. “Just do one pot at a time. Pick any pot, put it on the table in front of you and sit down with a blank piece of paper and pen. Write a short note telling how you came to have this teapot. Did you buy it yourself? Where did you find it? What was the shop like? How did it catch your eye? What made it special? Was it a bargain or a splurge?”

She looked intrigued. “That doesn’t sound so hard. I think I could do that, but surely there’s more to it than that.”

“There doesn’t have to be. Just getting the place and price down would be valuable. But I can tell by the way you hold these pots that they each have special meaning for you; the more of this meaning you include in their stories, the more interesting the pots will be to future owners. Have you ever wondered what their lives were like before you found each other?”

She was nodding eagerly, so I went on to suggest that she include details of occasions when she used that specific teapot. What memories of friends were associated with each? Did one make tea taste different from another? What would make her chose any given pot on a particular day?

Beyond that was the matter of arranging the finished stories. She liked the idea of an album she planned to name “All My Little Teapots,” with a picture of one pot on each page, and the story of that pot pasted beside it with lovely scrapbooking paper to set it off. If the story was a long one, and a few would be, she would allow more pages in the album for it. She quickly realized that she’d need a rather large album, because she’d need to tell the stories of the friends and relatives who gave her the pots, and the trips she’d taken to find others.

“I’m so excited about this now! I can’t wait to get started!” From the far-away look in her eyes, I could tell that her muse was paying a get-acquainted visit, and I’d best get out of the way.

I can’t wait to read the stories she writes. Do you have a collection or few around your house? You can add value to the collection by recording its story, and just think what a great excuse it is to spend time with each item. Don’t let it gather another coat of dust before you set pen to paper.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Truth, Or Spoof? It's Your Call

Yesterday I wrote a story about the time decades ago that I first made tostadas for dinner and invited my parents to share the meal. To go with the tostadas, I made fresh salsa of home-grown tomatoes and jalapeño peppers grown from seedlings my father had started. The highlight of the story was my horror as I watched my father enthusiastically drench his dinner with this fiery sauce, and then react explosively. He hadn’t realized it was home-made!

As I reread the story, I realized that although it made me ravenously hungry for a tostada, the horror and reaction were confined to three or four sentences, and fundamentally, it was a lackluster piece of work. What could I do? Give it a snappier opening and closing!

My original opening was:

The second or third summer after my parents moved to Richland, my father grew jalapeño pepper plants from seed and gave us a few starter plants for our garden. Those plants thrived in the narrow bed along the back of the house where they had full sun every summer afternoon. By the time they were ripe, they were hot as a pistol.

I changed this to read:

I never guessed that the seedling jalapeño pepper plants my father gave us for our garden might prove to be the cause of his early demise. Those plants….

The original ending was:

…He managed to scrape off most of the spicy mixture, and we all enjoyed the new dish immensely.

The new one read:

…We all laughed. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I laughed with relief that my father had not succumbed to his own chili at my hand.

The new opening and closing are definitely snappier, and the writing group I shared the two versions with with heartily endorsed the second. There’s just one problem: the revision may be more esthetically pleasing, but — the ending isn’t entirely honest and true to my recollection. The first one is.

I use this story to illustrate a dilemma life story writers may face as we strive to become more creative and polished. We can polish the life and truth right out of the story. These are the times we need to bluntly ask ourselves, “Am I writing this story primarily to entertain people, or to tell it like it was?” The answer matters, and our readers will know the difference.

If the balance weighs in on the side of entertainment, then why let a few facts get in the way of a good story? Go for the gusto and laughs and polish up that ending. In fact, polishing it to an obvious spoof may be a desirable option. If you are telling things like they were, stick with the truth.

Truth, or spoof? It’s your call. Just be clear with yourself about which side of the fence you’re on.

You’ll know when it matters, to yourself and to the future, and you’ll always be true in those moments.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Lulu Solution

In the recent past, few people could afford to spend the money to have formally bound copies of their finished lifestory projects made for their families. If you did have them professionally printed and bound, you had to decide ahead of time how many copies you wanted, and that was the end of it.

With the advent of POD (Print On Demand) publishing, all of that has changed. You can order a single copy of a professionally printed and bound book, hard bound or paperback, for no more than you would pay off-the-shelf at a bookstore. But, let the buyer beware. Few of the POD publishers are well-suited for working with individuals. Most charge a minimum of $500 for setting a book up.

Enter Lulu.com. Without investing a single cent, you can order as many or as few copies as you wish of a professionally printed and bound 250 page paperback book, with your choice of cover design (they have templates to help you set one up) and several pages sizes, for a mere $7.53 (as of December 2006), plus shipping. Imagine — you can order a single copy, just one, of a book you wrote yourself! That’s about the same price as photocopying it yourself.

If there is a catch to all this, it would be the need to get all the formatting in order yourself. You do the proofreading; you do the editing, you do the layout. Most projects are simple enough that you can handle this yourself with your word processing program, especially if you have a copy of the soon-to-be-released The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, by yours truly. In the final chapter I give you step-by-step instructions for the layout process. You upload your finished file to the Lulu website where it’s converted to a PDF file (think Acrobat Reader) for printing.

For an additional fee, Lulu will provide layout and editing services if you want to pay for help. If you wish, Lulu will list your book on their website so other people can order copies. You set the cover price with any amount of markup you wish (or none at all), and Lulu keeps 20% of the additional amount as their sales commission. There is no charge to you for this listing service, though they do charge a modest fee to set up a link with Amazon.

Think of the benefits of this: you may want to purchase nineteen copies at your own expense to give to your children and a close friend or two, but you may not want to purchase fifty-seven copies to give away to your barber, members of your book club, or third cousin Herbie. When cousin Herbie asks for a copy, you can smile and say, “I’m sorry. I’m out of copies myself, but you can order one from Lulu,” and give him the URL.

There may be other sites that offer similar prices and services. I haven’t done an extensive search. Lulu is probably the most popular right now. Although Lighthouse Point Press, a traditional publisher, is publishing The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, I’m working on a couple of projects that will have limited distribution, and I will definitely use Lulu for those. In fact, I just might start creating unique books for unique people. Why not?

The prices mentioned above are for black-and-white content. It can include as many pictures as you wish, but if you want color, the price goes up. Some people want to do books that are primarily pictures, with some text. These will cost more, as you’d expect, but you can do them the same way. Kevin Kelly writes about several color POD publishers and the relative merits and charges of each on his blog. You might want to check it out.

It may be a bit late to have books printed for holiday gifts this season, but this is a great time to start thinking ahead to next year.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Connecting the Dots

When pressed to define the distinction between a journal entry and a life story, I reply that in general, journal entries are more spontaneous, often raw and undigested, reports of events and reactions. The journal entry is grapes straight from the vine, newly stomped into juice. Freshly pressed grape juice is a delight to the taste buds.

The life story, at its best, is also grape juice, but juice that has fermented, then aged in oaken barrels for long enough to fully develop and mellow. This grape juice takes on overtones of the aging barrel wood, the yeast that ferments it, and all sorts of other factors. This juice delights not only the taste buds, but the soul. (When consumed in moderation....)

Life events are similar. We react one way today, and perhaps quite another way in a year or five or twenty. Over time we come to see deeper meaning and connections between the stories in our lives, lending rich overtones of insight and wisdom as we tell and retell them.

This is why many “experts” recommend that you hold off writing stories until the material has fermented and mellowed into the heady wine of experience. I generally agree with this thinking, but I also realize that some of my best stories have been impromptu blurts shortly after the fact. Follow your own heart in this respect.

The other day I discovered that even though you may wait for years or decades to write a story that seems fully developed, it may mature even further after it’s lain aside on paper for a year or few. Several years ago I wrote a story about a day I spent helping my mother with some painting over twenty years earlier. A week ago I mentioned this story to a friend and a sudden mental strobe light nearly blinded me. I had never connected the topic of conversation early in the story with an outburst from my mother later in the day. I’d always been baffled by her tirade. Suddenly I saw that it was a direct, if delayed, reaction to something I’d said. Lots of dots suddenly connected into a complex picture. That was mind boggling!

I never ever would have made these connections if I hadn’t written the story in the first place.I wrote it somewhat randomly because I’d been thinking about the morning and wanted to write it down. Years later, that random story fell into place as a key piece in a larger puzzle. The work of thinking it through enough to write about it was critical in the process. My strong hunch is that in this case, the delay in initial writing was important, but this may not always be so.

Have you ever read something you wrote years ago and seen it quite differently in retrospect? Perhaps if you write some stories that you don’t quite understand today, they will fall into place for you as mine did for me, and it won’t matter if they are journal entries or life stories.

And here we have yet another reason to write our stories, sooner or later: to help us connect our own dots.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Birth of My Inner Censor

“Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy!” At sixteen months, our toddling granddaughter was thrilled with her new-found ability to mimic what she heard people around her saying. She was picking up several new words a day. “Where did she learn that?” her mother asked. Nobody remembered saying “Oh boy!” but it’s the sort of thing any of us might say without thinking about it, especially when we’re playing with an exuberant toddler. Wherever she heard it, there she stood, gleefully chanting her latest verbal acquisition.

I had an extra chuckle remembering an incident the previous day. Grandpa had used a slightly colorful word and been reminded that little ears were recording every word. He and I locked eyes across the room and broke out in huge grins. “You’re thinking of that movie, Meet the Fockers, right?” observed our daughter. Yes, we were. If you haven’t watched that movie, there’s a scene where the main character lets the BS epithet fly with gusto in front of a non-verbal baby. The baby surprised his caretaking grandparents with a colorful first word half an hour later….

That all spun me back to one of my own earliest memories. My grandparents took me home with them for a week or two after my baby sister was born, a few months before I was three. While I was there, I got frustrated at something and blurted out “Doggone it!” The result was totally unexpected, and in my opinion, totally unfair.

“Don’t you ever say that again! Little girls don’t talk that way!” scolded my grandmother, in the sternest tone I’d ever heard her use—in fact, it was probably the first time anyone had ever .

I was devastated and withdrew to the front porch to lick my wounds. I didn’t understand her reaction at all. In the first place, I didn’t know there were things you weren’t supposed to say. But even if there were, my daddy said that all the time, and I knew my daddy wouldn’t say anything bad. I learned my lesson instantly, and I was careful never to say that again, at least not when she was around. My Inner Censor was born that very day, fully clothed and capable of judging situations as well as vocabulary.

Over the years I’ve acquired a sizable vocabulary that my Inner Censor keeps a tight lid on. The X-list has changed from time to time. During some periods the Censor was lazier than others, and sometimes she’s been challenged almost to the limit when I’ve been around someone who routinely used crude language. My brain is still like wee Sarah’s, recording and savoring intense phrases, and straining at the synapses to repeat them! But my Censor has help from within. Before I was in high school I learned and continue to believe that it’s a much greater and more rewarding challenge to find a creatively colorful way of self-expression rather than simply repeating profane platitudes.

Sarah’s Inner Censor won’t emerge for well over a year, but we’ll continue to shelter her ears until then, and even beyond, and hopefully we’ll continue to be delighted at the unexpected phrases she does acquire.

What memories do you have of things children (your own or others) have learned? What about the birth and function of your own Inner Censor? What is your attitude toward profanity? Has it changed over the years?

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

New Permanent Links

Long time readers, please take note. You may have noticed there are not a lot of links in the sidebar. I'm picky! I only add those I believe will add direct and tangible value to your personal story writing efforts. This morning I added two new links, one to the Old Forty Fives site I wrote about yesterday, and another to Kingwood College Library's American Cultural History site.

Stephanie West Allen, author of Idealawg, posted this latter link in a comment on yesterday's post, and it's one of the richest sites I've seen. Thank you Stephanie! If anyone else has favorite links, please do share them, either in a comment or an e-mail to me.

Another item I mentioned only passingly yesterday was the Life Story Writing YahooGroup. This group has a long history, and goes through cycles of intense activity interspersed with slower times, but it's a place to post stories, share treasured memories that may inspire others and find story ideas for your own writing. I've been involved with this group off and on since at least 2000 and maybe longer. Membership is open to anyone, and I urge you to get involved. If you have a Yahoo ID, just log in and sign up for the group at Life Story Writing to join the fun. If you don't, it's easy to get one, or you can subscribe directly by sending a blank e-mail with "subscribe" in the subject line to life-story-writing@yahoogroups.com.

Enjoy the links, and, as always,

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Take Me Back To the Fifties (and Sixties)

One of the great things about a blog versus a print publication is the ability to include links. Today I came across a super link that’s guaranteed to bring back lots of memories for those of us who came of age in the fifties and sixties.

My odyssey began with link from Thelly Rheam in a post to the Life Story Writing YahooGroup. Thelly sent us to the When Life Was Black and White page, which features a flash video about black and white t.v. This site has buttons along the bottom that take you to lots of other memory trigger sites. The one that appealed to me the most linked to the Old Forty Fives page, which has lots of links of its own. Rather than describe it to you, I’ll simply urge you to surf on over.

As I write this The Big Bopper is on that website speakin’ about what he likes: “Chantilly Lace, a pretty face, and a pony tail, hanging down…” Suddenly I’m back in 1958 (verified by the Top 100 Songs of 1958 list on the site). I’m in my freshman year of high school, wearing a 100% wool sheath skirt (slacks were never an option for girls at our school in my day, not even on the snowiest days—but we could wear leotards to keep our legs warm), an orlon sweater and black flat shoes with no socks or hose (pantyhose and knee highs weren’t even a dream yet, and nylons were far too expensive to wear to school). I’m walking down the hall between the wings of classrooms during a break, heading to my locker to change books, and hating the stares and adolescent noises from the line of boys sitting on the window sills along the way. But I do keep my eye peeled for a glimpse of a certain sophomore fellow….

I think of fresh snowfalls in the mountains, and how much I loved the snow back when it meant sledding, snowball fights and ice skating, but not shoveling, and not freedom from school. In the mountains of New Mexico in the fifties and sixties there was no such thing as snow days. Snow was a fact of life. We put on extra mittens, head scarves, galoshes and tire chains and dealt with it. Thinking of blowing snow and winter winds, I remember my red corduroy car coat with the corded toggle button closing, my zippered three ring binder with the orange plaid cover design, and the piles of textbooks I piled atop it.

I think of the excitement of after school activities, whether that was drama club, foreign language club, orchestra or any of the other dozen things I was involved in. Then there was walking home from school, alone or with friends. This was way before iPods, Walkmen, or other personal entertainment devices (although I did get a pocket-size transistor radio for my birthday in 1959 that ran on a 9-volt battery), so I had half an hour to think without distraction if I walked the two miles alone.

Other songs bring back memories of parties, people, clothing, classes, daydreams and so much more. I nearly always had the radio on when I was alone in my room, studying, sewing or reading. I haven’t listened to it so much since, but the hit parade was a defining element of my life back then.

What about you? Did music shape your youth? What memories does it trigger for you? Find out more about music and demographic data of the times at Old Forty Fives.com, Take Me Back To the Fifties, and associated pages on this glorious site. That should get your fingers flying and ink flowing!

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Major Milestones

Everyone has major milestones in their lives, like graduating from high school or college, getting married, winning an award or contest, buying a first car, meeting a celebrity, and so forth. I passed a major milestone today: I became the grandmother of a teenager! That’s almost, but not quite, as startling as becoming the mother of a forty-year-old, or turning forty myself.

When these major milestones occur, it’s natural to think back to corresponding events. Today I tried to remember my own thirteenth birthday. I remember the excitement of looking forward to becoming a teenager, but try as I might, I do not remember the actual event. And, though I blush to admit, I do not remember the specific birthdays when my children became teenagers. These were big days at the time, but the memory does not linger on.

You probably have similar lapses of your own.

What does this have to do with writing lifestories? This incident of mine merely underscores the fact that we don’t remember the details of every event in our lives, especially as they fade into the distance. Becoming a teenager was important to me, and I remember generalities, though I don’t remember the specific day.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. I just searched for “perpetual calendar” and looked up the date of my thirteenth birthday. It fell on a Tuesday, which means it was a school day. That means I found a present or two by my place on the breakfast table, and we had birthday cake after supper. That was predictable, and would blend into my composite Birthday Memory. If I’d had a party, I would remember that. I did have a sixteenth birthday party. My friends and I didn't have birthday parties, and they continued to be rare when my own children were growing up.

When I write about it, I’ll write about my general feelings, not an occasion. When I write about becoming the mother of teenagers, I’ll write about the challenges of adolescence in general, making note of the fact that I had three very different experiences with three very different children. Vital, compelling stories are about experiences and interpretations as much or more than actual events.

Happy birthday Keith. I’m going to remember this day, for sure, and I’ll remember the thirteenth birthday of each successive grandchild. Somehow major milestones in grandchildren’s lives stand out with special vividness. I think that’s part of being a grandparent.

For now I’m encouraging my readers who are grandparents to write stories about the major moments as they occur, as keepsakes for the youngsters, who may not otherwise remember themselves. Likewise, younger parents will do well to keep journals, no matter how sporadic or sketchy. Anything you write is going to be welcome later.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Just an Hour a Week

This is a day that the Lord hath made.
Let us rejoice and write stories in it.

— Sharon Lippincott

I've had a busy week. Our daughter was here for Thanksgiving with her toddler and husband, and shortly after they left, I came down with a bug (fortunately short-lived). Consequently, I haven't spent time writing for a week now. This could have been a disaster for the blog, but fortunately I had a small backlog that I could pop into place with a few clicks of my mouse. My backlog is now depleted, but it won't stay that way long. I woke up with my head simply buzzing with blog/story ideas.

Knowing all too well how important it is to honor my muse Sarabelle when she pays me a visit, especially such a bountiful one, I headed straight to my computer and started half a dozen new posts. If my backlog gets too full, I'll simply post more often for awhile.

One of the insights she gifted me with was the fact that I now have ninety-four posts in this blog, which began on February 7, 2006, less than ten months ago. That's an average of approximately one post every three days. The posts average 407 words. A page of normally formatted text (Times Roman Font, 12 point, normal line spacing, one-inch margins all around) will average around 660 words per page. A page following my recommended formatting* with a wider typeface like Georgia (used in this blog), 11 point, with 15 point line spacing and one-inch margins all around will average about 550 words per page, 500 with chapter titles and section headers. Given these statistics, the current contents of this blog would fill about 80 pages with my recommended formatting.

I seldom spent more than twenty minutes per post, sometimes less, so I wrote about an hour a week on this blog. In about forty weeks I've written and edited around eighty pages of text, spending only an hour a week doing it. That's two pages per week, or about one hundred pages a year.

Just think what you can do if you write just an hour a week for, let's say, ten years! Even if you write at half the speed I do, you'll have an amazing stack of pages. Now, isn't that news enough to get those fingers clicking? Rejoice and ...

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

* Full details on this recommended formatting and how to use Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Write or WordPerfect to make it happen are included in my soon-to-be-released book, The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. Stay tuned for ordering information.

Writing About the Wilderness

The trouble with writing about the wilderness is that there is almost none of it left, and so, although more and more writers are born, grow up and appear in print, fewer and fewer can possibly have even an approximate acquaintance with the wild destroyed world on whose splinters we stand.

—Edward Hoagland

I recently found that quote on Susan Albert's Lifescapes blog. It especially appealed to me because I grew up on the edge of the wilderness, and live on the edge of a forest today. Nature and wildlife have always been dear to me, and it's hard for me to imagine not being able to wander in the woods.

Sometime back I wrote this paragraph about the mountains of northern New Mexico:

Those mountains shaped my life and my abiding love for the woods. Alone among the towering pines, I was my own best self, free from all expectations, pressures and competition. I knew even then that the forest had healing powers. The memories from those mountains pull me back to being my own best self, and I always keep them near me in my soul.

Going beyond those mountains, I'm writing stories about exploring the fascinating reeds along the irrigation ditch when I was a preschooler, trips down in the canyon, the smell of pines in the playground, lizards and cactus at Girl Scout day camp and climbing Mt. Wheeler. In later years there is the splendor of the Oregon Coast, Banff, the Austrian alps, penguins in Antarctica, hiking the Milford Track, wild turkeys in my yard . . . the list is nearly endless. I want to share my general appreciation of the wild to perpetuate it in generations to come.

You may also treasure the wilderness. Are you doing your part to preserve it in memory as it is today? Maybe the wilderness isn't part of your legacy, but what about parks, or special gardens? Nature has impacted nearly all of us one way or another. Let the world know what it means to you.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Bring on the Turkey!

A cheery, lilting song has been running through my mind the last few days. It goes something like this:

Oh bring the turkey, golden brown,
the mashed potatoes light,
The cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie,
my, oh what a sight!
We'll eat and eat until at last,
we've had too much, but then,
Thanksgiving comes but once a year,
so we can get thin again!

I learned this song in third or fourth grade in music class and we probably only sang it one year. We learned dozens of those songs through the years, but this is one of the two or three that stuck in mind. I call this one my “Thanksgiving Carol” and I always hear it sung by children's voices all around me, with my own voice belting it out right along with them.

The tune takes me back to my early childhood Thanksgivings. Those all blur together. Many years we went to visit one set or the other of the grandparents (I was fortunate that all four of mine lived to become great-grandparents), and there were often lots of cousins around. Other times people came to our house.

It all blurs together into a composite memory of a crowded house, busy kitchen, wonderful smells and too much food. The menu was unvarying: Turkey, cornbread stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, candied sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, cranberry sauce (both jellied and fresh orange-cranberry), peas or green beans, 24 Hour Salad (a sinfully rich fruit, custard and whipped cream concoction), and pies (usually mince and pumpkin) with lots of whipped cream.

Today the people around the table are more likely to be friends and neighbors than family, but the menu has stayed the same, true to the tune in my head.

What about your family traditions? Is your menu set, or do you scour food magazines for new ideas? Who joins you? Do you have any rituals of giving special thanks? And what about songs? Do you have Thanksgiving songs? Do you remember any songs from school days? Write it all down!

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Single Most Important Thing You Can Do to Improve Your Writing

Someone recently asked what I’d recommend as the one single thing they could do that would help their writing the most. I answered with one word: Toastmasters.

Most people think of Toastmasters as an organization devoted to improving members’ speaking skills. It definitely does that — with a number of fringe benefits. The primary value of Toastmasters is the practice you gain in learning to organize your thoughts. To make a point in the five to seven minutes available for club speeches, you must pare your material down to its bare essence. There is no time for clutter or extra material.

This process of digging for golden nuggets of meaning transfers into all areas of communication. Your conversation becomes more precise. If you are in sales, you’re better equipped to assess needs and define benefits with laser-like precision. If you teach, you’ll l deliver streamlined lectures that emphasize the main message in a smooth and logical flow.

Your writing will become lean and spare.

When I joined Toastmasters in 1980, I thought I knew how to speak in public because I’d been able to stand in front of a classroom twice a week and dissert for three hours at a whack. Balderdash! I knew how to blather. Presenting an effective speech is quite another matter. I became a Toastmasters junkie. At one point I was an officer in three different weekly clubs and I often attended one or two others in addition. Friends made joking references to Twelve-Step programs.

The organization served me well, and I remain a steadfast supporter. Today I seldom give a formal presentation, but I continually give thanks as I write for the practice in quickly finding and framing a message.

I highly recommend Toastmasters for anyone of any age who wants to become a more effective communicator in any mode. You can find a club near you on the Toastmasters website. Check it out. You’ll learn some valuable skills, and probably make some fantastic new friends to boot.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergalfont></font>

Delightful Descriptions

A few days ago Herm posted a comment about the blog That's Not How I Remember It. Herm's concluding descriptions lit my day:

...He sandwiched the meat of laughter between the bread of raised eyebrows. When I finished he simply said, "That's not the way it happened at all."

I rewrote with the flames of my memory and the icicles of his testimony. It melted into something that was reality for both of us.

Wow! Sandwiching the meat of laughter between the bread of raised eyebrows. Flames of memory versus icicles of testimony. Don't those analogies just give your inner writer joyful goosebumps?

Herm is one of my "virtual" writer friends. We met several years ago in the Yahoo Lifestory group. The first story he posted had me sitting on the edge of my chair in admiration. A couple of years ago his story, "Denied the Prize," was published in Chicken Soup for the African American Soul.

Obviously Herm has an innate gift for story telling and depiction. His descriptions sizzle with color and delight his readers. I haven't asked him about this, but I'm assuming he would say it comes naturally to him. If that's the case, perhaps he grew up hearing colorful descriptions as he sat at his grandpa's knee.

Whether you are born with a gift for compelling phraseology or not, it's a skill you can acquire. It's more than a skill; it's a way of thinking and experiencing the world. The first thing you can do to build this skill is to read. Read constantly and pay attention to how authors use description to pull you into the story. Find authors who are particularly good at description and read several of their books. Keep a journal of phrases that especially catch your eye.

The other way to increase your skill is to practice. Think about other ways to say "He frowned," or "Aunt Abbie was huge." Let Aunt Abbie float around your mind until you come up with something like "Aunt Abbie admitted that she quit weighing herself when her scale bottomed out." Or, "Aunt Abbie's upper arm was as big around as my teenage daughter's waist."

Have fun describing your world. Try things out on your family and friends. The world will become more colorful and interesting, in your mind, in your writing and in daily conversations.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

George Orwell and Google

My posting rate has slightly slowed lately due to minor technical problems. I understand that these problems will probably go away if I switch to the new Blogger format, which also gives advantages like the ability to assign categories to each post. Now, how cool will that be, to find all the posts on, say punctuation, with a single click? In another month or so, the choice will no longer be mine. Blogger will switch everyone.

So, why on earth have I dawdled, rather than immediately switching?

Now, that’s a story I’ve never written. It goes back to my junior year in high school when I read George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty Four in English class. This novel made my skin crawl. I grew up in Los Alamos, NM, where nearly every family had at least one member with a Q clearance, the highest security rating at the time (as far as I know), and for much of the time I lived there, security guards limited entrance to the town to residents and invited guests. Perhaps the novel made more of an impact on me for this reason. In any case, it shaped my entire outlook on life.

The year 1984 has long since passed into history without Orwell’s dystopian vision being realized, at least in the Unity States. However, as time has passed and the ubiquity of credit cards, use of Social Security numbers for general identification, availability of all medical records to insurance companies, identity theft, airport security, and so on has grown, my discomfort has escalated. I tend to be, without apology, a personal privacy freak.

Enter Google, the undisputed king of cyber packrats. They never delete anything. I don’t totally boycott Google, but I do prefer search engines like Jux2 or Dogpile that combine results from several search engines. I don’t use Gmail, and I don’t have a Google account.

That last fact, that I don’t have a Google account, is the reason I haven’t switched. Google owns Blogger, and you must have a Google account to use the new Blogger.

Okay, reality check here. Am I going to duck Google forever? Of course not! I love that my blog comes up high on the first page of Google, and I love that Blogger is free of charge and ads are optional. Time to bite the bullet, focus my Attitude of Gratitude, open a Google account, and get with the program. In fact, if I want to go back and assign categories to old messages, I’d better get with the program pronto! The list is growing.

The above explanation doesn’t begin to do justice to my story of the psychic ravages of that novel, but it does give the bare bones. What about you? Did you read that novel? Did it shape your life? Have you written about your views on socio-cultural topics like personal privacy? These matters are at the core of what it means to be an American, a timely topic today that may continue to be of intense interest to your descendants as they consider the same questions.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

P.S. I did it. The change has been made.

That's Not How I Remember It

I recently had a leisurely lunch with a longtime friend, a rare luxury. During the course of the conversation we discovered that our memories of a project we collaborated on over a dozen years ago are as different as night and day. Each of us gives the other credit for instigating the undertaking.

“What a great story,” I replied when I heard the other side. “That’s not how I remember it, but it sounds good.”

“What do you mean? How do you remember it?” My version was like a mirror image.

“No way!” My friend plans to do a journal check to see “how it really happened.”

“I’m eager to hear what your journal says, but if it's different from my account, I’ll remind you that initial perception shapes memory, and we may have perceived it differently to start with. What difference does it make? We’re happy with the outcome, so probably we're both right, or the 'truth' is a combination of our memories.”

I went on to suggest that we each write the story of how this project began so we could post the two stories side-by-side. I doubt that will ever happen, but we had a good laugh, and parted in high spirits.

This isn’t the first time I’ve discovered that friends remember things very differently from the way I remember them. My husband and I have relatively little overlap in our long-term memories in the first place, so there is little conflict between them. We joke that our memories are so different that together we make a whole brain. My sister and I came to the conclusion ages ago that although our parents shared the same name, and we apparently lived at the same address concurrently, we grew up in very different families.

It’s been months since I wrote about the variability of memory. Check The Essence of Truth and A Million Little Pieces for further thoughts on this timely topic. You may also find this information about memory and false memories on Live Science quite fascinating.

Have you had amusing or startling experiences where your memory varied dramatically from someone else’s? How did you handle this? That’s probably worth a story in itself.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Importance of Clarity

Last week I read a letter written for the purpose of defending and rallying support for an important cause. The letter is unlikely to achieve that purpose and could even sabotage the effort. Among its flaws, it failed to clearly state the purpose, and supporting evidence for a poorly organized list of complaints was lacking. The effect was somewhat like scattering dots on a piece of paper without adding numbers so they can be connected to reveal a recognizable shape.

I had a sense of déjà vu when I read this letter. It reminds me of stories in my grandmother's autobiography. Her collection of a hundred or so memories consists mainly of disorganized recollections that lack sufficient detail and background information to render them meaningful to anyone who didn't know her well.

My grandmother wrote her autobiography in 1980, not long before she died. It was the first time I'd heard of an "ordinary person" writing an autobiography. I was impressed by the fact that she did it, and treasured it then and now. I've scanned it to save for posterity. Even back then I realized it was missing major chunks of information, and I have added missing pieces I know about - entering my thoughts in italics and initialing them so there will be no confusion about who wrote what.

Recorded memory fragments are not so different from shards of pottery in an archeological dig. The pottery must be cleaned and pieced together insofar as possible to recreate something meaningful, and even a reconstructed pot will shed only so much light on life in that early era. An intact kitchen, such as those found in Pompeii is far more useful.

Whether you are writing a letter of persuasion or a lifestory, you want to achieve the equivalent of that intact kitchen. You'll be more likely to accomplish that aim if you take a few minutes to write a sentence or two explaining the main purpose of your story. Then list the key points required to fully convey the message. You could also jot notes about facts needed to flesh out your main points.

You don't have to make the outline first. If you feel a story ready to gush forth, let it rip. When you finish, make your list to ensure you didn't leave out anything important. You may want to add more content to your story, or take out some distracting trivia. You may want to rearrange parts of it. You may even want to have a few other people, like your writing group, read it to see if it makes sense when read cold.

Never ever skip this step of asking for outside review when you are writing an important letter to generate support. It's an optional step for lifestories. Even though my grandmother's autobiography is scattered and confusing, she did write it, for me, my cousins and our families. I appreciate and honor her effort. In writing persuasive letters, clarity, order and thoroughness are critical. Those attributes are icing on the cake for lifestory writing. Stories that come from your heart, as a gift to the future, are the cake itself.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Reason to Write

If you’ve had any reluctance about starting to write your own lifestory, a blog post and comment I read today should send you scurrying to your keyboard to get started.

I’ve been blog-surfing, trying to find a template with a three column format that I could adapt for my own use here. In the search, I found a moving tribute posted on October 23 by Don Quixote announcing the death of his 97-year-old grandmother. In this tribute he mentions that he didn’t spend much time with her or know her well.

This post had a number of comments, and I clicked to read them. One was especially relevant to us here:

I sat in my grandmother's funeral and listened to all they had to say and realized that I didn't know her at all. I also knew that I'd never bothered to get to know her. She was just this old lady who featured in my childhood for a while and who faded out when my parents moved us away. Stupid way to be, eh?

I could write pages of speculation about why those two never quite connected, but what would that accomplish? For whatever reason, and sad as it is, they simply didn't, and the grandson didn't realize the tragedy of that until it was too late to change things. He was left with nothing but regrets and questions.

Whatever the state of your relationship with your family right now, what greater gift could you give your descendants than the opportunity to know you later, if the time hasn't already been right? Even if you have a close relationship and have spent a lot of time together, they'll forget more than they remember, and pass only a few basic facts on the the next generation.

Don’t let your memories, stories and wisdom be buried with you. Put them on paper and leave them behind. Then, regardless of your beliefs about the spiritual hereafter, you’ll live on for generations in the memories of your family.

Have you written a story today?

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

A Context For Thought

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”

— Edwin Schlossberg

For many of us this thought encapsulates the underlying reason for writing lifestories: To pour our own hearts and thoughts onto paper as a context for others to think and examine their own lives, beliefs and choices.

What more could we hope for? Admiration? Praise? Gratitude? Or simply to be remembered? There are no wrong or poor reasons for writing. Writing is its own reward, and all else is icing on the cake. For me, stimulating thought in others is the ultimate icing.

And thus I blog. How sweet it is to have such an opportunity and outlet.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

True Friends

I recently found this item in my e-mail inbox. Anyone who has been reading this blog for awhile knows that I don’t make a habit of raiding my inbox for blog material, but this exploration of True Friendship deserves special attention:

A simple friend, when visiting, acts like a guest. A real friend opens your refrigerator and helps himself (and doesn't feel even the least bit weird shutting your beer/Pepsi drawer with her foot!)

A simple friend has never seen you cry. A real friend has shoulders soggy from your tears.

A simple friend doesn't know your parents’ first names. A real friend has their phone numbers in his address book.

A simple friend brings a bottle of wine to your party. A real friend comes early to help you cook and stays late to help you clean.

A simple friend hates it when you call after they’ve gone to bed. A real friend asks you why you took so long to call.

A simple friend seeks to talk with you about your problems. A real friend seeks to help you with your problems.

A simple friend wonders about your romantic history. A real friend could blackmail you with it.

A simple friend thinks the friendship is over when you have an argument. A real friend calls you after you had a fight.

A simple friend expects you to always be there for them. A real friend expects to always be there for you!

Are these statements an accurate description of the way you relate with your own true friends? I don't regard this list as concrete definitions, but a place to start thinking and writing. True friends are such a treasure, and they deserve special recognition in our lifestories. I hope you will find inspiration here to express your appreciation of your friends. Send your tributes to the friends you write about, and be sure future readers know about them too.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

When Things Don't Go Smoothly

As technology marches on, some of our toughest writing challenges have nothing to do with finding topics or the right words to express our ideas. For example, for the past week I've been writing blog entries from afar as we visit an ailing friend. I have my list of topics with me so I won't be at a loss for content ideas, and the words flow easily enough. That's not a problem.

The problem is with equipment. My wireless connection works, but not reliably at any given time. It fades in and out. The Blogger server has not been any more reliable than my wireless connection. When the two hit a low at the same time... I won't alarm or bore you with the full list of geek talk.

These are high-level challenges that most writers will never face. The more common tech problems involve things like forgetting to save a file and losing a story when the electricity flashes off, or screaming vile words at Word when you can't get a photo to stay where you want it in a document.

Here's my rationale for the time I invest working these things out: Research is showing conclusively that both writing and solving problems keep our brains healthy and supple. These activities foster the growth of new neural synapses -- those are the connections between brain cells involved in learning and remembering -- even past the age of ninety. It used to be thought that learning stopped around age sixty. What a scary idea for those of us who are "older than dirt!"

When I come upon a tech problem, like a blog that won't post, migrating graphics, a blog post with half a sentence missing or the wrong font in three paragraphs, even after it looked perfect in preview, I take a deep breath and chant, "I'm keeping my brain young!" Right now my brain feels very young indeed.

(Right there I'm sorely tempted to insert :-), the smiley face I use so liberally in e-mail, but I've arbitrarily decided it will never be appropriate in other writing contexts. I accept the challenge of finding a creative way of expressing emotive thoughts in words rather than symbols or icons.)

You'll probably never need to fix blog bleeps, but you will encounter the occasional tech problem. Even acclaimed and prolific writers like Susan Wittig Albert, author of the China Bayles and Beatrix Potter mystery series and other works, has occasionally written of computer problems in her blog, which covers a wide range of topics. If you come upon one that stumps you, send me an e-mail or post a question as a comment and I'll try to help, perhaps even with a blog-post to help everyone.

Just remember, the very act of writing is keeping your brains and emotions healthy, and solving problems enhances that effect.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Make Crumb Cake

Many, if not most, lifestory writers begin by writing short stories about various topics. One day they discover they have an impressive pile of unrelated stories and wonder what on earth to do with them. Here’s the answer:

“Crumb cake? Stories? What’s the deal?” you may well ask. Just as there are many recipes for crumb cake, there are many recipes for weaving assorted stories into a finished anthology. Here are a few common ones:

Simple story album

In my forthcoming book, The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, I refer to finished collections of stories as albums, similar to photo albums or music albums. Photo albums generally have themes, such places and seldom have more than a few words describing date, place and names. The photos stand on their own. You can do the same thing with your stories. Just arrange them in a pleasing order and call it an album of short stories, each complete within itself.

Theme album

Just as some photo albums are about specific events, trips, or what have you, you can write a collection of related stories. This collection may be relatively short, if it’s about memories of a specific person, for example. People who traveled a lot may have a thick volume of their globe-trotting adventures. Still, each story will probably be a freestanding unit.

Integrated album
A third option is to take the stories you’ve written and tie them together with narration between. In this case, each story may be a chapter, or you may piece several stories together for a unit. Most published memoirs use a collage of assembled shorter stories this way. Go to your local library and check out a memoir or two and read them with this possibility in mind. Notice how shorter stories are strung together.

You’ll find related thoughts on this topic in an earlier post, “Like Beads on a Necklace.”

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Pre-writing By the Dawn's Early Light

I’m dimly aware of a truck passing along the road below me. Cracking one eye, I see the dark of night has given way to the grayness of early morning. I glance at my bedside clock and think how cozy and warm I am, how delightful my mattress feels, and how cool it will seem when I slide out of bed.

One thought leads to another and soon my current writing project is running through my mind. I let my thoughts wander over events I plan to write about, focusing on details as vividly as possible. As I rewind my mental video to zoom in on a specific scene, I realize the advantage of replaying the scene. I can go back again and again until I’m satisfied that I’ve attended to every available detail.

Suddenly I’m struck by the fact that some of these details are things I failed to notice at the time of the actual event. I have the advantage all these years later of moving around the scene, considering it from a dozen different angles, pre-writing until I get the story just right. I’m finding elements that were filed in memory below my level of awareness at the time. I continue to lie there, thinking of my story, what I want to include and what I want to leave out.

Words slide unbidden through my mind, offering their services as transfer agents to carry the image I hold so vividly into the minds of my readers. I select one here, another there, and the story begins transforming itself from pictures to words.

Now I’m ready to rise. I feel restless in bed, knowing that if I don’t reach my keyboard soon, all this good stuff will evaporate. It has a reliable shelf life of mere minutes. Yes, it’s definitely time to get up and write. Some mornings I’ll stop to make coffee before heading down to my computer. This morning I go straight to my desk, resisting the temptation to check my e-mail, which would probably distract me one way or another for nearly an hour. I open a new document and begin to write. The story flows forth quickly, with few hesitations or pauses.

I don’t wake up with a story in mind just every day. Not every story gushes out in this particular way, only the magical ones. But however they occur to me and whenever I write them, as words take shape, I use this same pre-writing visualization process. That engages my right brain, the part that notices colors, forms and feelings, nudging it into sync with my left brain, the logical part that gets the facts and relationships right.

Some days when I wake up without a specific story in mind, I’ll deliberately set my thoughts to wander until I find one, because that’s such a delightful way to think them through and an energizing way to begin the day. Maybe tomorrow you’ll wake up early enough to dawdle in your cozy bed, writing in your head before your fingers hit the keyboard or pick up a pen. Try it, you’ll like it!

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Writing Around the Block

Getting a book ready for press can turn into a family affair. My daughter Susan has been proof reading the manuscript for The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. Like her father, she’s especially good at finding tiny inconsistencies, and I appreciate her sharp eye. As writers, we grow so accustomed to our own words that it’s quite difficult to them freshly. Our mind tends to replay the words we recall writing rather than read the specific contents of the page.

Susan is a talented and experienced writer in her own right, specializing in marketing and public relations pieces. When she got to the section of the manuscript on overcoming writer’s block, she commented on her own methods of dealing with this challenge:

I used to get terrible writer’s block when trying to do brochures or press releases. I found that the more frequently I wrote, the less often I’d have writer’s block.

But, when facing a deadline and facing writer’s block – one thing I did to get around my block is, literally, to write around the block. Instead of trying to write the first sentence or headline, I’d write my conclusions. I’d write my quotes. I’d write something that made fun of my topic. I’d write anything just in order to start the flow of words on paper. It’s close to your recommendation to write a letter, or write about why you’re having a hard time writing… but instead it was just another way of moving around the block. So, I’d start writing backwards, with the ending first.

Susan’s technique would work well for writing our kind of story. If you can’t figure out how to begin, where to begin, or what order to tell your story, start with the ending. For example, I’m thinking right now of writing the story of learning to drive. It’s a complex story, with memories of my mother telling how she learned to drive, my own early driving experiences, and surviving the ordeal of teaching our children to drive.

That’s a lot of story to weave together. I’m not sure exactly where to begin, but I know how I want it to end.

“I glanced over at Susan sitting in the passenger seat of her ancient Volvo station wagon as I ground the gears and stalled it out. She wanted me to have a chance to get used to the car’s quirks under her guidance before I set off on the drive from Seattle to Gig Harbor on my own. Her skin was ashen, her eyes wide. She braced her hands against the dashboard as she glanced wildly around at the approaching traffic. I chuckled inwardly, feeling ironically vindicated as I recalled the sheer terror of sitting in the passenger seat as she learned how to drive. It isn’t often that you have the chance to get even with your children, and I savored every second.”

From this ending I can build my beginning. The ending may change somewhat in wording as the story gels, but the form is set, and I've written around my block.

Will you join me in writing around a block of your own? I also hope you'll join me in making your editing projects a family affair.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions

Did you know that writing about your past experiences can actually improve your current health? Perhaps not all stories are magic bullets for healing, but writing about distressing events has demonstrable benefits, as documented by James W. Pennebaker, PhD in his book OPENING UP: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions.

This report is a summary for executives, combining a 249-page book into a few sentences.

Dr. Pennebaker is Professor of Psychology and a researcher at the University of Texas. He formulates theories about health and tests them by conducting experiments using his many undergraduate students.

For this book, the premise is that holding back or inhibiting ones frustrations is work and affects short-term biological changes and long-term health and thinking abilities.

To test the theory, students performed various tasks and their vitals were measured before, after, in six weeks and after five years. Tests included blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductivity, perspiration, mouth dryness, brain waves and doctor visits. In one of the definitive studies, he assigned students at random to one of four groups. One group talked with classmates about random meaningless events. Another discussed anxieties, frustrations and problems. A third wrote, in a private room, about anxieties, frustrations and problems. The last group discussed and wrote about their unresolved issues.

After analyzing the results. Dr. Pennebaker concludes that verbalizing your frustrations, anxieties and concerns results in improved mental and physical health. Writing about these unresolved issues results in even more improvement. The most improvement came from discussion with friends and writing about the issues. He states that writing is a slower process, requires analysis, organization and resolution. When confronted, a problem is put into perspective, analyzed and resolved. Once closure is achieved, the issue is put out of mind and no longer drains mental or physical health. The effect is similar to putting data from a hard drive onto a disk and then filing the disk away.

The conclusion, for us, is that confronting our problems in writing class and writing about them will improve both our mental and physical health.

Thanks to Paul for the excellent summary. If any of you readers have doubts about writing certain stories, perhaps this news will be the nudge you need to get them on paper and share them with a trusted friend or relative. What have you got to lose but worry, stress and a few related afflictions?

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

To Thine Own Self Be True

Over the last few days I’ve had an exciting epiphany of sorts. Everything you read about writing lifestories and memoirs encourages you to express lots of emotion to add color, life and credibility to your accounts. This is good advice. Expressing emotion does that — if you can do so authentically.

Many people are able to use visualization or a similar technique to recreate past scenes vividly enough to experience the emotions anew. Others are able to imagine what they must have been feeling and express it in a credible way.

Another group of people have never been more than vaguely aware of any but the strongest emotions. To a significant degree, the way we experience emotions is hard-wired at birth. It relates to how our brains work, and no two brains work the same way. To put it in simplistic terms, emotions are generally thought of as a right-brain function, and many people are primarily left-brain dominant, favoring thought over feeling. It’s similar to being right-handed or left-handed.

If you happen to be a thinking person more than a feeling one, and you strain to stick in some feeling words to make your stories measure up, you run the risk of sounding contrived or insincere.

If you do remember how you felt in a specific situation, and if you can use the information in a natural way within your story, go for it. But don’t agonize over it. Write your stories, in your own natural style, and be content that they will reflect you as you really are/were, not as the Writing Correctness Posse tells you that you “should” express things. I feel angry when I think people are being bullied into writing something other than their own unique style!

That being said, please excuse my absence from the blog for the past week. I brought home a cold from a quick visit to our fourteen- month-old granddaughter and her parents. I’m happy to report that I’m feeling fine again now. And I’m delighted to report that the little one has two astonishing first “thing” words: Book and A-B. That’s A-B as in the alphabet song played many times a day on the Playschool thingy magnetically adhered low on the fridge door. Her favorite thing to do when she isn’t exploring her world at full throttle is to sit on the floor with her huge collection of books, flipping through the pages and “reading” them in her own unique language.

What a thrill to watch her. Do you suppose we have a budding writer there? What a delightful prospect.

Including emotion words comes easily to me, but if it doesn’t come easily to you, if you find yourself adding feeling words the same way you work on punctuation, to thine own self be true.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Major Milestone

I haven’t written much about the book I’m working on since the very earliest blog entries. Not surprisingly, the title of the book is THE HEART AND CRAFT OF LIFESTORY WRITING. I have to tell you that I’ve been going through absolutely every challenge I write about within the process of writing the book. I’ve had to pull disparate pieces of this and that together. I’ve had to write transitions, and document facts. I’ve had to reach out on faith into the nether world, trusting that the right words will appear, and every time they have, though not always as quickly as I’d like.

The good news is that I just passed a major milestone. I finished what I intend to be the final edit. There are still half a dozen items on the list that must be checked off before it is press-ready, but I’m pumped.

Passing this milestone of having all the structure and order the way I want it, the words flowing smoothly, and the formatting under control reminds me that we need to celebrate often as we write. Celebrate each story. Revel in the glory of your accumulating pile of pages.

Some stories are short. That’s okay. Not all stories need to be long.

Some blog entries are short. That’s okay. I’m tired and I’m going to celebrate!

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Coloring Your Memories

When is the last time you sat down with a box of crayons and drew a picture? If you’re like me, it’s been awhile. My last post was about the budget information I found. In the same folder I found a crayon drawing I made five or six years ago of the backyard I played in as a preschooler. I decided to scan it in and write about it now. The picture wasn’t that vivid when I drew it. The scanner magically intensified the colors, much to my liking.


I had an absolute blast drawing that picture. I drew the willow tree with me in my swing. I drew the chicken house in the back, and put my sandbox under the tree. The sidewalk where I learned to skate is on the right, with the fence covered in honeysuckle. The clothesline is behind the fence to the right, and the mysterious storage room I was never allowed to explore is in the top right corner.

When I drew the picture, I relied on my memory. Since that time, I’ve found old photos that showed me some errors in my memory. My sandbox was not behind the tree, it was in front, to the left of the swing. With the help of the photos, I now remember that correctly. The willow tree still had all four trunks. I can’t account for the fact that even now, even after my father told me he’d never cut anything off that tree, in my memory the tree had two stumps where the third and fourth trunks were.

Whatever the realities of the “real” yard and tree, I had fun drawing the picture. I felt like a kid again, just drawing without any concern about creating a polished work of art. Actually, I intended it to look like a child’s drawing, as indeed it does. (I haven’t progressed beyond that stage — I did not inherit my mother’s artistic talent in this respect.) I love the result, and may frame a print of the scan, with all the vivid glorious color.

I strongly encourage you to buy a box of crayons if you don’t already own one, and take a coloring break. Draw like a child, with vigor and abandon. Draw something from memory and see what you come up with. When you come up with something you like, try scanning it like I did, and see if your scanner works magic with the colors.

If your picture doesn’t fit with a story you already wrote, write one to go with it. Pictures like this will add lots of life to your final volume.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal