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NEWS FLASH: RITERGAL INTERVIEW NOW PLAYING IN STORY CIRCLE NETWORK PODCAST!

I love being on the cutting edge of new technology, so I was especially excited about the invitation to be a guest on Story Circle Network’s August podcast, produced and edited by Becca Taylor. I’ve been interviewed on radio talk shows before, but this was different in several ways.

On a live radio show, there is no safety net. Whatever you say is what listeners hear. Podcasts are recorded before they are posted, so if host or guest happens to have a coughing fit, or says something gauche, editing that part out is as simple as removing a sentence from a written document. You even have the opportunity for “do overs.”

Becca didn’t need to edit this interview, but it was nice knowing she could. We just had a grand old time talking about lifestory writing in general, how I got involved with it, the benefit of Toastmasters for writers, writing groups, blogs, the conceptual basis of the blog and book name, The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, and more.

Another difference is durability. Radio shows are fleeting, and listeners are often in their cars, unable to jot anything down. Podcasts can stay around indefinitely, allowing listeners to back up to listen to a point again, replay the whole thing, and share the link.

A third difference is technology. Most of the time, Becca uses the free Skype software program to call her guests on their regular telephones, and records the call with a sound capture program. She edits interviews and pastes all the parts together with the free, open source Audacity program, converts it to an MP3 file, and uploads it to the SCN website. The only hardware she needs is the computer and microphone she already has.

For this edition of the podcast, we both used Skype, creating a connection that went directly over the Internet, with no telephones and no call fees involved.

I hope you’ll click over and listen to the August podcast, then maybe listen to a few more. Some podcasts are set up to stream live within your browser. You have to download SCN podcasts. Just click the Podcast icon next to the monthly title, or the Direct Download link below the description. After it downloads, double-click the file name to open it in whatever program you use to for music.

If you like the podcasts, you may also like the free Story Circle Network monthly e-mail newsletter. A subscription link is on the front page. Story Circle has lots of great information on the website, so click around and take a look.

After you listen to the podcasts, think about ways you might use use this concept. You don’t have to put podcasts on the Internet, and they don’t have to include music, announcements, and all the other elements of a radio show. They can be as simple as one interview. Just think — you could call older relatives and interview them over the phone, recording their stories. Use the recordings for source material as you write, and save them on CD or DVD disks as a legacy of sound so future generations can hear the voices of those ancestors. Digital recordings are far more stable than magnetic tape.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Writing for Number One

The last couple of days I’ve been feeling rather growly, and I attribute the reason to all the time I’ve been spending writing blogs and workshop proposals, researching book promotion strategies, and . . . the list goes on. The point is, I’ve been doing everything but write more stories. My heart is pining for “real writing.”

This afternoon I said Enough is enough. I’m not good for anything else until I take care of me!

I gathered up the huge file jacket I use to keep folders with print copies of my stories and took it out on the sun porch where I could see the massive, centuries old oak tree at the far end of the small meadow we call a lawn, and the lushly wooded hillside above us. Surrounded by this nurturing scenery, on a day with perfect temperatures, I flipped through stories, looking for something to send to The Elder Storytelling Place, something to post on my still empty collection of Gather articles, and perhaps even something to send to local papers for print publication.

As I read through these stories, some of which are seven or eight years old now, I saw a few rough spots, so my aqua gel pen got some exercise. I also had a trip down memory lane, and thought of several other stories I want to write. Those ideas went on index cards that I’ll file away in the cunning little inch-thick plastic index card caddy I found for less than a dollar at the grocery store earlier today.

I’m happy to report that I feel better now. All is once again right with my world. It’s amazing how comforting it is to spend time with my “written offspring.”

I have a handout with ten reasons to write your lifestory. These reasons include:

• For personal satisfaction.
• As an adventure in self-discovery.
• To make sense of the past.
• To document the past.
• To entertain and amuse family members.
• To help offspring understand you as a unique individual, not just Mom or Dad.
• To answer questions your children and grandchildren didn’t think, take time, or know enough to ask.
• To help them remember the answers to the questions they did ask.
• To share lessons learned with others.
• For the benefit of genealogists in generations yet to come.

This list is several years old, and when I compiled it, I had no idea how significant it would prove to be that I had personal satisfaction at the top of the list. Today, reading through my stories, I felt immensely satisfied that I have so many, that I’ve had the experiences I have had, and that I have these wonderful stories to remind me of my past. It’s icing on the cake than future generations may also enjoy and benefit from them.

I’m hoping that each of you will soon have a pile of stories, be that six or six hundred, that will lift your spirits, as my stories do for me.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Write Like You Talk

Beginning writers are generally advised to “write like you talk.” Stories about personal experience generally come across best when you write in a conversational tone, like you are talking with a close friend. This isn’t always easy to do. Words flow out of our mouths without a lot of conscious thought, so trying to match the precise wording that we use orally can be a challenge.

Some people use sentence fragments in writing, for example “Never walked alone at night after that!” and claim “that’s how I talk.” I’ve listened closely to those people, and aside from idioms like “could be,” never once have I heard them use a sentence lacking a subject. Now and then people let sentences trail off without finishing them, but I have yet to see anyone write such a sentence in a story.

I see two things happening here. First, avoiding the use of “I” is typical of the way people write in letters. I do it myself in e-mail. It may not sound egotistical in speech to repeatedly say “I,” but it begins to look egotistical in writing. Beyond that, most of these sentence fragments are continuations of the previous sentence, and a comma would be more appropriate than a period.

What’s the prescription? This is a matter of personal preference. It is definitely not wrong to use sentence fragments, as long as the meaning is clear. But if you truly want to write like you sound, this is not the way to do it. I almost guarantee that you do not use incomplete sentences when you talk.

Before I consider any story finished, I read it aloud. It's rare that I read a story the first time through without finding my tongue saying one thing while the words say another. I let my tongue be the judge. Reading aloud works for me, but not for everyone. If you do find incomplete sentences, try attaching them to the previous sentence, adding a subject, or rewording them to place the missing “I” some other place in the sentence.

Not everyone is concerned enough to spend much time on the craft of writing, and it’s just fine if you aren’t one of them. It may be time here to repeat one of my favorite sayings:

Any story you write is
better than writing nothing.

If you do feel the urge to polish your prose, try reading your work aloud, but also have someone who knows you well read a few stories and tell you frankly whether they truly are written like you talk. The combination of these two feedback channels will fine tune your ears and fingers.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott

As Addictive as Popping Bubble Wrap

I’m having a mellow afternoon, sitting out in the sunshine, revising the manuscript for a collection of stories from my preschool years. I call this collection The Albuquerque Years. These were the very first lifestories I ever wrote, an experience I tell about in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. More than once I’ve assumed the collection was finished, and more than once I’ve been surprised when I reread it and discovered that many stories were missing, and that the ones there could be told better.

I’m working on several aspects of the stories, but for now I’ll tell you about a new discovery, or at least one that’s new to me. One paragraph tells of my toy sewing machine:

When they came home, Mommy and Daddy brought me a tiny chain stitch sewing machine that had been in Mummo’s attic. It never worked right and even Mommy could only make tangles on it most of the time. But I liked having it.

That isn’t adequate to describe my memory of that treasured toy. I kept thinking of the oddly satisfying sound the thread made as it began tangling. I want to convey the sense of perverse pleasure it gave me. But words seemed inadequate. On a whim I turned my paper over, and began writing random words as I thought of the sound. I didn’t make an orderly list — I just wrote words across the page as I thought of them. I came up with:

tangly thread pulling over metal    clangy    tangly    rubbing    song    chewing    thumping    ripe    resonant    watermelon    tight    straining    rubbing    cranky    grating    metallic

Then I tried a sentence:

I took perverse pleasure in the cranky, metallic resonance of thread straining against metal, getting tighter and becoming more shrill until it finally broke. It was as addictive as popping bubble wrap.

Now that has a ring to it. But ... it does not sound like anything a five-year-old child would say. So I tried again:

I kept playing with it because I liked the cranky, crunchy song the thread made when it was tangling up, getting ready to break.

Next time you feel stuck for words, try turning your paper over and writing what comes to mind. Don’t stop with the first word or two. Try for at least a dozen. If you feel stuck after two or three, relax. Focus on the image in your mind from different angles until more words come to you. Finding new descriptions this way could become as addictive as popping bubble wrap!

I’ll keep you posted on my progress with Albuquerque Years. I hope to send it off to Lulu.com within a few weeks.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Zahir

I feel a bit behind the curve. Though he may be the best-selling author in the world, I only discovered novelist Paulo Coelho a couple of weeks ago, and I just finished reading The Zahir. I’m awestruck. I can see why this was the best selling book in the world in 2003, even before it was released in the United States.

In this book Coelho makes a profound point about the power of telling our life stories. The main character is involved in a journey of self-discovery and must free himself from old attitudes and limitations in order to obtain what he seeks. (I don’t want to give away the plot for those few of you who may not have read the book yet.) The key to his chains is telling stories about his past. Once told, the stories lose their power to trap him in his status quo.

For most readers, taking the path of telling stories to free themselves from the past would be a matter of faith and intuition. Those who have been following the field of memory and neuroscience will assure you that this strategy is based on bedrock. Rather than explaining the science, I’ll give an example of how it works:

I became aware of the risks inherent in lingering over potent memories when I played an LP album of the Kingston Trio that I hadn’t listened to since I graduated from high school over a dozen years earlier. Listening to those old songs transported me back to an evening at a friend’s house where a group of us sat on the floor listening to that album. I felt the wall against my back and the cool hardness of the wood floor. I saw the shape of the dining table in the center of the dimly lit room. The taste of pizza lingered, and more than anything, I sensed a certain fellow sitting tantalizingly near — not touching, but close enough that I felt his warmth and inhaled his pheromones.

For several days I played that album nonstop until I suddenly realized the magic was gone. The moment no longer seemed real. It had receded into the background, never to be so poignant again. I had corrupted it by embedding the act of remembering into the original memory. It had lost fidelity as surely as the grooves on that plastic disk.

I can still recall that evening, but now the memory includes the replay, the frustration I felt when the freshness fled, and my fascination with the transformation. The evening has become objective now, lacking the power to warm my blood, even if I will it to be so.

The mere act of remembering changes memories and dilutes their power. Telling them to ourselves has that effect, and telling them to others may work faster. Telling your stories in writing is one of the most powerful ways of defusing them. Writing stories has the advantage that you can reread and rewrite them as many times and ways as you like.

I’ve even heard that magical things can come from writing a painful story, your own zahir, with a new and happy ending . . . .

Tell your stories. Write your stories. Through them, like the characters in The Zahir, you may find resolution, peace, and the freedom to love more fully.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Custodians of Family History

Last night at a book signing event, I was asked a question I hadn’t heard before. “What do you do about the older women, the ones who grew up in the Great Depression and thereabouts, who have never been comfortable talking about themselves?”

The woman asking the question (I’ll call her Jill) is curious about her mother’s life, but she assured me there was no way her mother would write stories. Mom’s too modest, and furthermore, she believes her life has been as plain and ordinary as mud.

The question stumped me. Many people are deterred by the perception that their lives are dull. I’ve written about that. If you think this of your own life and still want to write, that’s one thing. But you can’t force someone else to write. If they do it to appease you, the results will surely lack spirit, and probably not go beyond basic facts.

After some discussion, we came up with a plan. This woman will get a digital recorder, formulate some questions designed to loosen Mom's memory, and interview her mother. She’ll explain that she is interested in the details of her mother’s life, and if Mom thinks her own life is dull and ordinary, Jill thinks otherwise. But even if it is dull and ordinary, by today’s standards it would seem heroic. Her granddaughters and great-granddaughters are not familiar with that way of life, and they deserve to know. Jill is optimistic this will work, and promised to let me know how it goes.

After she finishes the recordings, she will download them to a CD, so future generations can hear the sound of Mom’s voice, and she will incorporate much of the information in stories about her mother.

Another person needed a way of capturing stories from a ninety-year-old grandfather. Recording was the recommendation there too.

These people reminded me that we are not only custodians of our own stories, but we may also need to be custodians of stories for previous generations also. If you have an older relative who isn’t inclined to write, fire up that recorder, capture some stories, and preserve their legacy before the timer runs out.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Framing Your Story

Few people think about layout in connection with writing stories, but it can play a critical part in helping your reader enjoy the story. People generally frame pictures before hanging them on the wall. Carefully formatting your stories before you distribute copies is much the same.

The most common formatting question I hear is, “Should I double space between paragraphs?”

“Since you asked, the answer is no.” If I’m not asked, I don’t comment.

Double spacing between paragraphs is not wrong, but it isn’t the accepted standard for publication. I have concluded that after leaving school, most people write nothing but checks, business letters, and e-mail. Double spacing between paragraphs is the accepted standard for business correspondence, and perhaps most office reports have drifted into this standard also. Thus the tendency to write stories like business letters.

Taking a historical perspective, when I was in school, professors required that term papers, theses, and other academic documents be type-written, with uniform double-spacing throughout. Paragraphs were indented five spaces. Odd as it seems in this electronic age, that’s still the standard for manuscripts submitted for publication. I don't keep up with term paper style requirements.

The other place you see double spacing between paragraphs is websites. It’s harder to read on-screen, so it’s important to keep paragraphs short and leave lots of white space when writing web content.

Your stories are not business correspondence, and they probably aren’t academic documents or website content. My recommendation is that you use the standard found in books — single spacing with indented paragraphs. Save the extra spaces for times when you have a major shift in thought or scene change within a story.

There are a few other things you can do to make stories easier to read:

• Increase the line height a bit. I give detailed instructions on how to do this, and examples of various settings in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing.

• Increase margins to keep line width shorter, making it easier for the eye to track across.

• Select a serif font, such as Georgia, the one you are reading, rather than a serif font like Arial. I use Georgia rather than Times New Roman (the standard on all word processing programs) because a wider font is easier to read. (Check the book for examples of several that work well.) A web search for “free font download” will turn up thousands of fonts, most of which are decorative, but you can find some that are good for extended reading.

• Use a comfortable font size. Twelve points is the standard, but depending on the font you choose, you may want to go up or down a point. All three fonts in the previous paragraph are the same point size, and you can see that they look different in size.
  

Purists also ask how much they should indent. This is entirely a matter of personal preference. The word processing preset, from typewriter days, is half an inch, but most publications use far less.

In general, let your eye be your guide. This is your story, and you can lay it out any way you wish. Just remember that picture frame analogy — good layout sets your story off to advantage and makes it easy to read. It’s worth finding a format you like, then sticking to it from one story to the next. You can make that easy by using a template, but that’s another post for another day.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

A Place for Your Stories

This post is a thank you note to Ronni Bennet, creator of The Elder Storytelling Place, a blog I wish I’d started. Ronni created this site as a place where anyone with at least a half-century of life experience can post (short) lifestories, and the world can read some very fine ones.

A person could spend lots and lots of time on this blog. Right now it’s only in its fourth month, with a total of 78 stories, so you could conceivably read them all in a long afternoon. (That is rapidly changing.) But the stories on this site are only the tip of the iceberg. Ronni includes links to three other “Elders’ Storytelling Websites” and many contributors have websites with stories. This may be a story web with no boundaries.

I’m so glad Ronni has started this site, and I hope that submissions snowball. It’s a treat to read other people’s stories. No two are the same. Some are funny, some heart-rending, some informative and some thought-provoking. Each is written from somebody’s heart.

I hope everyone will go read stories on The Elder Storytelling Place. Your muse is sure to get excited by the field trip as memories dance around, and your story idea list will grow. I hope a lot of you will contribute stories to the site. If you’ve never seen your words on the web, you don’t know what you are missing. It’s lots of fun to check back and read the encouraging comments. You can send the link to everyone you know, and be sure to send it to me while you are at it. Go to Ronni’s site, look in the top left corner under “This Is Your Blog” and click on “What You Can Do Here” and “How to Do It” to find out how to get started.

I’m going to look through my files to find something that’s about a page long and send one off myself.

Thanks again, Ronni. I’m putting you in my links bar.

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Writers' Role Models

You’ll find lots of strong meat in Jerry Waxler’s blog, Memory Writer’s Network. I’ve added Jerry to my Blogarithm watch list (accessible via the subscription link in my left column). Jerry’s training and experience as a therapist may be the key to his unusual insight into human nature and life writing.

In a recent post, Storytelling Lessons for Memoir Writers, he wrote:

Many successful writers recommend that you learn the art of writing stories by emulating the books you enjoy reading. My problem with this method is that once I dive into the story I stop thinking about writing.

If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, you may recall that I’m one of the people who make this recommendation. Jerry’s comment alerted me that some amplification is in order.

For me, the main benefit of reading authors I admire is in shaping my thinking. For example, Rosamund Pilcher (one example of dozens I could cite) excels at description and evocative wording. As I read her books, I pause and savor juicy phrases used to record details. I roll them around my mind and let the flavor linger. Increasingly often, I find myself searching for unique ways of describing elements of my environment as I make my way through the day. How can I give the sense of that fluffy cloud bank? What does it call to mind? How can I describe the unexpected joy of hands slipping through a sink of warm dishwater heaped with mounds of fragrantly iridescent bubbles?

It is true that over time, my conversation has become more colorful, and descriptive phrases flow more easily onto paper. But the greatest value comes when I'm rewriting. That's when I stop to look for ways to add greater variety and punch.

Jerry and I could be talking about two different things. He may be focused on structure while I'm addressing wordsmithing. Like Jerry, I don't consciously use my favorite authors as models for drafts. I might make note of some structural elements of a great memoir, like the way the author makes transitions between component stories, or uses flashbacks, and I might incorporate some of the ideas later, but my basic stories must flow as the land lies in my heart. They take shape as they pour forth, and as Jerry observed, when I am fully involved in transcribing a first draft, that thinking mind steps aside.

Whether you read memoir or fiction, other writers can inspire you to produce a more polished story along and remind you of stories you want to write, but those stories in your heart must take on their natural form as they emerge. That basic draft is the marble from which the statue is sculpted, and the inspiration you get from reading other authors primarily comes into play during this sculpting process.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Ta Dah! The Book Is Here

Today marks a major milestone for me. The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing: How to Transform Memories into Meaningful Stories hits the shelves. Let me fill you in on some back story and features of the book.

This book evolved from a growing pile of handouts I made over the last several years. After several years, many overlapped, formatting was inconsistent, and trying to figure out which handout to use for what group had become a headache, so I decided to consolidate all the handouts in a unified collection. I had it printed at the local UPS copy shop, directly from disk, an economical approach I highly recommend. That original volume was over one hundred full-size pages, and cumbersome to reprint. The obvious solution was a formal book.

In 1994 Lighthouse Point Press published my previous book, Meetings: Do’s, Don’ts and Donuts. That book went into a second edition, and we enjoyed working together so much that I contacted them about this new project, which they were also enthusiastic about — and here we are now.

The decision to compile this book was not made easily. There were already dozens of excellent books on the topic of writing memoir and lifestory, and I’ve read most of them. Each has a slightly different view of the process. Some are general, and others focus more narrowly, for example on writing to heal. None gave a comprehensive overview of the entire process of producing a finished lifestory volume. I decided to address that void.

The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing takes you down intertwining paths: planning and writing. Rather than prescribing a single approach, I show the elements of the process, from defining a purpose, listing story ideas, writing, editing, compiling a story collection and deciding how to print it.

Although you obviously can’t print unwritten stories, many elements can be done randomly (or skipped entirely), and interspersed with writing. You’ll find guidelines for selecting a path through this wilderness that will get you where you want to go, whether that’s to simply write a few spontaneous stories, complete a life-overview, or something in between. This is your story, and you must write it your way. This book is your road atlas with a full range of highways and byways.

A “heart” section on writing the initial story follows the planning section. The rest of the book is devoted to the “craft” of editing, rewriting and organizing collections. Most common grammar and punctuation questions are answered, with reference to further resources.

Just as the beginning is unique in providing a map rather than a list of steps, the final section includes information not found in other books. It is devoted to helping you work with your computer. Detailed instructions are included for selecting page size, setting margins, adjusting line height, choosing readable fonts, inserting graphics, using headers and footers, and more. Whether you use Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, or WordPerfect, you’ll find user-tested lists of steps necessary to complete each task. Instructions are specific enough to guide you through the necessary steps, and include a strong conceptual basis so if you have a somewhat older or newer version, you should still be able to follow along.

You’ll also find guidelines to help you decide whether to print copies on your own printer, use a copy shop, or upload your file to a Print-On-Demand publisher such as Lulu.com.

My purpose in writing this book was to help demystify the sometimes intimidating process, not only of writing, but sharing your lifestories with family, friends and maybe even the world. I’ve done my part. The book is there. I hope it will put wind under the wings of your writing, and perhaps you can use it to encourage others to start writing with you.

May your stories flow strongly and steadily! Please drop me an e-mail at Ritergal@gmail.com and let me know how it goes.

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal