Less Isn't Always Better

Something unique happened after I posted that last message, First, Do No Harm. I received two e-mail responses, both fascinating. Because they were so thought-provoking, I asked permission to share. They are quite different in focus, so I’ll start with the first and save the second for next time.

Marlene Clark wrote:

Interesting dilemma, that man with the lazy, no good son of a ....

Aside from the obvious harm that statement does, this actually falls in the same category as writing "Mother was wonderful."

I tell my students that generalities or grand pronouncements are vague, and we want to be perfectly clear when we write. It also is a lazy way of writing because they didn't think about what they actually meant. My mantra is, "prove it:" use examples that back up their statements.

This doesn't solve the problem of this man having bad feelings about his son, but it allows the reader to determine for himself that the son was lazy. But if the aim was revenge or vindictiveness, no number of examples will make the writer seem anything other than mean spirited.

Marlene’s astute and timely message is a variation on the theme of “Show, don’t tell.” If I were coaching that man, I’d suggest that rather than using that trite phrase, he include a paragraph describing Bumble Boy along the lines of:

“My son BB has chosen to ignore my advice on how to live his life. Rather than finish high school, he chose to move out to the country and live with a group of self-styled radicals on a farm. That lasted until Federal Agents shut the place down after confiscating dozens of bales of marijuana and other illegal substances from the barn. From there BB moved to (city name) where he lived with a series of roommates in sordid roach-infested squalor that made my skin crawl the two times I visited him. Through the years he has been in and out of prison for various misdeeds and has only contacted me to ask for money. He was eager for the money, but not my advice. I have come to the conclusion that although I dearly loved the young boy he was, I am appalled at the person he has become. Until he is able to clean up his act and become a responsible citizen, paying taxes and contributing to society for a minimum of seven years, he will receive no further assistance from me. Therefore I remove him from any distributions from my estate.”

Who could question the motivation behind that statement or the father's intention? The writer has stuck to the facts. He has not engaged in theatrics or blaming by telling how BB “broke his mother’s heart” or “lived a life of sin and desecration.” As sad as the situation is, we can understand both the message and the father’s rejection. Surely other family members will also be less appalled that they would be if they read that single sentence.

There are any number of variations on this theme. The writer could include more of his own feelings. He could expand the paragraph to include more detail. It sounds as if there is enough material to fill a full volume. But whatever length and level of detail, it will be most effective in conveying the father’s reasoned conclusions if it sticks to facts and personal perceptions or reactions rather than simplistic name-calling.

As a side note, writing an explanation of this nature may not come easily. It may take several drafts to knead out the toxic emotional waste and focus on the essence of things. But as you work on your drafts, you may experience a bonus dividend: you may feel your heart lighten and a burden lift from your shoulders. You may finally feel a modicum of peace around the issue. Exercises like this are heartily recommended by many psychologists and physicians as a strategy for dealing with stress.

Note: the descriptive paragraph above is totally fictitious. I know nothing whatsoever about the circumstances of the actual situation, nor do I know any of the people involved. Furthermore, my own two sons and daughter are happy, healthy, tax-paying members of their communities, parents of two amazing children each, and a source of great joy and satisfaction.

Write now: think of a person you might be inclined to dismiss with a single sentence of disdain and write a paragraph or more explaining why you feel such anger, disgust, betrayal, or other negative feeling. You can use your journal for free writing or write a draft of a longer story about the situation. Just write it. For the health of it. It doesn't need to be included or attached to a legal document to be worth doing.

First, Do No Harm

Through the years I’ve consistently given this exhortation:

Any life story you write is better than writing nothing.

Today I’m adding a caveat from the Hypocratic Oath: “First, do no harm.”I’ve written numerous posts about how to decide whether to share your stories, but I had not connected those dots with the advice above. That connection was formed by a recent question from a person who was helping someone else write his lifestory. The result was disturbing. The client insisted on including a section that described one of of his sons as a lazy, no-good, son-of-a-gun — or something to that effect.

Without going into the details of the matter, something became crystal clear to me: Anything you write is better than writing nothing, but ...

no writing you share with others should intentionally cause harm or exacerbate harm that’s already occurred!

I’ve discussed this point many times. But not until this situation came up did I realize that my core values have progressed to the point that I must say, loud and clear, that it is simply not okay to use your words, whether spoken or written, for the intentional purpose of demeaning, belittling, scorning, or worse. Writing for revenge pours oil on a fire rather than quenching it, and you will never find personal peace by going down that road.

So what do you do if you feel angry, hate-full, or abused? Am I saying you have to burn or lock up those words?

No. That is not my intent. Truth is important, and sharing your writing can unlock shackles of pain, bringing healing to at least the author. There is a difference between writing for the purpose of revenge and writing to document or “witness.” You can describe what happened and how it affected you. Pour the unfiltered content of your heart and soul onto paper or the keyboard. But it won’t be helpful or healthy to share your stories until you can write them without blame or attributing motives to others.

Heather Summerhayes Cariou does a fine job of this in Sixtyfive Roses when she tells how her maternal grandmother disowned Heather’s family. She tells of the circumstances and the resulting pain and loss she felt, but she writes objectively, without blame, making it clear she understands her grandmother's decision.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Heather wrote several drafts of her memoir before seeking publication. The first three or four drafts served the purpose of settling and healing her own spirit. Only then could and did she begin to share with others. Take a lesson from her example. Write those dark stories and thoughts, but don’t share them (outside a confidential writing group) until they have had time to mellow and you’ve thoroughly explored the consequences.

Do no harm. Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with you.

Write now: jot down some thoughts on a situation that has pained you and consider the perspective of the source of your grief. Do you think that person was intentionally hurtful? Do you honestly believe the person knew a better way to handle the situation? Why or why not? How do you suppose the situation made the other person feel? What do you anticipate the outcome would be of sharing your story with that person? In the overall scheme of things, did the situation affect your life for better, worse, or both?

Keyboard or Paper? The Journaler's Dilemma

Photo by Paperback Writer

Last week I was pulled into a discussion of Morning Pages with a couple of other writers. One had not found them helpful and wanted to know our thoughts on the matter. This evolved into a conversation about the relative merits of writing by hand or on the keyboard.

This morning as I began writing in my hard-bound paper journal, I began feeling restless. It would be faster to write on the keyboard. I could use cut and paste and ... I began listing all the relative merits and demerits of each form and came up with the following list:

Digital journals are

• Faster to write
• Searchable for nuggets of wisdom that flow forth
• Easily copied into other documents
• Less likely to be found lying around
• Password protectable for security
• Subject to file corruption
• Potentially inaccessible as technology advances

Handwritten journals are

• Durable
• Satisfying to write in
• Potentially risky places to keep sensitive insights
• Possibly making use of hand-heart-brain connection in unique way

Ultimately I realized that neither is perfect. There are dozens of purposes for journaling and some are better suited to digital and others to paper. For me, the danger of writing exclusively on the keyboard is that I may evolve it back to yet another resource for projects and lose much of the truly insightful, creative, soul-nurturing power that writing “off-line” holds for me. I write for at least a couple of hours nearly every day, and using the same place and method for journaling is risky.

I’m going to stick with my paper journal as an adventure, because I’m never sure where it will take me, and I’m going to spend more time on journal-type writing on the computer, especially for things I’m uncertain about sharing. It’s easy to password a folder, and easy to delete words after they are written. Short of destroying the volume or tearing out pages, that’s hard to do with a paper journal, and that realization is enough to deter (me) from writing with utter abandon in a bound volume. I'll use loose sheets, perhaps the back of junk mail, for that!

Although the debate about keyboard versus paper was not conclusive during that conversation I mention, conclusions we did agree on incuded:

• Writing a journal, any journal, is better than not writing a journal.
• No matter how you do it, journals are a great legacy, for yourself now and future generations later.
• Sooner or later, keeping a journal will lead to insight, personal growth, and probably healing.
  

As I searched Creative Commons/Flickr for an illustration for this post, I realized another reason I won't abandon paper journals. I've become hooked on making my own — the physical distraction frees my creative juices — and it's immensely satisfying to write in a volume made by my own hands. In some way, this seems to give additional importance or “honor” to my thoughts and words, and that matters to me. (I could become equally hooked on buying gorgeous volumes.)

Write now: spend (at least) fifteen minutes doing freewriting — the basis of power journaling. Do it by hand, in a paper journal, on scrap paper, whatever; or do it on the computer. It doesn’t matter how you do it. It matters that you do it! If it doesn’t lead you to instant inner wisdom and deep soul healing, don’t fret. If you keep at it, sooner or later it will.

Writing Through the Layers

Have you ever wondered what it takes to write a memoir that will not only be accepted by an agent and publisher, but has a chance of making the best-seller list, with all that’s attached to that?

Heather Summerhayes Carriou, the author of Sixtyfive Roses: A Sister’s Memoir, sheds light on that question in the guest blog she wrote for the Women’s Memoirs website. (Hey fellows, don’t let the name deter you. This post will be equally valuable to you.)

In the post she explains that over the course of twenty years, she wrote several drafts of the story. She combined bits and pieces and into larger stories. She wrote at home, standing in line, on the bus, in the air, everywhere. For months at a time, she didn’t write at all.
Heather had no thought of publishing the story until she was working on her final draft. Through all the preliminary drafts she wrote for herself, to heal her anger and broken heart, to understand and make sense of the life she shared with her sister Pam, who survived over twenty years after being diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, or “sixtyfive roses” as it sounded to her preschool ears. Reading the account in Heather's blog post of the process of writing all those drafts to get to her final, polished purpose and product, I’m reminded of a set of Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls, with a twist. The smallest doll in the center of this set is neither small (the book fills 436 pages) nor painted. It’s solid gold. To get to the golden doll, Heather had to write through all those layers of painted wooden ones, without even knowing the golden one might be there.

I read Sixtyfive Roses once for the story, and I keep going back to study the structure, how she used detail to move the story along, and other elements that make it so successful at achieving consistent five-star ratings in reviews. I’ve posted my own review on Amazon with more detail, and hope it helps you decide to read the book for your own growth as a writer and a person.

Heather’s post goes beyond the book to address the writing process, and I encourage you to read it. While you’re at the Women’s Memoirs site, you may notice that the blog post was a preview for one of the monthly Author Interviews Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonet conduct via live conference calls. They record these calls so people who are unable to join the call can listen later online. I encourage you to take the time to listen to their interview with Heather. It will be an hour well-spent.

Matilda and Kendra conduct Author Interviews each month, and they are always worth a listen, so I encourage you to join their mailing list and tune in. If you can’t join the call live, they e-mail the link when the call is posted on the website.

Write now: try the writing prompt Heather shared at the end of her post to help as you write through the layers of your experience.

Untangling a Memory Knot

Do you remember how you celebrated Memorial Day when you were a child? And what difference does it make to know? Traditionally, for me, Memorial Day marked the end of the school year. It was the official beginning of Summer Vacation, and worthy of celebration for that reason alone, especially since, rather amazingly, none of the many veterans in our family lost their lives while serving their country.

This question arose just just now as I wrote about my high school graduation in my journal. I graduated from high school on May 28, and the next day I went home with my grandparents to spend the several days between graduation and the first day of my summer job. My parents came to pick me up ... when? Memorial Day weekend? That didn’t seem possible. There isn’t time for Memorial Day weekend if I graduated on May 28.

My compulsive need for accurate details kicked in. I set my journal aside, reached for my nearby laptop, and googled over to a perpetual calendar to refresh my memory regarding the day of the week that May 28 fell on that year. Although perpetual calendars are enormously valuable for unraveling many mysteries, it didn’t help with this one. A few more clicks turned up the explanation that Memorial Day was always celebrated as a stand-alone holiday on May 30 until the passage of the Uniform Holiday Act in 1971 that created all the lovely three day weekend holidays we enjoy now.

Thus Memorial Day was not a long weekend back then as I’d been thinking. It was the First Day of Summer Vacation — unless it fell on a Sunday, in which case it was the Second Day of Summer Vacation.

What difference does all this make? It’s a prime example of how memories morph and blur. I forgot that we didn’t always have that three day weekend. It probably blurred together with Labor Day, which marked the official end of summer vacation — it was carved in stone that we return to the classroom the Tuesday after Labor Day, which has always has always been celebrated on the first Monday of September, ensuring a three day weekend.

If I had written in the Los Alamos Years memoir I’m tapping away on that my parents came up to pick me up over Memorial Day weekend, nobody would ever have thought twice about it, and it would have been true enough. That claim expresses personal truth, supported by the reality of memory. If anyone checked a few decades from now, at worst they’d figure I’d gotten a little wifty and let it go.

Since tools for determining factual truth are easily available, with about four minutes of searching, I was able to set the record straight. I can keep my account accurate, and perhaps insert a little historical insight by including half a dozen words about the history of the holiday date change.

Although this is a personal decision, when accurate facts are readily available, I feel better when I make the effort to find and use them. When the facts are not available, memory and considered speculation will suffice, though if I have serious doubts, I may qualify such statements with a phrase like as I recall... .

Write now: click over to a perpetual calendar and use it to determine the day of the week for significant events in your life. For example, do you remember what day of the week you were born? How about your children? What day of the week was JFK assassinated? Conversely, if you remember the time of month something took place, for example, the third week of August, you can probably find the date using the perpetual calendar. You can file these dates away for future reference, or just know that this tool is always there.

Alternatively or additionally, write about your feelings about technical accuracy in matters like this. How important is it to you?

African Adventure

Namibian village woman, photo by SL

I began writing this post at the beginning of an eighteen-hour plane trip home from a whirlwind tour of Southern Africa. I'm full of fresh memories backed up in a journal full of observations and experiences, thousands of photos, a few dozen video clips, and over a gigabyte of sound recordings of various things. Then there are the brochures, maps and other paper my husband accrued. No trip I've ever been on has been more thoroughly documented. I have enough material to keep me writing for weeks or months on end.

The adventure began with a sixteen-hour flight from Dulles International to Johannesburg, broken by a refueling stop in Dakar, Senegal half-way through the flight. We spent more than half our time in South Africa, visiting Pretoria, Soweto (where we visited Nelson Mandela's historical home, just down the block from Desmond Tutu's residence — the only street in the world with homes of two Nobel Peace Prize recipients), Cape Town, the Cape of Good Hope, Stellenbosch (home of the thriving and excellent South African wine industry and a top four South African university), Uhmlanga (a Durban suburb), and Kruger National Park. We also visited Chobe National Park in Botswana, Victoria Falls in sadly oppressed Zimbabwe, and made a shorts visits to Namibia and Zambia.

One highlight of the trip took me by surprise. I would not have planned on my own to visit to the prison on Robben Island where non-white apartheid political prisoners were held, but it turned out to be memorable and moving. During a tour conducted by a man who was an inmate there for fourteen years, we saw the cell where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen years, and heard first-hand about the solidarity that developed among the men there and their collaboration in educating one another. The visit concluded with his stirring and sincere-sounding testimony that in spite of the horrors they endured, they bear no grudge, and feel genuine goodwill toward all men today.

Other highlights included a short visit to an elementary school in Victoria Falls, where students from a culture class performed amazing native dances for us and we sang our national anthems for each other. Perhaps due to the sacrifice their families make to send them to school, these children seemed more than usually engrossed in their studies. We enjoyed a sampler dinner of typical native foods, including mopani worms, at the home of a Zimbabwe family, rode an elephant, and petted lions. Most especially, we enjoyed the National Parks where we saw thousands of impala, hundreds of elephants, dozens of giraffes and zebras, and all sorts of other exotic animals running free. I've posted several videos of these animals and some tribal dancers on YouTube.

The trip acquired personal meaning far beyond the planned activities and experiences. Equally memorable were snippets of information, much of it dark in nature, gleaned along the way, like the twenty-five percent unemployment and soaring crime rates in South Africa and the total ruin of the Zimbabwe economy under the rule of Mugabe, who has not relinquished power even after being voted out of office. Zimbabwe recently adopted the United States dollar as their official currency. In contrast, Botswana is healthy and prosperous, with the soundest economy in Africa and one of the strongest worldwide. Conversations and chance encounters with locals during free time roaming also added zest and perspective. I have come to realize that the world really is one huge community, though one with many differences.

My perceptions, interpretations, and tales will take some time to settle and digest into vignettes and essays. As I get around to writing about them, my variety of memory joggers — audio, visual and written, will be a huge help, and even if I never write about them, creating this backlog of information about the trip has helped reinforce the memories. It was worth the slight effort if only for that reason.

All of these memories will be enriched by the delightful group of people we traveled with. The trip would not be the same without the mosaic of personalities involved, especially Jo and Violet, octagenarians who enthusiastically dared to ride the zip line across the gorge below Victoria Falls from Zambia to Zimbabwe. You gals set a high standard, and you are my heroines! Cheers to those of my fellow travelers who happen to click over and visit here. Please don't forget my encouragement to write the stories of your own lives.

Write now: a few well-seasoned memories of your own travels, wherever they took you, be that the good old USA, or further afield. Write about what you learned from these experiences as well as what you did. Explore how they changed you and helped you grow.

Gone Adventuring

I'm off on an adventure.

Back soon.

Stay tuned.