Gutsy Writing–Help Needed

Most people might reflexively answer “Sure!” to the question, “Are you a gutsy person?” then be hard-pressed to come up with an example. Others would simply demur, “Not really. I’m more the quiet type.”

Sonia Marsh, author of the memoir Freeways to Flip-Flops: A Family’s Year of Gutsy Living on a Tropical Island, plans to change all that. Sonia has begun a campaign to help people find their inner gutsiness, and she’s doing that through story. She’s running a monthly writing contest, asking readers to submit their own gutsy stories. Each week she selects one entry to publish in her blog. At the end of each month, readers vote to select the winner of the  month.

I need your help!

Her contest is bearing fruit. My heart went pitter-patter at the thought of writing a gutsy story for this contest, but for the life of me, I could not think of a single one. I pondered for weeks before the cork popped from the bottle. As soon as I sat down to write, another came to mind – then another. I felt I’d reached a new level in a computer game that activated my “Gutsy Goggles.”

The story I submitted, “Grabbing Grannie’s Dishes,” is what I might call “micro-gutsiness.” You can read it here.  After you read it, I shamelessly ask that you vote for Sharon Lippincott as winner of the August contest. Scroll down a couple of screens to find the poll and click on the author of your choice (I hope that’s me!).

Getting in touch with gutsiness

By Sonia’s definition, a “Gutsy Story” centers on a decision you made that either changed you, changed the way you think about something, or made your life take a different direction.  These decisions may be huge  (like her family’s decision to move to Belize, then to move “home” again a year later) or tiny (like my decision to grab the dishes). Each one matters.

Getting in touch with my gutsiness is exciting and empowering. It’s not about public acclaim or crowing, it’s about remembering times I felt strong and able to “face the fear and do it anyway.” Some fears were bigger than others.

Not all gutsy stories have happy endings. Once I learned to “see” my own gutsiness, I saw plenty of times I made gutsy decisions that slammed me into a wall of one sort or another, but even those had hidden value: I learned from them, and often had new gutsy opportunities as a result.

A key to their power

At first it seemed this story would be easy. I wrote it a dozen years ago without realizing its gutsiness. It wasn’t hard to pare the fluff to reduce word count over 33%; that was a great exercise in finding the core story. What was more challenging was complying with the contest requirement that the story include a lesson learned. Without that lesson, the story was merely an amusing anecdote.

Therein lies the power of story – the lesson. It may spring from the author’s experience or some other source. The lesson is the key to the changes Sonia refers to. Finding that lesson in your own stories may take some digging, but it’s well worth the effort. In fact, it’s a gutsy thing to do. You may learn something in the process of finding the lesson, and writing about it may spark change in others.

Stories – gutsy stories – are seeds of change that can have far-reaching effects. Even quiet people have quietly gusty stories. So be brave. Write gutsy!

Write now: read Sonia’s contest guidelines, then begin writing a series of gutsy stories. Select your favorite and send it off to Sonia. Everyone is a winner in her contest, even if you don’t receive the most votes, because finishing a gutsy story is its own reward.

Finding Starts in Personal Essay Writing, Part 3

In two Part 1, and Part 2 of this series, noted essay expert Sheila Bender, author of the highly acclaimed  Writing and Publishing Personal Essays,  introduced the concept of essay writing as an adventure of personal discovery and described three freewrite exercises to start this process. In this final post, she explains how to harvest the riches of these exercises to open further possibilities for your writing.

Mining the Three Freewrites:

Whether you have done these freewrites in the course of one writing session or over several days, to find out what the freewrites have to tell you about an essay you might write, comb through them and jot down images and phrases that interest you.

When I look over what I have written, I am grabbed by:  “overwhelmed,” “dangerously close to the white line,” “shoulder to shoulder,” “heavenly bamboo,” “thorned bougainvillea,” “the plants survive” and “like me.”  I don’t know why exactly, but these words and phrases jump out. 

Next, I’ll challenge myself to write a paragraph that involves them all:

I live in Los Angeles shoulder-to-shoulder with millions, never far from others in our cars and apartments, on the busy beaches and walking and biking paths along them.  I was overwhelmed the first year I lived here with the sheer numbers of people, power poles strung with cable that buzzed audibly night and day, billboards and clogged freeway lanes.  Slowly I came to see what was planted, first the heavenly bamboo shrubs and of course the palm trees, draping bougainvillea along the banks up from the roads and the ficus trees lining the sidewalks.  I began to see the Morton Bay Figs, trumpet vines, stag horn ferns and exotic fruit trees, the kumquats and pomegranate trees.

It is perhaps not a surprise that distinguishing the plants coincided with making good friends and finding good work, that lonely, I saw only roads and cars and masses of people, and now more connected, I see flowers and trees, the way the people of LA cultivate what grows in this watered desert.  I struggle with my own container garden.  Against pests and fog, my diverse plants survive.  As I water them and watch people of diverse ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds drive and walk by my balcony, I realize I have come once again to value the American melting pot spirit that is alive and thriving in this city of angels and progress.  I have let the American Dream touch me once again.

From here, I could shape an essay that evokes the newly awakened American dream inside me.  I see that I might be talking about a process of growing numb to the dream for awhile before it reawakens in me.  I could talk about becoming jaded while coming of age in the 60’s when the country was engaged in an unpopular war and then again when raising children in the seventies and eighties and trying to teach environmentalism during a time of abundance and spoils. Now, watching and listening to people from all over the world raising families and seeking education, I am revived.  I believe that I could write this view of Los Angeles and of myself at this point in my life.

* * * * *

The way of writing that I am suggesting is aimed at opening writers to a state of not knowing exactly what will happen on their pages.  When we are i n this not-knowing state of being, words come through, and we start to figure out the terms of our explorations.  Teasing topics to the page in this way reminds us that every essay is written in response to the question, “What do I really know?” Finding out how we can put experience together into new knowing, we are on a treasure hunt; we search our way out of the not knowing.  This is the spirit that makes our writing come alive.

Sheila Bender is the author of over a dozen books, including her newest Behind Us the Way Grows Wider: New and Collected Poems, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, Creative Writing Demystified and Writing and Publishing Personal Essays. To learn more about her books and her online classes and instruction, visit http://www.writingitreal.com.

Finding Starts in Personal Essay Writing, Part 2

In the previous post, noted essay expert Sheila Bender introduced the concept of essay writing as an adventure of personal discovery. In this second of three parts, she continues with two more freewrite prompts.

A Second Freewrite

After writing from where you are, imagine yourself inside a place you can’t really write from, the pantry in your kitchen, a drawer, or perhaps a window box:

If I were sitting in the window box under the leaves of the trailing geraniums, I would look down at the impossible height and draw in my legs under my chin.  Would I feel cramped under scalloped leaves, next to the segmented stems?  Would a pink petal form a little rug at my feet or blanket my knees?  Nothing could protect me from the onrush of the watering hose, the torrents, the floods.  Would I sink into the spongy earth to arise like a swamp monster or get washed overboard to a new destiny, landing perhaps upon the heavenly bamboo or the thorny bougainvillea?

A Third Freewrite

Now open something in print and let your eye fall somewhere on the page. Use the words your eye falls upon as an opening for your writing. When I did this exercise last, I randomly opened William Kittredge’s collection of essays, Who Owns the West? to page 67 and pointed to these words:

Tess had worn a little path around the grave. She went down there and talked to him, she said. "I tell him the news," she said.  "Like all of us, Ray was given to a love of gossip and scandal.”

Knowing this passage was about mourning short story writer Raymond Carver, whose stories I had recently taught to an intro to fiction class, I wrote:

Like all of us, author Raymond Carver was given to a love of gossip and scandal. Although I never knew him, I’ve read and enjoyed his short stories, even taught one in particular, “The Cathedral.”  In this story, a narrator tells about the overnight visit of his wife’s former boss, a blind man from Seattle.  The narrator is a narrow-minded man with little real connection to others, and in the course of the evening, he does enjoy a moment of pure human (and therefore cosmic) connection with the blind man as they draw a cathedral together.  And gossip does seem to be a way of thinking in this story—the narrator uses all he has heard from his wife about this man to build notions about blindness that keep him from entering the moment.  I can certainly identify since I keep myself from living in the moment by leaning on structures in my mind.  One of those is the to-do list I seem to carry perpetually:

There are clothes at the cleaners waiting to be picked up, food to be found at the market, a resume to update and send out, and evening plans that require I bring a dish for the meal.  I have a set of papers to grade and more email than I want to answer at the moment waiting on the spool.  The cats are out of food and I have forgotten to cut their nails this month so they are sharp and leave scratches when they launch from my lap after a moth or a fly.  The outdoor plants need watering, on all three levels of my home.  The jasmine is in bloom.  I should fertilize.  Measure, mix, fill the jug, lift the heavy thing and hear the water rush into the pots.  Too much overflow in the dishes beneath the plants. Must empty that. They don’t like to get their feet wet, my horticultural friend reminded me.  No blooms on the bougainvillea, perhaps over watering.  Container gardening—there are rewards but the plants suffer if I am not attentive—cold roots, wet roots, underfed, overfed.  White fly, aphids. Bites out of leaves from something else I haven’t seen.  Somehow, the plants survive.  Like me!

Next post: In “Mining the Three Freewrites”, Sheila will conclude with instructions on how to tap the power of these freewrites to find a “new way of knowing” on the page.

Sheila Bender is the author of over a dozen books, including her newest Behind Us the Way Grows Wider: New and Collected Poems, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, Creative Writing Demystified and Writing and Publishing Personal Essays. To learn more about her books and her online classes and instruction, visit http://www.writingitreal.com.

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Finding Starts in Personal Essay Writing, Part 1

Today’s post is the first of a three-part series by noted author Sheila Bender. Sheila has become one of the leading national experts on writing personal essays. Her book, Writing and Publishing Personal Essays, is in its second edition. With her books, her online classes, coaching, and myriad of other services, she has helped thousands benefit from the humble art of personal essay.

Although it might not be obvious, those of us who write personal essays can benefit greatly from not knowing what we have to write about.  That is surprising to people who think of the essay as researched knowledge with a professorial, didactic tone.  But to write an essay is really to “assay” or test out a hypothesis about something.  If writers walk around with a head full of ideas and think they have to commit to writing them, they miss the hypothesis part of the process, the part about finding something of interest to test.  In other words, the essay is an exploration, not an initial knowing.  Because of this, I like to utilize exercises for finding topics that model not knowing as a way of beginning essays.

After the following directions for a series of three freewrites, I will show you how to mine the collection of material you create to discover your hidden essay topic.

First Freewrite

Go to a place you have not previously come to write.  It can be the corner of a room or a chair facing a different window than you usually face; you might sit at a café or park bench new to you, or even your car will work if you do park somewhere other than your habitual spot.  In fact, just getting out of the driver’s seat and sitting in a passenger seat could make any parking spot new for the purposes of this freewrite.

Begin your freewriting by describing where you are and what you see where you are.  You can add in what you think you will be able to see in the near future.  Then involve your other senses to stay “in scene” and really deliver the experience of the place you are describing. A sound or sight, smell or texture, or even the taste of something you are eating or have waiting for you for lunch will offer new experience and associations.  So stay specific. Don’t be cursory.  Don’t write, “Here I am again writing before I go into work and there are cars as usual and I am tired as usual.” Instead stay in the moment and record details from where you are:

Here I am again writing in my journal before I go into work and I am parked dangerously close to the white line that separates my space from the next car’s slot.  That spot is empty now but within minutes someone will drive in and our cars shall remain close, shoulder-to-shoulder, for the eight hours of the workday.  I hear the fibers of my wool scarf like Velcro releasing as I pull the scarf from off my coat collar and I smell the boiled egg I’ve packed in my lunch today and think of the animals that have scent glands and release smells as warning or to mark territory like this sandwich might if I let it out on my desk. When I open the car door, pulling the hard plastic handle will be like a handshake I don’t quite want to make with a person I must depart from though I don’t feel our business is done.  I will leave my scarf in the car so I don’t later forget to replace it around my neck.  What secrets does it keep wrapped up here on the seat till I return?  I will enter the cement-chilled air of the basement garage heading toward the chrome-lined elevator.  I will go up and up, hoping the crowd of my thoughts will stay warm and hatching until I return.

Next post: Instructions and prompts for two more freewrites.

Sheila Bender is the author of over a dozen books, including her newest Behind Us the Way Grows Wider: New and Collected Poems, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, Creative Writing Demystified and Writing and Publishing Personal Essays. To learn more about her books and her online classes and instruction, visit  http://www.writingitreal.com.

What’s the Difference Between an Essay and a Story?

Basically, story and essay are labels defining two ends of a spectrum of focus ranging from thinking to acting. Both are components of Story, an umbrella category that essentially comprises the operating system of the human brain. We use Story to make sense of life and the world we live in. Story explains how things fit together. It explains what happened and helps us predict what might happen next. It defines our place in the cosmic order. Story provides identity on all levels from “child of …” to “best friends forever” to “writer” to “This Is MY Country …”

As common usage has evolved over the last few decades, the term essay, specifically personal essay, has come to refer to relatively short compositions expressing the writer’s beliefs, values, and opinions about events, experiences and meaningful topics. Writing an essay is generally an adventure in self-understanding, as these beliefs and opinions may change as they are clearly articulated and organized on the page.

Story, specifically life story, generally focuses more on experiences and events as such.

Traditionally essays were confined to strict reason. Stories on the other hand had plots, action, drama, dialogue, all the elements that keep a person’s heart pumping and eyes locked on the page.

These differences began to disappear in the 1980s as the new genre of creative nonfiction began to emerge. Creative non-fiction has paved the way for the essayist to include personal opinions and experience. Today personal essay is as likely as story to have dialogue, description and action, perhaps even plot, so differences blur and become a bit meaningless. But the terms still exist in the general vocabulary and still serve some purpose.

Circling back to the earlier concept of a continuous spectrum, I see essay as a useful term for describing writing that focuses primarily on values, attitudes, beliefs, stories about what and how we think. At the other end, those compositions we generally think of as stories tend to focus more on action and experience — what happened.

The spectrum illustrates the fact that essays need to include at least a little bit of action or experience to provide context for thoughts. Readers want to know what happened to lead you to your current beliefs. They want to know the “story” of that belief. Likewise, stories that don’t include a certain amount of reflection and interpretation seem shallow and leave readers wondering how you felt and thought about the situation.

In general, personal essays are well-suited for the overall purpose of Story in making sense of experiences and perceptions. The essay writing process helps arrange reflective fragments into insights and coherent story. Once this basic understanding is in place, it can be embellished and polished into a work of art by employing description, dialogue, plot, and other tools that add impact for readers.

Stories that connect with readers will have it all: action and reflection artfully blended with all the elements that add impact. They’ll sit somewhere along the center of that spectrum.

You could start at either end to write these stories. Perhaps a journal entry about a puzzling situation inspires a story. Perhaps writing the story of an exciting situation prompts you to begin digging deeper into your feelings about it. There is no formula for concocting these powerful stories, but there are lots of inspiring ideas.

You can easily find mountains of books with guidelines for writing stories, but I have found only three that focus on writing non-academic personal essays. Sheila Bender’s Writing and Publishing Personal Essays is a classic, now in its second edition. Sheila has graciously agreed to share some starter ideas for writing personal essays in the next three posts here. Stay tuned!

Write now: read back through a few stories or scenes from your memoir and notice how much content addresses your thoughts about events and experiences in the stories.

Hooked on eBooks

I’ve been known to scoff at new devices. Before I plugged in an Epson ProWriter in 1982, I made no secret of my disdain for ugly, “unreadable” 9-pin computer printer output. You can guess how fast I changed my tune after I plugged in that ProWriter.

I had the same impression of eReaders. My brother-in-law was hooked on his Sony reader when we visited them in 2008. “I can’t imagine I’d like that as well as a paper book. Nothing can replace paper,” I countered.

Last fall, after receiving an iPad as a gift, I immediately installed eBook readers to preview the eBooks I planned to write. Besides the built-in iBook reader, I loaded Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Stanza, Bluefire and Overdrive. It was clear that eBooks are the wave of the future, but I still had no intention of abandoning paper for my own reading.

To get the hang of it, I loaded a dozen free eBooks, though I was slow to begin reading. Then I took the iPad on a cruise and I was hooked. Although the iPad is a bit heavy, it’s no heavier than a hardcover book, and it’s bigger than a dedicated reader. In fact … with the iBook reader in two-column landscape mode, it looks quite similar to a paper book.

Do you detect a change in tone? Sure enough.

A couple of weeks ago I read three library books. Paper books. I can’t highlight sections of library books. I can flag them, but if I want to copy sections to refer back to later in quotations or reviews, I must retype the material. I can’t insert notes in the book with reflective thoughts about the content. I still support libraries 100%, but I did keep wishing that material was on my iPad!

Now I have two books at hand that I’ve promised to review. One is paper, the other pixels. I bet you can guess which one I’m reading first.

What I like about eBooks

As mentioned earlier, I can highlight material for future reference.

I can open a note and write my thoughts about a passage, effectively turning the entire book into a series of journaling prompts. I can copy these notes into a document later if I wish.

I can instantly find highlights and notes through the reader’s indexing system.

I can search for words and names – if I forget who a character is, within seconds I can locate the answer. Try that in a paper book!

Built-in dictionaries are expanding my vocabulary. There’s no excuse to overlook unfamiliar works.

I’m nearly always online when reading, so if a question arises, Safari is a tap away. Yes, this slows me down, but it vastly enriches the reading experience.

I can set it to a dark background to read in bed at night without disturbing my spouse.

I don’t have to go in the other room to to check something in another book – unless it’s an old paper book.

iPad vs. Readers

I lack experience with dedicated readers, but I do like the versatility of the iPad. I can read both mobi (Kindle) and ePub (Nook) formats as well as pdf files.

IPads display full color in books – a featured available now on the Kindle Fire and sure to appear on more readers soon.

I don’t know about copying material from hardware readers. I must open Kindle books on my PC if I want to copy a passage. You’d need to do that from a standard Kindle anyway, because there would be nowhere to put text after you copied it.

Readers weigh less.

Readers are smaller.

Readers cost less. Way less.

Summary

I’ll still read paper books, but with less protective passion than before. When I publish future books, I’ll make Print-On-Demand paper copies available, but I see eBooks as the primary way I’ll be selling and sharing books in the future.

By the way, EReader apps work equally well on android tablets, and presumably will do likewise on the forthcoming Windows tablet.

Write now: Please write a comment with your thoughts about eBooks and readers. Are you Pro or Con? What reader are you using? Do you plan to publish any of your work in eBook form? What about your lifestory?

No Two People Read the Same Story

“Oh dear, that must have been so painful!” murmured Laura (not her real name) after I finished reading a story to our writing group. Her tone oozed compassion, and I saw a couple of eyebrows raise quizzically as others turned to look at her. I appreciated her response, though feeling it was off target.

“Actually, it wasn’t,” I demurred,“at least not on a conscious level.”

That experience brought home a crucial fact we must keep in mind as we write. We can spend years honing our Truth and writing our stories with finesse worthy of a Pulitzer, but we can’t control readers’ perceptions.

Readers hear their own story in ours.

This is not news. Mayhem at Camp RYLA, an essay I wrote years ago, is based on first-hand experience with differences in the way individuals witnessed a shared experience.

I wrote that essay years ago, and since then I’ve learned that neuroscientists have not only confirmed the validity of my observations, they have explained them. We compare new input to existing memories and information in order to catalog it for future retrieval. This classification process filters the input to fit with what we already know and does so along multiple dimensions.

Laura has never written about her childhood, and I’m guessing it was not entirely happy.  That could explain why she found my story so painful while I, the one who lived the story, did not. She was probably hearing her story as I read.

Another possible factor

Another factor may be involved in this interchange. Some people are more keenly attuned to emotions than others. It’s sort of like eating chili. My mouth is lined with asbestos. Habañero peppers are a little over the top for me, but I love jalapeños. In contrast, some people I know think a sprinkle of  black pepper on mashed potatoes is living dangerously. Emotionally Laura may be a black pepper person.

Implications for writers

While you have little control over this, you can monitor the emotional tone of your story to make sure it accurately reflects your own feelings. Have you reflected sufficiently on them? Did you give careful thought to the words you used, or tap in the first one that came to mind? You may need to add or subtract a few story components to get the balance right.

For example, I’ve read three or four stories to this group from a memoir I’m drafting. The stories were about my mother. After the last one, Laura mentioned that my mother was a cold, unfeeling person. I was stunned! But even aside from knowing about Laura’s filters, I could see how she would get that impression from the limited selection of stories I’d shared.  Her input alerted me to be aware of this factor as I compile memoir material and to be even more thorough in examining the element of emotional reflection.

Bottom line: write your story with gusto, realizing that each reader will get a slightly different message from it, some quite different from the one you intended. This is no reflection on your skill as a writer. Think of your writing as the gift of a mirror you give to readers to make sense of their experiences in light of yours. Strong reactions from readers mean that you are stimulating them and creating emotional connections, and isn’t that a goal we all strive for?

Write now: think of a memoir or novel you’ve recently read that you related strongly to. Jot down some thoughts about how the material you recall related to your life and how reading this story changed your outlook on something. Expand your thoughts to how your life story may impact your readers.

Photo credit: Jayel Aheram