Little Story, Lots of Lessons

Closing the covers on a tale of epic proportion is merely a transition on my path of savoring a book. I may spend weeks gnawing on the bones of that book, reliving favorite scenes and savoring the way the details come together. Shorter stories may provide welcome diversion and profound insights, but seldom stick with me as long.

Michel Sauret’s memoir, Child, Hold Me, is an exception. I found the book after following a link to”How Much Does It Cost to Publish a Book?” on Sauret’s meaty blog. A blurb for the book piqued my interest:

From International Book Awards winning author Michel Sauret, “Child, Hold Me,” is a short memoir about losing a child in the womb, told through a man's perspective.

What? A man has written a memoir about miscarriage? Wow! This was new territory for me. I read on and learned that Sauret and his girlfriend were still in college and … the frank confessions in that blurb stunned me. I clicked the link to Amazon.

For less than the  cost of a cappuccino, the story flowed onto my iPad, and I dug in right away. Captivated by phrases as rich as the insights they convey, I read straight to the end. Sauret writes with his heart wide open. I’m reminded of the phrase attributed to an army of authors,

Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed onto the page.

Sauret’s literary blood and gutsy writing flowed straight into my heart in little longer than the time required for a physical transfusion. This memoir is short – 88 pages according to Amazon (it’s not available in print) – but lacking in nothing, and it packs a powerful punch. I’ll be chewing on this bone for weeks to come. Some of the points I’ll ponder:

Reading memoir by diverse authors broadens my insight into the human condition. I’d never stopped to think how losing an unborn child might affect a man. Suaret’s frank disclosures jolted me to attention and broadened my point of view. I never intended to limit my perspective of difficulties conceiving and carrying a child to term as strictly a woman’s concern, but I realize now I pretty much did.

What other blinders do I unwittingly wear? I shall keep reading and learn, taking them off, one-by-one.

Self-disclosure builds bonds of trust between writer and reader. Daring to disclose personal truth on the page, especially raw confessions such as Sauret makes, opens portals between people. They crack shells of indifference and preoccupation. They remind us there are people out there. People who live and breathe and bleed when they’re hurt. They snap our little lives into perspective. They breed compassion.

Longer isn’t always better. Sauret writes his tale tersely, within a small space. Yes, I was left hungry for some additional details, but he covered the essential points. In retrospect I realize that the details I hungered for are primarily trivia that’s fun to read at the time, but seldom stored in long-term memory. He stuck to the bones with just enough muscle to make them move. I read the story in two hours, but will ponder it as long as if it took two weeks.

Story transcends boundaries of gender, race, time and place. Saueret’s story reminds me that men can move beyond macho to cry, feel compassion and unbounded love. Ian Mathie’s African Memoir series reminds me that purportedly primitive people are wise in ways we may fail to fathom.  Jerry Waxler’s Memoir Revolution thoroughly explores the world of ways memoir enriches lives.

The advent of digital publishing opens the opportunity to publish a collection of mini-memoirs, much like literary Lego blocks, allowing readers to pic and choose, linking them in a variety of ways. We are freed from the pressure to crank out 75,000 words to make our story worthwhile. Hooray for that!

Write now: think of a major turning point in your life. Outline the elements, including lessons learned, and consider ways of converting that experience into a mini-memoir, writing the bones, with enough muscle to make them move. Share your thoughts about writing in smaller scale. in a comment. Is this liberating? Disappointing?

What Is Truth?

Eight years ago as I pulled together the material that became The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, I thought I knew the answer to that question: It's what really happened, or what you really think. It's basic honesty, plain and simple. Everybody knows that, right?

That's a good starting point, but based on what I’ve learned and discovered since then, that definition is incomplete and misleading. Some of my increased understanding is old news, things I knew that had not yet integrated into my life writing neuron cluster. Meanwhile, advances in the field of neuroscience continue to deepen understanding of how memory works. These discoveries have profound  relevance for life writers. Here's a list of a few insights worth sharing:

Memory is fallible. Contrary to what you probably heard in psychology class, self-help seminars, and various other places, your subconscious is not packed with every minute detail of every sensation that ever entered your brain. Recent evidence shows that incoming data is filtered, scrubbed, compacted and consolidated. Unless it significantly relates one way or another to something you already know, most new material is filtered out.

Another stumbling block is that our brains often mistake vivid mental images for fact, embedding them as memory. This phenomenon explains many “suppressed” memories that may be planted by certain forms of questioning. Are those “true” memories? Debate rages on.

Memory morphs. Research shows that each time you recall an event or thought, current circumstances and thought become enmeshed in the memory, which may become buried in debris over time.

Perception is personal. If you have not yet done so, read my essay, Mayhem at Camp Ryla for a first person account of sensational and documented differences in personal perception as a simulated crime was committed. Elizabeth Loftus and other researchers have repeatedly verified my observations.

Truth is relative. As you take different points of view, you see truth in different lights. What was true without a doubt to you as a child may look quite different after fifty years of life experience. What seems true to a child is something entirely different to a parent. Experts often disagree on the truth of such fundamentals as the meaning of scripture.

Truth is situational. You may already have noticed how you select aspects of thought depending on who you are talking to. Conversation and writing are both shaped by our perceptions of the people we address. Time dictates filtering. Even if we had all the time in the world, shaping our message for best understanding is also important.

So, again, what is truth? Amazon is full of books on this topic. Here’s my current take. Today my best answer is that truth is found at the core of my being. It’s as ephemeral as an atom, lacking substance and location, but forming the essence of being. I recognize truth as a sensation of rightness or “inner knowingness” that washes over me as my beliefs, values, memories and experience converge in a single bright spot.

Truth does not trump fear, nor does speaking or writing it promise a smooth path. Speaking, writing and living in conformance with truth as you believe and understand it does lead to a sense of integrity and personal peace.

Story that springs from the well of truth within you shines the most brightly. You don’t need to blurt it out. You can veil it, scatter it, turn it upside down. But if it isn’t there, your story will ring hollow.

Writing, especially (but not only) journaling, may be the most powerful way to arrive at your truth. William Faulkner is credited with first saying,  “I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written about it.”  The longer you work on a story, the more you dig for detail, the more deeply you know the truth of that story, and the truth of yourself.

Write now: even if you’ve done this before, start fresh and write about a cornerstone memory, ideally one with volatile emotional content. As you write, as yourself the question, “Is this  really true?” Keep writing until the answer to that question is “YES!” Then write the true story.

Evernote – The Writer’s Best Friend

Most writers park scribbled scraps of story ideas, details and ideas for a story-in-progress, delightful descriptions (more about this further down), and other minutiae in a pile to deal with later. We might as well throw those scraps away, because they’re almost never used.

Now there’s a better way. Enter Evernote, the perfect place to store this stuff so you can find it and use it again later, even if you don’t recall that it’s there.

After three years, Evernote has become my digital brain annex. I keep all sorts of stuff there: blog post ideas, story ideas, scraps to use in future stories or handouts. I keep lists of contacts there, along with clipped web articles and recipes. I use it to keep notes of events I’m planning, To Do lists, and grocery lists. I used to make Word documents for a lot of these things, but they become hard to find and seem like overkill for very short scraps. Digital Sticky Notes are even worse.

Notebooks and tags make the Evernote difference. Notebooks are the equivalent of folders. You know the value of folders, and how quickly they fill up. Tags are a new advantage. I take the few seconds it takes to add descriptive tags for each new note so I can find it again, within the folder or .

Evernote is a great way to harvest those delightful descriptions I discuss in a guest post on Cate Russell-Cole’s blog excerpted from The Heart and Craft of Writing Compelling Description. That post tells you how to use a Word document for storing succulent snippets.

I still like and use the Word document so I can read the entire collection in one place. Now I copy each entry into a separate Evernote and tag it with author name and elements it illustrates. For example, one entry is tagged for sound, smell, dialogue, emotion, Linda Joy Myers, and Don’t Call Me Mother. I’ve made a Snips folder just for these notes, because these tags overlap with tags on other types of notes. The Evernote advantage here is that Word will sort only on the first word of the column. Evernote finds any tag, regardless of order.

Another example is found in my Thought Scraps folder where I keep random notes related to writing. I’ll soon use one note there to write a review of Dinty Moore’s memoir, The Accidental Buddhist. I added these tags: Dinty Moore, Buddhist, Buddhism, Memoir, Book Review. I may not remember any given one of these, but the variety makes it easy to find right away, for this and other purposes. If I enter Dinty Moore in the search field on the main Evernote window, it will pop right up, even if I’m not in the Thought Scraps notebook.

The feature that sold me on Evernote is its sync-ability. It works on any platform (except Linux) and device and syncs through the Evernote cloud from one device to another. So I can make a note on my laptop and find it on my iPad or desktop computer. If I’m away from my own machines, I can log onto the Evernote Website and find things online.

The very best feature is that it’s free. Each month you get an allotment of xx additional gigs of storage space. If you store lots of photos or music (yes, you can do that too), you can upgrade to a paid account. You can send notes directly from Evernote by email.

What’s not to like about all this? Give it a try. Move in gradually as I did. I predict you’ll soon be addicted as I am.

Write now: Click over to the Evernote site and browse through all the features. Set up an account, install it on your computer, your smart phone, and whatever else you use. Install the web clipper extension in your browser and save this post as a note to try it out and start building your own digital brain annex.

Disclaimer: I wrote this review because I love the product. I am not receiving any incentives or free product to do so.

Piles of Unfinished Stories

My mother a woman of great vision, imagination, and versatility. She was also a woman with many unfinished projects. She was a painter and an renowned stained glass artist. She made glass sculptures and sand-blasted glass creations, did batik painting, created wearable art, and occasionally mixed several media in a single project.

After she died, I looked through the sizable stack of water color pieces she never had framed. Some were obviously practice or experimental pieces. Some seemed unfinished. Others may have been finished, but she hadn’t framed or hung them. How sad, I thought, that she had left so much unfinished work. With her talent, it seemed that she should have had more to show for her efforts.

Today I see that scrap pile quite differently. As I look around the houses of my siblings and children, as well as my own, I see her art hanging in places of honor. And now I recall that her work hung in many galleries, and lots of pieces sold.

I compare her work to my writing. Both are creative, but different in a fundamental way: words don’t disappear like a sold painting. I keep it all. And unlike art, story scraps can be revised and recycled.

But our work is alike in another way. I have a huge and growing pile of unfinished stories. Most will never be finished. Perhaps the thought was incomplete. Perhaps I started it awkwardly and failed to find a way to smooth it to a finish. Maybe I got distracted halfway through, lost interest, or covered the subject in another story. Whatever the reason, I’ve kept those scraps. I may finish them one day. I may combine some into longer stories. Collectively, they record my progress as a writer.

I also keep them because I practice what I preach: “Any lifestory you write is better than writing nothing.” And, “Someday somebody is going to appreciate that scrap.” Who knows whether anyone will ever take the time to read all the stories on my hard drive? All I know is that if I delete anything, they won’t have that choice.

If anyone does go through it, I no longer care what they think of my pile of unfinished and unpublished stories, and it no longer matters to me how many pictures my mother may have sold. I’ve come to understand the joy in the simple act of creation, and that it’s often enough just to get those words on paper, whether anyone reads them or not.

But I know that Mother would be happy that her work will be admired by her family for several generations to come as it is passes from one to the next. And although it’s enough to write for my own satisfaction, I do hope my stories will be appreciated at least as long as her art.

Write now: Read through some of your old stories and find inspiration for new ones, or ways to move a few along. But more than that, reread for your own pleasure and joy.

Story Album to Memoir

Adventures of a Chilehead initially began as a simple story album – a term I use in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing to describe a collection of free-standing short stories. But a funny thing happened as I began assembling the loose stories into a document: they evolved into a memoir. Here’s how.

I began with three stories, two of which appeared in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. I’d already written the third back then, but decided to save it for later. Through the years I wrote other stories on this theme. When I put the collection together for this album and arranged them in chronological order, I thought of a couple more. As I wrote and edited, I shared each story with a writing group.

“Great story, but tell us more about this, this and that,” they said. “This line would sound smoother like so.” I love my writing group. My writing is always better with their help! Although they hadn’t said it in so many words, they wanted more reflection, They wanted to know what I was thinking, what the experiences meant to me. They wanted reflection. Oh, yes! That’s something I teach and advise others to include. But it’s easy to overlook in my own stories.

Adding reflection forced me to explore simple stories and memories more deeply, to dig for more significance. I had to confront the key question: why do I love chile so much? Why do I keep scorching my mouth? And what else was going on that made those stories stick in memory? The answer was a little different each time, and it made the stories richer.

Another aspect of the collection the group didn’t see was overlap among the stories. Some stories have short flashbacks to previous memories. In a collection, such shared stories should be told in full only once. Later stories can refer to them in passing as “the time my father …” without repeating the details. I pruned that overlap and tucked in a few mini-memories to add further insight and interest.

As I continue to fine-tune those stories, working on the reflection and thinking from one story to the next along the time line, a story arc gradually emerged. My thoughts and preferences have evolved over time. I have evolved from girl to grandmother with the perspective of several decades. With no specific intention, this project has organically morphed into memoir with continuity, focus, and evolution of the story.

At first I was reluctant to add much reflection. The original stories were funny. I often read the unpublished third at public events and it’s hard to keep from laughing myself. Would I lose that comic edge?

Simple story albums need no conclusion, but an integrated collection or memoir needs resolution. That concluding chapter gave me fits. Then I had one more adventure that I would never have recognized as such if I hadn’t been working on this chapter. After a dozen false starts, a very different story emerged. Meaning became laser clear. Whether anyone ever reads this memoir or not, my life is richer for that.

More work remains to be done before the project is finished. I’ll keep you posted.

Write now:  select an assortment of stories you have written and assemble them into a story album. If you have several on a theme, so much the better. Or maybe you have several from the same time era. Read through them all at one time and see what else comes to mind. Perhaps it will remain a simple short story collection, but you may find it becomes something more.

Lessons Learned

That curve ball I reported in the previous post about my book title has been tossed all over the field. I appreciate the comments many left there. An update is in order about  principles validated, lessons learned, and conclusions reached.

Principle 1: Do your research.

When controversy arose over the spelling of chile or chilehead, I did do lots of research, and I learned many fascinating facts about chile/chili quite apart from the spelling lessons and history.

Principle 2: Check your references

When I called my father to double check my memory of what he told me, I was in for yet another surprise. Without knowing why I was asking, he turned my memory inside out. In his considered opinion, replacing the “e” at the end of chile with an “I” is an affectation that became fashionable about the time people began naming baby girls Christie rather than Christy. I never did understand how he could be at such odds with local custom, so although chagrinned at this outcome, I’m relieved to find him in character after all.

Lesson 1: Involve lots of others

I was beginning to wish I’d never mentioned this project to the Facebook group, considering in retrospect that asking forgiveness would have been easier. I had no intention of stirring up such a flap. But … I was using what I remembered as my father’s guidance in the first place, and his opinion trumps the rest. Had I not stirred up that Facebook pot, a permanent cloud would have hung over that book when I learned of my flub. This way I can still fix it. Community matters. Crowdsourcing helps.

Lesson 2: Double check your sources.

Memory is a tricky thing. We all know that. My memory error was legitimate and defensible. And I could have asked that question sooner. I just never thought of doing that. So, learn from my example and think about it. Root out and check out your assumptions to keep that egg off your face.

Conclusion 1: I need a new title!

It’s time for creativity. I’m considering options and open to suggestion.

Conclusion 2: It’s chile, not chili.

Case closed on that.

The story of compiling this collection from loose stories to memoir goes far beyond the title. I’ll continue the tale in the next post.

Write now: Think back through your old stories, or perhaps one you are currently writing and look for underlying assumptions. In my case, this was an assumption about spelling and remembered advice. Yours may be quite different. When you find an assumption, check it out. This is especially important when your assumption is based on things other people said or did. Mine was resolvable. Yours may not be. But it’s always worth a try.

Photo credit: Clotee Allochuku

Chili or Chile? Check It Out

Adventures of a Chilihead is the title I chose ages ago for what I intended to be a story album or themed collection of short stories about my experiences eating hot chili peppers and other blow-your-head-off food. As usual, getting the book pulled together is an adventure itself as it morphed from loose stories to mini-memoir, and part of that adventure includes resolving a quandary about the proper spelling of the main subject.

More years ago than I can remember, my father sorted me out on the proper spelling of chile. “Chile is a country in South America. We eat chili!” He grew up in New Mexico, staying there until he was a grandfather. He’s a reliable trivia consultant and can always back up his opinions, so as far as I was concerned, that settled it. I consistently used the correct spelling in my manuscript.

Or so I thought. I follow a couple of Facebook groups populated with people who grew up in Los Alamos. On a whim, I posted a request for comments testifying to their love of chili. Results were completely unexpected. A few posted short comments about their love of chili, their favorite varieties and so forth, but far more made sure I know the New Mexican way to spell CHILE!

The word was originally adapted by the Spanish explorers from Mexico’s native Nahuatl term, “xilli” o(alternately spelled “chilli”). The Spaniards adapted it as chile, which was subsequently rendered chili in American English. The Brits, whether by design or fluke, stuck to the Nahuatl spelling, chilli. Although most of the United States accepts chili as the proper spelling, many southwesterners assert that the word is of Spanish origin, hence the Spanish spelling should be retained.

New Mexicans are especially assertive about this, and on November 3, 1983, Senator Pete Domenici, R-NM, had a statement read into the Congressional Record 129 (149) entitled “The correct way to spell chile.” However, I know of no resolution introduced or legislation passed, so the question continues to loom.

Not relying strictly on a well-informed, but possibly biased, sample, or grandstanding Congressional hoopla, I turned to my own definitive resource, a decades old publications from the New Mexico State Agricultural Extension Service. The title says it all: CHILE.

You may wonder why I’m taking such pains to detail all this. Why I don’t just quietly make the change? Because of the cover. I’d like to be true to my roots, but I also want an instantly recognizable title. So, I’m asking you to help me decide. Please look at the two images below and leave a comment to tell me if you see any reason to stick with Chilihead rather than changing to Chilehead.

Stay tuned for more of the writing adventure.

Write now: make a list of colloquial terms specific to the area where you live or grew up. Select a couple of related ones to include in a story, and consider how to make them clear to your readers while remaining true to your roots and voice. Do any necessary research to support your usage. Involve others who share those roots.