The Essence of Truth

Memoirist Alice Siebold claims that she writes the “essence” of truth. That’s all anyone can do. Some people get stymied while writing lifestories in an attempt to ensure all the details are accurate, but when they talk to family members or other people involved in a remembered episode, nobody agrees. How can this be, and how does it affect the validity of your stories? 

In 1984 I was on the staff of a Rotary leadership camp for young adults held north of Spokane. The junior staff members staged a mock crime witnessed by the unsuspecting campers and used it as material for a mock trial held to demonstrate the workings of the justice system. To everyone’s amazement, no two witnesses gave the same testimony. Elena swore she’d heard gunfire. Quentin claimed the driver had been swigging from a bottle of beer. Ted insisted the Jeep stopped mere inches from human bodies. 

When the testimony was compared with actual evidence, the gunfire would have had to come from a water pistol. The bottle contained root beer. The documented distance between the Jeep and the nearest person was over eight feet. How could these disparities occur? During the ensuing discussion, we learned that Elena experienced a flashback to a recent bank robbery she had survived. Quentin saw what made sense to him under the circumstances, and Ted’s senses were distorted by fear. Obviously, no two could agree, because no two saw the same crime. 

Similar circumstances explain how it is that two siblings growing up in the house, with the same physical parents, during the same timeframe, can grow up in two entirely different families, with little overlap in memory. 

So, who is right? What is true? 

The answer to that question is as fuzzy as the circumstances that generated it. In the trial, we had documentable, empirically verifiable evidence. For legal purposes that evidence is defined as Truth. That doesn’t mean that Elena’s experience wasn’t real and true. In his previously cited book, White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory, psychologist John Kotre explains that memory results from perception, and conversely, perception is shaped by memories. There are no equations because every person has a unique way of looking at the world. 

When all is said and done, our memories are the source of the meaning we ascribe to our lives. We rely on memory to define ourselves to ourselves.

There is no truth,
Only versions

When you write your lifestory, you have a choice. You can write a consensus account of the family history everyone agrees on. Or you can write the story of your life, which means writing the essence of truth as you perceived and experienced it, and reflecting on the meaning the memory has for you — how it has influenced your life. If anyone disagrees, smile pleasantly and tell them, “This is my story, and I told it the way I remember it. Perhaps you should write your own.” 

Write on, 

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Story Starter Resource List

Ideas for stories are everywhere, but sometimes you need help to get them flowing. The list below lists resources you can use to help remember stories and refresh your memory on details. Besides serving as memory joggers, several can be used to illustrate and enhance your stories as you write them.

• Old photographs of you, relatives, friends, events, places, anything meaningful to you. If you have boxes full, select the best and most appropriate ones for each category. Use these as memory joggers while writing, and include a relevant one or few in your story.
• Scrapbooks may include programs from plays you attended or acted in, dance cards, invitations, announcements, newspaper clippings, and all sorts of other trivia that ties in with stories.
• Diaries or journals. If you are an avid journal keeper, you’ll find a treasure trove of memories and insights. One key difference between lifestories and journals is that typical journal entries record events and reactions, but lack details. Lifestories take those events and reactions and emphasize their significance by giving form and shape to them to add meaning for readers.
• Old calendars remind you of forgotten events, and they are golden resources for documenting dates.
• Old music and songs from your youth or other special times in your life can bring long-forgotten memories flooding back. If you don’t have recordings of your own, search the Internet. In addition to YouTube, new streaming services are constantly appearing that allow you to select and listen to music on your computer, tablet or phone.
• Old letters written to or by you. Perhaps relatives have saved letters you wrote to them or have other material of interest they would be willing to return or loan you. Ask them, and get them involved with your project.
• Family members and friends can remind you of stories you’ve forgotten, or recall details you don’t remember. Tell them about your project, and ask about their memories of stories and events. It’s enlightening and fascinating to explore how differently people remember things. You may even want to incorporate some of these differences into your story, attributing the different perspective to the other person. Just remember who owns the story—you! Not long ago my sister read one of my stories and began enlightening me about what really happened. “I guess you need to write your own story,” I told her. “You may be right, but that’s not the way I remember it, and this is my story.” One day she just may.
• Internet websites. Search for sites on memoirs, genealogy, historical events, locations, etc. A search for “Lifestory writing tips” will yield thousands of hits with useful information. If you don’t have Internet access at home, go to the library. The librarians are happy to show you the basics of how to use it, and many libraries offer free classes on doing Internet research.

These suggestions should be enough to get anyone’s memories flowing. I hope you find them useful in stimulating ideas of more stories to write yourself. Write on, Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Value of a Personal Timeline

Whether you plan to write random stories about your life, or write a chronological account, a timeline is one of the most useful tools you can create for yourself. Timelines are suggested in most of the basic books about writing memoir and lifestories. Whether with writing or anything else, I’m personally more inclined to jump in and start working on a project first, and read the instructions when all else fails, or when I get bored and need fresh ideas. But in this case I followed the advice.

I began by making a table with one row per year. The table has only two columns, a narrow one to the left, identifying the year, and a much wider one on the right. In the right column I list key events that happened during each year. I use a hanging indent paragraph style because some events require more than one line of space, but you could also use a bullet list, or simply double-space between items.

Filling it in was easy at first as I put things like grade in school, births of my siblings, children and grandchildren, marriages, deaths, moves to new houses, etc. Then memory fuzzed. What year did we go to Yellowstone? When did we do the backpacking trip in the Wallowas? Which year did I go to Japan? When was that awesome US Steel contract? Fortunately I’m enough of a packrat that I still had old calendars and documents I could use to nail these things to specific dates. 

The other technique I used was to link memories to other crucial information that bore a mental time stamp. For example, we made a family road trip from Washington state down to California to visit my sister one summer. Which summer? Ah, yes. Our oldest son was learning to drive that summer and got a little highway experience, and also I was . . . so it had to be . . . .

Below you’ll find excerpts from a typical (fictitious) timeline constructed in this fashion (not in table form here, but this may be easier for you):

1954 
Jan — Moved to Kansas. Mrs. Schmitt my new teacher
Apr — Gram and Gramp came for Easter. Parasol for Easter Basket. Spilled beans.
Jul — Back to Iowa to visit. Old friends changing!
Sep — Begin third grade. Mrs. Young. Art Sojka enters my life.

1965
Jun — Graduate from high school.
Aug — Begin freshman year at Arizona State, the PARTY school.

1969
Jun — Graduate from ASU, begin job with Mountain States
Sep 13 — Marry Jack Jones

I’ve already mentioned reading the book White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory, by John Kotre. As I read this book, I learned that it was natural to have trouble identifying dates. The human mind is not programmed to think in linear, chronological terms. We only link dates to vivid key memories that have significant meaning in our lives. Other memories follow thematic links, such as our son’s student driver status on the California trip or my brother’s wedding to time stamp a move my parents made. Now that I have my timeline in place, I update it, and the older I get, the more important it is to update it frequently, not just every five years. 

 The unexpected value of this timeline is that I don’t have to dig for calendars to date events from decades ago — I just open my timeline, which I keep on my computer. It’s amazingly handy for settling family arguments!
 
I’ve also used timelines in tracking family history, for example to follow the migrations of my Scottish coal miner ancestors who left Paisley, Scotland to immigrate to Braidwood, Illinois, down to New Mexico, up to Seattle and the Yukon, and so forth. The timeline provided a way of sorting miscellaneous birth and other dates and putting them in meaningful order. I made another one for a great-grandmother in another corner of the family.
 
What will I do with my timeline now that it’s in order and current? Most of my personal lifestory writing is in the form of miscellaneous vignettes. If I ever publish collections of these stories, I’ll put the relevant part of my timeline in the volume so readers can place the stories in the overall context of my life. If I finish a chronological overview of my life, which I plan to do “someday,” the timeline will be my outline. If I never do any of the above, my kids can use it to settle family arguments and/or build on the family information about their own early years to develop their own. They could also use it to put my scrap pile of stories in context for themselves.

Just remember, any lifestory I write, even if it’s never formally published, is going to be valuable to some descendants someday!

My Read on Instant Autobiography Kits

Several people have asked if I plan to mention the books that have you fill in blanks to complete your lifestory in several dozen questions. I wasn’t planning to mention these, but since the question continues to surface, I will. Quite bluntly, I don’t recommend instant autobiography kits because they are for people who think in generalities and they have no option for writing on a keyboard, thus editing options don't exist. The space they allow for answering questions is similar to what you found in high school on short essay exam questions. There is room for one or two paragraphs, but unless you write with a magnifying glass, you’ll run out of room on the interesting items. At the other extreme, you are likely to find that half or more of the questions are irrelevant to your life. You’ll end up with a book of patchy responses, and it may well miss the key questions that define what makes you you. Having gotten the negative angles out of the way, I do like that they offer trigger questions, and they do fit with one of my Key Concepts:

Any lifestory you write is better than writing nothing!

‘Tis better indeed to fill in part of a book than to write nothing at all. If this is what you think you (or someone you love) can manage, then by all means, go for it. My aim with this site, with my workshops, and with my forthcoming book, is to help ordinary people learn to write extraordinary stories defining their own lives in their own voices and their own terms. Wow! I did it! A fully formed, crystal-clear purpose statement just popped out of my fingers from some deep, dark recess of my mind. Remember, we talked about purpose a few posts ago in The Value of a Clear Purpose. Lest there be any confusion, I do highly recommend the use of Trigger Questions. If there is any value in prefab books, it’s the questions. Use the ones you like, and leave the rest. If comments indicate an interest, I’ll post a list of trigger questions. For now, try these:

• What is your earliest memory?
• Tell when and where you were, and how this has influenced your life.
• What do you remember about summer vacations?
• How did you have fun in the snow?

Have fun, and write on, Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Value of a Clear Purpose

I have not read the hugely popular book, The Purpose Driven Life, but I’m a huge proponent of having a purpose. That applies on every level from a purpose for life in general to a purpose for writing blog entries. A clear sense of purpose is the driving force behind any project, and writing your lifestory is no exception. Without a strong purpose, you may sit down and write a story or two, but you are doing little more than scratching an itch in your brain. Once you finish scratching, you’re likely to move on to something else. When you have a purpose, when you see the end result in your mind, you’ll discover awesome staying power. Beyond the motivational value of a clear purpose, it will guide you in deciding which stories to include, what form to use in telling them, and how to organize them for your final package. There are many reasons to write a lifestory. For example, you may want to

• share your story with current family and friends
• document the time you live in for future descendants
• entertain people
• explain yourself
• discover deeper meaning in your life

Most generally, if you start with one purpose in mind, you’ll find that your results spill over into two or three more of those categories. Your purpose statement will answer questions about why you want to write your lifestory, who you are writing for (this could be an audience of one—yourself), what you want them to learn by reading it, and when they are likely to be reading it. My purpose statement includes four elements:

• To document conditions and times in which I grew up
• To shed light on some family quirks as well as my own
• To entertain readers with some stories and enlighten them with others
• To indulge my love of writing

My anticipated readers are family members of current and future generations, and for some stories, friends both present and future. Your purpose statement will guide you in decisions about what material to include and what to leave out — or at least when and how to share sensitive material. (More about that in a later post.) It will guide you in your choice of writing form, such as a chronological account, a scrapbook of assorted stories, an insightful memoir, essays about your philosophy of life, how you came to believe what you do, and so forth. It will lead you to your writer’s voice, a topic for later discussion. Whether you are still thinking about writing your lifestory, or well into a project, I urge you to take the necessary time to come up with a concise statement of purpose. In this statement include both your reasons for writing, however serious, private or frivolous, and the identity of your intended readers (from yourself alone to the world at large). Keep that purpose near at hand, and take a look at it when you’re having trouble staying focused or keeping your words flowing. If you already have a purpose statement and are willing to share, pop it into a comment. You may encourage others to follow your lead. Write on, Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Urge to Write Lifestories

A child born in the twenty-first century in America will never know life without cell phones, television or computers. This child is unlikely to know what it’s like to play freely outside, exploring a patch of woods or riding bicycles clear across town to get an ice cream cone.  This child may never ride on a train or learn to write letters with pencil and paper. Sewing clothing at home may be an amusing idea, and for most, cooking over a campfire will be something they know only from old movies.

For many people in our rapidly fragmenting era, the urge to write lifestories springs from a  deep-seated need to reach out and establish time-spanning connections to the next and future generations. We feel called to build a bridge from a time of hand-crafted objects and human-operated machinery to an age of electronic marvels we can only dimly imagine. As we foresee an age of instant and constant connection, we want to bear witness of a time when news was gathered over radio, from the daily newspaper, over the back fence, or from coffee klatches in kitchens. We want to tell generations raised with constant security checks what it was like to walk alone for blocks or miles when we were kids, use a jack-knife, ride in the car without seatbelts, or to play hide-and-seek with the neighbor kids well into the starlit night. We want to bear witness to freedom, trust, and a fearless life full of loving community.

That is the light side of lifestory writing. Not everyone had such a life. Just as the sun gives way to clouds and night, too often there is a dark side to life and to writing about it. A growing number of people are turning to writing their own stories of survival in situations that occur in the darkness of shame and secrecy. They tell of alcoholic parents, physical or sexual abuse, and their own addictions. They tell their stories to answer their own questions about why it happened, and what it meant, and they tell their stories to help others avoid falling into the same potholes in life.

A third group writes to explore their private lives and perhaps find deeper meaning in them, but more about that later.  For now, whatever your reason for writing….

Write on!

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Value of Proof Reading -- or Look Before You Send

A few minutes ago I sent out an e-mail announcement about this blog to dozens of family members, friends and acquaintances. Fewer minutes ago I looked at the message in my Sent e-mail folder.

To my chagrin, I saw the following sentence:  “My plans for this site are to post tips and thoughts about writing several times a month.” I don’t imagine it will be very long before my father replies with an e-mail asking, “Why do you need tips to write several times a month?”  My father is the world champ at pouncing on awkward wording!

The other sentence he’ll pounce on is “Beyond going to visit yourself, I hope….” He will want to know why he’d go to visit himself!

If you are looking at this post as a result of that e-mail, know that if I’d gone for that second cup of coffee before hitting Send, that first sentence would read, “Several times a month I plan to post thoughts and tips about writing.”  The second one would read, “Besides visiting the site yourself, I hope….”

One of my mantras for lifestory writers is, “There is no right way to write.  The only wrong way is not write.” That’s true. And when you are writing lifestories, “Any lifestory you write is better than writing nothing.” That includes those stories that don’t make it past rough notes or unedited drafts.

But both your stories and your e-mails will serve your purpose better if you check for obvious errors and the sentences your father could pounce on for their double meanings.

The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing

Lifestory writing is the process of transforming your own essence into words on paper for other people to know — daring to expose not only your actions and experiences, but your thoughts, your choices, your perceptions and your feelings. It takes courage to bare your soul for the examination of future generations and making the effort to share yourself with them is an act of great love. This love and courage is the heart of lifestory writing.

The craft involves sorting, polishing and refining the raw ore of the words that flow from your heart until they gain their maximum power to touch the hearts of your readers and inform, amaze, or inspire them. You may fear contempt or ridicule, but rest assured that if you feel the urge to share, someone out there needs to hear what you have to say. Some may be indifferent to your words, but many more in times and places you may not be able to foresee will be grateful for the knowledge and wisdom you’ve shared. You may spare somebody grief, comfort those who have shared your experience, or inspire a person to heights they’d never dare attempt without your example of quiet courage.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Welcome

Hello.

Welcome to my blog. I hope this site will become the gathering place for lifestory writers the world over.

Before we proceed, allow me to introduce myself. I’ve become something of a nut about lifestory writing myself over the last decade. I began writing stories to share with my grandchildren, shortly after the first was born. By the time I’d written the story of my preschool years, I was hooked. I’ve continued writing stories, stories about family, about school, friends, experiences I’ve had. Some of the stories are funny, some are sad, some are adventures. Some have been shared with family, some with friends, and some not at all. Some may never be shared.

Six years ago, after I retired from gainful employment, I began teaching Lifestory Writing at our local Senior Citizen Center and Library. I taught many subjects in my patchwork career, and there was never another I enjoyed nearly as much as Lifestory writing. Few things are as gratifying as having a student proudly display a finished volume full of stories and pictures, knowing how hard they’ve worked to get it together.

Through the years I’ve written dozens of handouts to answer student questions. I’ve also written essays with my own thoughts about lifestory writing, and I shall continue to do both. I’m currently compiling the handouts into a single volume which, not surprisingly, is titled THE HEART AND CRAFT OF LIFESTORY WRITING. I’ll explain the title in my next post.

I’m looking forward to this blog as a place to share snippets from the book, and other material that may not fit anywhere else, but seems likely to be helpful to someone. If you have questions about lifestory writing, please post them in the comments box. I’ll try to answer as many as I can.

I won’t be posting every day, but I hope to have something for you at least once a week.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal