New Year's Resolutions Don't Have to Be a Joke

Are you one of the majority of readers who will be making New Year's resolutions in the next day or two? Perhaps some of those will include resolutions about writing. Maybe you'll resolve to journal every day. Maybe you'll resolve to complete a memoir, or write a story a week. Whatever your resolutions, here's a tip to help make them bear fruit:

Commit to it publicly and create a time-linked Action Plan to go with each step. I am resolving to complete my Los Alamos Years memoir by January 1, 2011. Here is the Action Plan I just knocked out in about ten minutes I've had a lot of practice writing Action Plans, and I've completed several book projects, so I could do it faster. Perhaps mine will give you an idea what to include in your own.

Sharon's Action Plan for The Los Alamos Years

1-1-2010	Write a draft overview of the story.
1-14-2010.	Define purpose and audience
	Write philosophy of story. What message do I plan to convey?
	Break overall story into segments — these will probably become chapters.
	Survey all the vignettes I’ve already written and select which to include.
	Sort vignettes and align with segments.
3-1-2010	Determine what additional stories need to be included.
	Select photos for inclusion
	Write drafts of each chapter (add additional level to this action step when structure is defined).
	Develop scenes.
	Polish description, dialogue and detail.
10-1-2010	Send draft around to three or four trusted people for proofing and editing.
11-15-2010	Incorporate feedback from beta readers.
	Insert photos and other graphics.
	Finalize Title.
	Format for printing.
	Convert to PDF.
12-7- 2010	Create Cover.
12-15-2010	Upload to (CreateSpace) for PDF and eBook distribution.

Notice that I did not put dates on every single step. Some of these will be done "out of order." Some dates may slip and some may be met early. I'll print my table and put it -- somewhere here where I can see it even with the clutter that tends to build up around my desk -- so I can see it often and be reminded of my commitment. The table will grow as I refine the plan.

By the way, this is not a totally new project idea for me. I've been nibbling at it, dancing around it, for two or three years, and writing vignettes for nearly a dozen. I'm not starting from scratch. But I don't think it would matter. The steps remain the same, and will look familiar to anyone who has seen the Planning Diagrams in the first chapter of my book.

Write now: write a resolution of your own. It may be as simple as writing a single vignette, or journaling every day for a week. But take the time to put it in writing and create an Action Plan, however simple.

Merry Christmas

Sharon

Our Own Worst Enemy

An ailing friend was moaning to me the other day about the fact that having flu the week before Christmas means that she may not get all her baking done.

“So what? Just forget it. Life goes on. Everyone will understand. Besides, how many of you really need desert anyway?”

“Oh, yes, they do need it on Christmas. I’ll really hear about it I don’t come through.”

Later on I thought about that conversation. It’s so easy to hear other angles to someone else’s thoughts. I had an evil idea and sent her a tongue-in-cheek email detailing several possible journal entries that might wreck her karma if she doesn’t leap out of bed and whip up a figgy pudding, along with 80 dozen cookies.

Here’s a hypothetical journal entry from her adult son:

I know I should spend more time worrying about Mom. She's really trying to do so much, and the fact that she didn't manage to rise from her sickbed and do her usual baking is a terrible sign. Well, she's obviously starting to slip. That just isn't like her. In the past, it didn't matter what was going on, or how sick she got, she always came through for us. But hey, she'll be one hundred in a few decades, so I guess it's normal that she's slowing down. Still, why couldn't she wait and get sick some other week, and not when it was Christmas. The whole dinner was pretty much a wreck because we didn't have pudding and cookies to fill in around the edges.

“You are wicked,” she informed me after she read it. “Wicked, and right on target. I can be my own worst enemy.” She went on to tell me she had already come to the conclusion that a new waistline-friendly tradition may begin this year. “But if I hadn’t already decided, you might have convinced me, which is surely what you had on your devious little mind.”

Guilty as charged.

The next morning I paused while writing in my journal, remembering that email. It occurred to me that if wildly burlesque treatment of someone else’s foibles works so well to unmask them, perhaps it would work to use it on myself. I thought of a particular rock wall I’ve been beating my head against the past few days and turned my pen over to the control of a couple of inner “life” critics. They really let loose.

It worked. I ended up laughing at myself and the whole situation. My mind settled down, and I found some possibilities I had been overlooking. I felt cheerful again, even though I still haven’t solved the problems.

Journaling and humor make a powerful combination. I highly recommend it.

Write now: sit down with a cup of tea or beverage of your choice and spend ten minutes giving voice to one or more of the voices causing you stress this season. Let them mock and jeer and tear away. Exaggerate. Blow things out of proportion. Let them do their very worst and carry on until they run out of steam. You may be surprised how quickly that happens and how light you feel afterward.

The Other Side of the Story

Matilda Butler runs a column of writing prompts on the Women's Memoirs site. The current one is about point of view and includes some gorgeous photos of Mt. Shasta that visually illustrate her points. She suggests writing about an experience from your own original point of view, and then again from your current one. As an additional twist, you can write again from someone else's point of view.

I was not thinking of this exercise when I wrote the following mini-essay in an e-mail to a friend. As I read over it before sending, it came to mind. I realized that in a very few words, I covered all three of those angles. Can you find them? They are somewhat interwoven, which is a good way to make your writing sound organic.

Back in the '60s when we were newly weds and living in an $85-per-month ground-floor apartment in Boston, Frau Levy, a sturdily built German-Jewish woman, lived above us. Though she was barely five feet tall in her stocking feet, she sounded like an elephant thumping around overhead. A jingle kept running through my mind, to the tune of “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton” (aka “Away in a Manger”): “Tread lightly Frau Levy, we live down below.” Fortunately she did not keep us awake at night. I have no idea if Jack Paar (later Johnny Carson) kept her awake ‘til midnight — we did try to be good neighbors by keeping the volume as low as possible.

I never spoke with Frau Levy. I knew her name only from the label on her mailbox. I don't even know if she spoke English, though she must have known some. Everyone else in the building—several women and a couple of men—was old, and I didn't know a single one. I assumed they were refugees from Hitler. What a shame. If I'd gotten acquainted I could have become fluent in German (or were those Yiddish fragments I heard?) instead of being unable to say Guten Morgen understandably after two years of classes, and I could have learned enough to fill volumes about their refugee experience before and after they fled. But I was afraid of my shadow back then, and they seemed as strange and arcane as visitors from outer space. I had no idea what to say to them. I'm sure this went both ways. From their point of view, even if they did speak English, what could they possibly have had in common with a ditsy shiksa who was young enough to be their granddaughter and barely nodded their way in the hall?

Those two paragraphs flowed forth in about three minutes. Looking back over them reminded me that I didn’t always look at things from the other person’s point of view, and it doesn’t always fit smoothly into the flow of a story when I do. Perhaps the fact that I was writing to convey a specific message wove things together naturally here. For those times when it doesn't come naturally, exercises like Matilda’s are especially valuable.

Write now: take five minutes (I spent even less on the two paragraphs I wrote) and write a mini story like the one above with all three points of view — then, now and other. Let them flow naturally and add a dash of description while you are at it. Make it a mini-essay.

Virtually Moving

Over the last several days I’ve been totally immersed in moving. My mailing address has not changed, nor has my physical space, but I’m in a whole new place. I’ve entered the world of Windows 7. But never fear, this post is about the mental process I’ve been going through as I make this transition — which is not yet finished — not about computer stuff.

As I sorted through files to make sure  my C: drive was backed up before I began the installation, I was strongly reminded of the packing we did before we moved from Washington to Pennsylvania twenty-five ago. I began feeling similarly nostalgic about the XP home I’ve lived and worked in for eight years now.

When I finally got brave and made that last click that finalized my commitment to installing, I was torn. I was leaving behind a huge chunk of my past and forging ahead into a brave new world. I did not know what lay ahead, what hurdles I’d have to overcome.

As the CD reader spun, I did what any self-respecting life writer would do (that is, any self-respecting life writer who has an old repurposed laptop camped at her elbow, although a pad of paper and pencil would work equally well). I swiveled my chair to the left, opened a new document, and began writing. I wrote about my feelings as the installation progressed. Sadness, hope, dread ... all of it. Then I began seeing similarities to physical moves, to times in my life when I’ve had to let go of the past in order to move forward.

The document isn’t finished, but it has grown rather long and is taking a distinct shape. As I wrote, I found that each stage of the process invoked memories. I’ve come to see that moving into a new virtual home is a perfect metaphor for moving in general, physical, mental or spiritual. The operating system is the frame or skeleton of the house. Once the OS (in this case Windows) is in place, you have to divide the space into “rooms” by installing programs like Word, PowerPoint, Firefox, you name it. You can even decorate your new home with features like a new desktop picture, a color scheme, “skins” for some programs, or desktop gadgets.

Ultimately, once the structure is finished, it’s time to move in. All those folders and files need to be “unpacked” and put away.

Anyone who has ever changed residences knows how memory works overtime as you pack and unpack, and wear yourself out with the challenges of getting everything set up and squared away. Moving to a new computer is the same. The stages of the process serve as both memory triggers and a series of hooks for hanging and organizing those memories.

I intend to keep working on that document.

Write now: about a moving experience you’ve had. Capture the feelings you recall having before, during and after. Focus on those feelings and see what additional memories they bring forth. You may hit a rich new lode of material.

What's the Lesson Here?

 Light Chaos by Kevin Dooley

I don’t know if it’s the magnetic forces building as we slide into the core of the Milky Way, or maybe I'm wearing a sign on my virtual back that says “Trash My ’Puter” or something like that. My desktop machine (Hotshot) has lost the ability to record sound (think “Podcast Impossible”). Jack, my middle-aged ’Puter Wizard, is in the midst of finals week, and doesn’t want to hear my whining, or even take my money. He does his best to keep me self-empowered anyway. He assures me the sound card does work, so it's a Windows thing, and I “just” need to do a clean install and rebuild the system.

“NO!” I yell into the phone. “NOT THAT!” I have, oh, maybe 120 programs installed — true, half can be dumped — but it takes days to rebuild my system.

“Deal with it,” he tells me, in much kinder words.

Adding insult to injury, last night I discovered my laptop no longer recognizes our home network. The CMU wireless network I connected to Tuesday afternoon fried this function, and I can’t connect to the hard drive on Hotshot where I store all my files. This has happened before, and I’ve always relied on System Restore to make things right. System Restore has let me down. It looks as if a fresh installation of Vista is in the cards for the laptop. This system is less complicated and will only take one day. It's been acting wiggy anyway.

How’s a person supposed to find time to write?

After a quick test for compatibility and further consultation with Wizard Jack, I've resolved to replace Hotshot’s aging XP brain with Windows 7. I have to reformat and rebuild her anyway, and this should extend her life another couple of years. So add learning a new operating system to this mix I just described.

In case life weren't already exciting enough, my hubby just ordered parts for Jack to build him a new system (and I know who is going to end up holding whose hand while he installs his favorite apps), and the ophthalmologist who was scheduled to perform cataract surgery on my eyes in less than two  weeks just decided to hand me off to “someone better qualified” which will result in an additional delay of around two months. My head is spinning.

I seriously consider zipping up my down-lined red parka (red will fend off the deer hunters slipping through the woods just now) and going out to sit on a stump under our tri-centenarian oak, sucking my thumb, chanting, and rocking until I turn numb from the cold and . . . 

Wait! Sarabelle is saving me from myself. She just started a banner scrolling through my mind: What’s the message here? What are you supposed to learn? What’s the story? Ah, yes! The message. The story. Am I living my beliefs to the hilt? What sort of messages am I showering myself with? What would I like to have happen as a result of this craziness? These questions sent me scampering for my journal.

This is the true value of life writing: to write my heart out in times like this, to get these thoughts on the page where I can see them and work with them, and defuse their ability to sting and cause chaos. And in the process I’m certain to discover amazing ideas and answers.

Write now: make a list of questions you’d like to have answered about an area of chaos in your life — past, present or future. Use those questions as journaling prompts, then write a short essay about what you hope and expect to see happen.