How Long Should a Story Be?

“How long should a story be?”

I’ve never taught a beginning lifestory class without having this question arise. I’ve never found an improvement on the classic answer:

“As long as it takes to tell the whole story.”

For an powerful example of how large a slice of life can be packed into 282 words, click over to the essay blogger Maureen M entered in TupperWare’s Chain of Confidence contest. This poignant tribute to her mother covers a lot of ground. It includes all basic elements of a complete story (who, what, when, where, why, plus plenty of suspense and tension) and I guarantee you will not anticipate the surprise ending.

Maureen’s story is focused with laser-like precision, cutting directly to the point. There is enough content between those two dozen lines to fill at least a page for each word, but you may not understand the core story as well if it did.

Whether you are writing a single vignette story or a book-length manuscript, be clear on your purpose and let the story tell you how long it needs to be.

Write now: a laser-focused short story of 500 words or less about some significant influence on your life. Write fast; write tight; write real. And double-check for all the basic story elements.

Word by Word

While I was in Mexico awhile back, I struggled to express ideas in my rudimentary Spanish. I had to build sentences word by word. One day I realized that building stories is much like what I was going through to build sentences. Let’s take a look at how one sentence unfolds.

We go.

This sentence is grammatically complete, but it does not express a complete thought. It begs for amplification. Where do we go?

We go to mountains.

That’s better. But what mountains?

We go to Sierra Madre mountains.

And when do we go there?

We go to Sierra Madre mountains yesterday.

Why did we go?

We go to Sierra Madre mountains yesterday to take pictures.

How did we get there?

We go on bus to Sierra Madre mountains yesterday to take pictures.

Now the sentence story is complete. We know who is doing what (going), when, where, why and how. Those same elements are needed to tell a complete story, whether the story is one sentence long or hundreds of pages.

You probably notice an error in that sentence. The meaning is clear enough, but the verb is incorrect. It should read “We went ... .” If you wanted to polish the sentence further you could rearrange and tweak the wording, for example,

Yesterday we took a bus up into the Sierra
Madre mountains to take pictures of Indians.

You build a story the same way, thought-by-thought, answering the key questions and polishing at the end.

Write now: build a short story, thought-by-thought, answering the key questions of who, what, where, when and why. Make sure your story has a beginning (set the scene), middle (describe the actions) and end (tie the loose ends together). Get those bones on paper, and then rearrange the words, amplify the content to make it more clear, and polish your prose.

A Blog Is Born

Sharon Lippincott takes pleasure in announcing the birth of her new blog, A Los Alamos Girlhood. This latest addition to the Heart and Craft family of fine blogs arrived yesterday morning, January 18 and has been warmly greeted with instant acclaim. The blog, located on WordPress joins The Heart and Craft of Life Writing and Ritergal’s Tek Tips to form a trio of interrelated resources.

Why a new blog? Why not simply include all that information in this one?

It’s primarily a matter of focus and scope. This blog, The Heart and Craft of Life Writing, covers all forms of life writing, from raw, spontaneous free writing (aka rants) and journaling, through simple stories and essays to formal memoir. It explores interrelationships between the forms as well as giving tips on working in any given one. All content in this blog is valid for writing by hand as well as keyboarded work.
Ritergal’s Tek Tips limits content to the mechanics of writing and includes anything related to using the computer. If you have questions about layout, inserting graphics, or anything like that, drop Sharon an e-mail at the address in the sidebar and she’ll post an entry.

The new addition, A Los Alamos Girlhood, gives you the opportunity to peer over Sharon’s shoulder as she works on her memoir by the same name. The blog will document process, not content. It will undoubtedly include accounts of confusion, frustration, and massive revision as well as excitement, exhilaration, and the thrill of self-discovery. Every book is a new adventure, a fresh start, and each brings its own writing challenges. Your comments are expected to be as helpful to readers (and also to Sharon) as the content itself.

This fragmenting of blogs has application to life writing. There is no one-size-fits-every-purpose way to write. Some topics are best expressed as essays. Journaling is a great way to document and explore. Memoir gathers and synthesizes massive amounts of memory material to develop and convey insight.

Perhaps the greatest challenge is to coordinate your writing, keeping the parts in balance so they work together to help you advance in self-understanding and awareness as they develop into a source of light and inspiration for current and future readers.

Write now: pull out your files, whether they be full or paper or digital, and do one or more of the following:

• Make a simple To Do list of unfinished work you want to get back to and prioritize the list.
• Identify finished pieces you want to pull together into a larger project and plan how and when to do this.
• Write a journal entry including your feelings about your writing. Is it satisfying? Do you want to do more? Do you have expectations about it, or is anything you do quite enough?

A Los Alamos Girlhood

It’s probably time to start a new blog, specifically about the memoir I’m writing. I’ve been spending serious journal time doodling content and concept ideas, but had not found an entry point to begin writing.

Yesterday magic happened. A random sentence I heard earlier in the day took root and moved me to begin a new document beginning with that thought. Before my eyes drooped so low I had to crawl between the covers, about 2500 words had bubbled forth, and they were nothing I’d envisioned or considered writing. Yet they were good. They are keepers. Yes, I’ll do some editing, but my elusive concept is clear now. I can see how the story will flow. The shape has been revealed.

A key point that I often forget is that that although it sometimes hides behind the clouds, the story is within me. It’s there. It will reveal itself, and in my experience it will only reveal itself if I begin to write. That’s what I did last night. Begin to write.

Call it Sarabelle (the muse who until last night has mostly avoided me of late), call it the Creative Subconscious, call it whatever you like. It doesn’t matter what you call it. You have access to it, and if you aspire to write, it matters that you use it.

In my experience, Sarabelle is unpredictable. At random times, always while I’m busy with something else, she gifts me with spontaneous ideas whose value I immediately recognize. If I don’t drop what I’m doing and write enough to anchor the thought so I can recall it when I return to finish the piece, she’s sulk in hiding and avoid me for ages.

Other times she slips into my fingers after I’ve warmed them up and hijacks my word flow. This is always a good thing, though the results are often surprising, as they were last night.

As I wrote my Morning Pages today, she slung a title my way: A Los Alamos Girlhood, and she reminded me of the picture you see at the top of this post. I want to use that picture as a touchstone for the book. I’m not in this picture, but the girl on the right could be me. I had a bike like that, and I often rode it through that canyon. My hair looked like that and I had a yellow shirt.

Sarabelle also suggested that I start another blog, specifically about the process of writing this book. She told me this new blog would make me feel more accountable, and help me avoid distracting sidetracks so I'll actually finish the project. She told me it will give the book it’s own identity, separating it out from the more general content of this blog.

Yes, that does sound like a good idea. I shall do that, but not today. Watch for the announcement soon.

Write now: sit down and start writing about a story idea you haven’t been able to get your arms around. Write something, anything, and quite likely Sarabelle or one of her siblings will pay you a visit. You won’t know until you try, and it may take more than one try if you don’t already have a working relationship.

Fleshing Out the Bones

 What do Google, the Rootsweb database, my online Albuquerque Years eBook memoir, and this blog have in common? There could be any number of answers to that question, but the one I’m looking for is that they led to the unexpected email appearance a couple of days ago of a far-removed cousin on my mother’s father’s branch of the family.

His great-grandparents are brother and sister to my mother’s great-grandparents. I already knew a lot about that branch of my family, and the bare thread of the story as it moves through nearly two centuries from Ireland to Scotland, to Illinois, to New Mexico, looping up to the Klondike, back to Seattle, and down to New Mexico again before it frays at the end. Several relatives have been hooked on genealogy for decades and have probably found all the documents there are to find. My diligent daughter-in-law has posted an amazing number of entries on the Rootsweb site, making the collective knowledge easy as pie to access.

All that research has produced a helter skelter array of facts, but facts alone are little more than disconnected pieces of a puzzle. I had already set about the task of sorting and arranging the pieces to compile a more comprehensive narrative. The information Dan shared gave me quite a few new pieces and a broader view of others.

Wanting to anchor these new insights before they evaporate or I lose the notes, I pulled out the timeline I began compiling some time ago. Timelines are excellent tools for making sense of family history. The computer is perfect for making them, because it’s so easy to make changes and add extra rows as new information comes to light. I also color coded sets of children and added a column to indicate who the parents are for each birth. I'm feeling my way along on the format, trying to make it visually obvious.

As you arrange things that way, you begin to notice new connections. For example, I had assumed the Dinsmore brothers came over from the same mining camp as the Cowan sisters. However, the longer I peered at places of birth and where the earlier generations were born, I realized that they are unlikely to have known each other in Scotland. The brothers were probably near Edinburgh in the east, and the Cowans left from the Glasgow area in the west.

Before too long, I began to feel the need to add explanations of simple facts, so I opened another document and began writing. In this phase I’m able to look up events and other historical evidence of living conditions in that time and place and extrapolate what life was probably like for them. For example, I can raise the question of how they survived the notorious six-month coal mine strike in Braidwood, Illinois in 1877.

As I worked I also added snippets of material from other documents, like testimony from divorce proceedings I have copies of, notes my mother made, and similar material. The picture has developed considerably.

Adding story to flesh out the bones dug up by the family genealogists is a lot of work, but it’s a labor of love. I’m certainly learning a lot and coming to have even deeper appreciation for the variety of challenges my ancestors, especially my foremothers, faced! Hopefully it will make that corner of history come alive for my descendants too.

Write now: start jotting down some memories of your ancestors. If you have genealogical records, make a timeline of a branch of the family, and use that to draft an overview of people and events. Track down some distant relatives and see what else you can learn. You’ll have lots to talk about at family gatherings and your descendants will thank you.

Mapping My Mind

Remember that resolution I made to complete The Los Alamos Years (working title)? We have an ancient grandfather clock in the living room and this morning it reminded me that the year will fly past in a blur, so it’s time to get my fingers moving.

I began by making a list in my journal of specific features of life in Los Alamos that distinguished it from other places I might have grown up. As the list grew, I saw overlap and interrelationships. Suddenly I realized a MindMap would be a far better way of making these thoughts visible and clear. Clear thoughts lead to clear writing.

MindMeister to the rescue! There are several online mindmapping services that you can use for free. There’s also an opensource off-line one you can download for free, but I haven’t yet explored it. MindMeister is the one I chose today. It’s easy to use, but somewhat limited in formatting options. at least for the free account level.

I did not specifically copy the list from my journal, but used it as a springboard. The map you see below is primitive. I’ll probably move some things around and add far more elements, branching out another layer or two. I’ll add notes. I’ll draw some connector lines. But this is a start, and I share it with you here. 

I find mindmapping ever so useful in getting things out in a way I can see relationships. Chronology is not always the best way to organize and present memories, though ultimately you may use chronology as a thread to link clusters of scenes through the overall story.

Most likely I’ll use the mindmap as a checklist to make sure I incorporate these elements into scenes one place or another within the overall story to convey a strong sense of place, time and culture. A few are story seeds, but most are descriptive elements.

If you want to experiment with mindmapping, you can go online, or do it on the biggest piece of paper you can find. Since I tend to run out of space for some topics, I’m partial to digital mindmaps, at least to begin, so I can move branches around, and I’m not limited by paper size.

The best way to master mindmaps is to start making them. They will especially appeal to intuitive, “right brained” people, who will instinctively understand them. If you want more detailed guidance, I discuss mindmapping in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, and one of my all-time favorite resources on this topic is Joyce Wycoff’s classic book, Transformation Thinking. Joyce encourages people to use markers, draw pictures, and otherwise make their maps visually appealing.

Write now: try your hand at a small mindmap, online with MindMeister or on a sheet of paper. You may be amazed at what comes to mind, and the interconnections you find.

What to Do When You Can't Afford an Editor

I’ve recently read several posts about the prohibitive cost of having your manuscript professionally edited. For a book of 200 or more pages, those costs can climb to $3000 or more, and that does not include layout (figure at least $2 per page) or cover design ($200 or more, maybe lots more).  What’s a poor patronless writer to do?

Contrary to prevailing wisdom, I believe it is possible to learn enough to do a reasonable job of editing your own work, though input from others is invaluable. Below are some ideas to control the cost of editing, and to ensure that any funds you do expend will do double duty to develop your skills while enhancing your current manuscript:

Find an excellent critique group — online or local. Get a copy of Becky Levine’s brand new book, The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide: How to Make Revisions, Self-Edit, and Give and Receive Feedback, for guidance on making this process work.

Use beta readers, but be sure you choose discerning ones, not just "Oh, wow, you wrote a book!" people who are impressed with anything more elaborate than signing checks. If you belong to a book club, you know who the discerning readers are. If not, ask around. Use the guidelines in Becky's book to tell these readers how to be helpful to you.

Join a writing organization appropriate for your genre, i.e. National Association of Memoir Writers, Mystery Writers of America, or the National Association of Writers and Editors. You may also find local organizations. Take full advantage of teleseminars, conferences, classes, and other member benefits.

Take classes — online or local. These will be an investment in skill-building to help you in the future as well as now, and they may turn up critique partners. Writing organizations are a good source of prequalified classes. Some local continuing education classes are terrific, and others may be of questionable quality, so check the instructor out.

Invest in a few hours of coaching. Find a coach who will structure an agreement to give you the help and honest feedback you need to develop your skills, not a standardized one-size-fits-all prepackaged plan. I often recommend classes taught by other people or books that will help my clients strengthen specific skills.

Hire an editor for a a chapter or two. Learn from the results and apply that to the rest of your work.

Read books about writing. Use the recommended exercises. Check my website for a long list of recommended titles.

Read books in your chosen genre. Analyze their structure on several levels — storyline, style, use of dialogue, scene development, etc. This no-cost, do-it-yourself writing clinic is a powerful way to increase skill.

If you take advantage of even two or three of these suggestions, your skills will grow, your writing will sparkle, and you can self-publish a book that sounds as professional as any put out by a Big Name New York house. 

Write now: make a list of ideas for getting no-cost feedback on your writing and do some research on classes, coaching services, and organizations that can help you strengthen you skills.