What Is TRUTH?

Nine 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, what is truth: 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 as I've learned since then, that's both incomplete and misleading. Some of my increased understanding is old news, things I knew that had not integrated into my cluster of life writing neurons. Meanwhile, advances in the study of memory continue to deepen understanding. These discoveries have profound  relevance for life writers. Here's a list of a few evolving insights worth sharing:

Memory is fallible. Contrary to what you probably heard in psychology class, self-help seminars, and various other places, you do not remember every minute detail of every sensation that ever entered your brain. Recent evidence shows that incoming data is filtered, scrubbed and consolidated. Irrelevant material is unlikely to be retained. Furthermore, our brains often mistake vivid mental images for fact, embedding them as memory.

Memory morphs. Research shows that each time you recall an event or thought, current circumstances and thought become enmeshed in the memory, and the initial memory may become buried in debris over time. Compare this to your story files on disk. You may save your initial draft. Then you edit and save again. You may repeat that process twenty times, perhaps changing only a word or two each time you read. Five years later, if you had a copy of that original draft, you may not recognize it as the same story. But you didn't save the original, so there's now way to know.

Perception is personal and situational. In 1978 I grew sick of my long, hippie hair. I was enrolled in an off-campus graduate program at Central Washington U at the time, and made the hundred mile drive to the Ellensburg campus every couple of weeks. One day I left early and stopped at a hair salon before a lunch date with my mentor. Although I felt foxy as heck with my sleek new bob, I could barely see beyond a new fringe of bangs invading my view. My next stop was the library. When I stepped up to the checkout desk, I heard a man say, "Oh, my GOD!" A bomb exploded in my self-absorbed brain. Could my hair be that bad? I swung around and saw him gaping at a document.

Truth is relative. This perspective is based on the one above. In my essay, Mayhem at Camp RYLA, I cite the example of a young woman who worked as a bank teller and was held up at gunpoint a few months earlier. Shots were fired, though not at her. During a simulated crime at Camp RYLA, she saw an object held at arms' length, pointed in her direction. Not only did she tearfully swear under oath at the mock trial that a gun had been pointed at her, but that she'd heard a shot. That belief was so strong and true for her that she went into near meltdown at the revelation the "gun" had been a plastic water pistol.

Truth is situational and sometimes inconsistent. Victims of abuse often testify to this. "I loved him," they claim, years after they got brave enough to leave. "I really loved him. And I hated him when he beat me. Sometimes I wished he was dead." Those feelings, those truths, can exist side-by-side for decades.

So, you see, although I don't deny the existence of universal truths like the power of love, story truth is fuzzy, fleeting and personal.Write your story the way you see it, the way it's real and true to you. If you find truth changing as you write, consider yourself blessed.

Write now: Make a list of beliefs about what you hold true. Jot down a few examples of each. Then ask yourself Byron Katie's question, "Is this really, really true?" and "How do I know it's true?" You may be surprised by what you learn.

Photo Scanning Tips for CreateSpace

My heart nearly broke when I checked the resolution of a photo in a client’s family history/memoir I was preparing for upload to CreateSpace.com for printing copies for family members. When I copied the document photo and pasted it into IrfanView (my favorite free photo editor for low-end needs), I saw that the resolution was only 72 dpi (dots or pixels per inch). That’s a small fraction of the pixel density CreateSpace requires. This was the case with nearly all the several dozen photos in the book.

I had the gut-wrenching task of explaining to my client that she had a choice: I could resample the existing images to trick CreateSpace into believing they were 300 dpi . . . or she could rescan them.

How I wished that she, like the majority of people scanning old family photos, knew all along about scanning at a minimum resolution of 300 dpi. Here’s why it matters:

CreateSpace will sound an alarm when it analyzes an uploaded document and finds even one image of less than 300 dpi. For good reason. Lo-res images will look even worse in print than they do onscreen when zoomed above 100%. Ignore that warning at your own risk.

The left photo above is scanned at original size at 72 dpi. The image on the right is exactly the same picture, scanned at 300 dpi. Notice the crisp, clear detail in the high-res version compared to the blurry approximation on the left. That’s the sort of result you can expect with any image printed at 72 dpi.

My client wanted her volume to be top quality in every respect, so she opted to rescan as many photos as she still had available. For the rest, we stuck with small sizes and I resampled the existing photos as 300 dpi to stabilize them for printing. That turned off the CreateSpace alarms, but nothing could recreate lost detail. Still, those photos add value to the story and they are better than nothing.

Many of us scanned hundreds of pictures fifteen or twenty years ago when scanner technology was new and file size a concern. A 3” x 4.75” photo scanned at 300 dpi produces a file larger than the 1.44 megabyte capacity of the 3.5” floppy disks we used back then. We scanned at 72, or perhaps 96 dpi. I have a few hundred files like that myself, with the originals clear across the country, as many of hers are now. Those low-res files will work fine for eBooks and online viewing, but they are not print-worthy.

The tips below will help you get the best possible results for your publishing projects. If you decide to have someone else do layout for you, getting the photos right before you hand over the file will keep costs down and save you lots of aggravation.

Terminology

Resolution – the number of dots or pixels per inch. At 72 dpi, a square inch of image will have 72 pixels horizontally x 72 pixels vertically for a total of 5184pixels. At 300 dpi, that will be 300 x 300 for a total of 90,000, allowing for more than 17 times as much detail.

Resample – this word carries a touch of magic. If you change the resolution of an image, software uses samples from the image to calculate how to best condense or expand information to cover the desired amount of space. Increasing resolution spreads existing information thinner and is unable to add more detail.

Tips for preparing photos for publication

Scan at 300 dpi and 100% resolution – or higher. If you have a photo that’s 2” x 3”,  scan it at 600 dpi or higher to give you a high quality image printable at larger sizes so you can enlarge it enough to let people see detail. 600 dpi will allow you to double the size of the original in print. 900 lets  you print up to three times larger. Most old film photos lack the crisp resolution needed to successfully enlarge more than that.

Resample and enhance. If you aren’t able to rescan those old images, resample them to 300 dpi turn off the alarm.

Size in Microsoft Word to fit space on the page, then copy the image and paste into IrfanView or another editor to check resolution. Resample to 300 dpi at the precise size of the image in your manuscript. Replace the “temp” image with the resized one.

This matters because Word does a poor job of resampling, and images resized within the document generally look terrible when printed. This is partly due to changing the resolution as you resize in Word. Resizing is a nuisance, but worth the effort. I’ve tried not doing it and the results were not pretty.

Crop images with a photo editor. You  can do this in Word, and it might be okay, if you start with a 300 dpi image and don’t change anything else about its size. Check the quality of the image in your proof copy of the finished book.  For best results, crop in IrfanView, Photoshop Elements, or something similar and check to make sure the final image is 300 dpi.

Use an image editor to convert color images to grayscale if you plan to print in black and white. You can print from color or use Word’s image editing function to do this, but it’s not your best choice.

I’ll do another post soon on using your scanner interface. For now, scan big and pose questions in comments.

Write now: take a break from writing and scan a photo or two. Insert it in Word and play around with sizing. Download IrfanView and practice resampling. Tip: Resizing is on the Image menu. Ctrl+R will get take you right there. Have fun!

Six Things I Learned Going from Memoir to Fiction

Invited guest post by Carol Bodensteiner

Long time readers may be surprised to find a post about writing fiction on this blog about life writing. While it’s true that my focus is on memoir, lifestory, journaling and other forms that draw upon actual experience to express personal truth, sometimes the freedom of fiction is more effective in conveying truth. Carol Bodensteiner found this to be true. She has successfully written in both genres and her experience moving from memoir to fiction has lessons for all.

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I’d been a business writer all my life, so I was used to working with facts. Memoir was a logical first writing step. Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Girl, tells the stories of my childhood growing up on a family farm in the middle of the United States, in the middle of the 20^th Century.

When I finally raised my head from writing, publishing, and marketing the memoir, I looked around for what I’d write next. I turned to family-inspired fiction, which I’d never written before.  My novel, Go Away Home, which I indie published in 2014 and was acquired by Lake Union Publishing (an imprint of Amazon Publishing) later that year, is the result of that effort.

The road from memoir to fiction brought many adventures and a lot of learning. Here are six things I learned along the way.

1) A family story can be a great launching pad to fiction.

Go Away Home was inspired by my maternal grandparents. My grandfather died of the Spanish Flu in 1918. Throughout my life, I’ve been intrigued by my connection to this major world event. As someone used to writing from facts, a family story gave me a starting point: A story I cared to write and people and places that were familiar.

Writing the story as fiction was necessary for many reasons. One was that I didn’t have enough facts to write it any other way. Of course I never knew my grandfather and even though my grandmother lived until I was well into my 20s, I never asked her a single question about him or their lives together. And she was not the type to share. So though the story began with family, it is fiction.

2) Don’t get stuck on the facts

Once I got into writing the story, one of the biggest challenges was letting go of the facts. Since the genesis of this story rose from people in my family, and I knew a bit about the people, places, and events, my inclination was to use those facts. But I quickly found that the facts didn’t work for the story I was ultimately telling. They didn’t create a good story arc. There was no drama. On his website, Write the Truth, Robert McKee said, “The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: ‘But it actually happened.’”  Having gone this route, I believe him.

3) Do get stuck on the facts

Since Go Away Home is historical fiction, research was critical to creating the time period accurately. Clothes, transportation, hairstyles, technology, colloquialisms. The list of topics I researched and fact checked was long. Readers of historical fiction really care about the details. Writers must, too.

Research also helped shape the story. One example: Family lore was that my grandmother went to a sewing school. Research revealed that the town in question didn’t have a sewing school, rather that young girls apprenticed with seamstresses as a way to learn an important life skill and to meet a man to marry.  The idea that seamstresses were invited to their clients’ house parties had terrific dramatic potential, so I ran with that.

Another bit of fact to fiction. My grandmother took pictures, but the whole part in the book about the main character’s work for a photographer and her relationship with him is entirely fiction.  Most of the book is that way. Tiny fact. Huge fiction.

4) Planner vs. Pantser

Writers fall into two general camps: Planners and Pantsers. I wrote my way into Go Away Home, discovering the story through countless re-writes – by the seat of my pants. I always knew the end of the story; I didn’t know how we got there. In the first draft, the story started in 1900 and my main character Liddie was 10. In the second draft, the story started in 1915 and Liddie was 19. In the published draft, the story starts in 1913 and Liddie is 16. Believe me – those changes create seismic waves throughout the story.

Having used this highly inefficient “pantser” approach once, I’m reasonably certain that I’m a “plotter” at heart and will be more plan-ful in future writing.

5) Fiction is freeing

While I thought it would be easier to start with some facts because that was what I was used to, the reality was there was great freedom in starting with nothing. As the story developed (pantser), it became clear that connections were missing. I needed a scene to show my main character’s inexperience with men. No problem. I made up a guy. I found it was great fun to let my imagination run. Over and over, I filled holes with scenes that met a plot need.

6) New craft to learn

I learned a lot about creative writing as I crafted my memoir, much of which was also applicable to fiction. Dialogue, scene development, visual characterization – all come into play in both genres. Plotting was a new challenge in fiction writing, as I noted earlier. Developing multi-dimensional fictional characters was another challenge.

I used a number of techniques that contributed to creating the real, individual people living in my novel. I visualized people I know who were somewhat like the characters I had in mind. Writing exercises helped to identify key traits and to express them in fresh ways. I used Enneagram research to flesh out the positive and negative traits of various personality types.

From memoir to fiction, from craft to research, I will always be able to learn something new about writing, and for me, that’s great fun.

Go Away Home is available on Amazon in paperback and ebook formats.

Growing Up Country is available on Amazon in paperback, ebook, and audio book formats.

Carol Bodensteiner – Bio

Carol Bodensteiner is a writer who finds inspiration in the places, people, culture and history of the Midwest. After a successful career in public relations consulting, she turned to creative writing. She blogs about writing, her prairie, gardening, and whatever in life interests her at the moment. She published her memoir Growing Up Country in 2008. Her WWI-era, debut novel Go Away Home was acquired by Lake Union Publishing, an imprint of Amazon Publishing. It launches July 7, 2015.

Carol’s online links
Website/blog 
Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook

Write now: think of an interesting ancestor or other person who has influenced your life that you know relatively little about. Drawing on Carol’s experience, write a short story about how you imagine this person’s life might have been. Don’t worry about facts. Just let that story rip. Have fun with this!