Avoiding Editorial Disasters

What I would have to say in the review is "Stop the press and finish the book!”

When I agree to review a book, there’s an unstated contract that my glowing review will help promote the book. If I can’t ethically do that, I won’t write the review. I tell the author “I don’t think you want me to review this book. Here’s why.”

I made the notes below a couple of years ago to clarify my thoughts before emailing the author of a book I did not review.

… focused too tightly on few weeks when marriage finally died. Lacks background information. No sense of bigger picture. Doesn’t quite make sense. Seemed like her family wanted to knock some sense into her. His behavior not acceptable, but not egregious.More back story needed for context and less space documenting her helplessness.

…NO mention of physical affection during trial reconciliation  beyond briefly holding tight to him at beach and a couple of peck-on-the-cheek kisses. “Holding hands” in bed? Bizarre! Story is about the relationship. If they had sex, she should say so and tell how it affected her. If not, say so. Details are irrelevant, but avoidance creates gaping hole.

… She mentions money several times but no details. There is some, apparently hers, but ? His mother knows things he doesn't. Readers know only that we don't know. Ditto for details of her moving out of their shared apartment. Lots and lots of loose ends. Irritating!

The real tragedy is that this book was professionally edited – or at least the author paid someone for that service. Can you imagine anything worse than spending a sizeable hunk of cash on editing that results in this sort of reaction from readers?

Use these guidelines to help you avoid this sort of tragedy:

Seek input from at least half a dozen astute readers. Instead of or before you find a professional editor. Remember that friends and relatives know your story, so they may not see holes that strangers notice right away.

Look beyond your circle of writing friends. Much of my most helpful input has come from people who hate to write. Many book club members have highly developed critical abilities. They can spot plot flaws, awkward wording, inconsistencies and other areas for improvement.

Learn about various types of editors.

• Developmental or structural editors point out missing back story, loose ends and other flaws such as I mention in those notes above.
• Line or copy editors revise awkward wording.
• Proof-readers check for typos and similar errors.

Seek developmental editing help first. Don’t waste time polishing words in a story that needs major revision. I suspect the author I mentioned above used a line editor when she direly needed a developmental or structural one.

Check references. In .03 second, Google will find you tens of thousands of “professional editors”. A far better plan is to seek referrals from people you know or friends of friends. When you find a likely candidate, ask for contact information for authors they’ve worked with. Of course they will only give you names of happy clients. You should know that a startling number of authors are not satisfied with the first editor they work with and end up paying two or three.

Have others read the manuscript again after the professional edit is done. The author I mention above might have found out about those flaws before the book was in print if she’d sought more post-editing input.

YOU own the story. If anyone’s input, professional or otherwise, goes strongly against your grain, ask why they suggest what they do, then you decide. This is your story. Don’t be bullied. And don’t rashly reject input.

Consider your goals and budget. Who are you writing for? What are your sales goals? What can you afford to spend? If you are primarily writing for family and friends, input from people you know may be enough. If you dream larger, look for a qualified pro. But never spend more on book production than you can afford to write off. Don’t quit your day job and don’t spend your retirement fund.

Bottom line: In my opinion (and that’s all this is), a large team of astute readers can give you excellent results and are often enough for a superb story. If you have the money and inclination, professional editors can be worth their weight in gold, and working with one is an educational experience. Use due diligence in selecting one if you decide to go beyond what your circle of readers can help you with. And never rely on any one person’s opinion, no matter how qualified.

Write now: Make a list of people you know who might be willing to read draft copies and give you feedback. Keep this list growing, with the commitment that you will return the favor by reading for others.

Adventures of a Chilehead — Formal Debut

Today is the official debut of Adventures of a Chilehead. It’s a quiet affair. No big party – it’s too cold and icy right now. No champagne – but I will celebrate and toast the book with a bowl of chile, complete with guacamole topping  and a beer.

Books are much like debutantes —  when they make their formal debut, the whole community has watched them grow up and mature. Likewise, regular followers of this blog have read a number of posts about this book's progress.

You know, for example, that it began as a simple anthology and grew organically into a true memoir. You know that I learned many lessons along the way, and one that’s seldom discussed is the matter of length. People often ask how long a memoir should be. As with any story, a memoir should be as long as it needs to be to tell the story.

This book is short. You can read the stories in a couple of hours. And yet it does have all the components of a formal memoir:

• It has a story thread or theme, my love of hot chile, that runs through and ties individual scenes together.
• It remains tightly focused on that theme.
• It has a story arc, progressing from my first public involvement with surprisingly hot chile to the present, demonstrating change of perspective along the way.
• It is comprised of scenes, with a new adventure in each one.
• It hits the highlights without becoming mired in the mundane.

The book is short because it does remain focused tightly on its topic. If I’d wanted to make it longer, I could have pulled in other stories, or broadened the topic to food or cooking in general. But that was not my purpose. This is a tribute to  my beloved chile, and to the goddess Capsacia, who revealed herself in the process of writing. I said all I had to say on that topic. Thus I coined the term, “mini-memoir.

I think of this term as the memoir equivalent of a novella, a written, fictional, prose narrative normally longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. Novellas have no specific word count. They are generally more highly characterized than a simple short story, but less layered and complex than a full-length novel.

Although I had not heard the term “mini-memoir” before, I found it a delight to work with. Like a novella, it’s long enough to sink your teeth into, but short enough to avoid becoming bogged down. Especially with the advent of eBooks, mimi-memoir offers great potential. I chose to do a print version of this one, primarily because several people asked for one. They want to have the recipes handy in the kitchen. But a series of short eBooks would work just fine.

If you have several minis, you may eventually want to bundle two or three into a single print volume. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination. If you haven’t already read it, pop over to Amazon and order a copy. If you order print, the Kindle version is included for free.

Write now: look through your pile of finished stories and find a cluster of related ones. Consider ways of organizing them into a mini-memoir, using the “Story Album to Memoir” post as guidelines to help you organize your thoughts. If you don’t have more than a couple of finished stories, think of a theme, make a list of story ideas, and start writing, one story at a time. Don’t fret about weaving them together until you have them all finished.

Mouse Shoulder Break

I call it mouse shoulder. Doctors and physical therapists  talk about ulnar nerves. Whatever the technical term, it means I’ve been spending way too much time at my computer than is good for my body. My little finger tingles all the time. My shoulder hurts.

The good news is that I caught this early and it’s treatable, but not with pills. Pills can help, but they aren’t the answer. If I just take pills and power on through, it will continue to get worse. The bad news is that along with exercises, massage, and so forth, the treatment involves severely curtailing my time at the keyboard. That means cutting way back on blogging, Facebook, Forums, email, and all those things that have come to seem such necessary aspects of daily life.

Sometimes, wise people tell us, our bodies send us signals when change is needed. Those wise people urge us to pull out pen and paper and begin to dialogue with our affected parts. Oddly enough, writing by hand on a lap desk is still okay. This seems a clear message to spend extra time with my journal.

It’s a good time to plan, to make lists, to outline and organize, to do the creative parts of writing that are easy to overlook. It’s time to get out of a rut that’s beginning to wear deep. Raking leaves is good therapy. Painting walls. Going to the gym. Reading books.

So I’m taking a break for a week or few, and shall return when the time and shoulder feel write. Please get in touch with questions. I will check comments and email now and then.

Write now: pull out your journal and spend twenty minutes or more writing, by hand, on paper, about some physical symptom that annoys you. Let your body dictate the words as they flow freely onto the page. You may shift into dialogue. But don’t try to talk down the messages. These are jewels, as powerful as dreams. Listen and heed.

Image credit: Gray’s Anatomy via Wikipedia.

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.

Odds and Ends

Everybody has a junk drawer in the kitchen or somewhere, a drawer where you put the stuff you don’t know where else to put. Stuff you intend to sort and put away properly “someday.”

I have a folder like that stored inside the general Documents folder – odds and ends of lifestory starts and sandpaper drafts. Bits and pieces of memory and story that beg for completion, but I haven’t had time, or lost the thread or … you know. Stories that made it past the Story Idea List stage, but not by much. Stories with beginnings, but no endings. If you don't have a folder like that, I suggest you set one up.

Today, when the post I’d planned didn’t work out because the video I wanted to include doesn’t display right, I decided to peruse my junk files. In the interests of full disclosure, I have more than one such folder. I found an older one with files dating back about four computers. I haven’t looked in it for ages, and I found some real treasures.

Among them is a file I’d intended to use as the first chapter of a memoir about my mother. The folder holding that file dates back to 1999, and I have not worked on it since. Usually when I find a file that old, I instantly find at least a dozen ways to improve it based on the countless writing lessons I’ve learned in the interim. Not this time. It’s all there: description in all seven senses, emotion, reflection, dialogue, tension stretching several ways, bait on the opening hook….

That story is the exception. I also found meaningless scribbles that I’ll probably delete. Someday. But maybe not. Maybe I’ll leave them there, and someday one of my kids will look through my hard drive and find these files and either spend several days reading through it all or simply delete the entire file structure.

Maybe I’ll keep them all for a while yet because just as I look at the kitchen drawer you see in the photo above and remember where we got the chopsticks we’ll never use, or the countless trips to the bread store represented by the balls of string, and the sweater or dishrags I’ll never crochet from it, and the fragrant bottles of wine that held all those corks and the friend we drank it with, or the good intentions of the friend who gave us the beeswax candle I’m “saving for someday”, and the market in Victoria Falls where I bought the giraffe salad servers from a destitute woman too proud to beg, I realize that drawer is full of my life. Parts of my brain and heart live in that drawer, and much larger parts live on my hard drive.

Yes, I’ll keep the story crumbs, the odds and ends, and I’ll move that chapter about Mother up onto the active list. I’ll make yet another folder and move all the odds and ends of Mother stories into it where I can easily find them. I may yet get that memoir done. But even if I don’t, I have a solid start.

Write now: look through your scrap folder and find an unfinished story that merits polish or finishing, then take it to the next step. If you don’t have such a collection yet, open your kitchen junk drawer and find a memory. Write about it.

The Tree of Me

On a whim inspired by matroyshka dolls and Growing Old: A Journey of Self-Discovery by Danielle Quinodoz, I decided to make a sketch of my “layers.” I found a tabloid-sized sheet of blank newsprint, picked up a pencil, and within about five minutes this graphic emerged showing my life from beginning to now. For the purposes of sharing and further embellishing, I redrew it with color for the boundaries. It’s still rough, as you can see by the orange blotch in the core that didn’t work out quite as hoped. But that’s okay. This is a source of inspiration and insight, not destined for the living room wall.

I was surprised as could be to see it. I’ve thought for ages about a chronological map of stages of my life. I like this one ever so much better. It’s organic and representative. As Quinodoz points out, I hold all those previous layers within me, but redefine them and cover them with new growth as I go.

When I began, I had no sense of direction. I thought I might be making a graph of roles I play. This emerged on its own. I will still work with the role idea later, as creativity further instructs.

I especially value this form, because within the layers I have space to write thoughts about that era. Here I’ve included rudimentary memories of threads of activity and my emotions and state of mind at the time. The layer boundaries are especially bold and jagged for times of great turmoil and upheaval. My world shifted on its axis at these points. The colors aren’t significant. Note that the boundaries are uneven – like the rings in an actual tree. They serve to organize memory clusters to clarify my sense of them and provide inspiration when I write.

Perhaps I’ll develop this further, but for now it’s a super-rich source of writing prompts, and it basically comprises a life-long memoir-at-a-glance, at least for me. Those cryptic notes won’t mean a lot to anyone else. 

It does show chronology, because the rings expand year-by-year. I didn’t put dates on the ring boundaries, but I could. I could do a lot of things. So can you, if you give this a try. I suggest using even larger paper so you have more room to take your time and make more notes.  I predict that you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the patterns and insights.

Write now: Find a huge sheet of paper or piece of posterboard and make your own cross-section. You  might sketch it roughly in pencil first, then move to the full-size sheet. Add detail and make it rich. Then write about each layer.

Searing Memories

Photo: Aaron Wagner

We all have them, those memories that are so vivid they blaze in our memories forever. We remember exactly where we were, what we were wearing, the time of day, and all the details — although we may not remember the specific date.

One of my searing memories takes me back to one wintry Saturday in eighth grade. The phone rang about eleven in the morning. It was a boy — calling me! History was made that day. I’ll save the details for my memoir, and tell you only that it was the hottest guy in our class, asking me to meet him at the ice rink that afternoon. No! This was too good to be true. Besides, my parents wouldn’t let me date until I was sixteen. Besides, he sounded just like my best girl friend, who had a rather husky voice, and I kept trying to get “her” to admit who she was.

When I called her immediately after hanging up, she assured me she hadn’t called. I believed her. The voice didn’t sound quite the same. When I got back to school on Monday, I was apparently invisible to Hunky Dude. Just as before, he never looked my way, even though our lockers were near each other. Had it really been him? Or was someone pulling my leg?

I’ll never know for sure, but I do know that I felt good about the way I played the game. I had a strong gut feeling that if it had been him, I was being set up for some awful humiliation at the rink. I can only guess what that might have been, but I didn’t need it and was blessedly spared. I felt strong and capable of taking care of myself. This searing memory is a turning point in my relationships with boys. The concept of actually having a boyfriend turned from the theoretical into the possible that day, even though I suspected it would be a good long while before anything tangible came along.

Searing memories, defining moments, turning points. In The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing I refer to them as watershed memories. It doesn’t matter what you call them, they are mileposts along our journey through life. We all have them. Some are joyful and mark advances. Some are traumatic, some may be quietly profound. All are significant and provide strong pillars for organizing related memories as you develop stories.

Taking time to list your watershed memories and arrange them along a timeline will  pay enormous dividends are you organize your life story or memoir, whether you are just beginning to write, or grappling with final organization.

Write now: review your list of watershed or turning point memories if you have one, and make an inventory of stories that remain to be written. If you don’t have a list, start one. Add to it as more occur to you. 

Photo Credit: Simon Harriyott

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.

Writing Over Hills and Valleys

About twenty-five years ago I had the privilege of attending a two-day management training seminar conducted by Helen Reynolds, a noted author and speaker of the time who specialized in helping women develop their leadership skills. This lively grandmother refused to carry anything but a toothbrush and wallet aboard a plane, and she spent the first day clad in her elegant raincoat, asking questions and lecturing off-the-cuff while she waited for the arrival of her lost suitcase and her brain-in-a-box: a steamer trunk full of immaculately organized overhead slides. On day two, she seemingly pulled overheads forth at random as the conversation continued. Somehow this casual approach worked to inspire, instruct, and generate four-star evaluations. Aside from my astonishment at the success of her apparent lack of organization, I remember only one thing — a story she told.

“All I know about life, is that at times it is compact and tidy,” she said, holding an imaginary globe just a little bigger than a softball. “When it’s like that, everything goes according to plan, neat and tidy and right on schedule. I feel in control and on top of things, like I could do anything. When it’s like that,” she continued, “I know only one thing. Sooner or later it will go Poof!” Her hands flew apart.

“When that happens, life is big and scattered and chaotic, and I have no idea how I’ll get through the days.” She holds an imaginary beach ball as big as a small moon.

“But when life is like that, I know only one thing. Sooner or later, things will settle down, and fall back in order,” her hands slowly compress, “and before long, it will be tidy and orderly again.” Her hands have returned to softball size.

I understood the truth of those words as she spoke them. More than a quarter of a century has passed since then, and today they seem even more true than when I heard them. Yen and Yang, life cycles, hills and valleys, call it what you will. You know what I mean. But wouldn’t life be boring if the road were flat!

This principle seems to apply to all areas of life, writing no less than others. On unpredictable occasions, my writing is lucid and flowing, seeming to come from fountains of wisdom far beyond anything I could summon forth on purpose. More often it is work. I start a story or a blog post, get it half written and realize it isn’t going where I want to go. I may start half a dozen times. Then I cut and paste and snip, and only with great effort do I arrive at something that says what I intend.

Sure, I could just sit here and wait for my muse Sarabelle to come drifting by, but I’ve found that she’s more likely to visit when she knows I’m trying. The hard times are the workouts my fingers need to keep them limber for the times she does visit.

Besides, anyone who goes to the gym regularly knows that feeling of satisfaction that comes from a good workout. It isn’t easy to start, to form the habit, but once it’s formed, the work feels good, It generates a sense of satisfaction and well-being. Writing is no different.

So even if you struggle, even if it seems as if you’ll never get the words down just the way you’d like, keep on writing. If you’re stuck on one story, write another. And another. At the very least, you’ll leave behind lots of drafts, and as I’ve said so often,

Any lifestory you write
is better than writing nothing.

Write now: about times when you felt the most blocked in your writing. What did you do to free up your fingers? How do you cope during these times/ Then write about a time when you felt words flowing forth as if by magic. Or imagine such a scene and write about it. How does it feel?

Sibling Rivalry and Story Albums

The tale of sibling rivalry, especially among boys, is as old as Cain and Abel. It may be mild and quickly pass, especially in siblings with a wide age difference, or it may be intense and, as in the case of Cain and Abel, even deadly. It can be the source of humor, lasting scars, or even both. It's almost the norm that siblings argue, tattle on each other, plot revenge, and set each other up. They may even slug things out on occasion. This is all frequent fodder for comic strips like Foxtrot, Jump Start, or Baby Blues.

It’s also fodder for blogs. Pete, the author of the blog Your Neighborhood Reverend, posted a piece titled “Memphis - the New City of Brotherly Love” in which he describes torments he suffered at the hands of his older brother. It’s illuminating. Don’t let your children read it! I learned some things about spit from that story that I never would have guessed, and that swinging body — how graphic! Besides telling of tortures, he also assures us that not only did he survive, but that nobody who sees those brothers together today would guess at their past.

This is a great example of a vignette story that works well standing on its own. However, even as a story complete unto itself, it contains many loose ends. I’m left wondering: Does he remember having good times with his brother during that same period? How did he and his brother get from this stage of villain and victim to brotherly love? Aside from terror, how did Pete handle things during this period? Did he ever tattle?

Obviously Pete couldn’t paint a comprehensive picture of life with his brother in the limited space of this post, and this is where the value of a story album or integrated memoir comes into play. You can write about the various angles I mentioned above in separate pieces to tuck in those loose ends.

You don’t have to weave all your stories artfully into a commercially viable memoir to leave a valuable legacy for your heirs. Few people are that motivated. Pete has given his descendants at least a glimpse of his boyhood. If that’s the only story he ever writes, they’ll be glad to have that. But if you read Pete’s blog, you’ll see that this mystery man has more stories than you can shake a stick at, and they don’t generally relate to each other in any specific way. What would Pete do to pull those stories together for publication?

The simplest thing for Pete to do is to put together what I refer to in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing as a Story Album, or collection of short stories. Arrange them in any order that makes sense, which may be topical, chronological by your age in the story or when your wrote the story, totally random, or whatever. You’ll find further guidelines for assembling them in my book, and you can look at any book of short stories for further inspiration.

Now that’s a long circle, all the way from sibling rivalry to book layout, but this post was inspired by Your Neighborhood Reverend, and he’s also given to such rambles, so ... be alerted that what you read influences your writing.

Write now: about sibling rivalry in your family. How did your brothers and/or sisters torture you? If you were an older sibling, how did you cause grief for your younger ones? What is the other side of the coin? What good times and joy did you share together? If you were an only child, write about your longing for a sibling. Share your stories with your siblings, if you are really brave. I almost guarantee they’ll have quite a different version of the same story. Just remember, this is your story. They can write it their way if they wise.

I Had a Dream

I awoke this morning from a most wonderous dream: I was with a group of friends, sitting around a table talking about our various projects and ideas, encouraging each other on. Suddenly something dawned on me:

“Have you noticed he each one of us is responding to suggestions with ‘I could do that,’ or ‘maybe I could’? Nothing is going to happen as long as we say ‘maybe’ and ‘could.’ I’ve lived long enough to know no that nothing happens until I say, ‘I will do that.’ ”

I was as surprised at my words as anyone in the group, but I recognized them as absolute Inner Truth, a genuine epiphany. The dream ended before they had a chance to respond. I have a lot of dreams, but I seldom remember details. Now and then one speaks to me, and this one spoke to me. I took it as a message that I’m ready to turn “could” into “will” often in the coming year. Attitude is everything.

Beyond any personal meaning in this dream, it applies to readers who think about writing, whether anything from a single vignette story of a couple of pages to a voluminous saga covering the full extent of your years. Perhaps your family or friends keep telling you, “You should write all that stuff down!” Perhaps you’ve just been meaning to and going to get around to it. If you are still thinking about it, thinking, “Yes, I could do that ...” this is the time to turn your “could” into “will”. As the New Year rolls in and you think of New Year's Resolutions, make one about writing, and make it “I will!”

Aside from battles with your Inner Censor, the biggest obstacle to implementing that “I will!” decision is not knowing where to start. As I explain in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, it doesn’t matter where you start. Just pick up a pen and start writing about any memory at all, and things will fall in place.

For those who tremble at setting out on such an impetuous path and feel the need for more organization, I have three suggestions. One is to create a timeline of your life. I’ve written about this before in The Value of a Personal Timeline, and What Should I Write About?. What better time to start your timeline? If you never write story number one, that timeline will probe to be quite valuable.

The second suggestion is to do some free writing to make a list of story ideas. Take a piece of paper and set a time for fifteen minutes. Jot down every memory that comes to mind. Don’t dwell on them. Just write a few words to anchor it so you can bring it back quickly later, and move on. See how many you can capture before the timer bell rings. You’ll find more specific information about this topic in my post, Story Idea List.

The third is to turn to the list of Memory Triggers in Appendix 2 of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. (Or find a list somewhere else.)

Whatever you do, may this be the year that you put “will” in place of “could” and all your dreams of writing come true. All your other dreams too, for that matter.

Happy New Year!

Write now: start a timeline of your life, if you haven't already done so. Update it if you have.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Reading for Better Writing

My hubby is great at uncovering writing lessons for me. It never ceases to amaze me that a nuclear physicist who took the minimum requirement of lit courses is able to rattle off such stunningly insightful critiques of structure, conflicting detail, character development and other matters of interest to a writer. He freezes up at the thought of writing anything nontechnical himself, but he's a masterful reader, and I'm especially blessed to have the benefit of his skill.

Last spring I nearly wrecked my voice reading Haven Kimmel's memoir, A Girl Called Zippy, aloud in the car on a long road trip. This memoir, published in 1991, came at the early edge of the current spate women's memoirs, and due to some weaknesses, it may not make the publisher's cut today. Despite the flaws, it's a charming and delightful story, and we spent lots of time laughing at the humor found throughout.

I hadn't been sure Hubby would relate to the book, but he did enjoy it. He also rattled off some flaws before I'd even finished reading. Four stand out:

1. She didn't date-stamp her accounts, and she jumped around in time like a grasshopper on a sugar high. We often wondered whether she was six or twelve during a particular episode. Age was relevant to putting the story in context.

Writing lesson: Be sure to anchor each story in the five W's: who, where, when, why, and what.

2. She repeated material many times, without any indication that she intended to do so. Repetition is okay, but tends to bore readers and sound sloppy.

Writing lesson: When you assemble random stories into a collection, check for duplication of material. After the first time you mention an event, refer back to that first mention rather than retelling it in full. If you do retell it, recast it to shed a different light on things. Best of all, tighten up your content to avoid the need for repetition.

3. Her dialog was overdone. Many conversations sounded more like something you'd read in the New Yorker than a memoir about childhood. Perhaps she really was that precocious, but it sounded as authentic as a toddler wobbling around on oversize stilettos, wearing lame, lipstick and lots of bling. It was splendid creative writing, and had it issued from the lips of a more mature character, it would have been gold-standard.

Writing lesson: Keep your vocabulary age-appropriate when you use dialog. As I've mentioned several times in previous blogs about The Albuquerque Years, “grown-up” words or interpretive sections jangled loudly. My sense of things told me I had to keep it consistent with my age at the time; to keep the words true to the music.

4. She honed in on certain details with laser-like precision. Who can say? Perhaps her memory is that sharp. But for most of us, the mists of time tend to blur the edges of physical surroundings, and specific wording of remembered conversations. Sharpening them too much is like over-sharpening a picture with photo-editing software. The picture no longer looks real, and the story begins to sound contrived.

Writing lesson: Detail is good, but reaching too far, filling in too many blanks with guesses, or relying on input from too many others, weakens your credibility. Write from your own memory. Let intuition fill in a few blanks, but don't grasp for straws. Leave it out, or honestly admit that you don't remember.

In spite of these criticisms, the book is a delight to read, and I consider reading it time well spent — especially since my resident literary critic was along to point out the lessons.

Perhaps there is a further lesson in all of this — the importance of finding support people who are skillful readers. I feel especially fortunate to have one under my own roof. You may have to look a bit further. I'd suggest attending a few sessions of a reading group at your local library. Pay close attention to those who seem to be the most articulate in analyzing the books. If you can get one or two of those people to give you honest feedback on your own writing, you'll be getting some of the best coaching available, and they will probably be flattered to have you ask them, and glad to help.

Write now: about an early childhood memory. Use some dialog in your story and describe the surroundings. Before you begin writing, sit back with your eyes closed and try to remember what things looked like when you were that age. What did they sound like? How did you think about things. Try to become that age again. Then, open your eyes, and start writing. Most likely, your muse will be whispering in your ear, and words will flow right out onto paper like magic, in just the right words and level of description. It's okay to edit, but resist the temptation to "pimp it up."

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

More Than Just a Table

It already had a lot of history before it came into our family. I found the old table in the stairwell near the garbage chute in our first apartment in Boston. People put large things there for the janitor to dispose of, and anything you found was fair game. I thought carefully before adopting the table. I knew it would be a life-long relationship.

Forty-some years later, this appears to be the case. It still sits in my kitchen. It’s evolved considerably in the interim. For the first couple of years, a blotchy, peeling coat of colored varnish deepened the shade of the cherry wood. In the late sixties I painted it a lovely turquoise, accented with then fashionable antiquing, perfect for the spindled, early American legs. In the seventies, it acquired a coat of lime green paint to coordinate with the next house.

Eventually it was too small for our growing family and moved to the basement, where it served a variety of passive purposes. When we moved to Pittsburgh, it obligingly returned to active duty in the kitchen, while its successor occupied the dining room.

The lime green paint was jolting in the new location, so I stripped the table bare. It remained naked for more than a dozen years before I gave it a chic, sheer paprika-red glaze and a couple of coats of varathane, leaving the legs natural.

The story of the table’s surface doesn’t begin to tell what it’s meant to our family. It has been with us through infants, toddlers, teens and grandchildren. It has participated in celebrations, turmoil, tedium, and joy. It has hosted friends, held homework, collected piles of dirty dishes, served as a bread kneading surface ... .

As I consider this table, I think of all the stories it has witnessed, the stories it could tell. It's more than just a table — we have no secrets from it. An idea strikes me: I could write a collection of stories about our family with this table as the organizing thread. Will I write this series? I can’t tell you today, but it is a doable and exciting idea. The concept resembles memoirs people like Ruth Reichl write that use adventures with food as the organizing principle.

This idea is worth remembering. I just wrote it on a card and stuck it in my file box. I recently expanded my card filing system to include a section for theme ideas. Others include cars I have known and loved, special people in my life, vacation stories and many others.

Write now: about a treasured piece of furniture in your life. Be very specific in your description of the item, using all your senses. How did it smell? What was the texture as you ran your fingers over the surface? What sounds did you hear as you used it? Was this item comforting? Does it remind you of anything special? What memories are connected with it?

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Project That Just Won't Quit

I wouldn’t call it The Project From Hell, not by a long shot. No, this personal project I’m trying to finish as a test run of Lulu.com’s on-line Print-On-Demand (POD) publishing services is more aptly named “The Project That Just Won't Quit.”

The final result, The Albuquerque Years, will be the culmination of my very first lifestory writing adventure, the story of my preschool years, begun over ten years ago. As I explain in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, I began writing this story as a whim, to be able to share my own experience as a very little girl with my then preschool-age grandchildren. I simply sat down at the computer and did a memory dump, in a haphazard fashion, without much order or thought.

Toward the end, I decided I wanted to include photos, lots of photos. At that point, WordPerfect stalled out on files with more than a few photos, so the story began breaking up into a vast array of pieces. In frustration, put it away to deal with later.

A few months ago, I became embarrassed about the fact that I, of all people, have not completed a single finished volume with a legacy of my own lifestories. I pulled out The Albuquerque Years project, determined to see it through to print. OpenOffice and Word are up to the challenge now, and Lulu presents a way of having it professionally printed and bound at an astonishingly affordable cost.

As I launched into what I thought would be a couple of days of final touches, I was chagrined to discover that I’d only told, at most, half the story. Over the course of a few weeks, I’ve doubled the length to 76 pages in Lulu’s Crown Quarto page size (7.44 x 9.68 in.), organized the stories to flow more smoothly, added several details, and inserted over forty photos. I converted the file to a PDF, after wading through Lulu’s occasionally conflicting instructions. (The live chat function works splendidly for clearing up any confusion.) I’ve almost finished a cover design.

At the last minute, I decided to add an Afterward to give background on the project and explain the process of setting it all up to work with Lulu. Perhaps future generations will appreciate this insight, and it will certainly be helpful to anyone today who wants to use Lulu for their own story albums. I’d hoped to announce a couple of days ago on the blog here that the upload had succeeded. Maybe tomorrow.
The morals of this story:

• There’s lots more to do to complete a published project after you finish the writing. Things always take twice as long as you anticipate.
• There is always something else to be done when you are getting a book finalized, whether it’s a commercial publication or something as private and personal as this project.

But it’s not the Project From Hell. It’s more like my flesh-and-blood offspring, who all took at least an extra week to grow to completion. But they all three arrived, strong and healthy, and so will this book! Persistence will ultimately prevail.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

A picture is Worth a Thousand Words

You've heard the old saw, "A picture is worth a thousand words." That can work both ways. It may take a thousand words to explain what's happening in a picture. A combination of pictures and story is ideal. Most people think of adding photographs to life stories, but there are several other kinds of pictures that add interest and value to the story. In The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, I suggest including maps and floor plans with your stories.

For example, I'm working on a compilation of stories about the first six years of my life. For most of that time we lived in the same house. I will include this floor plan for that house, the best I can remember.


I drew this on the computer, but graph paper and a pencil would have been lots easier! It isn't exactly right, even yet, but you can see that it was quite a small and simple house. When I pair this with photos like the one below that shows the front of the house, the fireplace, or other spots in the house, the whole story takes on more depth.

Me with my doll, Vickie

I may also include map scans of the neighborhood and Albuquerque. I could include shots of flowers we had in the yard. I could include all sorts of things, both written and visual. Last September I did a post that included a crayon drawing of the back yard as I remembered it.

How do you make decisions about what to include? The same way you decide what written details to include. Decide what the purpose of your story is, and what focus you want it to have. If I want to focus on the logistics of learning to roller skate, I may want to find a picture of the sort of adjustable, clamp-on skates I had. If I'm more focused on the sensations of wild wobbling, the heaviness of the pillow my mother strapped around my boney tush to ease my tumbles, the cutting pain of the tight ankle strap, and my stubborn determination to stick it out in spite of the skinned knees, I will skip the picture.

I hope I've given you some new ideas for illustrating your stories, and a little guidance in deciding which are the most appropriate for your purposes.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Increase Story Longevity

I recently watched from the sidelines as acquaintances sorted through boxes of old family artifacts awaiting final disposition. Among the collection of musty old photo albums, letters and other memorabilia were dozens of journals kept by Grandpa over decades.

“You are not taking all those smelly old things home!” the wife stated. The look in her eye brooked no room for negotiation.

“No, maybe a volume or two as an example,” the descendant concurred. He wasn’t interested in reading them, he explained. They were too dry, too factual. All they contained were weather reports, prices of various commodities, times and dates of meetings, and other banalities. “Now, I’d definitely read them if they were my mum’s journals,” he told me. “Her journals were full of stories. They told what happened. You learn a lot from them.”

He elected to take the pile of photo albums home, with the intention of scanning in two or three selected photos of each person. “I can put those pictures in my genealogy software and they’ll print out with the paragraph I write about each person. I tell just enough that future generations will know who the person is and where they fit in.” When he’s finished, he’ll return the albums, and a nephew can do as he wishes with the contents.

Since it wasn’t my family, and none of my business, I held my tongue as both husband and wife continued to insist that “Nobody wants to see more than a couple of pictures, and they’d be bored reading more than a paragraph or two about each.”

My heart yowled in disagreement! Yes, I’d rather see a paragraph or two than none, and any picture at all, but those paragraphs they refer to would only whet my appetite for “the rest of the story.” I pour over albums of pictures, following the evolution of a person from infancy to old age, even when the people are unrelated to me. I’m fascinated by the details of people’s lives. I want to know what they thought, how they lived, what their passions were.

A couple of days later I thought more calmly about the incident and drew a few conclusions:

• An extensive collection of “raw” and unorganized journals or stories will overwhelm many people, who are likely to toss the whole lot rather than deal with them. If you are a prolific journal or lifestory writer, do future generations a favor and write at least an overview of your life.

• The most effective plan is to write on two levels. Give an overview for the easily sated, and work in detail elsewhere for the inquiring minds like mine.

• You can significantly increase the odds of survival for your documents by livening up your facts and figures with stories to produce the sort of mind magnet that Grandma created in her journals.

I’m happy for my new friends that they were able to find material that satisfies their needs, and sad that so much will be left out. But in the end, perhaps they took as much as anyone will ever want to read, and in any event, it’s definitely better than nothing!

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Countdown: 15 more days until the official release of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. Advance orders can now be placed at Amazon.com for the earliest possible delivery.

Secrets! of a Los Alamos Kid, 1946-1953

Memorial Day is a day for remembering and I spent this day remembering place as well as people. To help in this regard I had a copy Kristen Embry Lichtman’s memoir, Secrets! of a Los Alamos Kid, 1946-1953. I enjoyed this book on two levels. First, it was a vivid trip down memory lane. I also grew up in Los Alamos, and in my later years there I shared many adventures with members of the Embry family. For me, that combination of place and people formed the heart of the book.

Beyond that close connection, I appreciated the craft Kris used in creating the book. It’s a fine example of the scrapbook style of story organization I mentioned in the last post. The book is comprised of twenty chapters of varying lengths. Each chapter covers a designated period of time, be that a single day or several months, and each has a theme. Of the twenty, only six feature a single story. The others group several related incidents of anywhere from a single paragraph to a couple of pages to broaden the coverage of the theme.

Her liberal use of dialog, choice of present tense, and liberal use of photographs make the story sizzle with life, and her gently humorous accounts of her own silent fretting that resulted from typical childish misunderstandings lend a strong aura of credibility to the tales. She matter-of-factly tells of shenanigans like scooting out the door when her mother was distracted, and jumping off the top bunk with the older two sisters when their parents were both away in the evening. Kris’s cozy, informal writing style makes the book read like a letter to a cherished friend or relative and furthers the impression that this is a book one can take at face value without considering the role of literary device or artifice.

Her choice of content was judicious. Although she limited the book to her grade school years, she surely could have filled several times the 110 pages with stories from that time frame. The ones she did include are tightly focused on her purpose of showing various aspects of life in Los Alamos as a young girl. Readers become acquainted with her family, but always in the context of living in that specific community. For example, the tale of flushing extra toilet paper produced a reminder of the power of Zia, a mysterious force unknown to the outside world. The book is about the chance for young children to roam freely in the canyons, and the abundance of neighboring kids to play with. It’s about the lifelong love for the mountains and pine forests that she (probably most of us) developed growing up in Los Alamos. And above all, it’s about the role secrets played in our lives there.

Kristin’s story was published by the Los Alamos Historical Society, and that fact shows that our stories can have value beyond our families. Any of the thousands of kids who grew up as Hilltoppers will find a treasure trove of memories between those covers, perhaps story ideas of our own, and the views of the children growing up there at a crucial juncture in history are of historical interest. Beyond that, I recommend the book to any lifestory writer as an example of a completed collection of stories written and organized in an effective, down-to-earth way.

To date, I know of only one other Los Alamos offspring who has written publicly about the experience of growing up there. I’m inspired to join their ranks, and I hope many others will do likewise. How about you? Could you produce a collection of stories about the place(s) where you grew up? Make sure your Historical Society and/or public library have copies. Publish it on Lulu.com so others can easily obtain them. Who knows how many lives you can brighten, as Kristen has brightened mine?

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Countdown: 34 days until the release of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing on July 1. Stay tuned for ordering details.

The Scrapbook Approach to Lifestory Writing

When strangers hear that I teach classes in lifestory writing, they often confess, “I’ve been thinking about doing something like that myself, but I have no idea how to go about it.” While some people start with their birth and write their way through the calendar, another approach is easier for most people to follow. I call this the scrapbook approach to lifestory writing, in the sense that scrapbooks are a compilation of bits and pieces of random material, or a collection of related tidbits. I recommend the scrapbook approach to anyone who doesn’t instinctively reach for a calender, because you can fit the random stories to a calender later if you decide to use a chronological approach.

In the scrapbook approach, you write stories about your spontaneous memories, regardless of chronological order. I’m a scrapbook writer myself, and I might follow a story about my preschool years with another about signing up for Social Security. Some stories are three or four paragraphs long, while others go on for several pages. I have a huge portfolio that bulges with about five hundred miscellaneous stories now, roughly sorted into about a dozen file folders. Several years ago, I parked a few early ones on Ritergal’s website, and I selected a baker’s dozen to illustrate points in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, but most are slumbering in the depths of my file cabinet.

Themes are beginning to emerge, attracting clusters of stories, and later this year I plan to begin organizing these themes, weaving them together with some narrative, and filling in blanks with related stories. Perhaps I’ll publish a volume with several themes, one theme per chapter or section. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t clear yet how to do it. When the time is right, it will happen, and if it doesn’t, at least I leave stacks and piles of random stories behind to entertain and enlighten future generations.

If you read memoirs thought-fully, you’ll begin noticing that many are formulated with chapters comprised of a collection of short stories, many perhaps only three or four paragraphs long. Some authors may write the stories specifically for the book, but others do as I’ve mentioned above, culling through collections and assembling the appropriate ones. Who knows how many of these authors set out to write a published volume when they first put fingers to keyboard?

So, if you are unsure where to start, quit fretting. Just sit down and write the first story that comes to mind. Then write another. If you need help coming up with a topic, click on the Prompts label below and skim through the blog articles that come up, or click over to the 236 Creative Writing Prompts website and write your heart out. If you have compiled a story idea list, you are way ahead of the game! Over time, you’ll cover the important parts of your life map. If you get around to organizing the stories in tidy volumes, that will be a wonderful accomplishment. But if all you leave is a pile of drafts, your family will still be thrilled.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Countdown: 35 days until the release of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing on July 1. Stay tuned for ordering details.

Anything You Write Is Better Than Writing Nothing

My husband's Uncle Walter died several weeks ago, at the ripe old age of ninety-six after an exemplary life. Walter had a rich spirit. He was a masterful story teller, and it's a shame that his stories were never written down. Or so we thought.

Earlier today I was looking through my computer files to find pictures of Walter for display at his upcoming Celebration Service. I found some wonderful old ones that will serve the purpose well. Besides those pictures, I found a folder of scanned images that I'd forgotten about. Several years ago Uncle Walter began writing about his early life in Ray, a mining town in the Territory of Arizona. He also wrote down some recollections of his father. He loaned the stories to me for scanning.

The whole collection spans fewer than twenty pages, but each one is precious. Our family genealogist met him once, but barely knew him. She was ecstatic when she received the collection, because they contain some valuable genealogical information as well as anecdotes of life nearly one hundred years ago.

This goes to prove once again, that it doesn't take more than a few paragraphs to thrill your family! His were chicken-scratch scrawls, but they are legible, and they are terrific.

Speaking of scrawls and scans, at the beginning of the new year, I switched to from Microsoft Word to OpenOffice, an open source office suite that is available for download at no cost. OpenOffice has a built-in utility for exporting documents as pdf files (think Adobe Acrobat Reader). I have discovered that I can compile a large collection of image files into a single pdf document rather easily. I open a new document and set the margins at zero all around, assure OO that I really do want to do this, and enter a couple of hard page breaks (hold down Ctrl while pressing Enter). Then I import existing documents, one per page, or scan new ones in. When I have them all in place, I export the collection as a pdf file.

You could do this with Word, but it is a bit more finicky about margin settings, and the pdf function isn't nearly as powerful. Another option would be to use the free, open source program PDF Creator. The ultimate solution is Adobe Acrobat Professional, but that costs almost as much as a new computer. I'll stick with OpenOffice!

This process of compiling scanned images into a single document allows you to keep handwritten documents intact in the original handwriting. Transcribing them is great, but if you have fewer than one hundred pages, it's nice to see them the way they were written.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Record of a Summer Romance

What fun I'm having! I've put off cleaning out some old files for weeks, and finally dug into them. In the process I found the old notebook I used as a diary in high school. It isn't easy to read today, because I taught myself Old German script for writing it, to ensure privacy. Fortunately I did keep a master key, so I can still decode if I were so inclined.

But that wasn't the fun I'm referring to. I may go back to that another day, but I found something more interesting. Stuck in those pages were several sheets from a notepad giving a day-by-day account of all the dates my future husband and I had on our whirlwind summer romance. No details are recorded, but none are needed. With the simple prompts of date and place, it all comes flooding back.

Oh, the stories! Being an incurable binge and impulse writer, the urge to stay up all night and write is strong, but I'll let it go at typing up the list so it won't get lost again. I can use that list as the basis for a fairly long story about that summer.

Lists like this are a great way to begin a story that consists of a series of smaller ones that you plan to arrange in a chronological order. You might want to refer back to the post Like Beads on a Necklace for a refresher on compiling stories such as these.

Do you have any old lists that could jump start a new story? Maybe you'll be inspired by my example and dig into some piles you've been avoiding. You never know, your muse may be hiding in there.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal