Articles from The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing

The Project That Just Won't Quit
2007-08-30 19:44:00
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 ...

Do Not Go There
2007-08-24 09:54:00
Once upon a time when I was very little, like four years old, we lived at Kirtland Field Air Force base for several months while my father was studying chemical engineering at the University of New Mexico on the GI Bill. Most of the barracks in our part of the base were deserted, but there were no locks on anything, being a military base. We kids were told, on pain of unimaginable consequences, “DO NOT GO THERE!” Did I go there? Of course! I went with Denny, the boy next door and the only other kid as old as me. The memory emerges:It’s dark in here, dark, hot. Pat, pat, pat — my sandals won’t be quiet. Thump, thump — I hear my heart. Plop, plop, plop — I hear Denny’s shoes. I hear him breathing. Is anyone in here? I smell dust, see dust in sunbeams, it’s hard to breathe. What’s around that corner? More hall. Nobody. What if somebody comes here? What's in that room? Crreeeeek. Noisy door. More dust. Little room — little like me. Just two cot frames. Where are matt ...

We Hear What We Expect to Hear
2007-08-22 20:29:00
While looking for an old file, I found the following exercise from a communication skills workshop I used to teach. The exercise is about how listening works, but as I read it over, I realized it also has a lot to do with reading — and by extension, writing.Here is the exercise, from my instructor notes, complete with discussion points in green italics:Read the following to the group:Not long ago I was crossing Beacon Street at Murray Avenue. Traffic wasn’t very heavy, but I noticed some kind of disturbance off to the side. Well, I was crossing the street and didn’t want to jam up traffic or get hit, so I continued across, then stopped and looked back. Then I saw what was going on:A big woman in a black dress was pushing and shoving and even hitting two or three young kids.They were maybe ten or so years old...not yet teenagers. They didn’t seem to be fighting back.A crowd gathered. I heard a siren screaming off in the distance, but I didn’t think much about it.Then, a c ...

Earthworms and Ice Cream
2007-08-20 16:07:00
For two days I’ve been struggling with a new post. It reminds me of the huge, fat earthworms that surface in our yard after a serious rainstorm. Those worms lie there ever so enticingly, but if I reach to pick one up (okay, I hear those twitters of revulsion: “Oh ugh! How utterly gross! I don’t even want to read this!” Hang in there — I’m almost done) it wriggles convulsively, throwing itself end-for-end across the rocks to get out of my reach. If, just for the heck of it and memories of childhood fishing days, I do manage to pick one up and plop it in the palm of my hand, it continues to thrash around with amazing strength, seeking to return to its loamy lair.The essay I’m working on has the same slippery tenacity of those worms. I clearly see the concept, but as I reach for it, it skitters out of reach. I write a few words or paragraphs, but they slide out of grasp. It won’t hold still for the hook.Fortunately, I have no true deadline for this piece. There is only one ...

The Birth of Ritergal
2007-08-16 09:44:00
Someone recently asked about my alias of Ritergal. “Do you have a split personality or something?” he quipped.“Well, actually, yes,” I replied, “or at least I used to.” I went on to explain that although I had not yet met her, my muse Sarabelle bestowed this name on me seven years ago in 2000. That’s the only way I can explain it. She gifted me with it for the purpose of keeping Ritergal’s Story Site anonymous. I wanted to share some stories, while safeguarding the privacy of others. Ritergal was a great cover, with no link to my “real” persona.Sarabelle knew what she was doing. She knew I’d like that name, that I'd find it dashing and jaunty. She knew it would challenge me. Indeed it did! I felt a bit like a little kid playing dress-up. In the early years I found it easier to write certain things if I put on my Ritergal cape. Ritergal was more daring than Sharon could imagine being. Ritergal could be sassy and true, or gently tender, as the need arose. Ritergal ...

Profile in Courage
2007-08-14 15:38:00
Last month I wrote about Ronni Bennet’s blog, The Elder Storytelling Place, alerting readers that you can submit stories there for publication. I’m a firm believer in taking my own advice, and yesterday’s edition featured my story, “Profile of Courage.”This story does tell of a specific event in my life. However, it’s more than a mere narrative. I link two stories to tell a tale of a hero of sorts, a young man who dared to try eight times to get a date for prom, and how that story involved and inspired me, at the time and decades later.It’s not a simple story. It also chronicles the initial flutterings of feminist, activist seeds germinating in my tender heart, long before the faintest green shoots appeared. That’s a lot of story to cover in a mere 720 words.I originally wrote this story in August, 2001, so it’s well-aged. I didn’t set out to write with any specific purpose other than to chronicle the memory and immortalize Walter’s courage. It has been sitting in ...

Writing on the Wild side
2007-08-11 07:07:00
One of the touted features of Writing Practice or Morning Pages is allowing your fingers to run free of your Inner Censor to open new thought-branches and discover new ideas and connections. That happened to me this morning. I sat down to write about things I am especially grateful for today. Before I wrote a single word about gratitude, I found my pen moving off into the storm we had two days ago. In only a few lines, I reached a branch. I could write about this angle or that. I chose “that.”As I started writing about “that,” I found another branch and thought of the crooked path my words were following. My wild mind raced ahead of my pen and I had a clear image of the trails in the woods about a quarter-mile down the road from our house on the “wild side” of the road. Dozens of acres of woodlands spread along the hillside. It’s too steep for development, so it remains Mother Nature’s domain, a buffer zone. I love to hike in that suburban wilderness where magical thin ...

A picture is Worth a Thousand Words
2007-08-07 21:26:00
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 take ...

Braided Threads of Life
2007-08-04 14:55:00
About thirty years ago my mother was visiting for a few days. One morning as she sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast, she began to muse. “I don't know what I want to be when I grow up,” she told me. “I've been a mother, a secretary, a teacher, a shoemaker, a milliner, a seamstress ...” she paused for breath. “I don't know what to be next.”As things turned out, she became a multi-media artist (in the pre-computer-age definition of multi-media, meaning water color, oil and acrylic paints; stained, etched, sandblasted and shaped glass; photography, batik and various other fiber arts; and probably way more than that). She once had a one-woman show of pieces that were all based around a picture of a wasp on a flower that my father had taken. She did the wasp in stained glass, batik, various cloth treatments, paints ... you name it, she did it.Thinking over my mother's life many years ago, I remembered our breakfast table conversation and realized how rich and varied he ...

Conversation with a candle
2007-08-02 22:21:00
Most of us have memories we’d rather forget, but forgetting isn’t an option. Writing about the situation often pulls the plug on the power these memories have on your mind, but it takes a lot of time to write, and you may not want to run the risk of having your words discovered.Take heart. Take hope. And talk, if only to a candle.A candle as therapist? No, I have not lost my mind. Quite the contrary, I think I found it. I recently wrote a post about reading Paulo Coelho’s book The Zahir, and the importance he places on telling stories as a preliminary to becoming more loving. Although this injunction intuitively rings true, he doesn’t give directions on how to go about it.Coelho’s first book of note was The Alchemist, published in English in 1994, and I must be the last person on the planet to read this book. Aside from selling millions of copies, it is always checked out in libraries. Where have I been? I finally reached the top of the reserve list at the library the other d ...

Listen Live
2007-07-31 08:22:00
NEWS FLASH: RITERGAL INTERVIEW NOW PLAYING IN STORY CIRCLE NETWORK PODCAST!I love being on the cutting edge of new technology, so I was especially excited about the invitation to be a guest on Story Circle Network’s August podcast, produced and edited by Becca Taylor. I’ve been interviewed on radio talk shows before, but this was different in several ways.On a live radio show, there is no safety net. Whatever you say is what listeners hear. Podcasts are recorded before they are posted, so if host or guest happens to have a coughing fit, or says something gauche, editing that part out is as simple as removing a sentence from a written document. You even have the opportunity for “do overs.”Becca didn’t need to edit this interview, but it was nice knowing she could. We just had a grand old time talking about lifestory writing in general, how I got involved with it, the benefit of Toastmasters for writers, writing groups, blogs, the conceptual basis of the blog and book name, The ...

Writing for Number One
2007-07-27 19:04:00
The last couple of days I’ve been feeling rather growly, and I attribute the reason to all the time I’ve been spending writing blogs and workshop proposals, researching book promotion strategies, and . . . the list goes on. The point is, I’ve been doing everything but write more stories. My heart is pining for “real writing.”This afternoon I said Enough is enough. I’m not good for anything else until I take care of me!I gathered up the huge file jacket I use to keep folders with print copies of my stories and took it out on the sun porch where I could see the massive, centuries old oak tree at the far end of the small meadow we call a lawn, and the lushly wooded hillside above us. Surrounded by this nurturing scenery, on a day with perfect temperatures, I flipped through stories, looking for something to send to The Elder Storytelling Place, something to post on my still empty collection of Gather articles, and perhaps even something to send to local papers for print public ...

Write Like You Talk
2007-07-24 22:30:00
Beginning writers are generally advised to “write like you talk.” Stories about personal experience generally come across best when you write in a conversational tone, like you are talking with a close friend. This isn’t always easy to do. Words flow out of our mouths without a lot of conscious thought, so trying to match the precise wording that we use orally can be a challenge.Some people use sentence fragments in writing, for example “Never walked alone at night after that!” and claim “that’s how I talk.” I’ve listened closely to those people, and aside from idioms like “could be,” never once have I heard them use a sentence lacking a subject. Now and then people let sentences trail off without finishing them, but I have yet to see anyone write such a sentence in a story.I see two things happening here. First, avoiding the use of “I” is typical of the way people write in letters. I do it myself in e-mail. It may not sound egotistical in speech to repeated ...

As Addictive as Popping Bubble Wrap
2007-07-22 17:48:00
I’m having a mellow afternoon, sitting out in the sunshine, revising the manuscript for a collection of stories from my preschool years. I call this collection The Albuquerque Years. These were the very first lifestories I ever wrote, an experience I tell about in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. More than once I’ve assumed the collection was finished, and more than once I’ve been surprised when I reread it and discovered that many stories were missing, and that the ones there could be told better.I’m working on several aspects of the stories, but for now I’ll tell you about a new discovery, or at least one that’s new to me. One paragraph tells of my toy sewing machine:When they came home, Mommy and Daddy brought me a tiny chain stitch sewing machine that had been in Mummo’s attic. It never worked right and even Mommy could only make tangles on it most of the time. But I liked having it.That isn’t adequate to describe my memory of that treasured toy. I kept thi ...

The Zahir
2007-07-17 18:15:00
I feel a bit behind the curve. Though he may be the best-selling author in the world, I only discovered novelist Paulo Coelho a couple of weeks ago, and I just finished reading The Zahir. I’m awestruck. I can see why this was the best selling book in the world in 2003, even before it was released in the United States.In this book Coelho makes a profound point about the power of telling our life stories. The main character is involved in a journey of self-discovery and must free himself from old attitudes and limitations in order to obtain what he seeks. (I don’t want to give away the plot for those few of you who may not have read the book yet.) The key to his chains is telling stories about his past. Once told, the stories lose their power to trap him in his status quo.For most readers, taking the path of telling stories to free themselves from the past would be a matter of faith and intuition. Those who have been following the field of memory and neuroscience will assure you that ...

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