The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing Tips, guidelines and observations to help ordinary people write extraordinary stories about their own life and experiences. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 23 0 19 4666

Articles from The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing

Custodians of Family History 2007-07-15 19:04:00 Last night at a book signing event, I was asked a question I hadn’t heard before. “What do you do about the older women, the ones who grew up in the Great Depression and thereabouts, who have never been comfortable talking about themselves?”The woman asking the question (I’ll call her Jill) is curious about her mother’s life, but she assured me there was no way her mother would write stories. Mom’s too modest, and furthermore, she believes her life has been as plain and ordinary as mud.The question stumped me. Many people are deterred by the perception that their lives are dull. I’ve written about that. If you think this of your own life and still want to write, that’s one thing. But you can’t force someone else to write. If they do it to appease you, the results will surely lack spirit, and probably not go beyond basic facts.After some discussion, we came up with a plan. This woman will get a digital recorder, formulate some questions designed to loosen Mom's memory ... History

Framing Your Story 2007-07-11 06:36:00 Few people think about layout in connection with writing stories, but it can play a critical part in helping your reader enjoy the story. People generally frame pictures before hanging them on the wall. Carefully formatting your stories before you distribute copies is much the same.The most common formatting question I hear is, “Should I double space between paragraphs?”“Since you asked, the answer is no.” If I’m not asked, I don’t comment.Double spacing between paragraphs is not wrong, but it isn’t the accepted standard for publication. I have concluded that after leaving school, most people write nothing but checks, business letters, and e-mail. Double spacing between paragraphs is the accepted standard for business correspondence, and perhaps most office reports have drifted into this standard also. Thus the tendency to write stories like business letters.Taking a historical perspective, when I was in school, professors required that term papers, theses, and other aca ...

A Place for Your Stories 2007-07-08 15:30:00 This post is a thank you note to Ronni Bennet, creator of The Elder Storytelling Place, a blog I wish I’d started. Ronni created this site as a place where anyone with at least a half-century of life experience can post (short) lifestories, and the world can read some very fine ones.A person could spend lots and lots of time on this blog. Right now it’s only in its fourth month, with a total of 78 stories, so you could conceivably read them all in a long afternoon. (That is rapidly changing.) But the stories on this site are only the tip of the iceberg. Ronni includes links to three other “Elders’ Storytelling Websites” and many contributors have websites with stories. This may be a story web with no boundaries.I’m so glad Ronni has started this site, and I hope that submissions snowball. It’s a treat to read other people’s stories. No two are the same. Some are funny, some heart-rending, some informative and some thought-provoking. Each is written from somebody’s hea ...

Writers' Role Models 2007-07-04 22:27:00 You’ll find lots of strong meat in Jerry Waxler’s blog, Memory Writer’s Network. I’ve added Jerry to my Blogarithm watch list (accessible via the subscription link in my left column). Jerry’s training and experience as a therapist may be the key to his unusual insight into human nature and life writing.In a recent post, Storytelling Lessons for Memoir Writers, he wrote:Many successful writers recommend that you learn the art of writing stories by emulating the books you enjoy reading. My problem with this method is that once I dive into the story I stop thinking about writing. If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, you may recall that I’m one of the people who make this recommendation. Jerry’s comment alerted me that some amplification is in order.For me, the main benefit of reading authors I admire is in shaping my thinking. For example, Rosamund Pilcher (one example of dozens I could cite) excels at description and evocative wording. As I read her bo ...

Ta Dah! The Book Is Here 2007-07-01 20:51:00 Today marks a major milestone for me. The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing: How to Transform Memories into Meaningful Stories hits the shelves. Let me fill you in on some back story and features of the book.This book evolved from a growing pile of handouts I made over the last several years. After several years, many overlapped, formatting was inconsistent, and trying to figure out which handout to use for what group had become a headache, so I decided to consolidate all the handouts in a unified collection. I had it printed at the local UPS copy shop, directly from disk, an economical approach I highly recommend. That original volume was over one hundred full-size pages, and cumbersome to reprint. The obvious solution was a formal book.In 1994 Lighthouse Point Press published my previous book, Meetings: Do’s, Don’ts and Donuts. That book went into a second edition, and we enjoyed working together so much that I contacted them about this new project, which they were also enthus ...

Label That Feeling 2007-06-30 08:10:00 One primary difference between the writing of someone like Sue Grafton and yours is that she writes about Kinsey Millhone, a fictional person, and you write about yourself. Your challenge is to make yourself as real to readers as Sue makes Kinsey to me. One of the main ways she does this is by describing Kinsey’s reactions to events. She has me right inside Kinsey’s skin and head, feeling anxious, smug or delighted right along with her, right down to bodily sensation.In a quest to sharpen my ability to describe feelings and reactions, I recently began paying close attention to the way I’m feeling at any given moment. As I set my mind to do this, I'm thinking about it increasingly often, and I’m becoming aware of a wide range of subtle nuances. Right now I’m feeling gentle excitement about getting this blog written. A couple of days ago I was screamingly frustrated over that website block I wrote about earlier.You may have to stretch to find specific names. I recall a grad s ...

The Sweet, Sweet Taste of Victory 2007-06-28 22:18:00 It’s time to celebrate a new arrival. For weeks I’ve been working on building a website. These weeks follow a few months of avoidance, procrastination, and other forms of writer's block. Initially I thought I knew enough HTML and CSS (if you need to ask, you don’t want to know) to pull one together in a reasonably short period of time, say a couple of days.Suffice it to say that as I began the journey through my out-dated web editing program, into some open-source freebies, and out the other end into a bare-bones text-editor with absolutely no frills, and concurrently through dozens of pages of on-line tutorials, CSS reference pages, and an actual printed-on-paper book of HTML instruction, I was certain I saw a white rabbit running before me. I lost sleep over links that wouldn’t work, bum style codes, and a host of other problems.As recently as last night, I was ready to throw an ax through my computer tower. “I don’t need this grief! The world doesn’t need this page!†...

Shrinking World 2007-06-24 16:15:00 We weren’t the first people on the web, by any means. Our first contact was through AOL, about fifteen years ago. I clearly remember the first time I clicked on a link to an international site. I didn’t even know for sure what I was doing, but suddenly text appeared on my screen and I knew I was probing an electronic brain located halfway around the world, in real-time. That absolutely blew my mind! I could sit at my computer in Pittsburgh and instantly make things happen in Rome. I sat there, shivering with awe at the way the world had just shrunk.Today I click international links several times a week, sometimes without realizing it. The novelty has worn off. But I’m still thrilled when I check the traffic log for this blog and see how many people are visiting from every corner of the earth — it's exciting to see this interest in writing lifestories uniting people from everywhere. And I still get goosebumps when e-mail arrives from strangers around the globe. Today was such a ...

Two Minutes 'Til Midnight 2007-06-22 22:58:00 Here it is, late in the evening, and I’ve been “gonna” write a blog for ... I don’t want to think about it, much less write about it! Two days ago I told myself, well, I can let it slip one day. That will be okay. Nobody seriously expects something every second day all the time... Yesterday's inner voice was much the same. Today I started telling myself, I’ll get it in. I absolutely will get it done. And if I don’t, it’s only one more day. I’ll for sure do it tomorrow.Do these voices sound familiar? I hear the chorus of agreement! It’s not that I haven’t been writing. I have! Just not blog posts. I’ve been writing web page source code. I can do basic HTML tables with my eyes shut, but go much beyond that, and I’m swimming in deep water with no life preserver.I’m writing this source code for the new Heart and Craft of Life Writing site that will appear online, surely by the end of the weekend. I’ve dreamed of having my own website for years, and did set up R ...

In My Write Mind 2007-06-18 20:54:00 “You aren’t listening!� My hubbie knows how to get my attention. Not listening is a powerful accusation!“Sorry!� I reluctantly shift my attention to him. It’s not easy. I admit that I wasn’t listening because I was in my Write Mind. This is the term I use to explain the state of being I enter when I’m engrossed in finding a way to express something intangible. Perhaps I’m trolling the depths of my mind for delicious phrases to describe a person I just thought of for the first time in thirty-seven years. Perhaps I’m searching for adjectives to describe the magnificent sunset I notice behind his head. More likely, I’m trying to think of a way to quantify some intangible concept. Whatever is going on, my Write Mind is a delicious, floaty, totally absorbed state of being, and I like going there.Of course I spent considerable time in my Write Mind as I prepared to write this post. One thought that surfaced was the relative novelty of discovering my Write Mind. This roo ...

Increase Story Longevity 2007-06-15 08:10:00 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 picture ...

Hold the Fort 2007-06-04 15:33:00 Urgent business calls. The blog is on hold for a week or two, but I'll be back soon. Keep writing!Sharon Lippincott, aka RitergalCountdown: 24 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. ...

Writing For the Health of It 2007-06-02 19:08:00 All sorts of scientific evidence is emerging that writing is good for your health, especially the health of your brain and emotions. Sally Balfe reported on a study done by Dr. Robin Philipp showing that creative writing reduced anxiety and helped patients cope with bereavement and depression.WebMD reports a number of health benefits from writing, including relieving post-traumatic stress disorder, stronger immune systems, reduced asthma and rheumatoid arthritis symptoms.The Oregon Health & Science Center recommends journal writing as one of the ways to retain brain function as we age.In an eloquent essay, Esther Sternberg, M.D., author of The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions, recommends writing as a way of reconnecting with past emotions and finding your way to a place of healing peace.University of Texas Professor James Pennebaker, a leading authority on the connection between writing and health, and author of Writing to Heal, offers tips for healthful writ ... Health

Writing Into the Fireplace 2007-05-30 13:05:00 I can’t believe I haven’t already blogged about Writing into the Fireplace, but I just tried hunting down that post to send the link to someone, and to my amazement, it isn’t there! It’s time to share this potent secret.Creative Commons photo by Jernas Lukasz, from openphoto.netWriting into the Fireplace is a powerful way to get angry, confused, or hurtful words on paper to allow healing to proceed, without running the risk of damaging relationships with the result. Rather than sharing this writing, you immediately burn or shred it.I unwittingly developed this technique about thirty years ago when I was a grad student in counseling psychology. That degree program was a grueling experience, amounting to an extended course of personal therapy with quasi-therapists at every juncture, and I often found my head and heart spinning like tires in a snowbank. To combat my confusion, I often curled up in a comfortable chair with huge piles of recycled computer print-out — the kind wit ...

Secrets! of a Los Alamos Kid, 1946-1953 2007-05-28 21:23:00 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 cov ...