yourpassions.tk

When you write memoir you can only directly describe your own thoughts and sensations. If you are writing a scene that includes others, you are limited to writing what you can observe or what they tell you. For example, it’s entirely appropriate to write “The air was precisely skin temperature, and I was tempted to run naked to celebrate the return of summer, but I was afraid old man Jones would peak through a knothole in the fence, and I didn’t want to be sullied by his eyes.” You can write that about yourself, because you know your own thoughts. You can’t tell us that Janna was tempted to run naked unless Janna told you that herself. In that case, dialog would be a good way to put those words in her mouth. Let her tell her part of the story herself. For example, “What a glorious day!” I said, raising my arms to the sun and raising my face. “Oh yes! It’s perfect!” she agreed. “The air feels like it isn’t even there. I’m tempted to peel off my clothes and run naked, but I’d die if old ...

Turn off the Internet. Unsubscribe from all your mailing lists (well, okay, you can keep the one or two most meaningful). Close your e-mail window and only check e-mail once or twice a day. These draconian measures appeared on a list of advice for writers who were having trouble getting to their writing. Are you one of those people? Have you ever kept meaning to sit down and write and then realized that days or weeks had gone by without having touched paper or opened your story file? And it seemed like just yesterday that you ... If you haven’t had that problem, please get in touch with me and tell me how you do it. You are probably a professional writer who makes a living by tapping on your keyboard and have deadlines to meet. Most life writers and memoirists are not in that situation. Neither is this blogger. It’s not that I haven’t been writing. Indeed, I’ve written dozens of e-mails, many dozens. I’ve written program descriptions and course materials and written Morning Pages ne...

I’m proud to have Irish ancestry on my mother’s side of the family. One branch left as recently as the Potato Famine, the other left earlier. I know quite a lot about the more recent immigrants. They were coal miners, arriving first in Braidwood, Illinois then moving down to New Mexico where the family dug in. Maybe it’s that Irish blood in my veins, or maybe not, but Celtic music is among my favorite, and I feel most at home on earth in summer, surrounded by green. Perhaps those roots explain the dreamer part of me. Three years ago my husband and I spent ten glorious days rambling wild Irish roads in the southwest corner of the Emerald Isle. For reasons of economy we reserved a subcompact car, with a trunk so small that it wouldn’t hold both suitcases and carry-on luggage, and the choice was serendipitous. Many of those roads are paved over cart paths, with lanes only inches wider than that mini-car and stone walls tight beside. Hubby is a veteran left side driver, but our nerves wer...

Nearly every time I speak to a group or teach a class, someone asks about copyright: “Aren’t you afraid that someone will steal your ideas or posts and use them somewhere else?” “How do you protect your work so nobody can copy it?” “If I read someone else’s story and subconsciously copy something they said, can I be sued?” “If I want to include something someone else said, how much can I use without violating copyright?” Like all authors, I put a lot of work into what I write, whether that’s a blog post, a book chapter, a program description or handout, or an e-mail. I freely admit that I’m influenced by the work of other writers, and I often write on topics I’ve recently read about. However, I don’t write about anything until I’ve mulled it over enough to develop my own thoughts and opinions and can honestly say that what I write is my unique perspective because that’s how I learn and grow. And, it keeps me out of court. That gently modified perspective is what sets my work apart from...

Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat (or so I’ve been told — I’ve never met anyone who claims to have skinned one), there is more than one way to kill a chicken. This is but one of the many fascinating pieces of trivia that I learned from reading the memoir, Growing Up in the Texas Panhandle by Pat Flathouse, who also writes Pat’s Place , a Blogspot blog. Pat describes the way her grandmother wrung chickens' necks. This added a third alternative to the two decapitation methods I knew from my family. Many other tender memories are included in this collection of stories intended primarily for Pat’s family about the years she spent growing up in Pampa and Amarillo. She tells of roller skating on uneven sidewalks, walking alone to the grocery store when she was only seven or eight, and the family’s electric train project. We read of family vacations all over the west, and visits to grandparents in Amherst. We follow her progress from grade school through junior high and hi...

For most of my life I’ve thought of my father as a background person in my life. He was always around, eating dinner with the family every night, taking us on picnic and camping trips, and occasionally directing my sister and me to clean up the kitchen on nights my mother may not have bothered. He was handy to have around for help on math homework in high school. But he was not much of a conversationalist, and much of our interaction took place through the filter of my mother. For example, she would tell me, “Your father doesn’t like thus and such,” or “Your father thinks you should do this or that.” As I wrote The Albuquerque Years , I recalled all sort of things I did with my daddy as a very young girl. I “helped” him irrigate and tend the garden. I watched as he killed chickens for Sunday dinner. I rode in the basket of his bicycle to get fruit from the stand up the road. I rode on his shoulders. I learned how to take pictures. I tricked him with a fake yoyo on April Fool’s Day. I r...

I didn’t intend to go so long between blog posts, but life happened. I’m writing this on the plane on the way home from a week-and-a-half of emergency Granny Duty in Austin, helping our daughter tend her tots after a serious knee injury, while her husband was out of town. Chasing up and down endless flights of stairs after an 18-month old streak of greased lightening and her 3½ year old big sister is enough to fill nearly every minute, but I did manage to squeeze in some precious family history research time in Austin’s magnificent history centers and archives, and in my last hours there, I hit a vein of pure gold. I’m blessed with a number of colorful ancestors, but the story of my mother’s mother’s mother Tilly has especially caught my fancy. Two months before she turned sixteen, Tilly married Robert Roberts, a thirty-nine-year-old widower with two young children. She bore him five more children before he died ten years later at the age of 49. Four years after that, she married my gr...