yourpassions.tk

Who doesn’t love to get an award? I know I do. I was honored and delighted to receive the Superior Scribble Award from Karen Walker, author of Following the Whispers . I was totally blown away a few days later, before I had accepted it from Karen, to receive it once again from Kim Pearson, author of From the Compost .  I appreciate this award all the more for the fact it is so unexpected. I hadn’t ever heard of it. It’s especially rewarding to receive spontaneous recognition. And I love that awards like this foster a sense of community and connection in the blogsophere. One of the requirements of accepting the award is that you pass it along to pay tribute to five other noteworthy bloggers. Since I received the award twice, I shall issue a double helping of tribute (in no particular order). This makes the process a little easier, but I know of so many fine blogs, and the choice was still agonizing. Drum roll, please ... and the winners are ... Pat, At Pat’s Place Joy Hedlund, On the Pa...

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Write now! Every time the phone rings, my heart goes into my mouth. Is this the call? The one nobody wants to make or receive? A dear friend will make the call. Her daughter lies at death’s door, feeling the gauzy wisps of that final veil. It’s a matter of hours or days. Two years ago she was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the same malignant brain tumor that took Teddy Kennedy’s life yesterday.  Jen leaves behind two little girls, who just turned five and seven. Last spring, as she began having trouble finding words to express herself, she determined to write letters to each of her girls, letting them know how much she loved them, the beautiful things she remembered, the joy they have brought to her life, and her hopes for theirs. She wanted to leave them a legacy of her own thoughts and some of her memories of growing up.  It was too late. She was unable to even begin this project, not even with a video camera instead of her laptop.  Jen is young. She and...

here Photo from Victorinox The more I study the topic of writing dialogue, the more convinced I’ve become that dialogue is the writer’s Swiss Army Knife . You don’t have to know what all the other tools on the knife are for if all you want to do is whittle the tip of a willow pole for roasting a marshmallow. But it’s handy to know about the tweezers when someone gets a splinter, and the little scissors are a godsend for snipping off loose threads and hangnails. Screwdrivers come in handy every now and then, and so it goes. Swiss Army knives prune, snip, and open all sorts of things, and so does dialogue. Even those of us who are fortunate enough to have dialogue pour forth naturally can benefit from learning more about the functions it serves, and how it works. Some of these functions include Setting a mood Concisely conveying information Adding rhythm and color Developing character And more Even if you include dialogue in your initial draft (most people don’t), you are likely to over...

The onion is often used as a metaphor for self-discovery. I first heard it used that way in 1979 during a conversation with a social worker. “Just as I think I finally know the essence of who I am, I discover another layer. It's like peeling another layer from on onion.” I’ve often pondered this metaphor through the years, considering that at the center of the onion, there is nothing but . . . more onion. Is that all there is? I wonder. Just more onion? More “me”? A small matroyshka doll sitting on a shelf in my office recently caught my eye. I bought a bag of them from a street vendor in St. Petersburg a few years ago, and haven’t paid much attention since. I picked the doll up and gently twisted her open, removing the smaller one, and another, and . . . five dolls in all, the center one about the size of a dried pinto bean. Now that’s a better metaphor, I thought. Each doll is similar to the one it nests inside, but each also has a distinct personality. There is something new ...

Generated by Stellarium 0.10.2 The urge to use stories to make sense of our lives and share them with others is hardwired into the human brain. Some of us write these stories, others tell them. Some of the stories are public, some are intensely private, told only to ourselves. Whatever their form or level of disclosure, we all have stories, and we begin telling them as language dawns. In Child Development, Second Edition: A Practitioner's Guide , Douglas Davies states, “The stories of 2-year-olds...use narrative language to bring a personal sense of order and understanding to their experience.” He includes a transcripted story recorded by the parents of 28-month-old Emily. Her elaborate tale organized her understanding of a trip to the beach the following day. My daughter was telling stories well before her second birthday. The first I remember was one she told me when she was 18 or 20 months old, as I was tucking her in: “Daddy go Dibby house. Play bridge.” She needed to explain ...

I could sit here and bang away on my keyboard til the cows come home, and someone is likely to want to read some of it. But I just experienced a blinding flash of the obvious: without readers, this blog has no purpose, so keeping you happy and interested by answering your questions and providing helpful information is at the core of my purpose. If I really want this blog to be helpful, I should get some input from you about questions you have. Here's your big chance to help shape the future of this blog, and to have all your questions answered (or at least acknowledged). Please dear readers, whether you are reading this post while it's still fresh, or come across it months or years later, take a moment to post a comment with feedback on A question about any aspect of life writing, or an observation you have. Have you written something and would like to be interviewed for a blog post? Let me know, in a comment, or a private e-mail. Suggested links (your own or others). Suggestio...

A year and a half ago, Leo Babauta, author the the ZenHabits blog, signed on as a soldier in a revolution — the uncopyright revolution . I came upon this concept only a couple of days ago in a post entitled Grab and Run: The Great Uncopyright Experiment on Mary Jaksch’s Goodlife Zen blog. If you have any interest in copyright matters, I urge you to read both Leo’s and Mary’s posts. They may change your life. I’ve already discussed copyright on this blog twice this year. In March, I posted an article explaining the basics of copyright law and associated ethics. That post was prompted by the dismay a friend felt after discovering that whole posts from her blog had been pirated and reposted by a woman she had inspired to begin blogging, and whom she considered a friend. Two weeks ago I wrote about the resulting fiasco after Amazon arbitrarily pulled George Orwell’s works out of all accessible Kindles that had purchased the work. At bottom, that mess resulted from violation of copyri...