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After twenty years or so, my growing collection of hard drives has bits and pieces of old material hidden away in odd places. I opened one of those odd places today and found a short piece I’d searched for while writing a recent related post about Michelangelo. I wrote the original piece for a newsletter. Don’t be fooled by the third-person parable form; it is a true account of personal experience. The story follows, unchanged from the 1982 original: One day when Laurie was visiting Guru, he told her a fable about a small boy who asked Michelangelo how he was able to carve a horse out of a solid block of marble. The maestro explained that it was quite simple. He looked at the block, saw the horse inside, and chipped away all the marble that did not look like the horse. Another day Laurie saw Guru again and, in the course of their conversation, she told him how a mutual friend had, for the avowed purpose of helping her become a better, more successful person, used her as the dumping gr...

Kim Pearson , an author, ghostwriter and editor, shared a wrenching story on Womens Memoirs . Kim’s jolting experience with an art teacher taught her a lesson for life about the importance of doing our best. Although stunned by her teacher’s seemingly appalling behavior, Kim came to see it as a gift – it instilled respect for excellence in her developing mind. Kim learned a lesson in seconds that I spent years acquiring. I grew up with a mother who in sisted that ever stitch in every garment be perfect, and I sewed constantly. I hated her perfectionism at the time, but came to value it later. That ethic transfers to editing and making my writing the best it can be on any given day. I don’t curl up and die if a typo or missing word occurs in a Forum or blog post, but I’d just about as soon go out in public with my shirt buttoned crooked or jelly on my face as send sloppy writing out into the world. It’s about more than ego and self-respect. I see it as respect and consideration fo...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the great Paper versus Pixels experiment. It’s been ages since I posted anything geeky, so today you get an inside look at the template I set up to use when I want to write something personal on my computer. I made this template because writing in my standard Garamond font on a white background feels like I’m writing for publication, no matter what I tell myself. On a whim I decided that making the display look like warm paper, and changing to a font that looks like something flowing from a pen might help. Indeed it did. You see the result above. Rather than go into every detail of how I made the changes, I’m going to summarize them, and refer you to a couple of websites for specific instructions on working with templates and styles . Use Help or do a web search for any other steps you don’t understand. Begin with a blank document, and and … 1.  Change the paper color. 2. Reset the margins   to 1.25”. 3.  Select a new font. I spe...

During a recent discussion, someone (I’ll call her Darla) mentioned that she “needed to learn more about my grandmother’s history so I can explain why she acted the way she did and why she was so over-protective.” Although this aspiring memoir writer had only the best of intentions in mind, her comment set a couple of red flags flapping for me. Life story or memoir writers who claim to know why someone else did something, or what that person was thinking, lose credibility with me. Here’s my thinking on this topic: #1 Only fiction writers can explain why someone else acted as he or she did, or what that person thinks, and only then when writing in the third person. Darla’s granny is long gone, so there is no way Darla can tell us why she acted as she did. Even if Granny were available, Darla could only report what Granny told her, what she observed Granny doing, or her own speculation about why Granny did what she did. #2 This is Darla’s story. It’...

Cupid has got to be behind this synchronistic web discovery. Just hours before St. Valentine’s Day I found a link to a PsyBlog post explaining that Affectionate Writing Can Reduce Cholesterol . Previous posts here have explained how writing about trauma is good for your health, and also that writing about happy stuff is good for you. But love letters and affectionate notes had not made the list, and I have not previously seen reduced cholesterol linked with any form of expressive writing. This is great news! Based on the simple report on PsyBlog, this study appears to be among the hundreds of variations on the Pennebaker research model that has people write for about twenty minutes on three to five occasions: According to new research, writing down affectionate thoughts about close friends and family can reduce your cholesterol levels. Floyd et al. (2007) randomly assigned participants to one of two groups: one experimental and one control. The experimental group wrote with affection ...

A little birdie just whispered in my ear, “Check the date of your first post.” Sure enough. Today is fifth anniversary of that first post . It’s hard to imagine that it’s been that long. For those who came in more recently, this blog began about the time I fully formed the intention of writing The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing , and the blog bore the same name as the book . By the time the book was published about eighteen months later, my interests had broadened beyond just story writing, and within a year or so I renamed the blog, omitting the “story” to arrive at the current title.  Over the course of the five years in nearly 500 posts, I’ve covered almost every topic relating to life writing: story writing tips and techniques, working with your muse, journaling tips, elements of memoir, the nature of memory …   If all the archives were printed out, they’d fill about five volumes. Some have asked where I get my ideas for posts. Sometimes my muse Sarabelle whispers them in my ...

In January I participated in an experiment to explore the relative merits of journaling on paper versus keyboard. The research project was spearheaded by Amber Starfire, owner of Writing Through Life , a blog and ezine devoted to the fine art of journaling. For one week we wrote by hand. The second week we used the computer, and the third week we mixed the two.  Official results have not been released, but I was a little surprised by my personal findings. From the time I received a Hermes Baby typewriter in preparation for going to college, I used a keyboard for just about everything but taking notes and signing checks. For over a dozen years I kept sporadic journal entries in ongoing documents, adding to them through the space of a year.  Three years ago I began journaling on a regular basis, loosely following the Morning Pages model. After spending two or three weeks reconditioning my writing muscles, I fell in love with hand writing, finding deep pleasure in watching words pour from...