yourpassions.tk

My daughter recently sent me a copy of an article she’d written with the following note in her email: “… I’m kind of stealing your stories here and wonder if it’s okay and if you want o me to change anything …” I was pleased that she had the professionalism and courtesy to alert me and ask permission first. I read the article with interest. It was strong and well-written, but I saw with dismay that although she had the general sense of my experiences right, most all the specifics were inaccurate. I called her and set the record straight, giving the story my blessing. This experience underscores three fundamental facts about the importance of writing your own life story. If you want your story written right, write it yourself. My father is a great story teller. I’ve spent untold hours listening to him tell about his father’s job killing prairie dogs for the USDA (I think it was the USDA – I’m not entirely sure, which emphasizes my point here), teaching cadets to fly bombers du...

When I think of Valentine’s Day, I always think of red heart boxes full of chocolate candy. When I was young, my father always gave a great big box of candy to my mother, and smaller boxes, with half a dozen pieces each to my sister and me. I always ate all of mine right then and there, and nibbled from Mother’s until it was gone too. But I have many more Valentine’s Day memories. For example, I remember decorating shoeboxes each year for classmates to fill with valentines. That was a tense situation. Back then there was no mandate that you had to bring one for each person in the class, and somehow everyone seemed to know how many who got, and who gave which to whom. I always groaned inwardly when I counted and found a shortfall. It didn’t matter that only one person ever got a card from everyone in our class. I wanted to be in that category too, and I wasn’t! Did I remember on those Valentine’s Days that there were always one or two people I simply could not bring myself to addres...

Over the last few days I’ve read two memoirs back-to-back, Margaret Overton’s Good in a Crisis and Jonna Ivin’s Will Love For Crumbs . Both stories revolve around disastrous relationships with men. I was struck by the fact that although these two women had very different backgrounds and their stories are quite different, each had to piece together the puzzle of her mother’s life to break free and follow a different path. I was reminded of computer games where you must find all the hidden tools to advance to the next level.  As I thought about this similarity, I realized how universal this theme is. I did study Freud once, along with a tower of other psychology books, and dimly recall some psychobabble about “differentiation.” Obviously there is nothing new under the sun here, other than airing this process in public. That public sharing angle is the aspect that most fascinates me. Thinking beyond the stories themselves, I realized that as I read each one, it stimulated me to think mor...

As anyone who has written more than a dozen life stories or begun a memoir knows, some stories flow onto the page more smoothly and easily than others. What do you do when a story jams up? What do you do when you start writing and realize you aren’t going where you thought you wanted to go? Let me use this blog post as an example: I originally intended to write it to highlight Andrea Hurst’s AUTHORNOMICS Interview Series, which features weekly interviews with literary agents, editors, authors, marketing experts and more talking about their opinions on the publishing industry, writing, and what a writer needs to know. I wanted to tell you how valuable it can be to learn from experts in other genres as well as your own, and I wanted to alert you that I’m featured in an interview this week. But that’s not enough to fill an entire blog post, so I decided to add a few more resources, for example a link to Kathy Pooler’s blog, Memoir Writer’s Journey . Kathy is a walking Wikipedia for ...