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My holiday gift to you is a break from reading blog posts. It’s time to chill and focus your energies on celebrating Christmas or whatever you observe. If you have time and want to write, just do it. You’ll find plenty of inspiration in old posts if you dig through the archives. My hope for the coming year is that we can collectively use our writing to resolve some inner demons of our own and provide inspiration for others to do the same. As I’ve said many times, along with countless others, I believe Story can change lives, one at a time, and eventually those changed lives will fill the bucket of Earth with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and all that goes with it. Look for new posts in January with some fun announcements and new ideas. Write now: capture your thoughts on what peace would look like. Start with the personal level. What does personal peace mean to you? Move out to your neighborhood, your community, the larger area, your state, your country, and fin...

I met Herchel Newman, aka Herm, about a dozen years ago in the original Lifestory Group on Yahoo when we were both new to the genre. I’m always blown away by his richly authentic stories. Whatever the topic, gentle humor or compelling drama, I’m mesmerized from the first word. We’ve stayed in touch after that YahooGroup went poof, meeting in person one time, and we’ve both continued to write. Not long ago he emailed me some thoughts about his muse, the source of inspiration for his writing, both memoir and make-believe. He  graciously agreed to share those thoughts here on this blog. Hopefully Mr. Muse will guide you to tap more deeply into your creative forces. There’s a guy who lives inside my head. I call him Mr. Muse. Besides God and myself, I’m pretty sure he knows me better than anyone else. He is the contemplative as well as the whimsical part of me. He comes and goes as he pleases. It doesn’t matter if I’m asleep or awake. Sometimes he gives me rhyme and reason for things I’m h...

No, I have not been on vacation to the Amazon recently, though I wish I had – except not right now during its rainy season. I’m referring here to the unexpected twists and turns on the path to the CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) arms of Amazon.com  as I completed my journey toward publication of Adventures of a Chilehead. I wrote about early details of this project in three posts in June: “ Chile or Chile? Check it Out ,” “ Lessons Learned ”, and “ Story Album to Memoir .” In July that early manuscript flowed through email to a team of beta readers. After incorporating their sage advice about need for further detail, spots that needed an edit and more, I thought final layout as all I needed to do before the book was ready for publication. That predictably became complicated, and pressures of preparing for classes I was teaching in September resulted in setting the project aside for more than two months. When I reopened the project in late October, I was stunned. I re...

Jessica Baverstock in China My previous post, “ Living to Write the Tale ,” covers the concept of using writing to shape our future. Today I’m pleased to feature a post on this topic by Jessica Baverstock, who triggered my insight on this topic. Jessica  lives in Perth, Australia, almost exactly on the opposite side of the world from me, showing how life writers are forming a globe-spanning community. I hope Jessica’s five tips will enrich your life now and in the future, giving you volumes of memorable memoir to come.   When it comes to life writing, some of us might start thinking of our lives in the past tense. We think of the things we've done, accomplished, experienced - all the adventures we've had . We may view our writing time as reminiscing over the past, plumbing the memories we've acquired over our lifetime. While it's true that the Tree of Life Writing is planted in the soil of our memories, keeping that soil fertile is an ongoing pr...

A novel concept came across my radar lately in the form of a guest post request – the idea of planning to live a life worth writing about. Although I saluted the basic idea, my initial reaction was that such a post belongs in inspirational blogs, and does not fit the focus of this life writing blog. At first glance, it seems to contradict what I’ve said many times, that any life is worth writing about. I also failed to see the connection between establishing visions and goals and writing about life. The second time I received a proposal about this, something clicked. The idea of taking charge of your life, however many days or years you have left is nothing new. I recognized that people like Elizabeth Gilbert did just that in her best-selling memoir, Eat Pray Love . She planned the sort of adventures she wanted to experience and write about and negotiated a book contract before she bought her plane ticket. A few purists felt that was contrived and perhaps a tad beyond the pale for ...

We all know the feeling: sitting at the computer, arm wrestling words, hammering away at drafts that aren’t working, feeling stuck, threatening to throw our computers off the nearest bridge. This is the stuff of WRITER’S BLOCK. Two metaphors come to mind when I think of writer’s block. One is the legend of Michelangelo , chipping away at a block of marble, removing all the marble that isn’t part of the image he perceives to be hiding within the larger block. The other is of pregnancy. Stories are initially conceived within the womb of memory and mind. The initial draft of a story is akin to a newborn babe, requiring lots of tending and shaping before the child emerges as a self-sufficient individual. Here’s some good news. While as with chipping away marble or birthing a child, a certain amount of energy and toil is required, you can keep it to a minimum. How? RELAX INTO THE STORY . You may have heard of the concept of writing in a state of flow, where your creative powers are at peak...

When I read this advice recently in Vanessa Talbot’s ebook, 101 Ways to Live Extraordinarily , I thought of one of my great-great-grandmothers. Family legend has it that she opened the first brothel in the Yukon. The topic certainly does give us plenty of food for talk. Is it true? Did she? We don’t actually know. I’ve given it great thought. That she did go there early on with her new husband and son is established fact. Before she married that husband, she divorced the coal miner she married before emigrating from Scotland to Illinois in 1871. For twenty years this spunky woman had run boarding houses for single miners in order to provide food, clothing and shelter for her two children. Her first husband was an abusive bum who spent his money on whiskey. So she knew how to provide lodging for others. Demand for room and board was high up in the Klondike. It makes sense that she would ply the trade she knew to bring in immediate cash while her men were slogging around in the mud in se...

Last week I had a bizarre experience that had me almost dancing down the street with secret glee. I wanted to write about it. I HAD to write about it. I had chill time in my schedule that day, so I stopped at a library and got most of a first draft on the page. I decided at the outset that this story was too complex and personal to write as memoir, so I did the conversion to third-person point of view at the start. Aside from that, I stayed close to the reality of what happened. At t`hat point, I was the only active character in the story, and much of it was reflection and flashbacks. I shared the result with a non-writer friend, mentioning that I knew the ending was lame. She made an off-handed suggestion for strengthening the ending. Oh, my! Her idea was like tossing a match into a pile of dry leaves. A 15,340 word story has grown to nearly 5000, and it's just getting started. As I've continued writing, the main character has disengaged from “me” and taken on a life a...

I call it mouse shoulder. Doctors and physical therapists  talk about ulnar nerves. Whatever the technical term, it means I’ve been spending way too much time at my computer than is good for my body. My little finger tingles all the time. My shoulder hurts. The good news is that I caught this early and it’s treatable, but not with pills. Pills can help, but they aren’t the answer. If I just take pills and power on through, it will continue to get worse. The bad news is that along with exercises, massage, and so forth, the treatment involves severely curtailing my time at the keyboard. That means cutting way back on blogging, Facebook, Forums, email, and all those things that have come to seem such necessary aspects of daily life. Sometimes, wise people tell us, our bodies send us signals when change is needed. Those wise people urge us to pull out pen and paper and begin to dialogue with our affected parts. Oddly enough, writing by hand on a lap desk is still okay. This seems a cl...

Who would expect a diary to last hundreds of years? Someone told me a few years ago about conversion journals written by Quaker women as part of what might be called an initiation into the faith. If my source was correct, the women were required to keep these diaries, presumably to demonstrate the strength of their faith and their worthiness to be accepted as members of the Religious Society of Friends. The Lippincott tribe is descended from Quaker ancestors Richard and Abigail Lippincott , who arrived in the colonies in the mid-1500s seeking relief from persecution by the Church of England. A few years ago my husband received a copy of the Quaker marriage certificate of his grandfather’s great-grandparents, signed by everyone who witnessed the ceremony. He decided to donate this historic document to the Special Collections kept by Haverford College. During a recent visit to deliver the document, I asked to see some of these women’s conversion diaries. Unfortunately the collection i...

Let There be Peace on Earth, performed by the Empire State Youth Orchestra and Chorale Each time I pick up the paper, listen to the radio, or catch the news on the web or TV, it seems the world is besieged with violence, from my local community up to the global level. From hateful name-calling and accusations to death and bombing threats, it all breaks my heart. As I pondered the dire mess and state of the world, I remembered this song that has lived in my heart for decades. I remembered the key message: LET IT BEGIN WITH ME! How can I play a larger part, I wondered. What else can I do or say? I can go to local Council meetings and speak, but what more? Of course I know the answer. I can write! I can use the power of story in so many ways. For those who care to join me, let me list some ways: Journal out fear and other ugly thoughts. Many years ago I began turning to writing to dig deeply into attitudes, beliefs and reactions to even small things. I ask myself questions, l...

No matter how long we’ve been writing, free writing , writing practice , and writing prompts remain a powerful source of inspiration. Some prompts come from books, some from websites, some from writing groups or friends, but some of the most important come from our thoughts . I was reminded of this when I found the following email snippet from my writing buddy, JS: I was thinking last night about shaving and decided I’d write a little bit about it. I thought maybe I’d write about ten sentences. As soon as I started writing, I remembered all sorts of things I hadn’t thought about for years. I remembered how my father used to use his shaving brush to stir up some lather in his mug of shaving soap. He’d lather me and let me pretend to shave with a bladeless razor. I remembered starting shave for real, lots of different kinds of razors, blades and electric, and barbers I’ve gone to, and how they nearly shaved my head in the Army, and all that stuff. I wrote for nearly and hour and re...

If you want your story to shine its brightest, you’ve got to drill down to the core. That means going through it, sentence by sentence. The good news is that most sentences are simple enough and will pass without further ado. A few need further attention. Use these examples to find and fix those few. We continued our trip on to Koufonisia, a lightly populated fishing island for a very late lunch. At a glance, after adding the missing comma between island and for, most people would be satisfied with that sentence. It’s clear and grammatically correct. But let’s try a few things. Commas slow the eye down, so let’s move the qualifying phrase to a spot before the noun: We continued our trip on to the lightly populated fishing island of Koufonisia for a very late lunch. That’s better, but let’s try something else. Our trip continued to the lightly populated fishing island of Koufonisia, where we enjoyed a very late lunch. Better? I think so, but wait – when I was a h...

“I have piles of old journals. Can I use those as my memoir?” This question comes up in almost every class I teach. The short answer is “No . But you can use those journal entries as a resource.” Here’s why and how. Take a look at the Tree of Life Writing image in the right sidebar. Notice that Journal Entries fall at the foot, below the ground, out of sight and light. Those journal entries feed into Story , that appears first as Essays and Stories. Those component stories and essays feed into the composite Memoir. If you are using your journal to best advantage, you write with no boundaries . Your entries may ramble. They may not be coherent. You may omit detail or obsessively dwell on detail. You may write things that will send certain relationships up in flames if you don’t consign those pages to flames before anyone reads them. You may reveal things to those pages that would embarrass you or others, or betray their confidence. But aside from all that, reading journal entri...

Today I am pleased to host an interview with creativity coach Sue Mitchell, “The Memoir Muse,” about the challenges new lifestory and memoir writers face and some tips on avoiding them. SL: You explain on your website that your passion is to help people overcome obstacles and reluctance to begin or continue writing their memoirs or life stories. What are the most common obstacles people bring to you? SM: Most clients come needing some form of outside approval. They want to know if their writing is any good. They wonder if they’re going about this in the “right” way. They worry about offending others by sharing their view of what happened. I help them understand the messy nature of the writing process, teach them to set their own criteria for success, and help them give themselves permission to tell their stories. It’s also typical for beginning memoir writers to find that writing a memoir competes with other priorities in their lives, time slips away, and they don’t get to their ...

“What are we both doing right now?” asked a friend during a Skype session the other day. “Holding a conversation…” “We are talking about writing. We are NOT WRITING!” Oh! Yeah. I got the message. In our defense, the logistics we were discussing were important, but indeed, we were not writing . We continued to talk a few more minutes about all the things we do that aren’t writing, such as: Run to the grocery store to buy last-minute items for the dinner we just decided to fix. Finally remember to put in (or take out or fold) that load of laundry. Finally remember to call and make a dentist appointment. Send out publicity for an event. Vacuum the floor. Clean the car windshield – inside and out – and then vacuum the car interior. Meet a friend for coffee. Check Facebook. Scan the news. Work a Sudoku, play “one game!” of FreeCell, etc. That’s a very short list. Then we logged off of Skype with the promise that we’d touch bases in two hour...

Beginning writers generally write stories like they write email , telling what happened, skimming the tips of the waves. For example, “We camped at Yosemite and saw Half Dome. It was spectacular, but the the place was mobbed. Somebody left food out and a bear knocked over their cooler during the night.” If a friend sent me an email with that message, I’d assume she wrote it in a hurry, and make a mental note to ask about the intriguingly juicy bear story later. That friend can be excused for the email. After all, she is on vacation, and I hope she’s immersed in the moment, soaking it all in, so she’ll return home renewed and refreshed. But if she goes on to write stories about that vacation, I hope she’ll wring the juice from that bear. I want to hear things like: Did they hear the bear and know it was there? If so, how scared were they? What did that feel like? If not, how did they find out about it? What was going on around the campground as word spread? How c...

Ian Mathie, author of Bride Price and three (soon to be four) other African Memoirs, is the only person I know who has personally witnessed cannibalism . He put this horrifying event in context as I interviewed him across five time zones and one ocean recently. You can watch the video on YouTube or in the frame below and read the book to find out whether he actually ate any of that man.   Each of Mathie’s memoirs is unique in structure as well as content , but besides the fact they are all set in African countries, they all share one other feature. While Mathie is definitely telling the story in the context of his own experience, he is telling the stories of people he grew to know, respect and admire. He documents cultures and a way of life that’s all but disappeared in the ensuing thirty years, and his stories are a tribute and reminder that wisdom, love and compassion transcend time, place and culture. I’m reminded of the works of Margaret Mead I read in cultural anthropology ...

Closing the covers on a tale of epic proportion is merely a transition on my path of savoring a book. I may spend weeks gnawing on the bones of that book, reliving favorite scenes and savoring the way the details come together. Shorter stories may provide welcome diversion and profound insights, but seldom stick with me as long. Michel Sauret’s memoir, Child, Hold Me , is an exception. I found the book after following a link to” How Much Does It Cost to Publish a Book?” on Sauret’s meaty blog . A blurb for the book piqued my interest: From International Book Awards winning author Michel Sauret, “Child, Hold Me,” is a short memoir about losing a child in the womb, told through a man's perspective. What? A man has written a memoir about miscarriage? Wow! This was new territory for me. I read on and learned that Sauret and his girlfriend were still in college and … the frank confessions in that blurb stunned me. I clicked the link to Amazon. For less than the  cost of a...

Eight years ago as I pulled together the material that became The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing , I thought I knew the answer to that question : It's what really happened, or what you really think. It's basic honesty, plain and simple. Everybody knows that, right? That's a good starting point, but based on what I’ve learned and discovered since then, that definition is incomplete and misleading. Some of my increased understanding is old news, things I knew that had not yet integrated into my life writing neuron cluster. Meanwhile, advances in the field of neuroscience continue to deepen understanding of how memory works. These discoveries have profound  relevance for life writers. Here's a list of a few insights worth sharing: Memory is fallible. Contrary to what you probably heard in psychology class, self-help seminars, and various other places, your subconscious is not packed with every minute detail of every sensation that ever entered your brain. Recen...