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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...

Most writers park scribbled scraps of story ideas, details and ideas for a story-in-progress, delightful descriptions (more about this further down), and other minutiae in a pile to deal with later. We might as well throw those scraps away, because they’re almost never used. Now there’s a better way. Enter Evernote , the perfect place to store this stuff so you can find it and use it again later, even if you don’t recall that it’s there. After three years, Evernote has become my digital brain annex . I keep all sorts of stuff there: blog post ideas, story ideas, scraps to use in future stories or handouts. I keep lists of contacts there, along with clipped web articles and recipes. I use it to keep notes of events I’m planning, To Do lists, and grocery lists. I used to make Word documents for a lot of these things, but they become hard to find and seem like overkill for very short scraps. Digital Sticky Notes are even worse. Notebooks and tags make the Evernote difference . Note...