yourpassions.tk

Nine 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, what is truth: 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 as I've learned since then, that's both incomplete and misleading. Some of my increased understanding is old news, things I knew that had not integrated into my cluster of life writing neurons. Meanwhile, advances in the study of memory continue to deepen understanding. These discoveries have profound  relevance for life writers. Here's a list of a few evolving insights worth sharing: Memory is fallible . Contrary to what you probably heard in psychology class, self-help seminars, and various other places, you do not remember every minute detail of every sensation that ever entered your brain. Recent evidence shows that incoming data is filtered, sc...

My heart nearly broke when I checked the resolution of a photo in a client’s family history/memoir I was preparing for upload to CreateSpace.com for printing copies for family members. When I copied the document photo and pasted it into IrfanView (my favorite free photo editor for low-end needs), I saw that the resolution was only 72 dpi (dots or pixels per inch). That’s a small fraction of the pixel density CreateSpace requires. This was the case with nearly all the several dozen photos in the book. I had the gut-wrenching task of explaining to my client that she had a choice: I could resample the existing images to trick CreateSpace into believing they were 300 dpi . . . or she could rescan them. How I wished that she, like the majority of people scanning old family photos, knew all along about scanning at a minimum resolution of 300 dpi. Here’s why it matters: CreateSpace will sound an alarm when it analyzes an uploaded document and finds even one image of less than 300 dpi. For g...

Invited guest post by Carol Bodensteiner Long time readers may be surprised to find a post about writing fiction on this blog about life writing. While it’s true that my focus is on memoir, lifestory, journaling and other forms that draw upon actual experience to express personal truth, sometimes the freedom of fiction is more effective in conveying truth. Carol Bodensteiner found this to be true. She has successfully written in both genres and her experience moving from memoir to fiction has lessons for all. I’d been a business writer all my life, so I was used to working with facts. Memoir was a logical first writing step. Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Girl , tells the stories of my childhood growing up on a family farm in the middle of the United States, in the middle of the 20 th Century. When I finally raised my head from writing, publishing, and marketing the memoir, I looked around for what I’d write next. I turned to family-inspired fiction, which I’d never written ...