Archive for January, 2010

I had the rare and exciting opportunity last Sunday to hear powerful writing tips from Jason Roberts, author of A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler. He wasn’t there to sell books, although we coaxed him into staying around afterwards so we could purchase A Sense of the World from Book Passage and get his autograph. We have Tanya Egan Gibson, talented writer, author, and program chair for California Writers Club-Marin, to thank for coaxing him out of hiding, where he’s immersed in his next book.

While deeply serious about the craft of writing creative narrative for fiction and nonfiction, I’d have to say Roberts is an entertainer in disguise. His compelling tips, “From Silk Thread to Steel Cable,” were comprised of seven points – well, as he went along, he added another, so now there were eight – points he said he wished he’d learned before he discovered them for himself throughout years of writing. I’m sure he has a few more up his sleeve, and on Sunday he had an audience glued to his every word, anxious to hear any number of tips he took the time to graciously give his fellow writers – the crowd was enthralled.

I’m thinking perhaps he was trying this stuff out on us for our reaction prior to proposing a book on what he deems the narrative process. If he’s not planning to write such a book, he should. We’d all have bought it yesterday. Did I mention Roberts is a very clever fellow? Tricky even? And definitely handsome.

Next came the tricky part for me in trying to give you a taste of what I took away from his brilliant talk. He started off with a bang telling us, “Get over yourself. Don’t over write your prose.” Great reminder…”Get over myself” sticky note already up.

The following writing tips are my brief takes on a few of Roberts’ points. I am looking at them in relationship to the character grabbing, short memoirs that I encourage people to write. These true tales capture the character and spirit of people significant in their lives and often serve as the writers’ building blocks to longer works.

1.   “Cast your characters” by literally giving each character a role in your story. It is your job to see that your characters do something, rather than merely mentioning them. Ask yourself questions about each one of them: Why is this person in my story? Is this guy important to the story? Does the story work better without an appearance from this woman? If you think certain characters are not worth giving an active role, or if they seem to get in the way of the narrative, get rid of them.  Everyone needs a reason for being, right? Well, give them that reason for being, or out they go.

Each character, however, doesn’t need a balanced role – use or manipulate a character for a desired effect, and don’t make excuses for him. For example, you mention your dad in a story you’re writing about your mother. For the story to make sense, you need to depict him as a jerk, which is only one aspect of his character. Since this story isn’t about him, it’s not necessary or appropriate to show the reader his good side.

Roberts goes on to say, “You can clash with your characters if need be,” and “Don’t be too enamored of a character.” The resulting tension from a clash will give your work a desirable edge.  And if you’re overly absorbed in one of your characters, you leave little to the readers’ imagination. Mystery will give your audience the opportunity to read something into the characters – to see them as similar to people they know, including themselves. Moreover, when you don’t fully clothe your characters, they carry a universal appeal, which is what you need to achieve, if you want to be widely read.

2.  If it’s readers you want, remember “Readers are selfish,” so you have to give them what they need. Connection. They must feel a link or a tie between themselves and the characters when they read your story or they will simply close the book or turn off the screen, discarding the work that’s been your driving passion. So decide what you want your readers to feel before you write.

This sounds simple, but I know from my experience holding “Give the Gift of Story” workshops that many people, when they begin to write a story,  have no idea what they want others to feel. And has the idea about “how to touch others” occurred to them prior to starting their writing process? Perhaps not, since they often say they don’t even know what or how they, themselves, feel until the words start to flow. So, from here on out, I’ll put the horse before the cart and ask writers to spend time on what they want their readers to feel and what devices they can use to bring about that desired effect .

3.  “The past is a foreign country.” Capture the Zeitgeist. To successfully write creative narrative, your story must ring true with the spirit of the time in which the story takes place. In order to do this, you need to look at each place and period of time as having a personality uniquely its own. The Zeitgeist will have enormously influenced the hearts and minds and actions of your characters. Write this flavor of the times into your story to add depth and color, but also as a frame of reference as your readers get comfortable with your casts of characters.

Roberts reminded us, “You’re always writing about time.” On that note, I’ll stop now at a time and place where I know it’s up to us as writers to hone our craft with a spirit that craves more.

Thank you, Jason Roberts, for allowing me to share with my readers a bit of what I gleaned from your talk, even though you didn’t know what I was going to write. That’s trust, and I hope I have given them a connection to you, and that my rendition of and elaboration on a few of your points didn’t completely warp your intended meaning.

Links:

Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World. This book is now on my short list!

Tanya Egan Gibson, How to Buy a Love of Reading. You can also click here to read my review.

Now write like you’ve never written before as you capture the character and spirit of your mother or another significant person in your life. So they will always be remembered, write a bio-vignette and become a TellTale Soul.

The following is a recent reveiw of my easy-to-follow “how-to” guide to writing memoir that I’d like to share with you, especially for those who would enjoy learning the art of Tapping Memory to Write Memoir.

“Lynn, what a wonderful GIFT you’re giving writers! I loved your book, and your workshops are terrific!

Lynn Cook Henriksen’s Give the Gift of Story: TellTale Souls’ Essential Guide to Tap Memory & Write Memoir in Five Acts provides a fresh approach to crafting engaging memoirs about significant people in our lives. Writers of any caliber will find this gem of a book useful.

Practical advice abounds as Henriksen shows you how to “Think and plan before you write,” when to employ literary devices, and innovative scene-building techniques. Then she goes deeper with the clarity that not all memories are smooth sailing, “When we stir memories, we will find some lumps . . . let’s examine them . . . as we continue on our journeys.”

Enticing story examples and a helpful glossary make Give the Gift of Story the perfect memoir-writing kit.”

Review by Teresa LeYung Ryan, writing-career-coach and author

The Story Woman asks you to write short, true tales about  significant people in your life to keep their character and spirit alive for future generations. This isn’t a monumental task, simply write a bio-vignette of 800-1500 words that makes the person you’re writing about come alive on the page.

Give the Gift of Story available here: You can do it!  Capture it… Write it… Connect it…

INVISIBLE MOTHER may have been all over the internet, as most everything is. But when my sister sent this to me, it was as my first-time reading, and she asked me to post the article on my blog, so I will – I am.

As you’re reading Invisible Mother, think about your mother, as well as yourself. Was she invisible – is she still? Or do you see her as individual? Write a mother-memoir that captures her character and spirit to let her know you “see” her.

“It all began to make sense, the blank stares, the lack of response, the way one of the kids will walk into the room while I’m on the phone and ask to be taken to the store.

Inside I’m thinking, ‘Can’t you see I’m on the phone?’ Obviously, not.

No one can see if I’m on the phone, or cooking, or sweeping the floor, or even standing on my head in the corner, because no one can see me at all.

I’m invisible. The invisible Mom. Some days I am only a pair of hands, nothing more: Can you fix this? Can you tie this? Can you open this?

Some days I’m not a pair of hands; I’m not even a human being. I’m a clock to ask, ‘What time is it?’ I’m a satellite guide to answer, ‘What number is the Disney Channel?’ I’m a car to order, ‘Right around 5:30, please.’

I was certain that these were the hands that once held books and the eyes that studied history and the mind that graduated sum a cum laude – but now they had disappeared into the peanut butter, never to be seen again. She’s going; she’s going; she is gone!

One night, a group of us were having dinner, celebrating the return of a friend from England.

Janice had just gotten back from a fabulous trip, and she was going on and on about the hotel she stayed in. I was sitting there, looking around at the others all put together so well. It was hard not to compare and feel sorry for myself. I was feeling pretty pathetic, when Janice turned to me with a beautifully wrapped package, and said, ‘I brought you this.’

It was a book on the great cathedrals of Europe…I wasn’t exactly sure why she’d given it to me until I read her inscription: ‘To My Dear Friend, with admiration for the greatness of what you are building when no one sees.’

In the days ahead I would read – no, devour – the book. And I would discover what would become for me, four life-changing truths, after which I could pattern my work: No one can say who built the great cathedrals – we have no record of their names.

These builders gave their whole lives for a work they would never see finished. They made great sacrifices and expected no credit. The passion of their building was fueled by their faith that the eyes of God saw everything.

A legendary story in the book told of a rich man who came to visit the cathedral while it was being built, and he saw a workman carving a tiny bird on the inside of a beam; He was puzzled and asked the man, ‘Why are you spending so much time carving that bird into a beam that will be covered by the roof? No one will ever see it.’ And the workman replied, ‘Because God sees’ I closed the book, feeling the missing piece fall into place.

It was almost as if I heard God whispering to me, ‘I see you. I see the sacrifices you make every day, even when no one around you does. No act of kindness you’ve done, no sequin you’ve sewn on, no cupcake you’ve baked, is too small for me to notice and smile over. You are building a great cathedral, but you can’t see right now what it will become.’

At times, my invisibility feels like an affliction. But it is not a disease that is erasing my life. It is the cure for the disease of my own self-centeredness. It is the antidote to my strong, stubborn pride.

I keep the right perspective when I see myself as a great builder. As one of the people who show up at a job that they will never see finished, to work on something that their name will never be on.

The writer of the book went so far as to say that no cathedrals could ever be built in our lifetime because there are so few people willing to sacrifice to that degree.

When I really think about it, I don’t want my son to tell the friend he’s bringing home from college for Thanksgiving, ‘My Mom gets up at 4 in the morning and bakes homemade pies, and then she hand bastes a turkey for three hours and presses all the linens for the table.’ That would mean I’d built a shrine or a monument to myself. I just want him to want to come home. And then, if there is anything more to say to his friend, to add, ‘you’re going to love it there.’

As mothers, we are building great cathedrals. We cannot be seen if we’re doing it right. And one day, it is very possible that the world will marvel, not only at what we have built, but at the beauty that has been added to the world by the sacrifices of invisible women.” Anonymous

The Story Woman asks you to become a TellTale Soul by writing a short, true tale that captures the character and spirit of your mother or another significant person in your life.

I’d love to read your story. The best way to send it to me is via email: lynn(at)telltalesouls(dot)com. Replace (at)  with @ and (dot) with the usual .com.

I figured what could be better than to start the new year with a guest blog by my great friend and brilliant author, Tanya Egan Gibson. Thank you, Tanya, for helping make 2010 a very interesting year to look forward to. My advice – read my review - then read her book.

On Meta-Memoir 

Halfway into writing an essay about your mother’s carefully crafted thank-you notes–the handwritten and heartfelt kind that seem to have gone the way of the mastodon–you find yourself stuck.  Perhaps you’re worrying that nobody else in the world could possibly care about this story, or that you won’t be able to properly convey the nuances of your mother’s motivations.  Or perhaps you’re finding yourself revealing more emotion or truth than you’re really comfortable with–you actually resented the time she took writing those notes when she could have been helping you with your homework/Home Ec project/boy problems.  As you ruminate about how difficult it is to tell this story, a thought strikes you: Why not tell a story about trying to tell this difficult story? 

It’s Genius, you think. You will write about disconnection–about how hard it is to be a writer who is supposed to make strangers feel things about events and people the aforementioned strangers really have no reason to care about.  Like thank-you notes.  And that velour shirt for Home Ec that was missing a sleeve.

 And wait, there’s more!  Why not go even a step further and comment upon writing this story about not writing a story about your mother, narrating every moment of your writing the not-story, employing a Twitter-esque present-tense hyperconsciousness?  As in, I keep looking back at the last paragraph, the dangling preposition taunting me, but I force myself to type onward.

 Clever you.  Meta- you.  Are you feeling the heart of your story?

 By meta-, I mean writing does not encourage the reader to experience a waking dream–in fact, it keeps telling the reader, “This is just a dream.”  The writer may wax self-referential (”I am writing about writing about writing”).  He or she may employ devices normally reserved for non-narrative nonfiction (e.g., footnotes which themselves extend the narrative or even take over the narrative).  He or she might play with the structure of the narrative to make the form of the narrative as important as/more an important than its content. (Imagine the thank-you note essay structured as a thank-you note to mom.)

 It’s cool.  It’s fun.  It can be stunning, when pulled off subtly, rather than like the hyperbolic examples I gave above.  As a reader and writer of meta-fiction, however, I have a love/hate relationship with the stuff–because it can also be an excuse for heartlessness.

 Though I don’t write memoir, I do read it.  I read for emotional reasons as much as for intellectual ones.  Perhaps, to be honest, even more so.  I read to feel like I’m not alone in the world.  I read to understand what goes in the heads of people I might never meet, or I might be afraid to meet, or I might be afraid wouldn’t like me if we did meet.  I read to connect.

 Good writing is honest and brave (and by “honest and brave,” I don’t mean you tell-all).  To be brave, I think, is to embrace emotion rather than skirting it.  When I’m reading something self-referential, I hope to find a “self” nurtured by meta-devices rather than obscured by them–as in Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, whose manifold footnotes seek to engage the heart instead of distance it, or Stephen Elliott’s highly acclaimed The Adderall Diaries (which I put on my wish list). 

It is lovely to be clever, and it is lovely to behold cleverness.  But as Egger’s work implies, genius and heart are often at odds, even as they inhabit the same ironic title.  And in the end, I’ll take “heartbreaking” over “genius.”

 Bio: Tanya Egan Gibson is the author of How To Buy a Love of Reading– a novel that may or may not be considered meta-fiction (and that may or may not satirize meta-fiction)–about nouveau riche parents who try to cure their teenage daughter’s hatred of books by commissioning a custom-written novel for her.  She’d love if you visited the book’s site at http://www.howtobuyaloveofreading.com and shared your own story about how reading changed (or even saved) your life.