Memoir Writing – What is the meaning of your stories?

Posted on August 9, 2020 by moonbridgebooks

After online church this morning, I was thinking bigger about Jesus as storyteller, as he was the master of parables. Pastor Katie said, “If we look for one clear meaning, we limit the story of ourselves, of God’s kingdom, and possibilities.” In the parables, “a seed is not just a seed.”

What is the meaning of YOUR stories? When we write memoir, we are told to find the message we are trying to get across and stick with that focus, avoiding distracting details and side stories. At my first Zoom presentation the other day on life writing for seniors, I mentioned finding this focus. It may be broad, such as what your childhood was like during that time in history and society. It may be more focused, as how you overcame a certain major difficulty or adventure—the “hero’s journey,” as writers call it. I also told the attendees to just start writing and then see what comes of it, figure out how to organize the stories later—less daunting that way, too.

Memoirs do need to focus and have that raison d’etre, the reason to be. You are leaving a record of your life and personality, but are you also intending to educate about lived history (vs the impersonal broad brushstrokes of textbook nonfiction), to inspire others to persevere through whatever their own difficulties are, to build understanding and empathy for others whose shoes they don’t wear, or to entertain with your funny anecdotes or exciting travel memories—the biggest reasons to write your life. Often more than one, or even all, these reasons can be in one memoir.

Back to the Sunday sermon. You may have an overall message in your mind of what you want readers to get out of your stories, but there is more than one way to “get it.” A seed is not just a seed. A rule of writing, especially for children’s books, is to NEVER TELL THE READER WHAT TO THINK. Tell the story of what happened, but allow space for readers to feel their own reactions and discover their own meanings—not yours. They will enjoy your story more when they can use their own brains as they travel your life with you and make their own discoveries.

Once upon a time, she sowed sunflower seeds…

Storytelling: There is more than one way to “get it”

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Digitizing old slides, looking at old photos—nostalgia hurts!

Posted on August 3, 2020 by moonbridgebooks

These memories are not mine so I’m not sure why I am feeling this pain in my heart. I’m re-digitizing a lot of slides from photos my dad took of his youth, his army days, and early days with my mother. Seeing those photos, I think I am mourning my parents’ youth for them—when they first met and life was exciting. And historic. My dad was adventuring in an old Japan that doesn’t exist anymore, and my mother looks so young and preciously beautiful. Her childhood in poverty and war was about to be left behind.

A month or so ago, I finished converting all the slides, identifying and organizing them. I was originally very happy with the Wolverine F2D Titan slide converter, happy to find anything that would quickly convert the boxfuls of slides to high resolution .jpg images. I did my best on all the slides with basic photo editing. Some of these photos I really loved but could not fix very well, and most of the images still retained a yellowy hue or even a pinkish hue instead from my fixing attempts. Recently I had the (literally) bright idea to convert the slides while sitting in my back porch, in normal daylight instead of under the indoor yellow-hued lighting in my dining room. Ta-dah! Some slides would just never turn out good, but many others lost their yellowy hues. Live and learn.

But what’s with this twinge in my heart looking at old photos of my parents—it’s like I deeply miss them, but the “them” in that time of history when I wasn’t even born yet. Their images, these ghosts of the past, are reaching through time and making me feel they are a part of my life history. And well, they are! So this is how I will explain my weird, painful nostalgia for their old days. Somehow I was there.

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Ghostwriting Family Stories – writing for dad

Posted on July 19, 2020 by moonbridgebooks

Whew! I finished writing my dad’s stories of childhood and early adult years the best I could with some writings from him and letters he wrote to his family from his army service in the US and in Japan, late 1950s. How fun to read when he met my mom – my future! It’s in his hands now to correct anything and add to it. He was thrilled to read it!

I was excited to find that my dad’s mother, my grandmother, had saved all the letters he wrote back home. After she died, Dad kept the letters but never looked at them so he was a little nervous about what I would find in them. I laughed and told him, “You’re writing to your mom and dad, so I’m sure there’s nothing to be embarrassed about!”

The letters were fun to read and were a view into what my dad was like as a young man. He had a sense of humor and enough confidence that he was not impressed or cowed by “the brass.” He was surprisingly adventurous considering he came from a rather limited childhood in a family that worked hard to scrape a living farming on the far edge (then) of Chicago. He loved eating the strange Japanese foods and exploring Japan away from other Americans.

If you have a stack of letters from the past, my March 2012 blog post “What to Do With Those War Letters” might help you figure out how to incorporate them into a book. With my dad’s letters, though, I pulled out the interesting bits and added them in story form to his earlier writings of his life. I changed all the verbs to past tense and sometimes moved descriptive information around to fit into the narrative story better. My job was organizing all the bits of his writings into one long story in time sequence and figuring out how to divide the story into parts, sections, and/or chapters.

My dad’s memoir will be family-only, so you won’t be able to read his perspective of the Japan and its people he experienced about ten years after WWII—so fascinatingly different from today! It doesn’t lend itself to commercial sales since it has too much family and personal information no outsiders will care about but that is important to our family. I published my mom’s memoir, Cherry Blossoms in Twilight, because it contains lived history about a different culture and time in a different perspective, interesting to anyone.

Lived history is important to save, even if for family only. Its value is in the saving and passing it along, so it isn’t lost forever. Learning about how people lived, what they experienced or even survived through, enriches our lives, teaches us life lessons, surprises us or makes us cry, gives us inspiration, makes us appreciate what we have. They are special and have more meaning because they are true, not made up. When the person is our family member, the stories are even more precious.

Precious memories, how they linger, how they ever flood my soul…

Posted in capturing memories, ghostwriting, history, letters, lifewriting, memoir writing, memories, multicultural, storytelling | 1 Comment