A Time To Speak

Just over a year ago, on October 6, 2010, I got a phone call at 6:30 a.m. from my niece, Sadie, the daughter of my youngest sister, Karyl. She told me through sobs that her father, my sister’s husband Pat, had been killed in a freak car accident that morning. It seemed unreal. Pat was 45 years old, engaged in life, and one of the strongest men I had ever known. All the extended members of our family flew to Colorado where Karyl’s family lived, and the next few days were a blur of flowers, plastic-wrapped food, phone calls and planning. We were getting ready to drive Karyl to the funeral home for a 4:00 appointment to finalize details and I asked her how soon she wanted to go. “About 45 years from now,” she said.

In the past year, I’ve been surprised by a number of things. One was my absolute reluctance to write about the situation. I, who usually find it helpful to write about everything, suddenly found myself unable to put words together. I couldn’t seem to find a way to describe to myself or anyone else what was going on in my family, and writing about anything else seemed trivial and pointless. For about two months, I was horribly, inexplicably weary of words. It reminded me of the passage from Ecclesiastes about there being a time for everything, including “a time to keep silent and a time to speak.” For me, it was apparently time to keep silent. I didn’t really feel like I had an alternative.

I was, however, also surprised by my sister. I had always known her to be smart, funny and capable. But over the next few months through long phone conversations, I discovered that Karyl was also very wise. While going through devastating grief, holding a full-time job, and parenting her four children by herself, she was also able to articulate what the process felt like, and to educate me and others about what was and was not helpful when going through the grieving process. Here I was, the writer with nothing to say, while my little sister suddenly had volumes of wisdom to share. It finally occurred to me that, for her, it was time to speak. These were ideas she needed to share. I knew with certainty that she should write a book and that I could help her write it.

But not right away. We decided to allow Karyl and her family to navigate the hurdles of the first year. And there were plenty of hurdles. Actually, there still are plenty of hurdles. Nevertheless, we’ve kept notes, which I compiled in one, very long single-spaced document. After the one-year anniversary of Pat’s death, Karyl and I talked about starting the process of actually writing the book. We planned to meet in Colorado for several days, which is why I find myself writing this post from the living room in Karyl’s home. Karyl took time off work and my husband Doug and our daughter Sarah came along. This week, Karyl and I settled down with journals and notes and my computer. We’ve begun.

I hadn’t counted on the project pulling other surprises our way, however. Our parents also live in Colorado but their house is an hour away from Karyl’s. We really wanted to see them while we were in town so we asked if they would mind having all of us over for dinner one night. They improved on the idea; since our families will be in different places over Thanksgiving, my mom decided to host an early Thanksgiving dinner, complete with turkey, corn pudding, potatoes and pumpkin pie. She’s invited aunts, uncles and cousins. This was a bonus I hadn’t considered.

But that wasn’t all. Although it is a cliche, it is nevertheless true that tragedy has a way of refocusing priorities, which in my case meant spending more time with my sisters. With me in Oregon, Karyl in Colorado, and our other sister Karla in Texas, it was too easy for years to pass without seeing each other. No more. The three of us got together four times in the year since Pat died, visiting each other in Austin, Denver and my home in Lake Oswego. So it probably wasn’t that surprising when Karyl and I started talking this week, we both felt we needed Karla with us as well. Karyl called Karla yesterday, Thursday morning. Karla and her husband juggled plans, booked tickets, and will arrive late tonight. In a year filled with some of the most horrible things we could imagine, we can still be caught off guard by unexpected grace.

Today, after working for much of the day, we took a break. We decided to go for a run and then soak in the hot tub. Sitting there, looking out over the lights of Denver, I finally felt like I was ready to start writing about this big event that has blown through our family. I asked Karyl if she would mind if I occasionally wrote about our process in this blog, and she agreed.

God bless her. It is, once again, a time to speak.

 

 

Rules and Red Pens

I have a friend named Sean Lannin who is a very talented guy.  He’s a good business person, excellent basketball player, and makes a mean batch of chocolate chip cookies, but in all the years I’ve known him, we’ve never talked about writing.  That changed recently.  Sean had been reading and thinking about writing, and reminded me that for a lot of people the challenge of writing is really, really scary.  Worry rises up about “getting it wrong,” breaking some sacred rule of grammar, or invoking the wrath and the red pens of English teachers everywhere.  He started wondering what makes it so difficult for many people to start writing, especially about themselves.  Here’s what he came up with:  Rules.

What did he mean by that?  He answered his own question with a story.  Actually, he called it an “anecdote,” but it is a story, and it gets right to the heart the issue. With his permission, I’ve copied his story here:

My father was a Warrant Officer in the Army, training to fly helicopters.  The circuit included Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and Pensacola, but we probably lived in other states as well.  I lived in Germany, and Thailand, and Vietnam, all of these DOD schools.  In 2nd grade I left my family in Thailand and move to Bellevue, Washington to live with my Grandparents.  ”The schools were better.”

I did not attend much high school, preferring instead to spend my time in a basketball gym shooting baskets or sneaking off campus for some sort of mischief.  When I took a junior college creative writing class it was clear that I did not know an adverb from a noun, an independent clause from those more dependent, and then there was the dangling participle thingies.

I did not write much after that class–too many rules.  It was clear that moving from state to state, country to country, and from DOD to public school left a gap in my education.

I minored in English Literature.  With a double Major in Accounting and Finance I was the only student in the English department with short hair wearing button-downed shirts. The assignment was to write a paper on Othello.  Everyone in the class received their papers back with their grades, except me.  “I need to see you after class, Sean,” the professor said.

I knocked on the office door, went inside, sat in a straight-backed chair in the cramped office filled with books and papers.  “I need to see your notes! Where did you get your sources?”

It was one of the longest weekends of my life, waiting for judgment on whether I committed Plagiarism.  I had done nothing wrong. Surely he would know this.  What if?

“This is one of the best papers I have ever received from a student in more than 20 years of teaching,” he told me on Monday.  “You are a very gifted writer!” A+

I learned to like writing…

I love Sean’s story for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that it aptly illustrates several key ideas.

Stories teach. I have known Sean for more than ten years, but there were things about him I didn’t know until I read this story.  In the 331 words it took to write this piece, he was able to teach me things about who he is that I hadn’t learned in ten years of conversations.

Stories are a shortcut to meaning. I could have written pages and pages about why rules aren’t the most important part of writing.  In fact, I have written pages and pages on the subject, and probably will again.  But Sean was able to make the point quickly, efficiently, and in way that is easier to remember because he put it in a story.

Ideas matter, not rules. This was, in fact, WHY he felt compelled to write this story, and what he probably most wants you to take away from it.  After years of feeling like the rules of grammar or writing pushed him away, Sean was able to push back, and he wanted to encourage other to do the same thing.  He had a point he wanted to make and THIS is what is central his writing, not sentence structure or spelling or grammar.  The ideas come first; the message is primary.  All the other stuff is just a set of tools that help polish your ideas after you know what you want to say.  You can always find people or software to help you edit or shape your writing.  But only you know what you are trying to say.  Start there.

One of my favorite books of all time about writing is Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott.  I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that she addresses this very issue.  A major emphasis of the book is breaking down the terror and high expectations most of us bring to the writing process.  I recommend it if you are at all interested in writing.  Actually, even if you don’t care about writing, you should read it if for no other reason than it is funny and entertaining.  But it’s also completely accurate.  Contrary to most people’s expectations–or at least mine–even gifted writers don’t sit down to the page and spout perfect prose at will.

If I may vastly oversimplify her message, Lamott has two basic suggestions to get people writing.  The first piece of advice is to give yourself  Small Assignments.  All the worry about subject-verb agreement and split infinitives is really just a smoke screen for the basic fact that most of us try to take on assignments that are too big.  We get overwhelmed and stop.  The solution is to give ourselves smaller assignments.  Don’t write the entire essay.  Just write a paragraph.  Or a sentence.  Or an outline.  Just give yourself a small enough task that you can complete it in a 15 or 20 minute period.  Call your writing an anecdote, like my friend Sean did.  Enough of these small, micro-bits of writing will add up to something you can work with later.  It won’t look like much at first, like when you dump a bunch of puzzle pieces on a table before you start putting it together.  But you must have some pieces to start with.  Only when you have enough pieces available will you be able to see how they fit.

And Lamott’s second piece of advice?   Be willing to write Shitty First Drafts. I’m quoting the chapter title here.  Seriously.  Look it up.  Because in order to write something that turns out to be good, to say exactly what you want it to say, you have to be willing to write a lot of sentences that are just really, really terrible.  One of my favorite paragraphs in all of Bird by Bird is this:

People tend to look at successful writers . . . and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take a few breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter.  But this is just the fantasy of the unitiated.  I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident.  Not one of them writes elegant first drafts.  All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much.

I can’t tell you how many times I have thought of this paragraph when my writing is going badly, when I would be mortified if anyone else actually read what I had written.  I remind myself that a shitty first draft is the first essential step to writing something that works better, so I might as well  get on with it.

So that’s it.  With the help of Sean and Anne Lamott, these are my “rules” if I have any.  No Red Pens. Small Assignments. Shitty First Drafts.  Start there, and see how far they take you.

Hemingway and Facebook

According to literary legend, Ernest Hemingway was once challenged in a bar to write a story in six words. To settle the bet, he wrote:

“For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”

He won the bet, of course, and believed the story was his best work.  At the same time, he created a challenging assignment for generations of future writers. If you Google “Six-word-story,” you’ll find, among other things, a reference to a website called sixwordstory.net, blogs on the topic, an invitation to write six-word-stories based on photos, and a book entitled Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six Word Memoirs by Famous and Obscure Writers.

You can also find hundreds of examples of this “sudden fiction,” and probably lose a few hours in the process, as I did. Some stories are funny, some poignant. All are short. Here are a few examples:

“Please, this is everything, I swear.”
–Orson Scott Card

“Nevertheless, he tried a third time.”
–James P. Blaylock

“He read his obituary with confusion.”
–Steven Meretzky

“Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.”
–David Brin

“K.I.A. Baghdad, Aged 18 – Closed Casket.”
–Richard K. Morgan

“Ooh, shiny! Change course. Oops. Shiny!”
–Mad Gringo

“Well, I thought it was funny.”
–Stephen Colbert

And my own personal favorite:

“Easy. Just touch the match to”
–Ursula K. Le Guin

Try to write one yourself. It’s a fun assignment–kind of like a Sudoku puzzle—and a good way to pass 10 or 15 minutes.

But there’s more to these stories than that. In their condensed simplicity, six-word stories show us not only that stories of any length carry meaning. They also illustrate how they do it:  They make us work. In every one of these examples, you have to think for at least a second or two to “get it.” You draw conclusions about the speaker, the story line, or even, in Le Guin’s example, the outcome.  This underscores a general principle of writing: The most effective stories of any length require the active participation of readers to determine the meaning for themselves. In general, we tend to care more about something when we’ve invested part of ourselves in it.

It’s like the pleasure you get trying to figure out who the murderer is in a mystery novel. For the experience to be satisfying, however, the writer must plant just enough critical clues so that a reader has a decent chance of figuring it out. If the writer spells out too much for us, we feel insulted. Too little and we just feel confused or bored. The best writers hit that perfect middle ground: laying down significant details and actions and then letting go. We, the readers, are invited to fill in the blanks, building our own versions of the story.

While I was thinking about condensed meaning, and reader participation and the apocryphal nature of the Hemingway story, I decided to check my Facebook account.  Doing so, I realized  a more contemporary example of what I’ll call “sudden memoir” was staring me in the face: status messages. For those of you not familiar with Facebook, a status message is a short sentence or two posted on a profile page, updating your Facebook Friends about what you are doing or thinking at that particular moment.

Here are a few status quotes culled from some  of my Facebook friends, most of whom are either teenagers or young adults. These messages are cousins to six-word stories: short, specific, and a bit cryptic.

“I’m sorry, Shakespeare. We just can’t be friends.”
–Kate (18)

“7 1/2 years later I can feel my teeth!”
–Jesse (15)

“Dear Kansas, as much as I love you, I would really appreciate it if you would send me the $251 you owe me. Many thanks.”
–Sam (21)

“Okay, so maybe I have a Photo Booth problem.”
–Sabina (13)

“The creaks in my silent house are killing me.”
–Lauren (15)

It takes practice and thought to write a sentence that my daughter, Sarah, calls “status-worthy.” What makes a message so? Is it pithy? Funny? Sad? Or, in Sarah’s case, did your mother just say something so incredibly dumb that you need to share with all your friends? This has happened more times than I care to admit.

One day, when I finally caught Sarah in a silly moment, I decided to return the favor. I sat at my computer, trying to compose a status message that captured the incident. I typed something, then erased it. Tried again and erased that, too.  It was really hard, mostly because I wanted to set the tone, provide the setting, describe the characters. Sarah saw me struggling, sighed heavily, and said, “Here. Just let me do it.” She wrote my comment in less than a minute and posted it. It read:

“Barbara: What’s on the menu for tomorrow’s dinner?
Sarah: (Looking) Key-chay?
Barbara: What?
Sarah: Key-chay.
Barbara: You mean quiche?”

Done. 19 words.

I was impressed, and not only because Sarah was willing to help me write something that would make her look silly in front of all my friends, but also because she was good at it.  Such distilled writing is a skill, one that many of her generation have learned through experiment, practice, and the intrigue of a new technology. Frankly, I don’t care how it happens. Teenagers and young adults are spending huge amounts of time writing, often on a daily—or hourly—basis. What’s even more fascinating is that the restraints of the format – like Hemingway’s six-word-story, or a haiku, or a Facebook status comment—encourage a different kind of thought, one that forces them to trust that their readers will fill in the blanks.

Obviously, I’m not about to give up on long, expansive novels or detailed stories. It’s taken me about two hours and 995 words to write this post. Yet it’s good to remember that I can change speeds. I can see how little I can write and still communicate. I can trust that the people who read my words will do something with them that’s even better than I imagined.

Second Chances

In 1994, my husband and I took a trip to France on business. We planned the trip for early summer because it worked out best for our French hosts and for our own schedules. Our friend was meeting us in Paris and  would drive us to his home town of Etretat on the Normandy coast. I knew little about the town except that it was a favorite haunt of Impressionist painters, and that our friends had a boulangerie there. It wasn’t really a tourist trip. Still, I packed a French phrase book and prepared to indulge myself on fresh croissants and baguettes.

When we landed in the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and made our way to claim our bags, I was surprised at the festive atmosphere. Brass bands played. I think I even remember balloons. And there were soldiers in uniform everywhere. I looked more closely. These were elderly, white-haired men: veterans. I am embarrassed to admit how long it took me to realize that we’d managed to plan our trip to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

Then I put it all together. Etretat is in Normandy. We would be heading to the Normandy coast along with everyone else.

Normandy was a whirl of activity. Most of the invasion beaches were cordoned off to prepare for visiting dignitaries. There were parades through many coastal towns, including Etretat. We managed to elude most of the crush of people. We did, however, walk along the stony beach at Etretat and stare up at the white chalk cliffs looming over the water. The remains of German concrete bunkers still lurked in the cliff walls, and we tried to imagine Allied soldiers scrambling ashore under a hail of German bullets, racing to scale vertical cliffs like these. It seemed terrifying, impossible. I couldn’t imagine how those soldiers felt.

We took some time to visit in a few nearby towns: Caen, Rouen, Fecamp. We toured a bakery and visited the Benedictine distillery. We had lunch in a little cafes and walked through the Rouen Cathedral Monet had memorialized in paint. Everywhere we went, we saw veterans. Some wore uniforms. Others wore khaki pants and golf shirts. They wandered the streets, pointing out landmarks, touching stone walls that marked 50-year-old memories.

We saw a frail-looking man in a church wearing a windbreaker and a ball cap with “Veteran” over the bill. He stooped to point out an opening in the wall, a side altar of some sort. His wife, wearing a matching windbreaker, leaned in to see.

“And that’s where I hid,” he said. “I don’t know how long. An hour or so.”

She nodded gravely, placing a hand on his shoulder.

Here I was, ten feet away from someone who had lived through a significant event in history. And what did I do next?

Nothing. I walked away. We finished our tour, went back to Etretat and probably ate a pastry.

Looking back, I try to understand why I wasn’t more curious, how I could miss such an opportunity. Was I just tired? Shy about interrupting their moment? Or maybe I just didn’t know enough. Most of what I had learned about World War II I came from a high school history class decades earlier. I knew the big names: Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Eisenhower. I knew about concentration camps. I don’t think, however, the war had ever become personal.

A few years later, I read the book Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose, that follows the soldiers of Easy Company as they fought through Europe in WWII. In 2001, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks made the book into a 10-part miniseries. My husband and I watched each installment every Sunday night. As I watched, I often thought about those veterans I had seen in Normandy in June of 1994, and felt heart-sick. I wished I had that week of my life back, to tug the sleeve of a soldier and ask for a few minutes of his time.

Fortunately, I have been given a second chance of sorts. In addition to writing and teaching, I also work as a personal historian. You could say that it is now my business to ask questions.

One of my clients, Jack, just turned 90 years old last week. He is, among other things, a decorated veteran of World War II and the Korean War, and a career military man. Over the nearly two years I have worked with Jack, we’ve come a long way in documenting his story. It’s a great story. He lived in China as a child when Chiang Kai Shek hired his father to train the Chinese Air Force. In part because of his China experience, he spent most of WWII in the Chinese/Burma/India Theater as an advisor to the Chinese Army.

Working with Jack, I once again found the limits of my knowledge: This time, I felt clueless about the Pacific Theater of WWII. Jack is a great teacher—sharp, direct and eager to share. Still, I scrambled to learn, reading books about the Burma Road, Chinese history, and the English occupation of India. It’s fascinating information to learn, but the best part is this time it’s personal.

I was excited to learn that Spielberg and Hanks are at it again, telling the “other half” of the World War II story. Their miniseries The Pacific just began to air on March 14th, and will run for 10 weeks. The series follows the lives of three soldiers after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I just saw the first episode and it is, as expected, fabulous. More important to me, however, is that it is not entirely new information this time. I’ve spent two years asking questions. I have my own sources, and another reason to care.

Tell Me a Story

Imagine that you are attending a lecture, a workshop, or a class.  You’re sitting at table, a notebook in front of you, a pen in your hand.  You may or may not be paying attention.  A person stands at the front, explaining some fact or idea.  Then that person says,

“Let me tell you a story.”

What happens to you when you hear these words?  I’m guessing here, but I imagine that something in you lets go, relaxes. You might sit back a little in your chair, put your pen down. But you also start paying attention.

For me, hearing those words puts me back to a place where I am sitting on my mother’s lap, listening to Harold and the Purple Crayon for the 100^th time.  Or relaxing over pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving while my grandmother talks about her hardscrabble life in the mining towns of Colorado.  I somehow know that I don’t have to work so hard to understand this information.  I trust that my brain will “get” it – completely, accurately, and with little conscious effort.  It feels safe and easy, and I let my guard down.  Maybe you feel the same way.

In fact, that’s exactly what recent research on brain function has found.  Our brains perceive, organize and store information in the form of story.  Daniel Pink, in his book A Whole New Mind, argues that familiarity with the use of Story is one of six critical tools or concepts necessary in the 21^st century.  He states:

Stories are easier to remember—because in many ways, stories are how we remember.  ‘Narrative imaging—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought,’ writes cognitive scientist Mark Turner in his book The Literary Mind. … ‘Most of our experience, our knowledge and our thinking is organized as stories.’

Our brains are familiar with the patterns and structure of story, and readily accept and assimilate information presented in narrative form.  What is more, reading or listening to a story appeals to different parts of our brains.  According to Susan Weinschenk, author of Neuro Web Design, storytelling activates both the auditory and visual parts of the cortex, as well as the emotional parts of the mid brain.  As Weinschenk says, “A story not only conveys information, but it also allows us to feel what the character in the story feels. . . .  When we read or hear a story, our brains are partly reacting as though we are experiencing the story ourselves. “

Stories make intuitive sense to us. They help us grasp both the information and the emotional impact of a message, and they can do so almost effortlessly. This is the power of story.  We breathe story as easily as we breathe air.  We create stories to explain our experiences to ourselves and others, selecting some details from experiences that match the “theme” of the story, and let other details go.  We do this so efficiently that we are often unaware that we are making stories about our lives.  We assume that our stories are our lives.

This is a critical distinction.  If we are unaware of the fact that we create the stories we tell about our lives, we are also unaware that we have the power and author-ity to change or re-tell them when they aren’t working.

Start with something simple.  Someone asks you, “How was your day?”  You probably had any number of things happen in your day, some positive and productive, some challenging or difficult.  How do you answer?  Whatever you say, you are writing a story.  No matter which details you choose, your story is supported by accurate information from your life.  The only difference is the perspective you choose to take.  Was it a good day?  A bad day?  Which story will be the most satisfying to live, to share, or to remember.  It is truly up to you.

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