Cool Plums Weblog

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL – Final

John — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:40:02 +0000

"Damn this is good!"

PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS

A. Choosing and developing characters

pick minimum characters to convey scene
use the questions from the characterization, Exercise 3

(subtext). What is going on underneath the text. For example, if on the day your sister dies, you are buying a pair of gloves, the subtext of her death would greatly affect the way you felt, even if the action of buying gloves is ostensibly everyday. A good autobiography is a mirror of the way human beings behave. The writer’s job is to provide what is also underneath the behavior of human beings.

give each a purpose in a scene
remember events trigger action, action leads to discovery
use narrative summary sparingly—it is a connector or a door into a scene, never the substance—see your life as a movie (dramatic scenes linked by narrative summary)

B. Dialogue “do’s and don’ts

1. point of view for each character (attitude)

2. impression of natural speech

3. use dramatic structure to shape the sequence of

what is said

Don’t

1. let characters make long speeches

2. put in dead dialogue

3. write dialogue in which nothing is left unspoken

(no subtext)

C. Composite voice of autobiography (the person you are today versus the person you were then–both are critical)

D. Other techniques worth exploring through your reading of others

1. foreshadowing

2. incorporate external events

3. stretching and condensing

4. composite characters/scenes

5. changing vantage points

flashbacks (juxtaposition)
altering order to build drama

E. Disclaimers (to give you more freedom to tell the truth)

Some names and biographic details in this book have been altered.

This book is fiction though based upon events that really happened.

EXERCISE 5

Pick one of your scenes (initial or interim). Choose a setting that reflects theme and one–like Getting Closer–in which they are physically doing something. Who are the characters you will use in the scene? What is the subtext? What is each striving for?

EXERCISE 6

Write the scene. It helps if the people in it are involved is some kind of activity other than just talking (such as cooking in Getting Closer). This is a first draft, it is more important to write continuously than “correctly” or artistically. Write from your feelings, creating a scene that kindles them for you. Be brutally honest. You can go back later and polish the result, what you are after here is the raw energy and sharp detail that can’t be added when you edit.

TRUTH

“If you tell the whole truth, the complete picture, if you include all sides of a person, the dark and the light, then it is possible to tell even ugly truths about someone without committing character assassination–if your motive is not to condemn but to understand. It is not the objectivity of the reporter you should strive for, but a human treatment of the truth, a feeling for the vulnerability of human beings.

“Autobiographic narrative is more than simply remembering on paper. it is a second chance, a chance to get it right. Not that you change events, not that you don’t write about helplessly watching your sister drown with all the pain and guilt you experienced, but that this time you are on your own side, even in pain and failure. Now you can tell the story with insight and find the meaning of the single experience within the context of your whole life. Remembering one’s suffering from the perspective of acquired wisdom is different from simply replaying it.

“Autobiographic stories don’t require happy endings, but they do require a reason for being, a purpose, Knowing the end of the story means that even if a painful memory temporarily casts a pall over your present while you are writing it–and it well may–it is only a point in the story, not the entire story.”

–Tristine Rainer

SAMPLE MEMOIR – THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL 6

John — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:21:23 +0000

CREATING AND FINE TUNING SCENES

Editing My Wife’s Autobiography

I am a saboteur

behind the lines

eliminating adjectives

adverbs and other

old lovers.

-John Lehman

In the following excerpt look for:

1. description (how much?–the telling detail, not adjectives or adverbs, get the audience to judge, use of motion, atmosphere—setting mirroring character, conflict or theme (remember “opposites,” especially between characters and within the central character)

2. introducing characters through action (suggest singularity and temperament, gesture–body language)

3. dialogue–emotional subtext (each character in a scene has an agenda) summary dialogue, indirect dialogue, direct dialogue, hidden dialogue

4. realization–reaction, inner response, ie, emotional beat (Getting Closer) different from expository writing (topic sentence then development), the beat, not the paragraph is the unit, and its tempo is the changing intensity of your story.

5. changing place (and time), begin scene with establishing dialogue or description.

GETTING CLOSER by Frances Metzman (Rosebud #10)

I smell the earthy root odor of potatoes boiling on the stove. Smoke billows upward. As I lift the heavy pot and drain the water, steam burns my eyes. My mother’s heavy footsteps thump on the linoleum behind me. The sound chills my blood. Turning my head, I see she is only retrieving eggs from the refrigerator. Although I promise myself not to anticipate the worst, I am jumpy, worried.

Dumping the potatoes into a mixing bowl, I blink away the sting of heat and add several tablespoons of butter, the sautéed onions and eggs. I beat it all together with a portable hand mixer. Adding salt and pepper, I watch as the ingredients are pummeled into a smooth batter. The odor of melted butter wafts upward. The filling for the knishes is nearly done, and, so far so good. No fights that draw blood.

“You shouldn’t use electric appliances. The knishes have to be made totally by hand,” my mother says, making a depression in a mound of flour and breaking eggs into it.

Without the mixer I’d have to stay longer. I feel my back stiffen. “This is 1996,” I say. “Your great-grandmother in Russia would have loved to have one of these.”

“The woman couldn’t read, and sold bread by the roadside. They had no electricity. What would she do with your mixer?”

I concentrate on a bowl as though I’m inventing a cure for cancer.

I love knishes, those round, flaky-doughed turnovers filled with pureed potato. When I had asked my mother to show me how to make them, I’d hoped we’d use the opportunity to declare a truce. We’ve gotten adept at shouting matches, but in the last year or two I can hardly face her. I visit as little as possible. Give it one last chance, I told myself.

At first, she’d been excited by the prospect; now I see her expression has dulled. She’s cut me off again. Why do I feel like an orphan around her?

My mother excels in the kitchen. It’s not that she’s nicer, but her obsession with food seems to give her a measure of control over her life. She commands every utensil within her reach and any hapless human in her way. Parboiling, braising, steaming, sautéing, roasting and frying are performed like sacred rituals. I hold out little hope that getting her to initiate me into her hallowed sanctuary will reunite us. But it’s the last-ditch effort before I turn my back forever.

A tall large woman, my mother has developed thickening petrified slabs of flesh on her body over the years, kind of like the rings of a cut tree that tell its age. Yet now she moves like a musical conductor, stewing flour on the board as though bringing a violin section to a crescendo.

As she rolls the dough flat, each push forward seems calculated. It’s as though she must duplicate that motion exactly the same distance each time. I want her to stay in that position since I won’t have to hear the flat slapping, that odd rhythm on the floor that fills me with dread.

She folds the sheet of dough over her rolling pin and holds it in front of my face. it is beautiful, evenly translucent and a near-perfect oval. My sheet of dough has ragged edges and tears in the middle.

Using the back of a spoon, she runs the filling along a section of dough. Then she folds the overlapping sides over and seals it by brushing the seams with a beaten egg. A long puffed tube emerges. After dipping her hand in a bowl of flour, she cuts off sections with the side of her hand.

“I cut it this way because the dough sticks together naturally. Cutting with a knife just makes it fall apart. You didn’t know that, did you?”

“No.” I smack the rolling pin against my palm. “How the hell would I know that” You never let me in your precious kitchen.” And when you give me a recipe, I want to shout out loud, you deliberately forget to tell me the most important ingredient anyway.

My mother claps her hands together and a cloud of flour dust rises. “That temper of yours again. That’s why you’re thirty-five and not married.”

“Knock it off,” I answer in disgust. Why can’t I hide my anger? I feel tired although we’ve only been at it for half an hour. As I wipe the sweat from my face with a tissue, I

think it’s one hundred degrees inside. My mother never opens the windows in the summer time. She prefers to close everything out, even changes of seasons. I glance at the doors and windows, checking escape routes.

“I don’t know why you bothered me about cooking. You don’t eat my food, and you never come for dinner,” my mother mumbles.

“That’s because your meals are like feeding frenzies. You’re never satisfied no matter how much I eat.”

“Everyone loves my cooking but you. You can never give compliments.”

When her back is turned, I jab a potato-covered middle finger in the air. I taste bile at the back of my throat remembering how, as a kid, she forced me to eat every morsel of food put in front of me. At least those memories keep me thin now.

Rolling out a new ball of dough, I flip it over the rolling pin, trying to lay the opposite side on the board in one smooth gesture, just like she does. It slips off, and falls to the floor. She gives me a wilting look. Slowly, I pick it up. My arms ache.

She’s staring at me. “You’re just like your father. You even look like him.”

“Please, please don’t start that again. Let’s just have a nice time. Then we’ll eat the knishes.”

She’s jumped into bad territory. My mother dates her unrelenting unhappiness from the time my father left us twenty-five years ago. That’s when my memories turn ugly, from a mother who asked me how my dad had gone too one who seemed not to recognize me whenever her eyes happened to look my way.

I fan my face with a towel, recalling my dad’s explanation of why he left my mother for another woman.

“Your mother, she only gives me food, nothing else. Nothing for the soul, nothing for the body,” he had grumbled.

“Sure. What do you care about me anyway? Your father left me and so did you.”

“I have a life, too.”

“Some life. Hundreds of dates and no husband.”

“I think I’d better go,” I say.

After my father left, my mother talked of suicide. Day after day I’d rush home from school, watching her closely. When she went to bed, I’d sit up for hours listening for signs of life. Only when I heard her toss in bed or heard those heavy, scary footsteps was I able to sleep. Although she never attempted suicide, she managed to do some pretty destructive things. I sense her heading in that direction now.

Untying my apron, I notice flour is streaked all over my hands and shoes. Stepping behind me, she grabs the apron strings and reties them. The battle of the apron is on. The old familiar knot of anger pulls tight.

“The potatoes need more salt.”

“I hesitate, then I pick up the salt shaker. ” Will you be good if I stay? I speak softly.

“Okay,” she says. “I will.” She looks remorseful for a moment. I know she can’t help herself, but I pray for a miracle…

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL – Part 5

John — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:34:56 +0000

EXERCISE 4

Briefly identify each of the following for the example below and then for your own autobiography:

1. your story’s final pivotal event–(climax).

A turning point that could be the end of my story where something in me died so something could live or be born?

2. the initial scene

With what scene was I aware of the problem that would result in the final climax?

3. Your problem/desire

What incited my problem, whether I was aware of it or not? What did I want in response to this?

4. Adversaries or obstacles

Was there a person, people or factors that stood in the way of the achieving my desire?

5. Interim scenes (use events/desires from Exercise 1C)

List at least five other scenes or events that mirrored and intensified my problem in different ways?

6. Realization

What did you realize at the moment of transformation that made the

transformation possible? Did something in your behavior change as a result of the realization?

Here is an example. The conflict is over having a second child (it might be stated in mor general terms as: How do I keep the space I need to grow as an individual, yet stay close enough to my husband to keep love alive in our marriage?

1. Richard told me when we were dating that he wanted a big family. I wanted him and that sounded romantic to me.

2. We were both overjoyed when I delivered John.

3. Richard was supportive when I went back to work because we needed the money.

4. I got a promotion. Now I was making more than Richard. It made me feel in control of my own life for the first time. Richard was silent about it, except he made jokes about my being head of the family.

5. John started begging to have a little brother or sister. I knew Richard had been encouraging him. Richard reminded me that our plan was t have a big family. I said it wasn’t the right time.

6. I saw there was a chance to become director of the arts center and I knew I wanted this and I would be devastated if I didn’t get it.

7. Richard joined a Christian church and started taking John on Sundays. I used the time to catch up on work. I felt their disapproval.

8. Richard got a promotion at his job. It made him more confident and fun at home.

9. We took a long-planned trip to Europe without John. Unexpectedly it was like a second honeymoon.

10. The director of the arts center announced his resignation.

11. I discovered I was pregnant. I wept.

12. I knew if I told Richard I was pregnant he would never forgive me for not having the child.

13. I became irritable and started to have morning sickness, which I tried to hide.

14. Richard was more kind than ever, which made me feel guilt. I almost told him I was pregnant, but I lost my courage.

15. My friend took me to get an abortion.

16. If Richard ever suspected, he didn’t say anything. But something had died between us. Trust.

17. I got the directorship. I knew I had made the right choice. I loved my position and the power that came with it. This was all my life, what I was meant to do.

18. Richard and I began to live very busy and independent lives, and he never again mentioned having another child.

19. Now so many years later when John himself has three children and Richard and I are comfortably retired, but not really close. I still believe I made the right choice for me, but I often wish I’d had the courage to tell Richard and we’d fought it out, instead of each of us taking a solitary, silent road.

Once you have put these elements in order, turn to your own story and try to do the same.

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL – Part 4

John — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:04:07 +0000

EXERCISE 3

Answer these questions for the other major character in your scene (from Exercise 2). If you don’t know what the actual answer is, use your intuition and role playing ability and from what you do know project answers.

A. Who is the love in this person’s life? Think about the emotions this person has in a relationship with whom he or she is involved. Limit your answer to a single choice.

B. What is this person fighting for? What or who interferes with this subject accomplishing his or her goals. Most of us don’t live for realities, but for dreams of what might be.

C. What of special significance has happened to this person the year before, or if it’s more appropriate, what will happen to your subject within the next year?

D. Describe the humor in this person’s life. Often we alleviate the serious burdens of life by doing things that strike others as humorous (Hamlet has some hilarious lines). Identify the sense of humor of your subject or something he or she does that strikes others as humorous.

E. What opposites exist in this person? What fascinates us about other human beings are their inconsistencies (if there is love, there is bound to be hate too; if there is a great need for someone or something, there is a resentment of that need as well).

F. What kind of discovery is this person likely to make about himself or herself? Is there some kind of a revelation your subject will have? What is it?

G. How does this person interact with others? Particularly with regard to someone the subject should care about.

H. What is the source of this person’s importance? Reputation, money, power, title? Answer that for your subject.

I. With what place does the person have a close association? It can be a geographic location, an office downtown or a summer cottage, or it can be a particular room in the house–a workshop in the basement, the kitchen, a couch in front of the TV…even a car.

J. What is intriguing about this person? (When I think about my father I’m fascinated by how similar we are and how different we are.)

SOME COMMON METHODS FOR ORGANIZATION

by decade, 10 year increments or other intervals of time), or season–Time magazine, A Year in Province

around a key event as touchstone—(it’s like a slice of a sub sandwich)–On the Road,

embroidered thread or relationship –Fear of Flying, Bird by Bird

“bookends”—start in the present, go back, return to the present just before the end–Titanic.

a quilt-like pattern (such as interweaving past and present parallel situations)–Joy Luck Club

NINE ESSENTIAL STORY ELEMENTS (Tristine Rainer, Your Life as Story)

Beginning Initiating Incident

Problem

Desire Line

Middle Struggle with Adversary

Interim Pivotal Events

Precipitating Event

Conclusion Crisis

Climax

Realization

Every autobiography is the telling of:

1. The story the world told me.

2. The story I told myself.

3. (The story about myself I’ve discovered through writing about it)

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL – Part 3

John — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:49:22 +0000

USING OPPOSITES

Before we do the fleshing out of these scenes, there’s something worth remembering. Inexperienced writers are afraid they’re going to loose their audiences if they don’t hook them with the title and a gimmicky first line. Give your audience credit for more intelligence than this. Remember they’re not coming to this work critically, but with the hope that this is the story that will…go deeper in, take them further out… make them more of what they are. It’s why we go to plays expectantly, despite the fact that most performances are disappointing. Why we read the next novel, though left unsatisfied by so many before. We aren’t disappointed by tricks, but because a writer has squandered the opportunity to do so much more.

As you write, picture a person lovingly reading over your shoulder who wants more. Who says, “I want to feel it just as you did, don’t rush through the details. What was the temperature? How did the light shine in through the window? When she made that remark, did her expression change ever so subtly? What is the reason these characters are here? What are their relationships?” The scene, the characters are a means to express your and my fullest feelings, deeply and importantly. Explore the richness of each possibility.”

Michael Shurtleff (Audition) notes that in everyday living we try to avoid or resolve conflict, but conflict is what creates drama. Under the control of the written page we explore ramifications beyond everyday life. It’s not enough to capture reality on the page. We want heightened reality. The writer needs to find out what the characters in every scene are fighting for, to fully play out the opposites that exist within each character. You have many creative choices in the selection of what you include and what you exclude. Make choices that intensify real life drama. Find romance; it’s everybody’s secret dream. Whenever you have two conflicting personality traits that cancel each other out, do both. Michael Shurtleff says, ” One of the great results of using opposites is behavior that is unpredictable, therefore always more intriguing to an audience. It’s why people are forever astonishing us in life: We don’t know what they’re going to do next, they’re not consistent, we’re always being surprised by their doing something we didn’t expect. Interesting acting always has this risk element of the unpredictable in it. That’s why actors like the early Marlon Brando and De Niro and Pachino interest us so; we never quite know what they’re going to do next. They make us want to know. They make us keep watching them. They surprise us with their unpredictability.”

As a writer you need to supply these opposites, even if you don’t see them in your subject in real life. What’s there is obvious. It’s what is underneath the obvious that makes for interesting writing.

FROM GOOD MOTHERS, BAD DAUGHTERS

by Charlotte Nokola (Rosebud #11)

My mother had an old friend. This in itself surprised me, since my mother seemed to me to have little history aside from taking me to parks and frying up bacon. Her friend’s name was Hope West, which I knew from seeing it on the binding of one of the books in our house. She was an anthropologist, and she and my mother had been in college together at Washington University. In August of 1959, when I was seven, my family took a short trip to Chicago, to visit the Field Museum, to have lunch in the Marshall Field’s tearoom and to visit Hope West. In the museum I was thrilled by displays of Kodiak bears, hunks of alabaster and chrysolite and dinosaur bones. My other main concern on this trip was eating fried chicken as often as possible.

It seemed a little dreary to visit one of my mother’s fiends in the middle of all of this, and the August heat was thick. All of the old college friends I had met so far seemed to fall into one not very interesting category. They had given up their jobs, married and had children. They had “luncheon,” not lunch, with card parties once or twice a year, on card tables in their living rooms, were all very pleasant, and all seemed to be named Mary Helen or Helen Louise. But this old friend had no children, I was told, was not married and worked as a writer. Never had I met a woman like this.

Further, she lived by herself in an apartment. In my limited experience as a girl growing up outside St. Louis in a suburban house with a scrubby field behind it, an apartment in the city seemed to be a shrine to one’s own mind. Especially this woman’s apartment, since she was the author of books. As far as I knew, she and my mother hadn’t seen each other since college, and now it was more than twenty-five years later.

So I knew, when we walked into her apartment at the end of a humid August afternoon, that some kind of moment had arrived for my mother. Our family–my sister, my brother, my mother and father and myself–were much too large for Hope West’s apartment. We were a bulky group that disturbed the streamlined serenity of this “modern” 1950s brick skyscraper. My parents tried to make us look spotless and presentable, dabbing at our collars or the corners of our mouths, catching stray strands of hair. But here was a seven-year-old with legs long like a young horse’s, with scabby knees from falling in blackberry patches. A fourteen-year-old boy in wilted khaki pants, whose voice was changing and who was obsessed with meteorology. And a sixteen-year-old girl with three or four crinoline petticoats and upswept blond hair so that she could look like Kim Novak in Picnic.

My father stood slightly aside in shirt sleeves because of the heat and smoked a Pall Mall. His social bearing was a bit confused because this woman was a scholar and a writer. He didn’t seem to know whether to adopt the polite, deferential mode reserved for elderly maiden aunts or the bossy, commandeering mode used with business friends. And there was my mother, a mother with white gloves, responsible for all of these children who were now either bumping into coffee tables, in danger of breaking the African artifacts or rudely staring out the window at Lake Michigan. But I remember thinking, despite our gangliness that Hope West was certainly the one to be pitied. She was “a woman without children”–a fate always presented in our family as a lifetime tragedy, a sadness to be avoided at any cost.

Yet, Hope West did not look sad. She did not look like any of the other women I had ever met, the mothers with comfortable tummies, generous upper arms, curly hair with a little breeze in it, wearing a print dress that puffed out at the waist. Mothers who actually spent time crisscrossing the prongs of a fork on top of cookies for decoration. Hope West was tall and wore a tubular green suit. Her whole face gathered toward her hair, which was pulled up in a French twist, and seemed to collect what she was seeing and thinking.

There were no cookies waiting for us on the coffee table. One side of the living room held a wall of books, more than I had ever seen in anyone’s house. Most important, most amazing to me, was that all of these books were hers. On another side of the room was a huge picture window that overlooked Lake Michigan and the tops of buildings. Not flowers and a swing set. No one but Hope West enjoyed this view of Lake Michigan’s endless blue tabletop–hard to imagine, when the five of us crowded around the kitchen window at our house to look at rabbits or possums traveling through the backyard. Her own view, and her own books–and some of them were undoubtedly hers, of her own writing. How would it feel, I wondered, to have your own book on your own bookshelf: Her bookshelves, her room, her Lake Michigan. I had never met a woman who didn’t share everything with everyone. Who didn’t have to give up the best pork chop for the father or the children, who had more than a few private things in a bureau drawer that her children always raided. Hope West seemed strange and monumental, standing straight and gray-eyed in her French twist, in front of her books and a long vista outside.

Suddenly, the seemingly inevitable and unfortunate outlines of women’s destinies fell into relief for me. You could be Hope West, alone, with your books, with no children. Or you could be my mother with children, and no books of your own. I felt that each of the old friends looked at the other and saw what she did not have. It seemed that I had to choose sides, then and there. Of course I thought, maybe in loyalty, that I would be like my mother, the one with children. But I had always wanted to write a book, to hold a book of my own in my hand. Did I have to choose?

We took Hope West out to dinner with us. I ate fried chicken again, and wondered what Hope West did for dinner, alone, on all those other nights, when we weren’t there to take her out. My mother never did become Hope West, the writer of books, the mother of no children. But she did bring her impressionable children across four hundred flat miles of Missouri and Illinois to visit her on an impossibly hot summer day in 1959.

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL – Part 2

John — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 02:42:55 +0000

THE NEW AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The New Autobiography is a vibrantly democratic and deeply personal type of narrative writing that, while little understood, is becoming popular in our culture. it is new because it is being written by new voices, not only those who represent the official and dominant view from the top. It is new because it is written as self-discovery rather than self-promotion. It is new because it beholds the individual’s life, not through Puritan mandates of moral edification, nor nineteenth-century credos of materialistic success, nor twentieth-century formulas of reductionist psychology, but through the cohesion of literature and myth. It is a way of saying, “I matter; this life I have lived has meaning! And because I tell it from my perspective, because I frame it, it has the meaning I give it.”

Like the New Journalism developed by Tom Wolfe and other magazine writers of the late 1960s, New Autobiography appropriates storytelling devices from the realistic novel. It is often written in dramatic scenes with dialogue and interior monologues. It uses novelistic devices to reach inner truths, not just the truth of facts.

To shape an autobiographic story, in the process you recall your yearnings and dreams and their place in your destiny. You are led away from perceiving your history as a series of accidents or calamities that wrongly formed you. “We are less damaged by the traumas of childhood, James Hillman (The Soul’s Code) writes, “than by the traumatic way we remember childhood.” and “We dull our lives by the way we conceive them. We have stopped imagining them with any sort of romance, any fictional flair.” Through the autobiographic process you restore the “romance” and the “fictional flair” of story to your own life, and you replace old stories of powerlessness with stories of consciousness and revelation in which you are the protagonist. By applying story structure to your life you necessarily replace unconscious, unexamined scripts with consciously chosen stories… Stories lead to a climax that is a point of transformation.

When I view myself as the heroine of my own story, I no longer complain about the conflicts in my life and in myself. I am no longer a victim of circumstances… I am a protagonist in a world of unending dilemmas that contain hidden meaning that is up to me to discover. I am the artist of my life who takes the raw materials given, no matter how bizarre, painful or disappointing and gives them shape and meaning. I am within each scene and each chapter of my life, defining my character through the choices I make. I am on my own side, rooting for myself, aching for myself, celebrating my sensual experiences, marveling in the exquisite subtlety of feeling in my life that novelists have made me aware of in their books. I am as engaged with the ongoing story in my life as is a reader who eagerly turns the page.

In its simplest form a story is: what you wanted, how you struggled and what you realized out of that struggle. A story is a series of interrelated events that you made happen and that happened to you, and the consequence. The consequence is a change in you. In an autobiographic story, change may occur in other characters, but it must also occur in you, because you are the protagonist. The change may come form an event (you married, you got old), but it is also a moral change. You had a realization, a shift in values or perception. In other words, within the story you made a “character arc,” you had a change in character… You trace this character arc in an autobiographic story by including your feelings, reactions to the events you experienced and your realizations. You give the events of your life significance because of what they meant to you and how you changed from your engagement with them. An autobiographic story is not just an account of events; it is the charting of your emotional, moral and psychological course, which gives meaning to those events.

–Tristine Rainer, Your Life as Story

EXERCISE 2:

Sit in a comfortable chair with your pen and paper at hand, at a time and in a spot where you won’t be interrupted. if it’s your office, turn off the phone. Begin by relaxing your body and mind. Systematically tighten and relax all your muscles, then take a deep breath, hold it–then release it completely, releasing all tension. Close your eyes and take another deep breath. Release the tension. And again. Allow your breathing to become deep and regular. When you feel relaxed, allow that special place to come to mind, where as a child you were most yourself. Is it a wide open expanse or is it confined in some way? Sense the size and strength of your body at the age you were when you enjoyed this place. Are you moving, sitting, standing? Are you alone or with another?

Now begin to accumulate more information by asking yourself questions. Each time you think “I can’t remember,” relax and invent an answer. Don’t worry if you are fantasizing rather than really remembering, as long as the answer feels plausible.

Ask yourself and imagine: What do I see? What do I feel on my skin? What do I hear? What do I smell? What do I taste? What is the light like here? What do I want? What do I think/ What feelings do I have? In a minute you will write in the present tense what comes to you. Allow your imagination to take over where memory stops as you write. So far the scene you are describing is probably like a slide, full of detail but without movement. Now add movement. Turn it into a film. See and feel yourself move a part of your body. If you can, actually move as you would have then. Ask yourself: And then what happens? What do you do? What do you think or say? What changes? Write whatever comes without censoring it.

(Option): On a large piece of paper draw the floor plan of the house or apartment you lived in when you were 7 years old, including the hallways, bathrooms, bedrooms, back and front yards. After you have completed it with as much detail as you can, put it aside and find a quiet place to write a reverie about it. Imagine yourself approaching this house the way you had to get there, from a sidewalk, driveway, up three steps to the door–however you entered. Once inside, walk through and enter a room or place of your choice.

Now imagine the details, furnish the room–where is the bed or table, is there a fireplace or cupboards, are there rugs or carpets on the floor? Is it day or night? Are there lamps or overhead lights?

Place yourself inside this room and allow your writing to go where it will, exploring your feelings and thoughts at the age you were when you lived there, concentrating on your interaction with other people in the house.

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL – Part 1

John — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:18:18 +0000

THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL John Lehman

WHY WE WRITE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

You want to see how your life makes a story by setting it down.

You want the catharsis and self-forgiveness of an honest and complete confession.

You are in mid-life and want to gain from the life behind you the wisdom to mold the life still before you.

You are nearing the end of your life and wish to understand and share what it has meant.

You are a journalist, short story writer, screenwriter or novelist who wants to find your personal voice.

You want to find some eternal form of truth in your own contemporary life.

You are motivated by family love to leave your descendants knowledge of who you were and the life you lived.

You are motivated by desire to relieve the loneliness, fear or ignorance of others who may find themselves in a situation you’ve been through.

You have a whopper of a story to tell and you want to make a bundle by selling it.

You wish to write about your family as a way of ending destructive cycles and creating cohesion based on truth.

You are a notable person who has been invited by a publisher to write your life story and don’t wish to rely on a ghostwriter.

You are a not-at-all famous person to whom life has given experiences too valuable to fade into oblivion.

You want to know what is true, true for you.

You never enjoyed writing in school, but you want to experience the pleasure of writing like the contemporary authors you enjoy reading.

You want to relive and relish the best years of your life.

You know that the only thing that death cannot destroy is memory, and you wish to preserve from forgetfulness those you have loved.

You can endure your life only by transforming it into a work of art.

Your way to cope with your troubles is to make yourself and others laugh at them.

You wish to celebrate the mystery and complexity of your life.

Your nature is to tell your story.

EACH OF US IS A STORY

If we want to know about a person, we ask, `What is her story?’ `What is his story?’ For each of us is a story. Each of us is a biography, a singular narrative that is constructed and reconstructed continually through our senses, our actions and our words.

Biologically, psychologically we’re not much different from one another. To be individuals each of us must posses our own story—recollect (re-collect) our lives and act out their drama.

–Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

THE PROCESS

PRE-WRITING. Making choices in form and content.

WRITING. Specific techniques for making what you write more interesting to readers—dialogue, introducing characters, descriptive detail—using scenes

EDITING. Clarifying, transitions, assuming ownership The first draft is always for you, future drafts direct the material at a specific audience

EXERCISE

Part A: Stepping-stones are a list of the marker events that surface when you look over your life. You simply put down a phrase or sentence for each significant pivotal event in your life as it comes to you. Begin with “I was born” to get started, and then think of the next important turning point in your life, and the next, and the next, up to the present. Your list can be any length, but try to keep it between fifteen and twenty items. After you have finished writing your life stepping-stones, reread your list to get a sense of the continuity and movement of your life.

Part B: This second exercise is as easy as the first one. It is simply another list, this time of your desires as you moved through life. Each item on this list will begin with “I wanted…”

Think back to your infancy. What did you want? Your mother’s love and attention? To explore a world without any limitations? Then list the next major desire that motivated you on further.

Part C: The third part of this exercise is (on a new sheet of paper) to combine both lists by sensing which desires preceded which pivotal events. Some desires may be followed by only one stepping stone event–for example, “I wanted to get married” by “I got married.” Other desires may be followed by numerous events–for example, “I wanted to become an actor” might be followed by “I moved to New York,” “I enrolled in the Actor’s studio,” “I got fired from a play.” Now read your blended desires list and your list of stepping-stones as one merged list that tells a story. What do you notice about the relationship between your desires and your actions? As you sense a shape or direction in this combined list, play with it. Are there missing desires or events that will create greater continuity? Add them. Are there clusters that seem to go together, making distinct seasons in your life, periods that were devoted to the same desire? Delineate them.

THE LAST DAY OF THE SIXTIES – Final Part

John — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:28:13 +0000

THE JOHN DILLINGER CAPITAL OF AMERICA

Richard Brautigan was like the John Dillinger of poetry, robbing from the rich, giving to the poor:

Mooresville, Indiana, is the town that John Dillinger came from, and the town has a John Dillinger Museum. You can go in and look around.

Some towns are known as the peach capital of America or the cherry capital or the oyster capital, and there’s always a festival and the photograph of a pretty girl in a bathing suit.

Mooresville, Indiana, is the John Dillinger capital of America.

Recently a man moved there with his wife, and he discovered hundreds of rats in his basement. They were huge, slow moving child-eyed rats.

When his wife had to visit some of her relatives for a few days, the man went out and bought a .38 revolver and a lot of ammunition. Then he went down to the basement where the rats were, and he started shooting them. It didn’t bother the rats at all. They acted as if it were a movie and started eating their dead companions for popcorn.

The man walked over to a rat that was busy eating a friend and placed the pistol against the rat’s head. The rat didn’t move and continued eating away. When the hammer clicked back, the rat paused between bites and looked out of the corner of its eye. First at the pistol and then at the man. It was a kind of friendly look as if to say, “When my mother was young she sang like Deanna Durbin.”

The man pulled the trigger.

He had no sense of humor.

There’s always a single feature, a double feature and an eternal feature playing at the Great Theater in Mooresville, Indiana: the John Dillinger capital of America.

A friend of the poet, Keith Abbot, says, “Over the nineteen years I knew Brautigan, I never heard him refer to any people of the Northwest by name—not his sister, mother, father or stepfathers, not his girlfriends or teachers… The effect was ghostly, as if Brautigan’s past had faded into a kind of surrealist museum whose holdings were indicated only by chalk outlines. He once recalled his abandonment in a Montana hotel by his mother when he was nine or ten and he mentioned to me that he had met his biological father twice, once in a barbershop and once in a hotel room. Each time his father gave him some money to go see a movie.”

Perhaps you felt bad when she said that thing to you. She could have told it to someone else: Somebody who was more familiar with her problems.

That is my name.

Or it was a game that you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were old and sitting at a chair near the window.

That is my name.

THE LAST DAY OF THE SIXTIES – Part 3

John — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:25:49 +0000

THE SIXTIES AGAIN

As I saythe kids at the high school where I found myself teaching didn’t go on to college. Oh maybe one or two went to some kind of car-mechanic training or beautician school. So threat of poor grades or homework assignments or anything didn’t really carry weight. These students were there because their friends were and if they were going to learn anything it had better have some relevance to their life that day. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Jefferson, F. Scott Fitzgerald…forget it. That’s when I zeroxed this poem by Richard Brautigan:

If I were to live my life

in catfish forms

in scaffolds of skin and whiskers

at the bottom of a pond

and you were to come by

one evening

when the moon was shining

down into my dark home

and stand there at the edge

of my affection

and think, “It’s beautiful

here by this pond. I wish

somebody loved me,”

I’d love you and be your catfish

friend and drive such lonely

thoughts from your mind

and suddenly you would be

at peace,

and ask yourself, “I wonder

if there are any catfish

in this pond? It seems like

a perfect place for them.”

And then…

I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don’t look like any girl I’ve ever seen before.

I couldn’t say: Well, she looks just like Jane Fonda except that she’s got red hair and her mouth is different and of course she’s not a movie star.”

I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma, Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or ’42: somewhere in there. I think I was seven or eight or six. It was a movie about rural electrification and a perfect 1930s New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids.

The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn’t have any appliances, like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn’t listen to the radio.

Then they built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.

There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.

Then the movie showed Electricity like a young Greek god coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life.

Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings.

The farmer’s family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.

It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner” or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt or hearing him on the radio.

“…The President of the United States…”

I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio.

That’s how you look to me.

And finally I gave my high school kids this. They didn’t know it, but it was how they would be graded…

Oh, Marcia

I want your long blonde beauty

to be taught in high school,

so kids will learn that God

lives like music in the skin

and sounds like a sunshine harpsichord.

I want high school report cards

to look like this:

Playing with Gentle Glass Things

Computer Magic

Writing Letters to Those You love

Finding out about Fish

Marcia’s Long Blonde Beauty

A+

What Brautigan brought to those kids was a sense of, not how great and important he was, but how great and important each of them was. One convinced the principal to let him make the morning announcements, a bunch of others started an underground newspaper. “Creative Writing Class” became “Movie Making” and unemployed kids who had graduated the year before joined the cast. And I, who had missed The Sixties was getting a chance to see them first hand all over again.

THE LAST DAY OF THE SIXTIES – Part 2

John — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:11:25 +0000

Trout Fishing in America

“I WAKE UP JUST BEFORE THEY COME.”

(John reading from a book)

Richard Brautigan was born January 30^th, 1935, in the Pacific Northwest. He was the author of eleven novels, ten volumes of poetry and two collections of short stories. He lived for many years in San Francisco and become a literary idol of the 1960s whose iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imagination of young people everywhere. Maybe you were around then? Maybe you even remember reading this:

We’re staying with Pard and his girlfriend in this strange cabin above Mill Valley. They have rented a cabin for three months, June 15^th to September 15^th, for a hundred dollars. We are a funny bunch, all living here together.

Pard was born of Okie parents in British Nigeria and came to America when he was two years old and was raised as a ranch kid in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

He was a machine-gunner in the Second World War, against the Germans. He fought in France and Germany. Sergeant Pard. Then he came back from the war and went to some hick college in Idaho.

After he graduated from college, he went to Paris and became an Existentialist. He had a photograph taken of Existentialism and himself sitting at a sidewalk café. Pard was wearing a beard and he looked as if he had a huge soul, with barely enough room in his body to contain it.

Pard’s girlfriend is Jewish. Twenty-four years old, getting over a bad case of hepatitis, she kids Part about a nude photograph of her that has the possibility of appearing in Playboy Magazine. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she says. “If they use that photograph, it only means that 12,000,000 men will look at my boobs.” This is all very funny to her.

What we eat is funny and what we drink is even more hilarious: turkeys, Gallo port, hot dogs, watermelons, Popeyes, salmon croquettes, frappes, Christian Brothers port, orange rye bread, cantaloupes, Popeyes, salads, cheese—booze, grup and Popeyes.

We read books like The Thief’s Journal, Set This House on Fire and The Naked Lunch.

Pard and his girlfriend sleep in the cabin and we sleep outside, under the apple tree, waking at dawn to stare out across San Francisco Bay and then we go back to sleep again and wake once more, this time for a very strange thing to happen, and then we go back to sleep after it has happened, and wake at sunrise to stare out across the bay.

Afterwards we go back to sleep again and the sun rises steadily hour after hour, staying in the branches of a eucalyptus tree just a ways down the hill, keeping us cool and asleep and in the shade. At last the sun pours over the top of the tree and then we have to get up, the hot sun upon us.

We go into the house and begin that two-hour yak-yak activity we call breakfast. We sit around and bring ourselves slowly back to consciousness, treating ourselves like fine pieces of china, and after we finish the last cup of the last cup of the last cup of coffee, it’s time to think about lunch or go to the Goodwill in Fairfax.

One morning last week, part way through the dawn, I awoke under the apple tree, to hear a dog barking and the rapid sound of hoofs coming toward me. The millennium? An invasion of Russians all wearing deer feet?

I opened my eyes and saw a deer running straight at me. It was a buck with large horns. There was a police dog chasing after it.

Arfwowfuck! Noisepoundpoundpoundpoundpoundpound! POUND! POUND!

The deer didn’t swerve away. He just kept running straight at me, long after he had seen me, a second or two had passed.

Arfwowfuck! Noisepoundpoundpoundpoundpoundpound! POUND! POUND!

I could have reached out and touched him when he went by.

He ran around the house, circling the john, with the dog hot after him. They vanished over the hillside, leaving streamers of toilet paper behind them, flowing out and entangled through the bushes and vines.

Then along came the doe. She started up the same way, but not moving as fast. Maybe she had strawberries in her head.

“Whoa!” I shouted. “Enough is enough! I’m not selling newspapers!”

The doe stopped in her tracks, twenty-five feet away and turned and went down around the eucalyptus tree.

Well, that’s how it’s gone now for days and days. I wake up just before they come. I wake up for them in the same manner as I do for the dawn and the sunrise. Suddenly knowing they’re on their way.

HOW I DISCOVERED RICHARD BRAUTINGAN

I couldn’t hang out in the Army forever. For one thing, my wife back then couldn’t stand it. For another, I was curious about what was going on at home. We had some whitewashed accounts, but it was time to experience this for myself. The only practical way I could do that without money was to attend grad school on the GI Bill. What would I take? Anything I wanted, because I was going into high school education.

The school that hired me, Whitehall Michigan, was interesting. They had fired all their hippy teachers from the year before, and I couldn’t have been more surprised when, after my interview, they hired this guy with a foot long beard and shoulder length hair (My wife, infant son and I had been camping around Europe for a year after I was released from the service.) But here was the catch.

The kids at that school didn’t go on to college. Oh maybe one or two went to some kind of car-mechanic training or beautician school. So threat of poor grades or homework assignments or anything didn’t really carry weight. These students were there because their friends were and if they were going to learn anything it had better have some relevance to their life that day. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Jefferson, F. Scott Fitzgerald…forget it.

That’s when I xeroxed this poem by Richard Brautigan: