Write Your Vivid Journey

The road is long and usually poorly lit. Writing adds wattage.

Start your writing by giving the whole delightfully weird thing a working title…or several titles.

Will this path take me to a place I already know or a different more appealing one?

Imagine you have just written your up-to-the-minute life story (it lies on your lap, all 48lbs of it)! It covers not only your beginning but the whole crazy lot of people and experieces that you have inherited. That’s right, you started breathing at zero, but soon you were inhaling the air from generations past.  As we gather years under our belts, we realize more and more how this life of ours has emerged within a deep context of inherited delights and eccentricities, many charming and wondrous, but others more fodder for novelists.

So if you are embarking on writing your life story, you’ll need to include, even if it’s on the periphery, some acknowledgement of what went on before.  Now these may not be the sexy bits of your story that you are really interested in writing about (and you may know little about your generational history) but leaving imaginative space for that knowledge to seep in is important.

Make your titles compelling so that you will want to write the story suggested by them. A good title will also put you in an investigative mindset that is liberated from fixed interpretations of events.  Write, perhaps, seeking alternative interpretations of long held conclusions.

SOME TIPS ON CREATING TITLES:

Use sensory titles, ones that evoke  a compelling mood or image: In The Deceptive Quiet; What I Didn’t Know;  I Thought I Could Always Rely on Art to Pull Me Through; Killer Tomatoes; Only God Knew the Score and She Wasn’t Talking; Me and History Keep Colliding; Jazz When I Needed Bach; It Always Stinks at Low Tide

Consider visual images that serve as metaphors: Smoke Rising in the Distance; Living Under Glass; High Heels and Flat Tires; Hung Up in the Laundry While the Action Was in the Kitchen; Waiting For the Ships to Come In.

Borrow from movies, plays, books and websites; give them a twist: The Postman Kept On Ringing; Me and My Inner Robocop; Years of Living Dangerously; War, Peace and Rye; Apocalypse Postponed; How Green Was My Knowledge; Life on the Cutting Room Floor.

By contrast, there are factual titles that announce the story but may not stir your imagination: Me And More.  My Road. My Story To Date. What I Have Seen. Maxie’s Life. What a boy from Chicago Did; My Years at GM;etc. Whatever you choose, you’re not stuck with–work with one title until it’s outlived its usefulness.  Move from Little Red House in Suburbia to Armageddon to Jersey Shore as you need!

My book titles include: “What He Saw But Didn’t Notice,” “Nomad In Settler’s Clothing” and “What Happened To Broadway?”

Your ancestral story may not be vivid to you, but its themes are probably woven into your roots.

As you come up with titles, you’ll see that each one suggests a slightly different slant on your story.  My Tree Grew in Brooklyn But the Apples Had Worms! and Atlantic Ave Was So Long You Could Always Find the Sun! These titles may tell the same story but do it from slightly different perspectives that draw out stories that reinforce the dominant tone of the title.

You can get so used to telling your stories in the same familiar ways that you may forget or no longer see that different versions of the same stories may also be “true” and that subsequent data may have altered the original story.  I could no longer tell the story of my father leaving me at 5 and my not seeing him until I was 16 in the same way I did once I discovered that for several years after my mother divorced him, he suffered great depression.  And while that’s a dramatic example, our most savored stories (often ones filled with great emotion) may need to be revised over time as subsequent data (and our own maturing) add more nuance to those once brightly lit tales. Writing heightens our awareness of how our life has changed thereby updating us on who we are. Not a bad thing!

What's the title of the life you are yet to lead?

What can the mirror see?

For work direction, for life decisions, for noodling your way out of the dark, writing your life story is an essential process.  Ah, but why spend months writing your story when you can do it in 3 minutes! Why not do it now…in 3 minutes!

True, there are differences–200 pages of fly-by-the-pants writing about your torrid mixed-media life beats covering it in only 3 minutes–but until you do that, and as an aid to doing it, try this: write your life in 3 minutes!

Insane, I know but here’s how to do it and why:

Think of twitter and tweets and the restriction of messages to only 140 characters (which we’ll translate into 35 words). Poets and other word people love cramped boxes and mind-bending formulae to work inside of (think haiku, sestina and stories containing only the names of paint colors).  Here you have 35 words to capture the whole to date: huge chapters are summarized in 3 or 4 words or a phrase, your holy cat is given 1 word, your first 6 marriages condensed into 5 or 1 visual image, Herbert gets 2, your work in Altoona a piddling 4, your spiritual quests…well, maybe another 4. The numbers add up quickly.  Living with Napolean shortened to 3.

But you see, you do it all fast–your brain is spinning, your heart pumping and soon your mind drops out of the picture and you’re left with a greater chance to access the unrehearsed, the spontaneous, the newest twists on old info, the real juice that’s been running through your life.

What will appear if I set the stage?

Here goes: my dad instead of Billy, inheriting shadows, nickels for bowling, dying at 56, attracted to glitter, born old getting younger, Iran forever, arches, architecture, loving teaching, writing, learning to say good-bye,  marry, children, wonder, night painting, music, blue eyes.

Add a title that captures some of these words and phrases: Started Old Growing Younger / Look What Appeared Around the Corner!

You never know what may drop from the sky?

It will take several shots at this 3 minute writing to start seeing themes, patterns and surprises and to be loosened to the point that inexplicable phrases emerge that have power: inheriting shadows was new to me while nickels for bowling elevates what I thought was a minor event into something more major, something for me to think about. I may have even gone over 35 words (39 in fact!) but the point is to use the form to tease out essences and if you find yourself on a roll, keep rolling.

Try this and let me know what happens.

Do it 2 x a week for a month and see what emerges.

Specific use of this tool: Why the 3 minute versions of your life story can help is because each of them is composed of key words and images that can be mined for specific purposes. These key words become research tools to help you sort through your life for relevant data.  Imagine if you were a retail manager frustrated by work and references to helping, problem-solving, directing, humor and crisis kept emerging. For a client of mine, they were the beginnings of a shift into international crisis management.

Here are this week’s words and exercise!

Week #1: 5 Words

Subway / Mystery / Hot / Bounce / Brazil

Use these words to help start your writing. Use one a day or all of them at once. Recycle them and vary their order. Make up your own lists to help anchor your writing. Think of them as islands that you have to get to by using whatever rickety improv word-bridges you find along the way.  Try using them in the following exercise:

Week #1: Exercise /Free Writing : Free write for 6 minutes a day 3 x a week

Free writing is one of those basic tools for writing anything.  It gets the juices flowing, surprises us about what’s happening beneath the waves, and brings energy to whatever writing project you have before you. Here is one of the many versions of Free Writing,others will be explored in later posts:

(Can you spot the 5 words for the week embedded in the following writing!! )

orange at work

Write for 6 minutes 3 days a week to shake out the doubts blues confusion and to find energy for writing and remembering but don’t worry about structure or run-on sentences or creating nonsense because this writing is designed to awaken ideas and shine light through the wandering unimpeded nature of its rhythm being only guided by the 5 words and others you create at the beginning of your 6 minutes that allow you to enter the unter-terrain of your memory and ride the subway to the known and mystery stops along the way not worrying whether they’re hot listless or cold only that you were willing to keep going and bouncing even if you’ve landed in Brazil while believing this process is useful in some fractured indirect way.

Once done with your 6 minutes: look over your writing and underline any phrases that call to you.  You’re looking for what may be seeds for immediate and future writing, however disguised these writing seeds may be.

Seeds for me are: hot listless / mystery stops / unter-terrain of memory