Archives for August 2015

Writing Family History

August 13, 2015 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

Trying to write on a topic with a reasonably reliable periodicity turns you into a sort of vulture—flying slightly above the writings of others so you might pick free some carrion to feed your own column. This cannibalism has a long-standing tradition. Of course, to take the effort of others and claim it’s your own constitutes plagiarism, and I told my middle-school students that the easiest way to avoid such an allegation is by giving credit, putting content of others into context with quotes, and trying to put the results of their collective research into your own words. The joke is that taking from one is plagiarism; taking from many is research.

There is a time when the information acquired from all your readings and research morphs into a collective knowledge. The distinction is the difference between knowledge researched for a particular purpose (essay or report) and that collected and accumulated over time to become part of your general library of knowledge.

Of course, and ideally, after a reasonable amount of research, you should discover your brain starts to come up with some of its own original interpretations of the acquired knowledge and you find yourself adding to the discussion of a topic rather than borrowing from it. One place this can happen is family histories—where your ancestors speak through you. You give them voice. You tell rather than report their stories.

For the most part, therefore, rules of plagiarism do not strictly apply, and unless family discussions and debates and arguments were recorded, it is you, the biographer, who must re-create the “likely” story and fill in the gaps in your family’s history. Where along the continuum of accurate facts at one end and complete conjecture at the other any single piece of family history resides is something you must determine along with how best to present it. Sometimes the best way to fill in the gaps is with the most likely and logical conjecture.

William Novak—he co-wrote memoirs of such famous people as Lee Iacocca, Magic Johnson, Oliver L. North, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., Nancy Reagan and Tim Russert—referred to autobiographies or family biographies as the books “very few will read.” That is why the form might be a very good place to practice your writing skills. Let’s label it “family writing”.

Unless you have committed some faux pas that has gotten you ostracized, excommunicated, or otherwise disowned, direct family sources is the place to start the research from which you could draft, i.e., piece together, a family history, which is really nothing more than a collection of events populated by relatives that helps explain how your family got from point A to point G, or wherever. You might not be able to put together a chronological history because Aunt Bessie’s side of the family ended when she ran off with the milkman in St. Louis, but with a little effort, there is a tale to tell, you just have to locate the tidbits that fit together and bridge the gaps.

The beauty is that biography has changed in recent years, from the dry and boring to the delightfully entertaining because the focus has gotten away from the recitation of facts and statistics to using them to tell story. You get to blend the talents of an historian, journalist, and novelist to recreate an era.

Where to start your story? How about with some intriguing family member or event? You don’t have to start at the beginning. Why not in the middle and use flashbacks to fill in the historic gaps as you move your family forward through time? In my case, I discovered that my grandmother on my mother’s side traveled by covered wagon as a young girl to Ogallala in the Sand Hill Country of Northwest Nebraska. Her father, John Eckstein, had served in the Civil War (Union Army Captain), and apparently obtained training in engineering and/or architecture (likely in Germany where that part of the family originated).

Family history has it that he designed the courthouse in my hometown, which I would give as one reason I went to law school—courthouses are in the family blood. But the fun part of the story that my grandmother let me in on, as if it were a secret of utmost titillating importance, is that he also got a gig to design the courthouse in Ogallala. My grandmother explained that the two structures bore a striking similarity. Her smile indicated that she was proud that my great grandfather apparently had peddled the same set of blueprints twice. That might explain why so many old courthouses looked so similar.

What I have not done is invest any effort to research the history in order to determine if there is more than a grain of truth behind the story and how I might write that part of my family history were I to become inclined to do so.

My family didn’t produce many journal or diary keepers—as far I know, only me—so my research would depend on outside sources: public records, local media articles . . . and a trip to Northwest Nebraska, in an effort to separate fact and fiction and family legend. (Who knows, there might be a group of left-over, fanatically dedicated descendants of a lynch mob lying in wait for me to seek revenge for some dastardly deed my ancestors committed! A story of true dedication.) Your family history might be the story of your effort to find your family history.

Suddenly there is the issue about accuracy. Inevitably, one will need to fill in the gaps between the absolute certainty of family facts and segments for which no history exists—a lost decade here or there. There is that old saw: “When there’s a choice between history and legend, write the legend.” A good biographer will let his or her readers know when they are doing which, but a family history will provide many challenges to journalistic objectivity.

If you want to stay true to the concept of biography or autobiography, a serious research effort might result in widening your audience and writing something beyond a chapter intended just for the family. The more entangled a family history becomes with broader historical events, the audience shifts from family into a considerably broader and deeper readership.

In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, companies existed that sent agents into small towns to write the history of the city and county and populace. The idea, of course, was to report histories that tended to mention everybody and every family in order to sell as many books as possible. My grandmother had such a volume and chuckled at the level of embellishment she discovered in its pages.

To find truth, you typically have to drill a little deeper into a mountain of facts, which tend to accumulate haphazardly. The ultimate goal is not to embarrass your family but to enlighten it. As Novak says, “not every memoir has to be a confessional, and no rule, heavenly or human, requires us to disclose every detail of our lives. Call me old-fashioned,” he continues, “but I’d rather explore the qualities and actions that will inspire future generations. Chances are, they will inspire me.”

I’m not sure I agree with that. I find family dirt can be more intriguing than finding some other family’s dirt. It has more to do with how you handle it and write about it. The most sordid of relationships contain some fundamentally decent morals that hold the sordid bricks together. In reality, however, what you find when you start to pry into your family history is that family members tend to want to present the family in the best possible light. You might be willing to diss the shirt-tale relation on your mother’s side, but reluctant to do the same to dad’s far off cousins. The Mormon side of my family has taken my dad’s side of the family back to early New York landings of Europeans. Did the French heritage of Dad’s family start out as pirates in the early days of Long Island? That rumor and conjecture can easily be adopted and become historical fact. I’d love to welcome a few early buccaneers into the family, but I want them to have really existed.

That is one of the problems with family histories—they are frequently motivated to put controversy and intrigue in the front row seat of history—or the back—when in reality our family members were mere bystanders . . . if that. Of course, if the second cousin on your mother’s side died in prison from syphilis, you might get to enjoy the challenge of digging up the truth and finding the humanity of his (or her) experiences and putting them in another and more favorable light. You’re a writer!

Years ago I knew an executive in a Midwestern power company who told how his father met his end on a California gallows—for killing the husband of the woman in whom he had a “romantic interest.” Rather than a small part of a cocktail conversation, the story could likely have been developed into several chapters of a family indiscretion, especially if the family history included letters of relatives discussing the case and reports in the local press about the hanging. Murder yes, but for love. How romantic.

Some families, or a few family members, might be resistive to airing the family’s “dirty laundry” on the public clothesline. But family memoirs are meant to be for family; others, with more historical impact, beg for a broader audience. Novak also points out “private books don’t demand complete structure consistency.” Make the form fit the content, he suggests. “There are times, for example, when the best way to handle a complicated or controversial subject is to present an edited conversation that reflects several viewpoints. I don’t take these liberties too often,” says Novak, “but it’s nice to have options.”

Let’s face it, it’s likely that most family facts will produce more boredom than titillation, but you can add a bit of sparkle by putting aspects of your family history into a broader—local, state, national, international—historical perspective. Maybe your grandparents met working on a World War II scrap iron drive in their hometown. They might even have received recognition for their efforts to collect scrap in an old Radio Flyer wagon, and so what started as a blurb in the local paper mushroomed into romance. Adding information about scrap-iron drives and the role they played would provide the stage upon which your relatives acted. (The reality is such drives didn’t contribute much to the steel supply but were successful in generating support for the war effort). And, so what if the closest Grandpa Miller ever got to action during the war was peeling potatoes. The story might get interesting were you to explore the who, what, when, where, and how of those peeled potatoes and their importance in energizing the troops. Sometimes, the people a past family relative met and knew add spice to a family history. A long-deceased surgeon father-in-law cherished his picture standing at the bedside of a wounded GI next to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I had a distant and considerably older relative—Cookie Clark—who served in World War I. My father told me before he went to war Cookie “wasn’t worth the powder to blow his brains out,” but came home a really decent person. Cookie and I worked together one summer for the County Conservation Commission. One of our jobs was to kill weeds in a “back forty” path along an old railhead that was to become part of a planned future lakebed. He drove the little cub tractor and I straddled the cowling taking out the enemy with my spray gun as we crept along.

I lacked the courage to ask him much about his war experiences and he offered few, but I really benefited from getting to know and work with a truly wonderful human being. In a family history, he might get little more than a nod, but it would be an important nod.

Years ago, I had the glorious opportunity to attend the last concert of the reconstituted Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band in San Jose. The band had toured the country playing music from Miller’s arrangements originally played to entertain Allied troops during World War II. The evening became even more memorable when the emcee opened discussion to the audience to share their experiences. One elderly audience member stood up and shared how he would hop on a plane and transport Miller’s radio program recordings from London across the Channel for broader distribution though the Armed Forces radio network to homesick GIs in Europe.

I hope some family member wrote that man’s story. And that is the lesson here. We all sit on top of a mountain of family stories. We just need to dig them out and up and breathe life into them. And what a great way to explore writing biography, or even autobiography—to write a family history from your point of view that weaves the events past into the web that makes the present. The tack you take depends on which perspective works best, and the way you discover that is by doing your research and testing various approaches.

By now you probably have some ideas on what would make a good story or good approach to writing your own family biography or some unique and fascinating aspect of it. All you need is the spirit and spade to dig a little deeper and contemplate a little bit more, then dig a little deeper to chase those previously loose ends as far as they take you. If you have to fill in the gaps, the gaps might be a little narrower as the result of your research efforts. And remember, history doesn’t have to be as dramatic as a world war to be interesting. Big heroes exist in small places doing seemingly small things. You writing is the magnifying glass.

If you find writing about your own family unappealing, there might be an alternative that will still expose you to the biographical form. As I write this piece, I’m sipping my tea from a mug with the bust of the Frankenstein monster printed on it. I wonder how he might approach writing his personal biography, as multifaceted as it must have been. What suggestions would you offer him? You might even help him write the first chapter.

I’m not going to suggest any particular structure you might take to write your own family history. The structure likely will be driven by the nature of your family history and your unique sources and resources. In ?;AFFTON: Time Upon a Once, to which you can link from my homepage, I narrowed in on a time and place—my childhood years in St. Louis before my parents moved back to the Iowa hometown. In chapters I focused on various aspects of my childhood and experiences with no particular effort to write a chronological biography. Instead I focused on my most vivid childhood memories and the result was an emotional revisit to a special past.

Perhaps an explanation is in order. I chose the Glenn Miller story because he was my hero back in the day when I played trombone in school. Only many years later, a very enterprising writer for “The Wall Street Journal” researched the facts of how this world-renowned bandleader met his end. Flying back from the Continent in a small craft, his pilot flew low and close to the choppy water of the English Channel. Allied bombers coming back from a mission on the Continent followed the usual procedure and dumped their remaining ordinance in the Channel before landing on the English coast. Mr. Miller became an unwitting victim of those he worked so hard to entertain.

To find and make your family history more interesting, you need to fly a little closer to the choppy water.

Oh no! Another Five Rules of Writing

August 2, 2015 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

Like commandments issued from a disembodied voice high atop a mountain, rules of writing quickly lapse into meaningless mantras, spoken with a certain level of bored automaticity in hopes the speaker will receive the benefit of some blessing merely from repeating them. Good writing is the product of hard thinking and good work and good thinking and hard work. But for some reason, people who write about how to write seem compelled to turn rules of writing into lists of magic tricks that will make your writing shine by effortless application. I suspect you could trace the roots of this mandatory “positiveness” to the salesmanship. A writer magazine with headlines founded in reality probably would have less a tendency to fly off the newsstand than those sure-fire techniques of characterization. But somewhere between “Pollyanna” and “life’s a bitch, then you die” there’s a palatable reality that the terms “hard work” and “writing” do belong in the same sentence. If you fear you will lose readership if you tell the truth, what do you think happens when the audience discovers the truth?

Here’s the truth. To get from Point A to Point B in writing requires effort. Point A is where your story is now and Point B is where you want it to be. If you want to ace the history midterm you read the chapters. If you want to play the violin, you practice. Writing is like playing the violin. The quality of the sound is determined by the talent involve in moving the bow across the catgut.

In the interest of the ongoing search for truth, justice, and the American way, I have taken a list of five writing rules I recently came across and which I found sounded good but didn’t really speak the language of reality. I’ve peeled away the way the facades to get to the underlying truths hiding behind each rule.

RULE ONE: Do your research and decide your structure before you start writing.

Good basic advice, but the author gives the following reasons for the rule, to: (1) avoid the risk of changing your mind about content and structure; (2) avoid the discovery you don’t have enough content; and (3) avoid something popping up that is more complicated than expected and “you have to set your writing aside to head back to the library, which will interrupt your flow.

Honest, he wrote that. My initial response was to simplify the offered reasons into something simpler: To be creative, the first thing you must do is to check your creativity at the door.

Writing is a creative process and the creative process, not unlike turning a herd of cattle into hamburger and steaks, can get messy. The offered rule would confine your creative output by locking down your creative process before pen meets paper just to avoid the chance that another idea—potentially even a better one perhaps—might creep in and mess up your schedule. This logic would be funny were it not so ludicrous.

Journalists may hit the newsroom after a public meeting and have the editor limit the story to 15 inches of copy. The editor is putting together the layout of the morning edition and that’s the room that’s been allotted for the story. Welcome to the newspaper business and the formulaic inverted pyramid.

Creative writing is a different animal. It’s wild and unruly and has to be tamed or at least controlled. Like breaking a wild bronco, the process initially requires a lot of rope and a big corral. It’s understandable that a writer’s output may ultimately need to be confined into a small space, but the creative forces behind it should rarely be.

Sometimes writing is the best way to get a handle on and find your focus and approach to what you’re ultimately going to write about. You may have to write for a while to find what you want to say and/or how you want to say it—to find your story. As such, writing is both the tool and the product—the ultimate double-edged sword.

You might well want to do some brainstorming before you start to write by jotting down key words and ideas that come to mind and then sitting back to see how these pieces of the literary puzzle might best fit together. But writing can sometimes be the brainstorming process, and brainstorming doesn’t always produce your best alternative. Trial and error does.

This is not to say you should set aside a roadmap and wander off into the wilderness to see where your writing might take you, although isn’t that what stream of conscious writing is all about? Usually, you have some goal or destination in mind and it’s a matter of finding the best route to it.

Writing captures an idea. Editing gets it to fit into a given space.

RULE TWO: Get into a regular routine.

The fundamental idea here is to establish a well-disciplined commitment. But let’s step back from treating writing as a scheduling effort. The first thing that gets in the way of this rule is . . . life! There are two terms of which a writer needs to be aware: vocation and avocation. Vocation is what you do to put food on the table; avocation is the sideline or auxiliary activities you enjoy. Hobbies fit here. For most of us, so does writing. Vocations have schedules, avocations don’t always and I’m not so sure you should commit yourself to apply the structure of a vocation to the more creative processes that lie behind your avocation. They are fundamentally different creatures. This is not to say you don’t need discipline or that setting aside a specifically scheduled time for writing is not a good idea, but it’s a luxury that many don’t have, so why make them feel that they’ve failed before they even get started? Your writing has to find a groove and once you’ve found it, it starts to flow more and more efficiently. This is achieved not by applying a rule as much as finding the process(es) that work best for you under the given circumstances. And remember, the circumstances are never perfect.

Having a regular time set aside to write is mostly a good idea. In anticipation of its approach your brain can shift gears and open your mental literary files and do the subconscious calisthenics that open those magical doors through which you step from reality into the world where your characters and plot reside.

There’s a process involved in shifting those gears and regularity of your writing schedule enhances the efficiency of that. But don’t feel guilty just because you have less control of your free-time schedule than the ideal writing rule says you should have. When you don’t have the luxury of a consistent schedule, you need to work on coming up with a system that lets you shift as seamlessly as possible into your creative side to maximize the time you have allocated to it. The motto “Just Do It” applies well to writing. The time you invest to whine takes from the time you need to shine.

As important as a keyboard is to a writer, so is a notebook. Never, ever let an idea slip away for the want of a piece a paper and a pen. Ideas are like butterflies. As beautiful as they are, they will flutter into oblivion, so write them down, and write them down in sufficient detail that when you return to them, they haven’t disintegrated into gibberish or gobbledygook. There should be little notebooks bedside, on your bathroom counter, in your car, on your desk, in your pocket. A notebook is quicker to get to than an electronic device. Getting an idea, thinking about, and making notes about it IS part of writing process and that process needs to be efficient.

RULE THREE: Snatch odd moments.

I like this rule because it’s saying have the flexibility to put your vocational downtime to use working on your avocation when you get the chance. The downside is that you don’t always know when a slice of time will pop up, so you need to be prepared. Have a couple of things about what you’re working on—how to characterize Mrs. Jones or how Jim is going to react when he discovers he was adopted—on your “Think About List” and develop the ability to quickly shift your mental gears and open the file. This isn’t automatic or even easy to develop, but with practice you’ll get better at it and a five or 15-minute break will become a productive slice of time.

This brings us back to the first item on the list, which brushes up against another very important tool for a writer—flexibility. Sure it’s nice to picture yourself sitting in a Hemingway-like setting, but get over it. You’re not there . . . yet. Do not get trapped in a need to be at your favorite (ideal) spot to write. Take on what I call the “paperback attitude.” Paperback books, besides being a lot cheaper to produce, give readers a portability they never had before. Light, storable, and easily replaceable should you spill something on it or leave it at the coffee shop. They give new freedom to reading. That’s the same mentality of portability you need to apply to your writing. Damon Runyon would grab a table and shove it against a blank wall and sit down and write scenes and dialogue in Cinemascope and Technicolor.

Develop the same ability for writing—the ability to be able to write virtually anywhere under an array of circumstances. Tablets have increased your ability to write virtually anywhere, and notebooks always did. You have to convince yourself it’s what is inside your brain that is more important than where you are when you let it out. Don’t let form triumph over substance.

Still I understand that having some minimal standards for the environment you prefer to ensconce yourself in is powerful. If it is a need that you find you can’t fully overcome, learn to use your downtime to make notes or to brainstorm or assess where you want you story to go next. You’ll feel better.

RULE FOUR: Talk it out.

The idea is to dictate your novel.

As a lawyer, dictating equipment was a key tool. First the desktop Dictaphone enabled the executive or writer to dictate notes without the need to have someone with a steno pad present. Those boat anchors gave way to mini-recorders. I recall finding it exhilarating to be able to get up, walk around my office, and look out the window as I dictated my correspondence or a brief.

No doubt there are writers who have become adept at capturing what they want to say “on tape,” but our brains tend to think sloppily, which was only slightly improved by the process of dictation. The real work begins when words appear on screen or paper as s product to work with and edit.

Here is what the original author of this rule had to say about talking it out: “Have you considered dictating your book and using transcription software (or a professional transcriber) to convert it to the written word? It’s worth experimenting with, especially if you find it really hard to write.”

If you find it “really hard to write,” there’s a good chance that you might already be wasting your time trying to be a writer since the physical act is intimately intertwined with the mental act. Writing is a creative process. Writing requires that you get very intimate with the words you chose to express yourself or employ to create a fictional world. You’re not making widgets; you’re making story. It’s not about finding an easier way to get words down on paper, but getting really good words down on paper by whatever means. Writing should not be considered an issue of production but an issue of creation. Even if you are typing a story from your own handwritten notes, it’s still creation, and the closer you stay to the words, the better your final product will be.

The keyboard is the primary tool of a modern-day writer. It is the interface between thought and print. Learn how to use it. But keep the pencils and notebooks handy! Keep control of your words. You might be able to automate their capture and how they are applied to paper, but you can’t automate the processes of their creation, and don’t confuse the two.

RULE FIVE: Don’t worry about your first draft.

Let’s get something straight right here and now. Erase the term “worry” from you writer vocabulary. It’s more than a negative word. Just look at a few of its synonyms: fear, fearfulness, timidity, error, trepidation, horror, fright. Floating around your cranium, it will short-circuit your creativity. It’s like pouring acid on your thinking. It’s at the far end of the continuum from “concern.” Yes, you do need to be concerned about your first draft, and every draft in between it and your final one. The first draft is the key—and initial—part of the writing process, and you want to improve your skills at every stage or level of the process. In fact, as you improve, the “distance” between your first draft and your final draft will likely get shorter. You go from having to catch and edit a repetitive sloppy phrase or structure to not writing it right the first time. Over time you discard bad habits and create new and better ones. Your first draft is a measure of how well you’re doing with that process of improvement as a writer.

The author of the rule said this about first drafts: “Allow yourself to write a ‘rubbish’ first draft and let your creativity flow.”

Why does creativity have to start out as rubbish? It’s worse to think that you don’t need to extend as much effort because it’s only a first draft. No, it’s the draft of an idea that already has taken shape and to some extent been honed in your brain. It is the first physical step of your creative writing process. It is important to treat it as important. Writing is a not a fix-it process, it’s a getting better process. The closer your standards for a final draft get to your first draft the better the writer you will likely become.

Don’t pay so much attention to a “rule” that you don’t pay attention to the quality of your writing.