ANALYZE
THE LISTS YOU'VE COMPLETED
Find
relationships and/or events you can group under one category or heading.
With whom did you always play sports as a youth? List the women or men
you dated between age 16 and now. Were your most enjoyable times at
dances, concerts, parties, picnics, or senior proms? Was there one person
with whom you always got into trouble? Group good times and bad times.
What were your most significant relationships with people? What were
your best decisions? What were your worst ones?
REWORK
YOUR LIST
Can some
of the information be listed or repeated under separate headings? Does
some of it head in a particular direction or have a prime focus? You
modeled in a fashion show in high school. You didn't think you were
a great model, but one of the judges asked if you'd like to work in
her dress shop. Should you have taken the job? Take your time. Include
specific dates and times. "I arrived in Los Angeles from Guatemala
on September 3, 1996. David was born in September, 1992."
Feel
free to add to your list at anytime. Keep filling your portfolio with
stories, even if they're not related. Keep writing things in your journal
as you remember them. Write down the major incidents you recall. Keep
recalling more of them.
NARROW
YOUR LIST
At some
point in this life writing experience, you should think about taking
notes about the ten top relationships or major events to create a core
life list. These should be the most crucial events of your life, the
ones without which you would absolutely have become a different person:
your family moved to a new location, your father lost his job, you failed
kindergarten, you had a love affair at age eight - all crossroads events.
PRIME
YOUR MEMORY PUMPS
If you're
afraid you've lost too many details of your past, writing those things
you do remember will help you recall more than you can imagine. Like
water pouring from a hand pump that has been primed, memories will begin
to flow once you prime them with writing. As you write, new, previously
unrecalled incidents come to mind, e.g., how your grandparents looked
at each other across the living room, their eyes full of love for one
another, how insecure you felt at your high school prom when you had
to dance.
KEEP
WRITING
Write
frequently and don't worry about whether or not your writing is "good
enough." First drafts can be "streams of consciousness,"
rough, incomplete, contradictory. Don't censor yourself as you go along,
it'll make you hold back.
CREATE
MENTAL IMAGES
Write
vignettes, scenes, and dialogue as you recall significant events or
imagine important conversations from the past: your teacher complimented
you on your work, you were picked over good athletes for a team, and
you got a better grade than you thought you would. Use your own mind's
eye to provide images to your future readers. Shaping your writing will
come later in the rewriting stage. That's another, later step. First,
it's important to get text - a text - from your head to paper. Use your
journal for your memory writing. Place vignettes (descriptions of actions,
scenes, and dialogue) in an order that makes sense to you. ". .
. My grandfather came to the U.S. from Mexico and eventually settled
in Glendale." You suddenly remember a story your aunt told you
about her husband crossing the U.S. by hitchhiking on Highway 66. You
forgot he was only 14. What was the trip like? How can you find out?
Aunt Marie's 93. Will she still remember?
As you
add pages of text, your work becomes meatier. You reach a point at which
you must decide what you'll keep and what's unnecessary baggage. This
is called "final editing." It has its place but not now. Let
your first drafts be first drafts.
Remember
that each stage of your writing will provide its own rewards and challenges.
Don't worry about perfection at this stage. Try for length, not strength.
Keep priming the pump.
WHERE
TO START?
You've
already started. You wrote about an early memory. You may have already
written about yourself or developed short narratives about members of
your family before taking this workshop. Perhaps you've developed a
family tree, saved important documents in files, or collected photographs
for family albums. Most of us have favorite family stories about a particular
Christmas celebration, a holiday trip, everybody lending a hand in landscaping
your parents' front yard, of a first visit to the beach.
Your
initial attempts at life writing may also reveal memories you need to
clarify or integrate back into your life. Many memories still lay on
the surface waiting to be dealt with. Does your little sister always
cry when she sees something sad on television? Why does she do that?
Do you relate to underdogs or heroes? Do you always feel guilty about
dropping the pass when your team lost the championship game by one run?
Why did you rip up your favorite doll?
CUEING
UP YOUR MEMORY
Try memory
jogs to get ideas out of the foggy past. Photo albums, libraries, old
movies, and creating mental images all can serve as jogs, helping you
recall what you may think may be imbedded too far back in your memory
files. Look at old photos. Try to name all the people in the picture
and their various relationships. Write a mental photo of your mother
when you were very young. What did your brother look like at five? Describe
the details: clothing, hair, dress styles, setting. What would have
happened right before the photo? Right after? Go to the library and
look at photos and paintings of the time you want to write about. Look
at the recent history of fashions, automobiles, or home decorations
of the time you're interested in. Watching old movies or videos may
strike some memory cords. Make lists of members of your family: names,
dates, birthdays, principal residences, type of schooling, marriage
dates, number and names of children they had, illnesses, jobs, careers,
special events in their lives, and circumstances of their passing -
these items all help to uncover additional facts about others and long
forgotten situations. That uniform in the picture must have been a costume
in a play. Dad was only 15 and a schoolboy in Salvador during W.W.II.
ADD
TO YOUR LIFE LISTS
Keep
adding material to your Memory Bank. List both serious and frivolous
items: your "unforgettable" neighbors, former teammates, music
tapes and discs, favorite hit songs, car breakdowns, times of loneliness,
best dance steps, special foods - anything else in your past that interests
you. Then, write about the memories these lists evoke.
Talk
about the past with people who were there. Even people who didn't know
your family and didn't live in your neighborhood, didn't come from a
foreign country, going hungry, what clothes they wore when they were
young, silent movies, fads, and whether an ancestor rode horseback or
took a trolley to work are all quite important.
TIME
CAPSULE DESCRIPTIONS
Go back
through the years and stop at one place. Steal "a moment of truth"
from the past. These descriptions should include physical, emotions,
and spiritual considerations. Select various ages - for example, at
10, at 15, or at 18. When did notable differences in appearance and
character occur? Mother's beauty? Dad's gray hair? The failed hardware
business? My brother's car accident? Learn visualization. Try closing
your eyes and calling forth specific images: your mother when you were
15, the first apartment you lived in, your favorite dog. Call forth
images of your ancestors, experiences that were important to you. Pull
out some of the information your conscious mind may not even be aware
of.
WRITE
LETTERS TO A RELATIVE
Write
to a relative, whether alive or dead. Write a real letter. Share your
innermost thoughts and feelings. Ask specific questions. Imagine your
first trip to Disneyland. What did you see? What did you eat? What were
your favorite rides? Now, write a letter back to yourself that the person
you wrote might have written. Have some imagination fun. Write a relative
who has passed away and tell her how much she meant to your, but you
were too young or too naive to tell her when she was alive. Use that
wonderful tool - your imagination.
Unit
4 Questions
1.
List five members of your family you could interview about incidents
that occurred in the past.
2.
List five relatives who live some distance from you who would enjoy
receiving a letter from you.
3.
What is a vignette?
4.
How can photograph albums or old pictures help you in your life writing?
5.
Describe your appearance when you were ten years old.
Send
a copy of your answers as an attachment to an E-mail addressed to your
mentor.
HOMEWORK
Please
send each homework submittal as an attachment to an E-mail addressed
to your mentor.
1. Continue
writing your daily activities in your journal.
2. Pare your core life list from childhood, teenage, and adulthood to
the ten most significant events, relationships, or transitions. Enter
this list in your journal.
3. Make lists of categories: best friends you have had, favorite sports,
favorite movies, favorite television shows, favorite sports heroes,
and other categories you can think of.
4. Briefly relate the lives of your grandparents in your journal, e.g.,
where they grew up, where they met, what work they did, what kinds of
people they were.
5. Find an old photo album of your family. In your journal, name each
person in the photo and indicate what he or she was doing at the time
of the photo.
6. Choose one relative and write a letter to him or her. This is your
writing assignment for this unit. E-mail a copy to your mentor.
