Dig out the gems, in pieces if you must

When you write a memoir, you record more than the details of what happened.

You peel back layers,

            uncover,

                        dig deep,

                                    excavate.

You mine gems buried under your life’s layers.

You get out a magnifying glass and hunt down the inner, more significant story.

Examine,

            scrutinize,

                        study,

                                    investigate,

                                                inspect,

                                                            analyze.

Search for ways your experience changed you and made you who you are today. You might find answers to questions that eluded you in the past—or maybe you’ll make peace with questions that still have no answers.

Search for lessons you learned, for patterns (positive or negative) you recognize now, looking back.

Mining those gems can hurt. Have you ever watched Prospectors on The Weather Channel? 

The digging can scrape skin off your knuckles and break your nails and leave dirt between your fingers.

But the discovered treasures—priceless! Priceless in mining, priceless in memoir-writing.

Unearth things about yourself, and others,

that you hadn’t realized before.

Sometimes the discoveries sting,

but they can also shape and mature you

and send you down better paths

and strengthen your faith

for all that comes your way in the future.

Sometimes you unearth blessings you overlooked before,

the ways God was walking alongside you,

closing some doors and opening others—

even if you couldn’t detect it at the time.

Recognize the people He sent to cheer you on,

a job to pay the bills,

a doctor to diagnose your illness,

a Bible study, a church, a friend,

a scholarship, a car, a repairman, a song,

a professor who believed in you, a fireman.

A grandparent who prayed for you.

Look over the vignettes/chapters you’ve already written. Within each one, ponder, meditate, piece together:

• What did you learn the hard way?
• What do you know now that you didn’t then?
• What new people did you meet—people who changed your life? Maybe for better, maybe for worse.
• How was God involved? Include relevant Bible verses.
• What wisdom did you gain from the experience?
• What joy resulted from the experience?
• What would you do differently if you could go back and do it again?
• What (or who) would you have missed without that event?
• How did the event make you a better person?

So excavate, burrow down, plow, rake, till, sift through the soil of your life.

Dig out those gems—

in pieces if you must—

but dig them out!

Dig it out, in pieces if you must

When you write a memoir, you record more than the details of what happened.

You peel off layers,

dig deep,

unfold,

investigate,

uncover,

excavate.

You mine gems buried in layers.

You hunt down the inner, more significant story.

When you write a memoir, after you’ve mined those hidden gems and you’re holding them in your hands, get out a magnifying glass:

examine,

analyze,

reflect,

meditate,

muse,

ponder,

piece together,

connect the dots. [link]

As a memoirist, search for ways your experience changed you and made you who you are today.

You might find answers to questions that eluded you in the past—or maybe you’ll make peace with questions that still have no answers.

Search for lessons you learned, for patterns (positive or negative) you recognize now, looking back.

What did you need to learn the hard way?

What do you know now that you didn’t then?

How was God involved?

What wisdom did you gain from the experience?

How did the experience make you a better person?

Unraveling can be difficult. I’m writing my second memoir and recognize anew how mysterious the process can be and that this memoir stuff can be painful. We unearth things about ourselves we hadn’t realized before, and the discoveries can mature us and strengthen our faith for all that comes our way in the future.

I appreciate a quote in Kathy Pooler’s recent blog post:

“As a writer,

I dig to get to the meat of the troubling,

sensitive issues.

I often find it’s a tough nut to crack,

so I take out my nut cracking tools.

I apply pressure

and squeeze to pop open the topic.

I probe to separate kernels of truth

from their protective shells.

Sometimes I lift the fruit whole

and intact from its hiding place,

but more often I dig it out in pieces.”

Sydney Avey

What are your nut-cracking tools?

What pressure can you apply to extract those kernels of truth?

What will you do to pop open your story?

Squeeze, probe, and dig it out,

in pieces if you must,

but dig it out!

Book giveaway!

“I realized I wasn’t alone in my suffering, and my wounding wasn’t just for me,” writes Tina Samples.

“I realized that God’s plan to work in my life, and my family’s life, had a broad scope; He wanted to bring healing to others facing the same issues.” (from newly published Wounded Women of the Bible: Finding Hope When Life Hurts; emphasis mine)

David Wolpe says it this way:

“When God, for whatever reason, has wounded you, 

you learn how to minister to others with the same wound…. 

Even the keenest anguish can be, as the poet put it, 

a ‘gauntlet with a gift in it’—

a challenge to use the wisdom to help others in the same pain.”

 David Wolpe

Tina understands David Wolpe’s message: She has both a gift and a challenge to share her story with others who need hope and healing.

Tina’s co-author, Dena Dyer, writes, “We’ve also seen God use excruciating wounds to purify, mold, and shape us into more resilient, hopeful believers.”

Dena, too, knows about the gift and the challenge.

In Wounded Women of the Bible: Finding Hope When Life Hurts, Tina and Dena have woven together stories of women in the Bible and stories of today’s women, and their prayer is that “you would find His peace for your pain, His joy in the midst of your trials, and His hope for your heartache.”

I am humbled and honored that Tina and Dena's book includes a story from my memoir, Grandma's Letters From Africa.

To celebrate Tina’s and Dena’s new book, I’ll give away a free copy to one of you readers!

Here’s how it works:

Between now and October 9, e-mail me a vignette about the ways God (a) helped you heal from a wound, tragedy, or heartache, and (b) in the process, taught you new things about Himself and strengthened your faith, and (c) used the incident for His glory and your good.

By sharing your story, you will be doing what David Wolpe and Tina and Dena encourage: You’ll be offering a gift of hope and healing to others who are suffering their own wounds.

That’s what 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 is all about: “the God of all comfort … comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”

Aim at 800 words. I will publish here the vignette I select (I’ll be happy to edit before publishing) and will send the author a free copy of Wounded Women of the Bible: Finding Hope When Life Hurts.

E-mail your vignette to grandmaletters [@] aol [dot] com (remove the brackets, replace the word "dot" with a period and scrunch everything together) and do me a favor: Write WOUNDED VIGNETTE in the subject line. Otherwise I will probably delete it as spam.

Here are a few quotes from Tina and Dena’s book which, I suspect, will resonate with you and give you story ideas:

“We can’t see what God sees, we don’t know what God knows, and we have no idea how God will deal with any given situation. But we can rest in the assurance of Psalm 56:8, ‘You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book’ (NLT). Psalm 147:3 says, ‘He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.’ God will restore us in due time.”

 “God understands even when things don’t make sense to us: ‘Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit’ (Psalm 147:5).…  He will mend our broken heart so that we can find a way to fully live.”

Oh, how I appreciate those words: He mends and heals so we can “fully live.” Not just limp through life but fully live!

Tina writes: “One day … I came upon John 16:33. I remember weeping as I experienced a sense of the Lord’s presence. At that very moment, God revealed to me that through Him I could have peace in all things, and that although we live in a fallen world, I could have joy through Him—because the world has no power over God. He has overcome the world. He is the conqueror, defeater, and deliverer, and He reigns over all things. That Scripture has carried me through my high school years, until I left home and found healing. God used it to give peace to my heart during my toughest days.”

“God uses everything—even the most undesirable parts of our past—for His, and our, good.”

“…What looks detrimental to us, God, in His mercy, can make beneficial.”

Ready, set, go! Write!

Related post: Wounded Women

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you’re missing a lot of additional resources.

Click on the Facebook link in the right column toward the top.

Wounded Women

Most of you have faced a shattering loss at some point in life.

Or maybe someone betrayed you. Many of us have wounds inflicted by others—by a spouse, parent, child, sibling, or friend.

Some of us imposed wounds on ourselves by choices we made.

Sometimes we suffer because God seems silent; we feel He has let us down—or maybe even abandoned us.

Grief. Illness. Financial problems. Scars. Heartache.

Wounds. We all have them.

Would you like perspective and healing and hope for those wounds? If so, Dena Dyer and Tina Samples’ new book will bless your heart.

In Wounded Women of the Bible: Finding Hope When Life Hurts, Dena and Tina offer an in-depth look at women of the Bible and their wounds, and then pair their stories with those of modern-day women, everyday women like me. Yes, I am honored that Dena and Tina chose a story from my memoir, Grandma’s Letters from Africa, for their book.

From Tina’s website:

“Imploding relationships, incapacitating losses, injurious personal mistakes, or spiritual failures—whatever the issue, the wounds are the same. Whether it’s a lapse in judgment by Bathsheba or the moral failure of the women’s ministry leader in your local church; the spiritual insensitivity of Martha or the compulsive obsessions of your church’s care circle chairwoman; the terror of an abandoned single mother like Hagar or the struggling single mother in your prayer group—the time and circumstances are different, but the wounds are equally deep and spiritually devastating.”

Dena and Tina write:

“Our heartfelt prayer is that while reading the stories we’ve shared … you would find His peace for your pain, His joy in the midst of trials, and His hope for your heartache.”

From the back cover:

“Dena Dyer and Tina Samples don’t pray this prayer lightly for their readers.… In this book, they … [seek] models of Scripture’s wounded women to lead the way to healing.… If you’ve never thought of women playing much of a role in the Bible, or of having much to teach the modern woman, you’re in for a surprise.”

Wounded Women of the Bible includes a Bible study for individuals and groups that want to dig deeper. Consider this Bible study for your church’s women’s groups: it’s a Bible study for women of all ages.

Read more at Dena’s blog and at Tina’s blog, and you can order Wounded Women of the Bible at Amazon.

Three writing opportunities for you

In writing vignettes for your memoir, some of you have written stories worthy of a broader audience.

Others might be looking for ways to strengthen your platform.*

If so, today I have three opportunities for you.

Dena Dyer, writer, editor at The High Calling,* and lover of all things literary, is collecting 500-word stories from contemporary women who've been healed in various ways—emotionally, spiritually, physically, or mentally. Based on “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds,” (Psalm 147:3), the book—and a companion women’s retreat—will be released in 2013 from Kregel Publishing.

Dena says, “We need LOTS of material from others. I'd love to see anything you want to send. You don’t have to be a great writer—I can adapt and edit your story while keeping your thoughts and voice.…” Read more at Help Me with my Book (please?) at

http://denadyer.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/10/a-writing-opportunity-help-me-with-my-book-please-.html

Over at 1^st Writes, Pam encourages submissions to the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books. She credits the enormous success of these books to “writers like you and me, who contribute wonderful stories of ‘inspiration, hope, overcoming life’s challenges, and realized dreams.’” Find out more at http://1stwrites.blogspot.com/2011/10/1st-mentions_29.html

Here’s an opportunity for—ahem—seasoned folks to participate with David Brooks, currently with the New York Times and the PBS Newshour. In his recent New York Times article, he writes:

“If you are over 70, I’d like to ask for a gift. I’d like you to write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way.…

“…I’ll write a few columns about them around Thanksgiving and post as many essays as possible online.

“I ask for this gift for two reasons.

“First, we have few formal moments of self-appraisal in our culture. Occasionally, on a big birthday people will take a step back and try to form a complete picture of their lives, but we have no regular rite of passage prompting them to do so.

“More important, these essays will be useful to the young. Young people are educated in many ways, but they are given relatively little help in understanding how a life develops, how careers and families evolve, what are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood. These essays will help them benefit from your experience.…” Continue reading The Life Report at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/opinion/brooks-the-life-report.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Please pray about these opportunities.

Remember, your stories are important! *

You have stories only you can tell.

Your stories are not your own. They have been entrusted to you by God.

People need to hear them.

Be sure to check out Cecil Murphey’s new 50-part series on writing. He’s a hugely successful author with a wealth of expertise. You’ll find a link to his blog here in the right column.

*Resources:

What is a platform?  http://womensmemoirs.com/memoir-writing-book-business/memoir-marketing-your-platform-and-the-statue-of-liberty

Your stories are important:  http://spiritualmemoirs101.blogspot.com/2011/05/are-your-stories-important.html

The High Calling: http://www.thehighcalling.org/