Prepare to
choose courage over cowardice when the remembering and writing hurt.
Prepare to
be surprised and delighted when you peel off layers surrounding your past
experiences.
Prepare to
find God’s fingerprints all over everything.
Prepare to
discover links, insights, and joys.
Prepare to
unravel your life’s mysteries (or at least some of them).
Prepare to
make better sense of your life.
Prepare to
feel good about it.
Your
stories are everywhere, all around you, just waiting for you to put them in
writing.
Look
at your cell phone contact list, your address book, email inbox, friends on
Facebook and other social media. What stories can you write about the fun you
had with them? About the adventures? What skills did those people teach you?
Go
deeper: What did you learn alongside them about failure, hard work, success,
romance, illness, teamwork? What lessons did they teach you?
Think
back: Who taught you about honesty, integrity, perseverance, kindness,
compassion, generosity, faith in God? How, specifically, did those individuals
shape you and encourage you to be the person you are today?
Stories
are everywhere—not just stories. God-and-you stories.
Look around your office or your house. What
have you tucked into a special drawer or a safe deposit box?
If
a tornado siren sounded, or if a smoke alarm went off, what would you grab and
take to a safe place?
If
those items could talk, what stories would they tell?
I
think about that question a lot.
Someday
I want to write stories based on my old blue American Tourister carry-on bag. It traveled with me for thirty years across three continents: from
this planet’s most primitive places to the world’s most sophisticated cities. What
stories it could tell!
What
stories would my husband’s grandmother’s aluminum colander tell? And her
ironing board? I don’t know how many years Grandma Jennings used them, but I’ve
used them for more than fifty years! Five generations of our family (so far)
have used those items. Imagine what stories they could tell—stories of God’s goodness
to our family, generation after generation.
Why have you thrown out some possessions
but kept others for many years?
Why could you never throw them out or give them away?
Because they represent something important to you.
What is that something?
Look
around and ask yourself:
“If
this dining room table could talk, what stories would it tell?”
“If
my old Bible could talk, what stories would it tell?”
“If
these boots could talk, what stories would they tell?”
What
about a photo? A book? Washing machine? Piece of art? Jewelry? Woodworking
tools? Coffee mug? Mechanical tools? Art supplies? A vase? A favorite old
devotional book?
Many items could tell stories—stories significant to you and your family.
Glenda Bonin suggests we interview key people—and even ourselves.
“Don’t be timid about interviewing yourself and others,” Glenda writes. “A good interviewer asks questions and waits for answers. . . . Listen deeply, allowing as much time as needed for quiet moments of thought. Do not rush in with a new question until you are satisfied that the question has been fully explored. . . . These moments are often where the best family stories can be found. . . .”
I
like Glenda’s suggestion: Interview others, yes, but also interview yourself,
and “listen deeply, allowing as much time as needed. . . .”
You
might even schedule a time to think, to ponder an item’s importance. Or maybe you
could contemplate while you drive to work or mow the lawn or walk the dog.
What
questions do you need to ask?
What
questions do you need to ask yourself?
Peel back layers.
Wait for answers. Listen for them.
When answers surface, write your stories—
not just stories. Write God-and-you
stories.
Remember,
while you’ve been using and enjoying those items, God has always been with you,
working in you, working on your behalf.
You don’t need to experience news-making miracles
to witness God at work. He is in your everyday comings and goings.
As
Oswald Chambers says,
“We
look for visions from heaven
and
for earth-shaking events
to
see God’s power. . . .
Yet
we never realize that
all
the time God is at work
in
our everyday events
and
in the people around us.”
Write
your stories!
If
you’re thinking about writing a memoir, you need to know the definition of “memoir.”
And
if you’re already writing your story, sometimes you need to remind yourself
what a memoir is. This helps focus correctly and work efficiently.
A
memoir is so much more than spinning yarns and telling tales.
Since
there’s some confusion about the genre of memoir, let’s pin down what it is not:
Memoir is not journaling. A journal is private—for your eyes only—but you write
a memoir for others to read.
A
memoir is not an autobiography. An autobiography documents your whole life
beginning with the day you were born, but a memoir focuses on one segment of
your life—(1) a specific theme or (2) a time period, a slice of life.
You
can write a memoir based on a theme—for example, the theme of working as a
seamstress in Asia, or a food vender at Seattle’s T-Mobile Park, or a stepmother
to six kids.
Focus
on only that theme, leaving out other topics—such as the fact that you might be
friends with a famous movie producer, or that you worked at an animal shelter your
first year after college.
Or
you can write a memoir based on a time period. My first memoir, Grandma’s Letters from Africa, covers my first four years in Africa. My second memoir,
Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger's Memoir, focuses on three years in South America.
Another
person’s time period might be his teenage years, or the years following a spouse’s
death, or service in the Peace Corps. We focus only on that slice of our lives
and leave out other topics.
We
include only those details that pertain to our chosen window of time or our
memoir’s theme.
Personal
reflection is a key ingredient in memoir. Remember that. Most of us need to work
on understanding what reflection is because, as Richard Foster observes, “The
sad truth is that many authors simply have never learned to reflect substantively
on anything.”
So,
memoirists reflect in a deliberate way:
You
look back,
peel
away layers,
excavate,
find
the gems.
Dig them out in pieces if you must,
but dig them out.
Inspect.
Examine
those gems,
ponder
their deeper meaning.
Spend as much time as you need
to make sense of what you discover.
Uncover
the deeper, higher, wider, richer story.
In
the past you might have overlooked something of the utmost importance, so make
time to search for those profound lessons—insights, healing, blessings—in the events
of your life.
In
the process, you might need to do a “Doggie Head Tilt,” a phrase Michael Metzger coined. “If your head never tilts,” he says, “your mind never changes.”
True!
In
the process of reflecting, answer these questions:
Not
all memoirs include a spiritual dimension.
But
if you are writing a spiritual memoir, keep this in mind: It does not require that you have exceptional, supernatural
religious stories to write about, stories that would make the evening news and
get tweeted around the world. Instead, look for ways God was involved in your everyday
life.
You
don’t have to write about God in every chapter. Whether you realized it at the
time or not, He was with you, busy working out His good plans for His
children—and from time to time in your stories you can spell out what He was
doing. And do so in a winsome way, rather than sounding holier-than-thou.
Jesus
said,
“Go
tell your family everything God has done for you”
(Luke
8:39).
Write your memoirs!
By
now you recognize how important remembering is when writing a memoir.
Reflecting—examining
the past, discovering deeper significance than you recognized at the time.
Remembering
and analyzing and piecing together can bring deep healing—and might even change
the direction of our lives.
Reflecting
on what God has done for us and through us can be life-changing.
Sometimes,
however, our introspection
leads
to painful memories, regrets, shame.
Our
hearts become troubled.
You
know what a troubled heart feels like.
So
do I.
Sometimes
it hurts for a long, long time.
And yet, Jesus said, “Don't let your hearts be troubled” (John 14:1).
Lloyd Ogilvie offers us this consolation and hope: “We have a place to go with our troubled hearts—the heart of God.
God’s heart is “a place of reconciliation, forgiveness, and acceptance. . . . We were created to abide in His heart of love. . . . An intimate communion awaits us where we can unburden all our troubles and receive strength.” (Lloyd Ogilvie, Silent Strength for My Life)
Take
in Henri Nouwen’s words: “We are people with souls, sparks of the divine. To
acknowledge the truth about ourselves is to claim the sacredness of our being,
without fully understanding it.” Nouwen says we must “trust that our souls are
embraced by a loving God.” (Bread for the Journey)
“Solitude,
silence, and prayer . . .
offer
solutions
for
the complexity of our lives . . .
because
they bring us in touch with
our
sacred center, where God dwells. . . .
It
is the place of adoration, thanksgiving, and praise.”
May
God bring healing to our painful memories
and
our troubled hearts,
and
may we rejoice in Him
as
we dwell in that lovely place in His heart.
