Next Steps...
Pictures & People:
they populate most memories and imaginings. Study a family snapshot of yourself
as a child. Then close your eyes. Go back: stand in
that moment. See yourself there, with the People. Notice the Actors & Actions:
watch what they do, hear what they say; notice your surroundings,
physical details, the feeling of the space. Colors, sounds.
Jot some details, make some notes, draft short paragraphs.
Stand
in the Moment: tune into your five senses: watch…
listen…feel sun on your face or your mother’s hand on your
forehead…Taste the moment: home-made peach ice cream, ballpark
hot dog, grandma’s pirogi. Stand there and soak up this
information of your senses: how the crack of the bat makes
your heart leap, how the screeching tires chill your blood. These
are the keys that unlock fresh insight into your personal story
and your life today. SIM!
This
process helps you locate key impressions as
you recollect events using this toolkit of techniques everyone can
master. If you're actually following the suggestions here, it's already leading you on an entertaining, edifying,
maybe even gently harrowing path, showing you how to observe and record
the past (or the past you "invent") as dramatic, detail-rich episodes springing from the actual
foundations of your perceptions.
Success depends less on writing than on honing your observation skills:
you learn to scribble down physical details, actions and feelings
as they happen, recreating the moment-to-moment story as it actually
unfolds. With a sharp sensory focus on each single moment, you
use your innate ability to observe and describe the characters, action
and details that build up your story layer by layer.
Focus on the Senses:
Why so much emphasis on the senses? Because they’re the “raw
materials” of both imagination and memory. Happy or sad, all that we know comes to us
literally via our senses. Experience literally enters us via our
ability to see, hear, touch, taste and smell. How these
impressions register in our brains is what “happens” to us.
Experience is the raw material we remember and invent with.
The
way to get close to a narrative is to bring the feelings and events out
the way they went in—following those sensory trails left in our
brains. For memoir writers, using the details you observe and describe helps you
make a true facsimile—and avoids a remote, second-hand
narrative "telling" rather than dramatizing what you “think” happened.
For
fiction, the same hold true: blocking out a "tale" involves the
same sensory process. That’s why I say, “you bring the facts and
feelings back the way they went in.” Without
a focus on feelings, when we go from our head to paper, we tend to edit
out of our thoughts the really juicy human materials (the details) of
our experience—the “blood, sweat and tears” of emotion we respond to in
great art, music, theater and literature, for example.
We
use the following steps in our groups to help us make the connections
to past and get them down on paper. We repeat them as often
as people chant mantras in meditation, so I call them:
Mantra No. 1: Follow the Senses back to the Moment…
Mantra No. 2: Stand in the Moment and Observe…
Mantra No. 3: Be a Camera that Records what you Observe…
Mantra No. 4 Record the Actors/Actions and sensory details…
Mantra No. 5 Describe what happens as it happens…
Stay in the Present:
I urge people to use the present tense at first whether they write
memoir or fiction. It makes them stay close to the action and
the way it unfolds or develops because it’s the way they actually lived
or imagined
the narrative. Things happen in sequence. One thing
follows another. Staying close to the action helps involve and
focus writers to get the moment-by-moment sequence of events right—and
it involves readers more too because it brings them closer to the
action as well..
“There
never was a time in your life that was not now, nor will there ever
be,” observes Eckhart Tolle in his popular book The Power of
Now. “Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will
happen in the now.” Staying in the “now” of story writing
is good for writers and readers alike.
Hold that Thought:
I also urge writers when they start the SIM exercises to write
about childhood experiences—as they were lived by a child and seen by a
child. This avoids the trap of using adult language and
“explanations,” making judgements or looking back as somebody who may
not—at first, at least--easily revisit the sunny innocence or darker
concerns of childhood. "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a good example.
Many
people have a burning desire to write about a specific occurrence or
great events that shaped or turned their lives—a sensational or
life-changing event, a crushing personal loss, a career full of
accomplishment and relative fame. Or maybe they just want
to memorialize a life of patient progress as parents bringing up kids
in a less hectic era or more bucolic setting. The process is
pretty much the same: both the saga or the hymn need rendering into
finite parts, the distinctive “snapshots” in which characters, settings
and atmospheres shine with physical details, recalled dialog,
characters that interact to make the “story” move along.
Life is, after all, a progression of Pictures & People, Actors & Action.
I
try to get people to approach a blank page or screen as a painter does
a blank canvas. First, we learn to sketch. Then we learn to
paint. Because writing is a lot like painting. It’s an
additive, cumulative process: you build up the picture with
little dabs of observed detail, brushstrokes of emotion and feeling,
patches of experience applied in bits and pieces.
People
love digging into their pasts, especially when they summon the courage
to explore painful as well as happy moments—because everyone’s life
parade has been rained on at one time or another. They are
enthused to discover forgotten details, happy to relive fond memories,
amazed so much residual feeling, so much emotion still clings to
certain episodes. By “re-viewing” the past from a new
perspective, they gain revealing personal insights that help adjust or
change their feelings about themselves as well as others.
Consciousness-Raising:
Logging your personal story has powers to reveal new insights into your
life. Every thought we think becomes memory. Even our concerns
about the future instantly become memories. Because we become the
stories we tell ourselves, seeking to revisit and “re-view” milestone
moments in our lives can help change the way we think about
ourselves. Unlocking forgotten moments opens new doors to self
understanding.
In
fact, the process reflects true “consciousness-raising:” How we
tell our “personal” stories (to ourselves as well as to others)
reflects our self image. As we come to recognize how we become
the stories we tell ourselves, we tend to focus more on the
present—living more in the moments of daily living.
Let the Process Empower You:
Why do we say power of the personal story? Because participating
in the SIM process enables you to use the actual material of your life
to make a spiritual journey that leads to personal progress. And
because the only place you can do anything about the past is in the
present. You can’t change your past; but you can change your way
of seeing it. A new freedom and satisfaction naturally spring
from this “re-viewing” of our past—a keener ability to understand and
accept. We come to see things differently. We adjust our
judgments. We shift our perspective and focus; this new viewpoint
often creates opportunity to escape traps of old, habitual, negative
reactions and feelings. As inspirational author and speaker Dr.
Wayne Dyer says: “When you change the way you look at things, the
things you look at change.”
The
following are frequent workshop subjects (and their corresponding
personal benefits) you can use to guide your own story and your own
development. You’ll find you can:
1) Illuminate—precious moments, milestone events, personal triumphs
2) Reclaim—the innocence and happiness of a bygone childhood
3) Honor—mentors who guided, comforted, encouraged you
4) Forgive—people who never meant you harm, most of all yourself
5) Focus—on formative people who shaped your life
6) Resolve—tangled feelings, misplaced blame
7) Heal—psychic wounds long-nursed but never addressed
8) Let Go—of painful losses, injuries that can never be undone
9) Reveal—gifts, insights, lessons in your story you never saw before
10) Resolve—corrosive grudges, resentments weighing you down
11) Feel Free—embrace the power of dropping defenses, forgiving others
12) Find Joy—by letting gifts come to you rather than seeking them
Guide