An Online Place for Lifestory Writers to Discuss Their Craft

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My new friend Sharon Lippincott of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing has joined with Jerry Waxler to start a Yahoo-based discussion group for those interested in lifestory writing. Although my interest in that area is embryonic at best, I’ve joined the group and am impressed with the warm and generous spirit its founders and members convey.

You can join here, and in the extended portion of this entry, I have also borrowed (stolen) QUITE liberally from Sharon’s site to further explain the group. Here’s the first part of Sharon’s invitation:

Calling All Life Writers
There is good news for anyone who would like to hang out with other people who write life stories, memoir, journals, personal essays, or other forms of recording their lives in writing. Whatever your reason for writing about your life, the newly formed Life Writers Forum is a great place to ask questions, share thoughts, post short stories or excerpts from longer works, and generally shoot the breeze about writing.

The rest of Sharon’s invitation:

I am hosting this new YahooGroup together with Jerry Waxler, author of the Memory Writers Network blog. Jerry and I have started Life Writers Forum because there is no similar gathering place in Cyberspace for those who are involved with life writing. With people getting busier than ever and energy costs soaring, the time is right for joining something you can squeeze into your already tight schedules any time you have a few minutes. You don’t have to drive to any meetings, and best of all, there are no membership fees.

Whether you are still wondering about the difference between autobiography and memoir or have several memoirs published, this is the place for you. Everyone knows that beginners benefit from the advice of seasoned mentors, but it isn’t so well known that newbies’ ideas can help veterans keep our writing fresh and our minds open.

We hope you’ll join us to generate lots of lively discussion about various aspects of writing. Below are examples of topics we love:

  • Writers-block busters
  • How to add punch to stories
  • Sorting memories and them together
  • How to handle touchy topics without getting sued!
  • Posting short pieces for feedback
  • Markets for stories
  • Working with agents and publishers
  • Self-publishing vs. commercial
  • Overcoming writers block
  • Reviews and recommendations of published memoirs and books on writing
  • Classes, workshops and retreats for life writers

These are only suggestions to get you thinking. Hopefully you’ll add lots more to the mix. One of the great things about virtual groups is the diversity of view points they generate, and the support they can offer.

There are two ways to join. You can go to the homepage for the group and join from there, or send a blank e-mail to lifewritersforum-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (no human eyes will see this, so don’t waste your time composing a message). Although you can join by e-mail without one, if you already have a Yahoo ID (as in Yahoo e-mail address), you can read previous messages in the message archives on the group website. If you don’t have one, it’s worth setting one up. You can use any name you want (as long as nobody else is using it), so make it fun if you wish.

A Storied Career as Fragmented Knowledge

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In an article in KMWorld Magazine, Dave Snowden writes that “everything is fragmented.” Further, he writes of a shift (in the world of knowledge management) to:

… the unstructured, fragmented and finely granular material that pervades the blogosphere. … In the world of fragmented knowledge, the individual must gather at the point of need knowledge fragments from a variety of informal sources (e.g., colleagues, blogs, wikis, etc.) and then blend that information on the fly to reach conclusions and take action.

Snowden talks about how the standard practice of knowledge management has been to structure knowledge and place in hierarchical taxonomies. But that approach doesn’t allow knowledge to be adapted well to change, Snowden asserts. Instead:

… In the world of fragmented knowledge, the individual must gather at the point of need knowledge fragments from a variety of informal sources (e.g., colleagues, blogs, wikis, etc.) and then blend that information on the fly to reach conclusions and take action.

To skeptics, Snowden asks:

Faced with an intractable problem, do you go and draw down best practice from your company’s knowledge management system, or do you go and find eight or nine people you know and trust with relevant experience and listen to their stories? With the odd exception … everyone goes for the stories.

I think of A Storied Career as a knowledge-management system, primarily for myself, but also for anyone else whose storytelling interests are similar to mine. It’s a repository for all the bits of fragmented information. I don’t really attempt to organize and structure the fragmented bits much beyond placing entries in categories (with “Storytelling — Other” probably the predominating category). It’s not structured, but I know it’s all here as a repository of the expanding body of knowledge of aspects of applied storytelling that interest me. (I also like how blogger “Dr. Pew” describes blogging as “a means to process things.”) Apparently, according to Snowden, I am engaging in a naturalistic form of knowledge management:

It’s not natural to chunk up material, to make it context specific; it is natural to share, blend and create fragmented material based on thoughts and reflections as we carry out tasks or engage in social interaction.

And apparently, my style and that of millions of bloggers like me aligns with the way Snowden believes organizations need to move away from old, entrenched modes of non-ambiguity, whereas:

Narrative, social computing, the open source movement are all comfortable with ambiguity, embrace it and use it. Organizations need to do the same, but the old patterns of control persist beyond their natural utility.

Trusera Revisited: Inspired By Founder’s Story

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Tara Holahan, the marketing coordinator at Trusera, about which I blogged here, wrote to me about the story-driven origin of Trusera:

I see that we share a belief in the power of sharing firsthand experience, or stories, to benefit others. At Trusera, our goal is to create the largest repository of health stories to benefit those looking for guidance in taking the next step. This comes directly from our founder, Keith Schorsch’s, experience with Lyme disease, which took eleven doctors and finally one phone call from a friend to diagnose. Keith has a powerful entrepreneurial story [also here] that you might find interesting. Our hope is that by creating a platform to share experiences, we can make the process of connecting to people and useful experience easier, help others take control of their health and support sound health (and life) decision making.

The Middle Ground Story

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In her company’s blog, Creating Tomorrow (which is also the name of her company), Trina Roach relates this story she once heard:

When I first started out in advertising, I was told the story of the agency’s successful launch campaign for a major client’s new product. When the agency introduced the idea for the campaign to the client, the client was livid. It wasn’t what they expected, and it certainly wasn’t what they thought they needed for their product to be a success.

The agency believed in their concept and stood behind their innovative idea 100 percent.

Their middle ground? They agreed to develop a parallel campaign more in line with client expectations and to pay to put both campaigns into market research. The client agreed to abide by the research results, and launch the winning campaign.

In the end, the agency version got the highest-ever research scores. It gave the client’s product a massive push into the market, became talk-of-the-town, and went on to win a creative prize in New York.

Oh yea, in the end the client agreed to pick up the research costs.

Roach goes on to enumerate several types of stories used in leadership, some of which I was familiar with, some not. They include the “Who am I?” story, the “Why Am I here?” story, the “What do you want to know?” story, the “What are our core values?” story, and the crux of the story above, the “Where is out middle ground?” story. Here’s how Roach describes that kind of story:

Where is our middle ground? — As a leader you are sometimes called upon to bargain even when you strongly believe you are in the right. The challenge here is to let the other party see that you truly understand their perspective, while challenging them to give your method a try.

Share a Story at Divine Caroline

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The site Divine Caroline tells readers:

We thought you might like a place to share a Story, get inspired, make a connection or figure things out.

Lots of great stories here, mostly by women, about relationships, parenting, home/food, body and soul, travel, style, career/money, play, neighborhood and world.

Storytelling, Authenticity, and Outright Lying

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When I read the following quote by Peter Guber in an article called “Four Truths of the Storyteller” in Harvard Business Review, I immediately thought of my mother:

… many people assume that storytelling is somehow in conflict with authenticity. The great storyteller, in this view, is a spinner of yarns that amuse without being rooted in truth.

Similarly, Casey Quinlan of Mighty Casey Media Mighty Mouth Blog writes here:

The word “story” and the word “lie” — or, less in-your-face, “prevaricate” — are often thought to be synonymous.

They often ARE synonymous.

These thoughts reminded me of trying to explain my dissertation topic to my mother. “Storytelling in the job search” was the shorthand I used to describe the complex document. “What do you mean, storytelling — you mean making things up, telling fibs?” She could not grasp that storytelling could be anything but inauthentic. Clearly my mother is the kind of story skeptic to which Guber refers.

How odd a worldview when story can so beautifully convey a person’s authenticity.

Wally Lamb writes in an article in O magazine (about teaching women in prison to write autobiographically): “Your uniqueness- – your authenticity — is your strength.”

Autobiography, Memoir, or Lifestory: What’s the Difference?

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In a reprint from her book The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, Sharon Lippincott (who blogs at The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing) ponders whether there’s any difference among the terms autobiography, memoir, and lifestory. (She later uncovers a number of other terms for similar genres of writing – “faction” [fact-based fiction], docudrama, nonfiction novels, personal journalism, dramatic nonfiction, literature of fact, creative nonfiction, autobiographical novels, nonfiction narrative, personal essay, literary memoir). Her initial thoughts were these:

… autobiography was primarily linear in nature, covering the full space of a life up to the time of writing, and was largely documentary. Memoir was a more artistically developed literary form that could address limited periods of time and specific experiences. It left more room for creativity, interpretation and emotion. Lifestory writing seemed to me to be the most spontaneous, natural, cozy form, informally written from the heart, like a letter to a friend.

After taking the reader through some very interesting research on the subject, including the history of autobiography in Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story and the Web site and audio/podcast files of Creative Nonfiction, Lippincott concludes:

I realize that the attempt to define terms is meaningless. I’ve come to understand that writing stories from our experience, from our lives, is far too personal a matter and too complex a challenge to be bound by form. Our form will be as personal as the stories we write, and our reasons for writing them. The forms we evolve will be perfect for our unique stories. … No beginner should let ignorance of form or style delay the writing of a single word. Go beyond the confusion and simply write the story that is in your heart. Call it what you like and let it grow as it will. Learn as you go, and it will become your own perfect story.

[ A tip of the hat to Stephanie West Allen for alerting me to this essay. ]

Stories are the Essence of a Culture

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“Stories are the essence of a culture” is one of the tenets of the group behind Living Cultural Databases. Starkly, the group notes that “once the stories are no longer re-told, the culture is dead.”

On oral heritage and the importance of storytelling, the group writes:

Stories are the essence of a culture. For indigenous peoples they inspire, offer analogies, teach practical skills and an understanding of how to live in fragile or hostile environments. Furthermore, the recounting of myths and narratives are vital for maintaining ethnic identity and group solidarity. Stories have social functions, representing the collective memory of the people, combining the past with the present and attaching meaning to space and time. They encapsulate the deeper beliefs and values of a culture, promoting role models, ways of living, behaving and believing. In summary, storytelling is at the heart of social life, personal and cultural identity. Once the stories are no longer re-told, the culture is indeed dead. … Narrative can be the tool to guide a group’s development and the cultural choices they face. In other words, the reinterpretation of folklore is important for shaping the cultures of the future.

The group’s goal is to to create Living Cultural Storybases for the communities themselves.

The author of the blog, The Written One, echoes the concept of storytelling as culture and storytelling as the means to express culture:

The ideal of a storytelling culture is one where individuals are not blocked from self expression, where the ideas emerging from that situation are shared in an organic (for want of a better word) and democratic way. For it is these ideas that make up the tapestry of that culture overall, just as each bird in flight makes up the beautiful tapestry of a soaring flock. As such, this tapestry can truly claim to represent the ideas and beliefs of the people involved. This allows for a rich storytelling culture overall.

(Thanks once again to Stephanie West Allen for making me aware of this site).