Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers – book review

Recently, a friend gave me a copy of the book: Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers written by Leslie Leyland Fields and Dr. Jill Hubbard. She knew that I liked memoirs and thought I’d enjoy it.

The back cover reads “If our families are to flourish, we will need to learn and practice ways of forgiving those who have had the greatest impact upon us: our mothers and fathers.” It goes on further to pose these questions:
• Do you struggle from the deep pain of a broken relationship with a parent?
• What does the Bible say about forgiveness? Why must we forgive at all?
• How do we honor those who act dishonorably toward us, especially when these people are as influential as our parents? Can we ever break free from the “sins of our fathers?”
• What does forgiveness look like in the lives of real parents and children? Does forgiveness mean, I have to let an estranged parent back into my life? Is it possible to forgive a parent who has passed away?

Using a series of heart-wrenching stories, (some personal, some from others), the authors manage to present horrific examples of parent-child abuse and then they go on to explain why it is so important to forgive.

What’s interesting to me is that this is a memoir of a different color, not quite a memoir – not quite a reference book – instead it’s sort of like a “memfrence.” Add to this a strong Christian tone and what you get is a complex book that weaves several ideas and approaches into one piece.

Which, in this case, actually works, and that’s just not an easy thing to do.

My friend assured me that the religious aspect was all in context. “It appears naturally,” she told me. And it does. Not only does it appear naturally but it appears often. Obviously I’m not the right audience for this book because I found the references a little jarring. However, if you go over to amazon, you’ll find many, many readers who appreciated that very same Christian aspect. They liked the approach, for them it felt right and it helped them, while using their faith, to figure out their relationships with their parents.

But don’t get me wrong. Adding religious views is not a bad thing, especially if it is part of a sincere backbone to your book’s purpose, as it is here. It’s all in how it’s presented. This is a well-written book that manages to keep several balls in the air at once. I have tremendous respect for the authors who could have been side-tracked by telling too many stories, by not telling enough, or who could have hijacked a story with too much reference material. See what I mean? Writing a book that “does” several things (not just tell a memoir story but also gives instructions) is a very tough thing to do. Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers is a great example of a book that not only manages to balance all, but does it well.

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Wendy Thomas is an award winning journalist, columnist, and blogger who believes that taking challenges in life will always lead to goodness. She is the mother of 6 funny and creative kids and it is her goal to teach them through stories and lessons.

Wendy’s current project involves writing about her family’s experiences with chickens (yes, chickens). (www.simplethrift.wordpress.com)

The tangled web

We live in an older house that used to be a summer cabin, but which over the years has been added (and added) on to. Parts of our house are the original cabin which means that “air tight” is not a term you are going to hear any time soon in our midst.

Critters in the wall and bugs all around are a way of life for us.

I’ve rationalized this by saying that at least the presence of insects means that we aren’t being overcome with Radon. It’s just part of living in a house with kids, chickens, a dog and a view that can’t be beat.

A few weeks back, while brushing my teeth, I glanced up and saw a spider weaving a web near the light fixture.

When E.B. White is your Great-Uncle and you’ve been raised on the story of a gracious and kind spider, who gives her life for her friend, your first thought upon seeing a spider isn’t – “I need to get rid of this, now.”

Instead, it’s more along the lines of – “Why hello, little buddy, how’s it going?”

Since then, I’ve been watching my little (big) spider. I’ve seen her nap, repair her web, and I’ve seen how when she caught a fly in her web, she wrapped it in silk and then delicately sucked its guts out.

Recently another younger spider (daughter?) has joined the bigger one and I’ve seen how they work together to build their community web. Lately they’ve moved from under the light fixture to a higher corner of the ceiling where the hunting might prove to be better.

At one time, my daughter’s friend offered to catch the spiders and let them loose outside. She had her shoe ready to scoop them away from the wall.

“No,” I replied. “No. No. NO.”

The spiders stay. I want to know how this story is going to play out. I want to know its ending. I desperately want to know what happens.

I have to know what happens.

After a few weeks of watching these cunning and cooperative arachnids, one morning, I casually mentioned to my son Trevor, “have you seen the spiders in the bathroom?”

“You mean the ones that ate the fly?” Apparently Trevor had been watching the spiders for as long as I had been.

Hmmm, the compulsion to observe and tell a story – do you think it’s nature or nurture?

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Wendy Thomas is an award winning journalist, columnist, and blogger who believes that taking challenges in life will always lead to goodness. She is the mother of 6 funny and creative kids and it is her goal to teach them through stories and lessons.

Wendy’s current project involves writing about her family’s experiences with chickens (yes, chickens). (www.simplethrift.wordpress.com)

The bones of a book

So what do you do when you’ve finished one big project, pushed it out the door, and are just waiting, waiting, (waiting) to hear about it?

You turn around and focus on the next piece.

Oh sure, I have my articles to keep me busy (at last count, I have 19 due in the next 2 months) and I have my blogs, but I also have another book-length manuscript in me (maybe even more.) And while it feels a little like I’m abandoning my first-born, there is nothing to do until I hear what to do. (I know, it sounds rather Zen doesn’t it?)

I’m going back and starting from the beginning with this next project (even though I have a 300 page rough draft.) I’m going to plot the organization and the action and then see what I have and see where it fits. It’s been sitting, patiently waiting for me in a box for a few months. Hello friend of mine, let me see you with fresh eyes.

While some may object to this rather clinical approach to writing, I’ve always worked well with structure and guidelines. I love a story that is so well constructed, it can hold water.

I love books where themes are subtly repeated throughout. I read a book recently where you were hit you over the head with the book’s theme of “bloom where you are planted” in *every* chapter. Enough already – if the author had had a structured outline, she would have seen how repetitive she was. I love books where a detail mentioned in an earlier chapter becomes important in a later one, a continuity that makes sense, and each chapter logically follows the one before.

But to do that well requires planning. A lot of planning.

I’ve read many “blogger” books lately and I have to say, that for the most part blogging does not translate well to book writing. They are just not the same beast. You can be an excellent blogger (and there are some very good ones out there) but a lousy book writer.

In a blog post you can explore voice. You can get a little sloppy with your language. You can make assumptions on what your readers know.

But if you don’t understand that a book has a different structure and formula, you are going to get people who will shake their heads after reading your book and say “huh, what just happened?” Blog readers are already familiar with your story, unlike those readers of a book, who need to be taken by the hand and led through your story.

So how is this done? How best is a blog converted to a book (or any information or story for that matter)? By knowing book structure and by knowing story formulas. I don’t care if you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, the bones are important. They are so important.

The bones are what makes your story stand.

Which is why this weekend, I’ll be sitting at my computer with some of my favorite story architecture books (Blueprint your Bestseller by Stuart Horwicz , Story Engineering and Story Physics by Larry Brooks) and I will working on defining my blueprint *before* I attempt to build my house.

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Wendy Thomas is an award winning journalist, columnist, and blogger who believes that taking challenges in life will always lead to goodness. She is the mother of 6 funny and creative kids and it is her goal to teach them through stories and lessons.

Wendy’s current project involves writing about her family’s experiences with chickens (yes, chickens). (www.simplethrift.wordpress.com)

The Rush To the End Syndrome

I see this often in books and I don’t know if it happens because of time pressure or because of writer skill, but here’s what happens –

A book starts off strong and you’re thinking “wow, this is a great story!” but then somewhere, usually about ½ to 2/3rd of the way the writing gets noticeably weaker. It almost feels like the writer is rushing to get out a finished product.

It was a great idea and it needs to be published *now!*

While accomplished and practiced writers who follow formulas like Patterson (nothing against him, just read his book ZOO) if a writer does not have the strength of story organization and formula under her belt, things quickly fall apart.

And the reader senses that.

Perhaps the best example I’ve read of this is Wild where you’re going along and then (literally) in the final few paragraphs, the author fast-forwards to several years later with marriage and children. (That’s when I threw the book against the wall.)

The end.

Huh?

Someone obviously told the author that her time was up.

I’m currently reading A Discovery of Witches – it was a staff pick in an indie bookshop and while it started off okay, I’m at 200+ pages (out of 600!) and it feels like someone told this author that she needed to pad her story (with tea time, yoga classes, and black slacks.) In this case, it’s not so much that she’s rushing to the end, but that she’s lost her focus (although to be fair, I’ve read the reviews on Amazon and I don’t have much hope for the ending.)

How can this be avoided?

Take your Time

You’ve got to take the time to write your book, be comfortable in your skin and in your story. I’m working on a memoir that will be ready to go out at the end of this month. I’ve done what everyone says you shouldn’t do – I’ve written the entire manuscript instead of the first 50 pages like you are advised to do with memoirs. I’ve taken my time and it says what I want it to say.

In the past, I’ve had agents bite on my “great idea” only to pump out a mishmash of garbage in order to meet a deadline. It didn’t’ work. I didn’t have the skills to write that way (and quite frankly I don’t want to write that way either.)

Outline

Look, you all know I’m a planner. I write out an outline of my projects and I keep to that general outline (notice I said general, it’s not set in concrete.) An outline is my road map, it keeps me on target. I write with a copy of it right in front of me.

I know my ending before I start my first paragraph, and in fact, I often start with the ending and work back from it so that it’s justified in my story. When I get lost (and don’t think I don’t) I look to my map to see where I should be heading and where I’ve come from.

Edit

I also let a friend read my work and I trust her enough to listen when she says something like, this part doesn’t really belong. Sometimes I push back but often I discover that that passage is important to *me* and not to the story. Out it goes.

As a writer, it’s important to give yourself enough time, a road map, and an outside point of view – while it may not completely eliminate wandering text and a rush to the end, it will certainly curtail it.

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Wendy Thomas is an award winning journalist, columnist, and blogger who believes that taking challenges in life will always lead to goodness. She is the mother of 6 funny and creative kids and it is her goal to teach them through stories and lessons.

Wendy’s current project involves writing about her family’s experiences with chickens (yes, chickens). (www.simplethrift.wordpress.com)

The Hero’s Journey

Note: this post contains spoilers to the movie “Gravity.”

As an effort to show my students that I walk the talk of writing, I always bring in the current book I’m reading to stress that writers read. All the time. The other week I brought in a copy of The Writer’s Journey – Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler. I started talking about the Hero’s Journey and Joseph Campbell and all I saw from my students were blank stares.

Besides making me feel really old (seriously, you’ve never heard of Joseph Campbell?) I realized that I had a great teaching opportunity here. I could show my class that just like in Technical Writing, some creative writing also follows organizational rules that make it easier for the writer.

“Yeah sure,” is the response I got from my students whose eyes had already started to glaze.

The Hero’s journey must always start in an ordinary world, I began.

Where does the Wizard of Oz start? On a farm.

Where does Star Wars start? On a farm.

The hero must be approached by someone who asks him to go on a journey – to which he replies no. He’s safer where he is, he has no interest in leaving, and he has no interest in being uncomfortable.

But then something happens that makes it impossible for him to say no.

Auntie Em gets sick. Luke’s relatives are slaughtered. BAM. The story begins right here.

At this point I realized that some of my students were starting to pay attention to what I was saying.

I went through the various additional aspects of the Hero’s journey.

In the Wizard of Oz – the wizard is the mentor (with the arguments that her traveling trio also mentored to some extent.) In Star Wars, you have Obi-Wan Kenobi – literally the wise old man. (And yes, I’m going to use the word “Literal” many times in this post because, well it literally means what I want it to mean.)

There is a talisman of some sort – in the Wizard of Oz, you have ruby slippers (also the basket with the dog but as the dog actually plays a role, we decided against that.) Indiana Jones has that fantastic hat.

There is an “evil force” that opposes the hero (witch in the Wizard of Oz, Evil Empire (Lucas makes it very easy for you to identify this one) in Star Wars.

There is challenge one, challenge two, and then challenge three.

Finally there is trial by fire from which the hero emerges and is then rewarded.

Do you remember the final scene in Star Wars? They literally get rewarded with medals for their actions. (Lucas may be brilliant but no one is ever going to accuse him of being subtle.)

At this point I had the entire class’s attention. “Wow,” I was hearing. “I never knew this!”

I then turned to the horrific (personal opinion) recent film “Gravity.”

It starts off in space (ordinary for them) a warning comes (asteroid debris is on the way) which is ignored.

The asteroids hit (call to action which can’t be refused.)

The astronaut, buoyed by her talisman (a photo of her daughter) decides to fight.

The astronaut tries to get back into her capsule (challenge one.)

Tries to get to the next space station (challenge two.)

The astronaut tries to get to the final space craft (challenge three.)

We have a mentor (ah, that silly George.)

And we have evil in the form of death by lack of oxygen (to ram this down our throats, she runs out of oxygen several times throughout the movie.)

There is a final (literal) trial by fire when she re-enters the atmosphere and is almost burned up.

She survives and after landing in a rather amniotic environment she escapes from her pod (which the exit hatch is conveniently located underwater) to be reborn into a more confident woman who can now LIVE with the death of her daughter.

Fade to black.

When I was done explaining this, I turned to my class. Once you see this pattern, it can’t be unseen, I told them.

“So what you are going to say, the next time you watch an action movie that begins in an ordinary world?” I asked my astounded students.

“We’re going to say that we already know what’s going to happen, because our teacher ruined it for us.”

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Note: this is a quick overview and there is so much more to the hero’s journey. If you want to learn more do yourself a favor and pick up Vogler’s book.

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Wendy Thomas is an award winning journalist, columnist, and blogger who believes that taking challenges in life will always lead to goodness. She is the mother of 6 funny and creative kids and it is her goal to teach them through stories and lessons.

Wendy’s current project involves writing about her family’s experiences with chickens (yes, chickens). (www.simplethrift.wordpress.com)