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The World Is Waiting To Hear Your Story Thu, 14 May 2020 19:08:45 +0000 en-CA hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://pattimhall.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/cropped-icon-1-32x32.png General| Patti M Hall https://pattimhall.com/general/ 32 32 Don't Wait for Answers to These Questions–they aren't comin' https://pattimhall.com/dont-wait-answers-questions-arent-comin/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dont-wait-answers-questions-arent-comin Mon, 12 Sep 2016 17:17:41 +0000 http://pattimhall.com/?p=1031 Over on Huffington Post, I’m coming clean about the questions that just won’t be getting answered to your satisfaction before the memoir gets rolling. you can read it Here:  or scroll down. Those questions that run through your mind like a song on repeat.. We all have plaguing, nagging questions that get in our way…

The post Don't Wait for Answers to These Questions–they aren't comin' appeared first on Patti M Hall.

]]> Over on Huffington Post, I’m coming clean about the questions that just won’t be getting answered to your satisfaction before the memoir gets rolling.

you can read it Here: 

or scroll down.

Those questions that run through your mind like a song on repeat..

We all have plaguing, nagging questions that get in our way before we start a project. Why would it be any different with your memoir?

As unique as each of our life stories is, there are some commonalities in the journey from memory to memoir. I think that all life writing projects start out with the burning desire to describe an experience. This yearning is universal, in my opinion, and I see it almost every day of my life. Whenever someone meets me for the first time and finds out that my business is to inspire memoir writers―they sit me down, put a coffee in my hand and after a three-minute synopsis of key life events, tell me how “everyone says I should write a book.” (Sound familiar?)
But they quickly admit―”I just couldn’t get past the questions I had.” Again, has this happened to you? Read on….Then there are the folks who have gotten to the page and poured their memories and feelings onto them. Hurray for them. I get jazzed when a person just like you sends me a note and says, “I was so inspired to write about my life after last month’s family reunion.” They go on to describe how they wrote like a whirling dervish (look it up), cranking out pages like a Gestetner (remember those) on jet fuel.

Question mark sign made of stones

Questions are NOT cast in stone!

Then comes the next common element of the memoir writing process―the toilet-scrubbing, agonizing walk through the mud that we all must endure―the questions that ride like anvils on our shoulders:

How do I know my story is good enough?
Why would someone ever want to read about my life?

I want to offer evidence to you and in order to assuage the doubts that are keeping you from filling journals with the stories of how you came to be the person that you are. 

Do you think Elizabeth Gilbert knew whether her “story” about travelling to Indonesia, Italy and India in the year after she had endured major life crises was going to be a best-selling sensation, that an Oscar-winning actress would play her in the movie or that her memoir would be translated into umpteen languages? No. I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say she had these two questions too. Eat, Pray, Love was the book Gilbert was called to write, the story that chased her to the page. The questions above were asked and answered: I can’t know and I don’t know. Then she went back to writing.

What about the woman who wrote a memoir about a 94-day hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995? (you may have heard of her) Do you think Cheryl Strayed wasn’t wondering if anyone would be interested, at least some of the time in the intense two and a half years she spent crafting Wild? Strayed spoke about this when questions regarding her next book were occupying interviewers minds: “It’s kind of none of my business how the next book does or what people think of it.”

Each of these memoirists had to ask and answer the two burdening questions above. They needed to put aside the distracting concern of the quality of the story and the interest of the reader. Then they just wrote the book that was in them to write.

The truth is, you can’t answer either question, anyway.

Your attempts to craft some satisfactory response for yourself will only paralyze your efforts and consume the precious energy you could be using to draw memories from the reaches of your mental archive.
Put simply―stop asking the questions and just dip your pen in the inkwell.

I have a sign that hangs over my desk:

Don’t think. Write.

It’s what writers do.
The sheer joy of the flow of the story and the filling of the pages will be all the reward you need…to never bother asking the questions you can’t answer anyway.

Write on. The world is waiting to hear your story.

P

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SEND ME THE PROMPTS!

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]]> At What Cost? https://pattimhall.com/at-what-cost/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=at-what-cost Fri, 13 Nov 2015 10:58:03 +0000 http://pattimhall.com/?p=272 Eighteen blue, silver and white gift bags, stuffed with contrasting tissue paper lined the table. Each sported a number from 1 to 18. However typical it was of me to overdo things with gift giving, especially when it came to my boys, this was a milestone made grander by the medical ordeals my son Adam…

The post At What Cost? appeared first on Patti M Hall.

]]> Eighteen blue, silver and white gift bags, stuffed with contrasting tissue paper lined the table. Each sported a number from 1 to 18. However typical it was of me to overdo things with gift giving, especially when it came to my boys, this was a milestone made grander by the medical ordeals my son Adam had endured to make it to here.

Adam fist pumped as he unloaded the loot and passed it to his brother. The hockey cards, cash, candy, and a couple of much higher priced items were an elaborate haul. The last bag contained coveted tickets to an All-Star game featuring his favorite team. I stood back, my face revealing glimmers of how my much younger self must have looked at Adam when he was a baby. I felt the heat, the slow roll of tears down my cheeks and busied myself with pulling away the refuse of his unwrapping from around his feet.

I knew what other moms did on their son’s 18th birthdays. There would be backslapping and congratulating and joking about being legal to vote or to have a first drink. I stood back, stomach clenched against what might have been. A couple of rounds of the pleading mantra that had become the soundtrack of our lives rolled by in my head, “please not my baby, please not my baby.”

We were two years into the odyssey with Adam’s ultra rare, incurable disease, and around that birthday, we caught a break for a couple of weeks. There were more regular days than hospital days, and fewer phone calls to remind us our lives had registered an 8-point earthquake from which we wouldn’t be rescued. So we made a freaking big deal of that birthday.

We do a lot of things that other parents wouldn’t do, we parents of rare kids. I’m not talking about extravagant presents. We do absolutely everything we can and more. We become more than mothers, transforming into advocates, cheerleaders, bodyguards. We get a Ph.D. in our child, his symptoms, her treatment options and the doctors who can provide it. While we make the calls, keep the appointments, talk our terrified kids into painful tests and relentless pokes and so many repeat scans, we end up in relationships with our children that are more complex than the other parents we know.

“Your boys sure love their mom,” my friend Mailie said. She made the remark outside the dressing room after one of boys’ games.

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“They actually choose to spend time with you. You’re always together. I’m so jealous.”

“Ya, but think about why that is. Then you won’t envy it. We spend a lot of intense time together in places where they don’t want to have to go without me.”

“You mean because of the divorce?” Mailie asked.

“No, the divorce was nothing compared to all the medical stuff. Adam’s stuck going with his mother everywhere. I’m sure he wishes it were different, that a lot of things were different.”

“I don’t think he sees it that way, actually,” Mailie said. She had known my boys for about eight years, and felt qualified to surmise.

“Really?”

“He wouldn’t be as well as he is without you. Remember that will ya? It may be a life-saving necessity, but you guys make it almost look like fun.”

I thought about this. She wanted me to thank her. She wanted me to beam pridefully for a moment, confident in the knowledge that I was one of the cool moms. But how could she know that in an odd way she had shone a light on the deep sadness, the perpetual grief in our lives, and on our difference.

“I’d give it all up, you know. All this time with Adam, for just one day when he could get up and forget he is sick.”

Closer than other mothers and sons, hell yes. But at a cost no child should have to pay.

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