By Paul Bishop
Western writer Louis L’Amour once created the wonderfully romantic notion of a heroine who scattered her poems across the frontier by using brightly colored ribbons to tie them to uprooted tumbleweeds. Wandering cowboys were constantly on the lookout for these scraps of verse, finding both comfort and campfire conversation from their creation. The heroine’s audience was miniscule, but her writings still had a powerful effect on the individuals who discovered her gifts.
Most of us who subscribe to writers’ magazines, buy how-to writing tomes, and participate in writing workshops do so with the objective of getting our writing out to the widest possible audience. While this is an admirable goal, it can sometimes blind us to the special blessings our writing and storytelling abilities can bring to a much smaller audience.
I’ve been fortunate over the years to experience the highs of having nine novels published, numerous scripts produced for episodic television, and am poised for the release of my first feature film. None of these wonderful writing milestones, however, have compared to the joy I’ve received from far more personal writings designed to be read by very small or singular audiences.
Bedtime Stories
When I married my wife, I also inherited a seven-year-old son. Trying to find a way to smooth the blending of our lives together, I spent many evenings making up stories for him about Inspector McCaw, a parrot recently retired from the Brazilian Parrot Police and now living in London’s Chessington Zoo. Over the course of several evenings, Inspector McCaw solved The Case of the Elephant Who Lost His Memory, The Case of the Empty Snake Skin, The Case of the Solar Eclipse, and other activities related to zoo life. My wife encouraged me to put these stories on paper and bind them, so as not to lose them for the generation of grandchildren she was planning for even then.
I thought the notion was silly until I realized how much my wife’s father’s stories concerning the adventures of Chirpy the Cricket and Hoppy the Rabbit meant to her. These simple tales were an important legacy that needed to be preserved for the small audience of just our family.
Collecting and putting these stories into prose was, of course, an effort. But the labor of love – for that is truly the essence of this type of storytelling – was infinitely repaid when my son and wife unwrapped their own copies of the stories as part of our tradition of giving homemade Christmas gifts.
Memoirs
In talking to writing groups and other gatherings interested in the creation of memoirs, I am always struck by the restrictive and apparently overwhelming human need to start with the line, “I was born…” This instinct to assume nobody will understand the juicy parts of your life without the full story for background is just plain wrong. Not only that, it’s boring.
I have found the best way to preserve the precious memories of your life for future generations is to concentrate on specific events. What are the seminal experiences that shaped your life? What specific incidents were you involved in that are substantially different than the like events of other individuals?
In my own attempts to create these event specific memoirs, I first wrote about an extended ping-pong tournament played in our living room against my father when I was fifteen. For me, the culmination of the tournament changed the balance of our father/child relationship in a heart-rending way. When I gave the story to my father on his 73rd birthday, it immediately brought back warm memories, laughter, and yes, tears – an experience much more precious than any monetary return.
When creating these memoir moments, look for events that are unique to you. Once, talking about memoir writing to a group of residents at an assisted living home, an elderly woman kept attempting to interject stories from her youth in Germany. All of these were generic and of little interest to the group until she informed us that she had once dated Adolf Hitler! Now, true or not, there was a story unique to her experience that everybody wanted to hear – a memoir moment she needed to put on paper to save for the posterity of her family.
Humor
Using humor in your personal writings can often make a special impact on your select audience. For a golfing friend’s 40th birthday, I created a tale featuring my friend as a mad scientist intent on stealing DNA samples from the world’s greatest golfers in order to create an unbeatable Frankenstein-type golfing clone. In the story, “Night of the Frankengolfer,” I cast myself as the bumbling detective Sherluck Jones out to foil the plot.
Other family members and friends put in semi-veiled appearances that distorted their best known foibles. The story ended with the mad scientist pushing his horrid creation off the castle ramparts and being arrested for making an “obscene clone fall.” Silly? Absolutely. But when read aloud to much laughter at the 40th birthday party, it became a cherished gift and a family event.
Being self-deprecating in the humor of these stories – making gentle fun of yourself as much as the others involved – is generally a smart tactic. In creating the tale of the Frankengolfer, the humor was exaggerated because it suited the nonsense style of a completely made-up story.
In telling the true tale of our family’s first adventure vacation, the humor of the situation only needed to be slightly exaggerated to make its point. Specifically, this tale involved what my very safety and security conscious wife and son would refer to as river rafting. In actuality this event was little more than a gentle tub float down Arizona’s Salt River. This difference in perception between my wife and son and myself became the heart of a story we now cherish as a family heirloom.
A Life of Its Own
The joy of writing for an audience of one can sometimes take on a life of its own, becoming a family story within itself. Going back again to when my son Greg was seven, his enjoyment for picking up the mail, coupled with his disappointment that there was never anything address to him, provided another special writing opportunity.
In a letter addressed to Greg, I wrote from the point of view of T.H.E. Kat, a feline who lived with a seven-year-old, red-headed boy, at a veterinarian’s practice in England. I placed English stamps on the envelope (steamed off letters from relatives) and popped it in the mailbox after the postman’s visit. When Greg picked up the mail, he was delighted to find a letter for him, and amazed – as only a seven year old red-headed boy can be – that a cat would be writing to him.
Surprisingly, his first impulse was to get his mother to help him write a return letter to T.H.E. Kat, full of questions and observations. This became the beginning of a bi-monthly correspondence between Greg and T.H.E. Kat. that lasted until Greg was in his early teens. By then, of course, he had figured out it wasn’t a cat writing to him, but he was still surprised when he found out it was me writing the letters and not one of my extended family in England.
At first, Greg would get me to read the letters aloud and then get mom to help him write a reply.
However, as the correspondence continued, Greg would read the letters aloud to us and then sit down to create his own response. This activity became a family event, drawing my wife and me close together as we watched our only child’s reading, writing, and creative skills expand. Obviously, we kept all the letters and responses, and can’t wait to pass them on to Greg’s wife and family as they give a telling window into Greg as a maturing child.
Presentation
When creating a piece of writing for a singular or selective audience, its presentation as a gift can be given in the form of a simple printout or a more elaborate handmade book.
Now, don’t let the words handmade book throw you into a panic. I use the term to refer to creations as uncomplicated as stapled pages taken directly from your printer, or pages placed in plastic page protectors and secured in a binder. More sophisticated efforts can include covers secured with spiral bindings, script pins, brass fasteners, or (my favorite) decorative bachelor buttons found at the local fabric store.
The options for designing and making handmade books are limited only by your imagination. For my part, I’ve never used anything to create my presentations beyond scissors, art papers, a ruler, a hole punch, a paper cutter, spray adhesive, and a variety of items available for free at every local copier store. I’ve produced more elaborate handmade books with ideas from how-to volumes borrowed from the library, and a constant search for legitimate ways to procrastinate starting the next writing project (just kidding – well, sort of just kidding).
Remember, it is not the binding or design of the homemade book that is important. It is the words inside that are going to have the impact.
The most valuable writing I’ve ever done was a fairytale about a poor jester entitled “The Richest Man in the World.” There was only one person for whom this was written – only one person who ever read it – the woman who is now my wife. Many years later, it is still part of the foundation of our enduring love. No wider audience could have been more important.
Whether you’re dropping scraps of poetry from your car as you travel, writing memoirs for those closest to you, or making up personalized stories for friends, know these efforts will endure longer and mean more than any mass market bestseller. Yes, write to succeed with the wider audience, but don’t neglect the impact and power of writing for an audience of one.
Next: The Key to Your Personal History
