• Eps 2: Small Memories Can Be the Start of Something Big

  • Sep 16 2019
  • Length: 15 mins
  • Podcast
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Eps 2: Small Memories Can Be the Start of Something Big

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  • Photo courtesy of Sam Erwin Transcript: Hi, listeners, welcome to this episode of "Your Story, Your Legacy." I’m Amy Woods Butler, founder and owner of The Story Scribe. I’ve been helping people write their life story and family history since 2010. And I want to help you write yours. Or help you write the life story of a beloved family member, so that future generations can know about the people and the family they come from. In the last episode, I explained what I do as a professional personal historian, and how I help clients who want a book written but don’t want to tackle the writing themselves. From this point forward on the podcast, the focus is going to be on you doing the writing, and the things that I’ve learned along the way that can help you with that. Because I get it, writing your own life story can be overwhelming. But you can do it! It’s a matter of taking it a step at a time. And I’m going to be giving you suggestions on what those steps can be. The writing suggestion from last time was to take a look at your first or middle name, and jot down some story or memory related to it. We didn’t want to include the last name, because when you do that, it’s too easy to slip into the territory of genealogy. I love genealogy, I think it can be great fun, but genealogy is about gathering the data—names and places and dates birth, etc—and what we’re doing is gathering the STORIES. I told you I’d give you an example with my own name. I come from a family of two kids, my older sister and me. My sister was born in 1964, and the family history has it that my mom got to pick her first name, and my dad got to choose the middle name, and then the same for me two years later. My sister is Stephanie Cassandra—Stephanie from my mom, Cassandra from my dad—and I’m Amy Celeste. Mom’s choice, Amy, Dad’s choice, Celeste. Now, you’re probably thinking, that’s not a real story, or who cares? It’s just a trifle. And we all have them. You’ll see when you start thinking about your life story, and the memories you want to share, these random bits will pop up. I like to think of our memory as a field of vision. And you know how you get floaters in your field of vision? The dots and squiggly lines? I think of these random bits as floaters in our memory’s field of vision. And I’m going to share with you a couple reasons why they can be valuable. Using random memories as openers In the case of the names, I might want to use this as an opener to the passage where I talk about my appearance on the scene. [On a side note: Don’t start your life story with “I was born on this date in this place.” It’s boring! You’ll turn off your readers. More importantly, it can lock you into the frame of mind that you have to give a factual chronolgy of your life. Chances are you’re going to tell your story chronolgically, but you don’t want it to be a “this-happened-then-this-happened” kind of story, the way small kids tell their stories or dreams or the plots of long kids’ movies. I’m going to circle back to this at the end of the episode and give you more thoughts about this.] Using random snippets of memory to trigger bigger memories and insights The other way these floaters on our memory’s field of vision, these random bits, bitlets of memory or story, can be useful is where things get exciting. Because the random things will often trigger more substantial memories or the impulse to reflect on the meanings of things that happened. For instance, with the names, this random memory might lead me to think about the reasons why my parents chose the names they did. Or the historical context—In the mid-1960s, when my sister and I were both born, women in the US were still staying at the hospital for a week or so after giving birth. That’s some historical context, and I could even build that out more, and talk about how women were put to sleep during the birth, what they used to call “twilight sleep,” or about the cockamamie ideas they had about forumula ...
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