The Shoreline Times THE WRITE STUFF: How to create lighthearted personal stories Published: Thursday, August 08, 2013 By Lynn Haney Trowbridgetrowbridge.lynn@gmail BLITHE. WITTY. MIRTHFUL. Yeasty. Irreverent. Ebullient. Urbane. Droll. It’s alarming how charming a writer can be if she just flings caution to the winds. A client of mine — author, poet and Ph.D. professor Elizabeth Hahn — has done just that with her children’s book titled “Scamp.” It’s a fictionalized memoir of Elizabeth’s early years, back when she was called Betsy and living with her family in the Grove Beach community of Clinton. This was during the Great Depression, before the Shoreline was built up and when family members had to rely on each other for support and entertainment. CHILDREN LIKE BETSY, a Pippi Longstocking sort of a rascal, could wander free along the water’s edge, dillydally in town or go searching for adventure in wooded areas. Despite its insouciant style, “Scamp” doesn’t stray far from the author’s actual family history. After Betsy’s father died suddenly from a typhoid kind of infection, her mother took a job with the New Deal Federal Art Project, managing painters and sculptors. She left her three children in the care of her own parents who were endearing characters. Grandpa, a retired wildcat prospector who relished the rough and tumble life of the American West, had issues with Grandma, and spent his time in the basement making toys and talking to his pet spider, Maude. Grandma, a patrician, was determined to instill the WASP code of good conduct in her grandchildren. Betsy subverted Grandma’s program — and therein lies much of “Scamp’s” charm. ELIZABETH DESCRIBES how Betsy highjacks a neighbor’s jalopy and runs it into a ditch; loses a much-awaited bank check; and sneaks food to The Leatherman (a legendary hobo who wandered Connecticut and New York dressed in a homemade suit of animal hides), who is camped in a cave near Clinton. Intrepid Betsy even tries to rescue a family clutching desperately to their house as it floats down a flooded marsh during the 1938 hurricane. LIKE THE REST OF THE COUNTRY, Clinton felt the devastation of The Great Depression. “If you lost your job, the next stop was the breadline,” recalled Elizabeth. “Yet many people in Clinton were too proud to go for help. They just suffered.” You may wonder how Hahn managed to write such an entertaining book given the misery around her. Simple: viewpoint, exaggeration and adroit selection of material. Yes, she was heartbroken by the death of her father (the defining moment of her childhood), and she yearned for things every kid wants, such as a bicycle, but when it came to setting anecdotes down on paper, she knew what material to include and what to pitch in the wastebasket. Focusing on quirky characters and zany situations, she portrays herself as a spunky kid who jumped over boundaries, but still had a tender heart. DURING AN INTERVIEW WITH NPR’S Terry Gross on the Fresh Air program, David Sedaris, an essayist who writes funny personal tales (“Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “Naked,” “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” and “Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls”) touched on the difference between an author’s private self and the persona he projects in his writing, adding that the two sometimes collide in his journal. “There’s the you that you present to the world,” he told Gross, “and then there’s, you know, of course the real one, and, if you’re lucky, there’s not a huge difference between those two people.” CASTING ONESELF AS LUCKY in personal stories can infuse a lighthearted tone in your writing. Ernest Hemingway carries off this approach beautifully in “A Moveable Feast: Sketches of the Author’s Life in Paris in the Twenties.” Describing hardships such as hunger pangs in Paris while surrounded by sensuous food, Hemingway beguiles the reader by reflecting: “But then we did not think of ourselves as poor. We did not accept it. We thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich.” Another technique to enchant readers is to add juicy stories about luminaries, if you happened to know any. In “A Movable Feast,” Hemingway evokes the pain and poignancy of 1920s Paris with his tales about Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. ONE FINAL TIDBIT: Whittle your prose. Shakespeare coined the phrase, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Satirical poet and short-story master Dorothy Parker made this adage part of her modus operandi. She even played with the Bard’s words by quipping: “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” Lynn Haney Trowbridge is an author and writing coach with extensive experience advising people about essays, memoirs, novels and nonfiction projects. Contact Lynn at trowbridge.lynn@gmail
Posted on: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 20:19:04 +0000
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