Tag: Stories

A story that will touch your heart

Neera

As you can tell, I am a collector of everyday stories. Here is another one:

One afternoon, Martha Sweeny, was in a coin laundry outside her hometown of stonewall Texas, when half a dozen young motorcyclists suddenly roared up to the gas station next door.

They were all a boisterous, rough-looking lot, and one of them—younger than the other, no more than seventeen—was the loudest and roughest-acting of the bunch.

With several of his friends, the boy entered the laundry, and then something happened when he looked around this small, rural town—and, especially when he notices this older woman observing him.

In one of those revealing moments we’ve all lived through, Martha made eye contact with the boy and saw him hesitate.

Later, after his friends had gassed up their cycles, he told them his starter was on the blink to go on without him. He said he’d catch up.

After the others went roaring off, the boy brought some dirty clothes into the laundry. “His shoulders sagged as if he were terribly weary.

Dust and grease and sweat-stained his shirt and jeans. A beginning beard faintly shadowed his chin and leans cheeks. He turned briefly, our eyes met again. Emotions flickered across his face—doubt, longing, pain?”

Moments later, he ran his clothes through the washer and dryer, then disappeared into the men’s room.

When he emerged ten minutes later, he was wearing clean pants and shirt and he had shaved his scraggly beard, scrubbed his hands and face, and even combed his hair.

He now grinned in Martha’s direction and jumping on his motorcycle, zoomed away.

Not following the others, but going back the way he’d come—back toward home.

Every time I read this story, I get a lump in my throat. And that is the aim of the stories. To evoke emotion. To bring out a single tear.

Personal stories are all about change

Neera

Phillip Berry Osborne said:

Ultimately, the key to personal-experience stories is change. Where our personal lives are concerned, in fact, change is probably the biggest single challenge we all face and share.

That’s why the best personal stories explore our transition in life—if only to encourage us to accept ourselves in some new context or as we’re becoming.

Such transition or change is vital to storytelling since it’s bound up with the overall message that underscores any good story – and yet, too often, writers fail in this one key area of change and, especially the message that comes out of it.

Without a message, a story is like an egg without a shell.

Many of us, as writers, neglect this fundamental requirement.

Evoke the senses with your writing

Neera

E. L. Doctorow once noted, “Good writing is supposed to evoke a sensation in the reader—not the fact that it’s raining but the feeling of being rained upon.”

Like the one below by Jean Georges, a New York writer, and a master of sensory writing.

After a winter storm several years ago, Jean was asked to check a friend’s Long Island beach house while the friend was away.

Jean expected to find a ‘dreary scene—an abandoned cottage set among pines, stirred by mournful winds.’

But the instant she climbed from her car, she found a world of harsh beauty, discovery, and sensory delight.

The air smelled clean as I looked at a brilliant landscape. The sea was a violet blue, the sky turquoise, and the beach, which the last summer had sloped gently, was not steep, scooped out luminous. Crabs scurried for burrows and gulls spiraled down on them, like paper airplanes against the sky. At the water’s edge, empty shells that whisper when summer waves turn them now made shrill, whistling sounds.

She saw a couple walking hand-in-hand. The man leaned down and wrote something in the sand. She smiles at his age-old act, the epitome of transience: romantic declarations written and so quickly erased by the sea. Not so.

When she came upon his sand message—one word only, his companion’s name—the erosive winter waves were sweeping it, etching the letters more sharply and deeply until they fairly shouted their permanence.

They will be there forever, she thought… or at least until the next high tide.

What a beautiful story and how beautifully and simply it is written.

Everyday Stories

Neera

In the last few posts, I have been sharing everyday stories with you. Ordinary stories from ordinary lives.

Yet they are compelling and stay with us forever.

Some of the best writing—the kind that the readers readily identify with—comes out of all the little happenings in our daily lives.

How little snippets from our daily lives get stored in our memories, percolate there, and then turn into stories, have fascinated me.

A few weeks ago, when I sat down to write my father’s eulogy, the first thing that came to my mind was his hands.

My father had big, soft, and caring hands. The kind of hands a father should have. I started writing about them and out came to a story that I didn’t know existed in my memory vaults.

When I was a little girl, on one hot summer day while playing in a park, I got thirsty. My father led me to a water tap where I tried to drink water with my hand. My tiny hands couldn’t hold much water. Watching me struggle, he cupped his hands, filled them with water, and let me drink from it. My thirst was quenched with just one handful.

Out of millions of such snippets, I was surprised that this one surfaced.

I wondered why. Why didn’t I recall so many other things we did together? Why was nostalgia didn’t take me to the jokes he cracked or the poetry he recited?

Following that, another snippet of memory surfaced. This time he was putting five-years-old-me to sleep by patting my forehead.

Then another one. A photo from my wedding day. He had his hand over my head in the form of a blessing.

It made sense. My father was the symbolic protective hand over me all my life.

But that was not the reason for these memories to come flooding on the morning of his cremation.

It was because he held my hand briefly when he took his last breath, as if reassuring me one last time that everything was fine. He was fine. I will be fine.

The memory of his touch conjured other similar memories.

That is perhaps how everyday stories are formed. One memory recalls another one until they all get interconnected.

Stories are all around us. The trick is developing an active curiosity about them – the way a child does.

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”- Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginning.

Better than anything else, that probably summarizes what these personal stories are all about and what they tell us about the diversity and story worthiness of ordinary people.

They speak to our sense of closeness.

Columnist George Will once put it so succinctly:

“It is extraordinary how extraordinary an ordinary person is.”

And even more extraordinary is the number of stories they’re carrying around—waiting to be written.

Aunt Grace’s Philosophy

Neera

Many years ago I read a story that impacted me so much that I wrote it down in my journal. Recently, while going through old notebooks, I read it and it hit the cord in me again. I have to share it with you.

It originally appeared in Reader’s Digest.

The writer Nardi Reeder Campion describes a time in her life when she was down in the dumps and discovered a diary that had been kept more than forty years before by a maiden aunt who had gone through some bad times herself.

Aunt Grace had been poor, frail, and forced to live with relatives. “I know I must be cheerful,” she wrote, “living in this large family upon whom I am dependent. Yet gloom haunts me. Clearly, my situation will not change; therefore, I shall have to change.”

To help her hold her fragile world together, Aunt Grace resolved to do six things every day:

  • Something for someone else
  • Something for herself
  • Something she didn’t want to do that needed doing
  • A physical exercise
  • A mental exercise
  • An original prayer that always included counting her blessings

These six things help change Nardi’s life as they had helped change Aunt Grace’s life many years before

“Can life be lived by a formula?” Nardi asks herself in the article. “All I know is that since I started to live by those six precepts, I’ve become more involved with others and hence less ‘buried’ in myself.”

Ever since I read this story, Aunt Grace’s motto, ‘Bloom where you are planted’ has become my motto too.

Publishing a book doesn’t make you a writer

Neera

There is a misconception that all aspiring writers have. They are not willing to accept themselves as writers till they have published a book or an article or a short story. They are over the moon if their story wins an award because now they can call themselves a writer. There is proof now. Someone has published their story and given them an award.

But it is a fallacy.

You were a writer before your story got published. Weren’t you? You wrote the story first, then you sent it for publication.

And chances are you wrote a lot many stories before you sent one in a competition. I can bet my last dollar that you had written much more before you wrote those stories. A diary. A journal too maybe. Some poems. Occasional letters. You have written them and that makes you a writer. Then why don’t you call yourself a writer?

It comes down to acceptance. You are not willing to accept the value of your own work. You are looking for authentication from someone else. To give you permission to add the title of ‘writer’ in front of your name.

I have been writing for at least sixteen years now. It took me at least ten to call myself a writer in front of others. Like many aspiring writers, I failed to see that publishing a book doesn’t make you a writer. It makes you an author. And the two are separate terms. The writer is the one who writes, and the author is the one who publishes her writing. You become a writer first and then you become an author. So start calling yourself a writer. And when you publish your book, you can call yourself an author.

Use this philosophy to bury the critic inside you.

Focus on the ‘verb’ of writing and ‘noun’ will follow.

Write, and if you are writing, you are a writer.