Family Reunion

I go to Nauvoo to speak at a family reunion. Not my own. I'm impressed with what the family has pulled together about their Nauvoo ancestors. People who lived there however briefly and joined the Saints as they were driven out toward the west--eventually the Salt Lake Valley.


I'm impressed again with the value of story. Family members gave short sketches of lives they descend from. We stood at Carthage Jail and heard of Willard Richards, and a great great grandfather who was in the jail with Joseph two nights before the martyrdom.


We stood at the Trail of Hope on Parley Street and heard of others who left in that initial exodus from Nauvoo.


Over and over the descendants said they wished they had more information. But everything they knew, every shred, was interesting to them. One family member says she found a stubborn determination--sometimes to a fault--that she sees in herself and even in her children. That helps her, she says, to moderate her behavior.


Another family member that I have known for 40 years has quoted for years from her grandmother's journal. The grandmother's philosophies and ways of facing her own difficult life have continued to teach my friend all these years later.


Value lies in the writing.


I would prefer that my descendants know something about me that is important to me rather than more trivial information they keep just because that is all they have. Which means, I have to write it.


Technology makes it easy now, the writing. Letters, emails, talks, ideas, journals, actual autobiographies, all easier.

I determine to try again. In the meantime, Nauvoo is beautiful.

Draft Two

When Zach entered "Chapter Nine" into the computer this week he suggested we go back to read the beginning of The Six Towers to see if we were on track with where we started. We ran off two copies of the first 50 pages and sat down with red pens.

Several hours later we were almost finished with chapter one! The next day we returned to the 50 pages and labored onward. We are not yet finished, but the whole process has taught us several things.

1.  To become a better writer, practice writing.

We can already see that our mental muscles are more limber and more interesting than they were several weeks ago at the beginning of the book. Like the piano player who practiced on a silent keyboard when he traveled on the train said, "If I miss one day of practicing I can tell it, if I miss two my audience can tell it."

2.  To find threads, read what you've written.

Though we promised ourselves when we introduced a character or an event that we would return, we found three places we had already forgotten about. Letting the thread come to the front of the story will not be difficult, but we have to do it to make it happen.

3.  To discover new ideas, read what you've written

A character we thought was nobody and worth mentioning only in passing suddenly has a place farther along in the book. Because our plot is more fleshed out and events have surfaced we didn't know about when we mentioned him, we never would have thought about him again. Until we read again.

4.  It is okay if rough drafts are, well, rough.

Some days the words flow, some days they don't. Getting something down is better than fretting over it. Working on draft two will let us see what we wrote with fresh eyes.

5.  Writing and revising are two sides of the same coin.

We can see the two sides of the coin take two different sides of the brain. Writing is like building a fire and fanning the flame to reach every corner of our creative right brains. Revising is like throwing water on the fire to put it out and examine it, coldly, clearly, making decisions we do with our analytical left brains. Both processes cannot be done at the same time. In fact, if they are, we will frustrate the process by building the fire, throwing water on it, only to have to build it up again, only to put it out again. Pointless, and sloggingly slow.

So we will finish these first 50 pages, allow a friend or two to read them and give us feedback on the characters and the plot, then throw ourselves into the rest of the writing from chapter nine on.

Somewhere, several weeks from now, we will return to read the beginning again to see if we are doing what we mean to do.

We'll let you know how it goes.