Wild mood swings mark the adolescent phase of a year. We call this phase spring. On Monday balmy sunshine calls for short sleeves and sandals, and Tuesday it may snow. Even so, watching tenuous green shoots emerge from ground and branches keeps hope alive, reminding us that seeds will soon turn into early produce, we’ll romp in shorts, and the season of “easy living” is just around the corner.

Although I generally spurn ritual observances, I do have rituals for greeting spring. I wrote about one of my annual rites, a walk down the road to look for the first ...

A yellowed poster adorned, only by the words of Max Ehrmann’s poem “Desiderata” penned in brown calligraphy, has hung on my  various office walls for nearly forty years. I first became acquainted with this poem when I came across the recording by Les Crane, and I still thrill to the sound of that sweeping line, “You are a child of the universe…”

This poem and song stirred my soul when I first heard it, and it has remained an inspiration through the years. I stop to read it now and then, and consider how closely I’m applying its ...

Sharon Lippincott is pleased to announce the birth of a new blog, Writing for the Health of It. Few regular readers will be surprised at this news, as I have included this concept in many posts here, and mentioned the Writing For the Health of It classes I teach.

The Heart and Craft of Life Writing blog will remain active, with one or two posts a week focusing on the process of writing. Writing for the Health of It will focus on the vast body of research exploring health benefits of expressive ...

Thursday I’ll announce some major news that has been a long time in the making.

You know how sometimes you start reading a book and can’t bear to put it down to go to bed? It’s the tension and mystery or drama that keep you turning those pages. That’s the sort of gripping reader involvement we all strive for as we write memoir and shorter life stories. We want to keep readers hanging, panting for the revelation.

That’s an especially big challenge when people know how the story ends before they begin. So what you can do to add that ...

If you haven’t discovered the TED Lecture series, I suggest you waste no time exploring their phenomenal videos about leading edge ideas, presented in TED sponsored programs.  I’ve embedded one of my favorites for your viewing pleasure. Noreena Hertz is an expert speaking on the dangers of becoming addicted to the advice of experts.

Her words appealed to me on just about every level, perhaps because I was raised on a family of die-hard do-it-yourselfers who lacked the resources of Google to solve every problem. We didn’t even go to the library. We just ...

After twenty years or so, my growing collection of hard drives has bits and pieces of old material hidden away in odd places. I opened one of those odd places today and found a short piece I’d searched for while writing a recent related post about Michelangelo. I wrote the original piece for a news-letter. Don’t be fooled by the third-person parable form; it is a true account of personal experience. The story follows, unchanged from the 1982 original:

One day when Laurie was visiting Guru, he told her a fable about a small boy who asked Michelangelo how he was ...

Kim Pearson, an author, ghostwriter and editor, shared a wrenching story on Womens Memoirs. Kim’s jolting experience with an art teacher taught her a lesson for life about the importance of doing our best. Although stunned by her teacher’s seemingly appalling behavior, Kim came to see it as a gift – it instilled respect for excellence in her developing mind.

Kim learned a lesson in seconds that I spent years acquiring. I grew up with a mother who insisted that ever stitch in every garment be perfect, and I sewed constantly. I hated her perfectionism ...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the great Paper versus Pixels experiment. It’s been ages since I posted anything geeky, so today you get an inside look at the template I set up to use when I want to write something personal on my computer.

I made this template because writing in my standard Garamond font on a white background feels like I’m writing for publication, no matter what I tell myself. On a whim I decided that making the display look like warm paper, and changing to a font that looks like something flowing from a pen might help. Indeed ...

During a recent discussion, someone (I’ll call her Darla) mentioned that she “needed to learn more about my grandmother’s history so I can explain why she acted the way she did and why she was so over-protective.” Although this aspiring memoir writer had only the best of intentions in mind, her comment set a couple of red flags flapping for me. Life story or memoir writers who claim to know why someone else did something, or what that person was thinking, lose credibility with me. Here’s my thinking on this topic: #1 Only ...

Cupid has got to be behind this synchronistic web discovery. Just hours before St. Valentine’s Day I found a link to a PsyBlog post explaining that Affectionate Writing Can Reduce Cholesterol.

Previous posts here have explained how writing about trauma is good for your health, and also that writing about happy stuff is good for you. But love letters and affectionate notes had not made the list, and I have not previously seen reduced cholesterol linked with any form of expressive writing. This is great news!

Based on the simple ...

A little birdie just whispered in my ear, “Check the date of your first post.” Sure enough. Today is fifth anniversary of that first post. It’s hard to imagine that it’s been that long.

For those who came in more recently, this blog began about the time I fully formed the intention of writing The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, and the blog bore the same name as the book. By the time the book was published about eighteen months later, my interests had broadened beyond just story writing, and within a year or so I renamed ...

In January I participated in an experiment to explore the relative merits of journaling on paper versus keyboard. The research project was spearheaded by Amber Starfire, owner of Writing Through Life, a blog and ezine devoted to the fine art of journaling. For one week we wrote by hand. The second week we used the computer, and the third week we mixed the two.

Official results have not been released, but I was a little surprised by my personal findings. From the time I received a Hermes Baby typewriter in preparation for going to college, I used a keyboard for just about ...

Few things have compared to the astonished delight I felt when I opened the front door to an unexpected ring. A man stood on my front porch clutching a  a Happy 40th Birthday Mylar balloon in the midst of several colorful plain ones. After he determined I was indeed Sharon Lippincott, he confidently stepped into the living room and began singing the Happy Birthday song. Then he handed me the bouquet, bowed, and left. What a sweet surprise! Though the attached card had two names, I knew my sister-in-law had outdone herself, and my gratitude lives on.

The standard ...

There are lots of ways to add energy to your prose. One of the simplest is to break your habit of using puny phrases such as “there are.” How can I rephrase that first sentence to add more power to it? Here are a few of many alternatives: Would you like to add energy to your prose? One of the best ways to add energy to your prose is … Your prose will be  more compelling if you … Readers won’t be able to tear their eyes away when you energize your prose with these simple techniques. A more typical example ...

When asked how he went about carving such magnificent statues, Michelangelo is said to have explained that he simply looked at the block of marble, saw the statue within, and chipped away everything that wasn't part of it.  That parable has a lesson for life writers. Most of us have been accustomed to thinking of the task of writing a story as one of creating something from nothing, or transforming intangible memories into a tangible record. We struggle to find the pieces, to find a way of connecting them … writing is hard work, often intimidating and easy to put ...