Part 1: Connect with the heart of your story

This series focuses on how to write your best Accidental Mentor stories about women who shaped your life without even trying.

Welcome to the first in a four-part series I’m calling Accidental Mentors Story Craft. These are inspirational stories that honor women just for being themselves and remind us that the influence we have on others who cross our path can be greater than we ever realize or acknowledge.

This is your opportunity to acknowledge and thank the women on your road to who you are today. You’ve read about mine. Now it’s your turn. I believe with all my heart that if we do this, we can bring some much-needed light into the world. Won’t you join me?

Series Schedule

Each Thursday between now and October 12, 2023, I’ll publish a post designed to give you some tips to help you craft your own stories. Here are the topics I’ll cover:

• Sept 21 - Part 1: Connect with the heart of your story to find the lesson

• Sept 28 - Part 2: Incorporate sensory details to turn two dimensions into three

• Oct 5 - Part 3: Write scenes to transport readers into the story

• Oct 12 - Part 4: Revise, revise, revise to make it your best work

By the end, I hope to receive a flood of submissions from you. If you feel ready, please feel free to submit sooner than that. Submissions are open now.

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So, let’s get started.

My biggest surprise

My biggest surprise in writing Accidental Mentors was how deeply spiritual the project was for me. The more revisions I did of each piece, the more personal they became and the more emotional the experience of writing them. The best pieces in Accidental Mentors (yes, I fully admit some are better than others) are those where I allowed the emotion in—where I let myself laugh, cry, or even feel embarrassed. The less afraid I was of letting myself feel these emotions, the stronger my writing became.

As you consider writing about the women in your life, prepare yourself for the reactions that might follow. If you do, I am confident your writing will be richer than if you stay on the surface and only write what is immediate and present in your mind.

So how do you do that? Here are a few of the things I learned in the process.

Feel “all the feels”

Before I started writing, I had to allow myself (force myself?) to take time away from the keyboard just to relive my time with the woman I wanted to write about. I encourage you to do that too. Take an imagined walk with her, visualize yourself talking with her, and more importantly, her talking with you.

Whether or not the woman is still in your life, write her a letter (that you’ll probably never send), or write yourself a letter as if you were her. I’ve written a series of letters to my mother and have found that the more I do this, the more I remember about our relationship and what was important to each of us in it.

Grieving all over again

If the woman I was writing about had passed away, I searched through photos of our time together, scanned old yearbooks, watched videos—whatever I could do to make her present to me. I let our relationship wash over me, feeling the good and the bad, the happy times and the sorrowful ones.

Several times in this process, I found myself overtaken by grief that I thought had long since been resolved. This reminded me that as much as our society would like us to believe otherwise, grief never leaves us. Instead, it lives within us like a favorite old book. We might put it on a shelf and move on to other stories, but if we pull it out again and open its tattered and torn pages, the story feels as alive as it did the first time we read it.

Women still in my life

If the woman was someone with whom I continue to have contact, I focused on our early encounters before thinking about our current relationship. I tried to recall my first impressions and what I imagined her first impressions were of me. I thought about places we’ve gone and things we’ve done together.

I also challenged myself to explore how I feel when I’m with her now, at this point in our relationship, and what it feels like when I’m not with her. This often helped me realize that what I value about her might be different than what I thought I valued. I loved it when that happened because it was like receiving an unexpected gift from an old friend.

What about women who are absent from my life

And then there were the women who are alive but, for a host of reasons, I’m no longer in touch with. In some cases, that’s her choice, in others, mine, and still others, life just got in the way and we drifted apart. I still chose to include them in Accidental Mentors, but I will be honest in saying that these were the toughest to write.

One of the joys of this project was reaching out to women who’d I’d lost touch with. These included my 3^rd-5^th grade teacher, an old junior high school friend, former college basketball team members, early lovers, and even a daughter of my mom’s best friend. When I told them what I was doing, they were touched to be included and appreciated the opportunity to reconnect.

In some cases, though, I had to allow the negative feelings that might have characterized our relationship at the end to flow through me so the positive could resurface. Be prepared for that to happen if you choose to write about someone you’re no longer in touch with because things didn’t work out between you. In my case, I decided that they still deserved to be recognized as women who shaped my life, and I’m glad I included them. In a few of them, it helped me find peace with them. I only regretted writing one piece, which is no longer in the manuscript. And that taught me something too, so it’s all good.

Be specific

As you start writing, don’t worry if the lesson you want to focus on isn’t clear to you. The more you write about her, the more clarity you’ll have.

One way to focus is to journal about your recollections of each woman, and, truth be told, that’s a great approach. I’m certain my wife, Wendy, whose license plate reads JOURNL would agree. For me, it was enough (or maybe, more honestly, all I could handle) to put myself mentally into the places we were together, feel whatever feelings arose, and recall the time or times when this woman had something to teach me. The method you choose is up to you. The goal is the same, and that is to go as deep as you can into your memories to extract a gem of truth.

You might already know the lesson or lessons you want to share through the story you’re writing. If that’s the case, that’s great! In 600-to-800-word stories, you want to bring the reader as quickly as possible into the moment when you first learned the lesson you’re focusing on. That calls for you to get specific. Take us into a scene where you witnessed the thing you’ve tried to emulate (more about writing sensory imagery and scenes in Parts 2 and 3 of this series).

Sometimes there wasn’t a moment, an incident, or a conversation that sparked the realization that a woman taught me something valuable. For some of the women I wrote about, realizing they were a mentor to me came only after looking at our relationship in its totality. If I wrote this way, however— about the whole of a woman—the piece fell flat. I had to find some incident or detail that a reader who doesn’t know this person could appreciate about them. If that’s the case for you, keep searching, keep journaling, keep remembering—something will come to you.

Protect privacy and confidentiality while still publicly honoring your mentors

I want to leave you today with a final consideration and that is about protecting privacy and confidentiality. In my posts, I tried to share things that I knew the subject would be comfortable with my sharing. I rewrote several stories after I reread them and questioned how the person would feel about having certain information or a private conversation become public.

In several cases, I shared the final draft with the subject before I published it, like in the case of my friend Susan whose mom died by suicide, to make sure they were comfortable with the content. I encourage you to think carefully about how you want to handle this.

In a traditional memoir, you have every right to publish your story, your memories, your account of things that happened in your life, even if other people in your story don’t agree with your take on things. You might experience backlash, but it’s still your choice. The purpose of this project, however, is to honor and appreciate the subject, so it makes sense to take extra effort not to expose or harm them with what you write.

We’ll revisit this when we talk about revising in the fourth post in this series, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind from the start.

Get writing!

I hope I’ve given you some things to think about that will help you to get started with an early draft. Don’t try to make it perfect—just write! You’ll have plenty of time to revise it after you get your initial thoughts down.

I’ll see you next week with some thoughts about crafting sensory images for your readers.

Have fun!

Annette