Continuing Legacy?
As I mentioned in my previous post, I blame my parents for my needing to write stories.
I've been going through some of my late parents papers (mother) and computer files (father).
My mother had notebooks galore. She loved going to an office supply or stationary store or even Walmart and buying a brand new notebook, just so that she could find a quiet place to sit down and write in it. Sometime what she wrote was lists; shopping, inventory, ideas, etc. Sometimes she wrote journal like entries. Sometimes she cried out to God in prayer during difficult times of her life. She wrote a lot.
One of the things I found in her papers was a notebook from her first college experience where she trained to be a teacher. It was only an associates degree. One of the courses was College Writing. The stories were interesting, but I saw that I come by my week grammar naturally.
In my father's computer files, he spent a lot of time, especially most recently reminiscing about his early life. He had always been an absent minded professor type, but that became much more so in the last several years of his life. He had multiple copies of his memories, as he called them, because he couldn't remember where he'd saved the one file. Or he'd try to put them in a more chronological order. Or he'd start editing and forget where he'd left off.
So I'm going through all these files to cull all duplicate bits of information. Even in his random train of thought typing he was a story teller. I'm having to compare the same memory found in two different files, written slightly different, to see which one to keep, which is written better, which has the richer detail. And those two things aren't necessarily the same thing.
I'm finding in both cases that I'm learning about my parents. And I'm learning about writing and story telling and that those two things aren't necessarily the same thing either.
I've been going through some of my late parents papers (mother) and computer files (father).
My mother had notebooks galore. She loved going to an office supply or stationary store or even Walmart and buying a brand new notebook, just so that she could find a quiet place to sit down and write in it. Sometime what she wrote was lists; shopping, inventory, ideas, etc. Sometimes she wrote journal like entries. Sometimes she cried out to God in prayer during difficult times of her life. She wrote a lot.
One of the things I found in her papers was a notebook from her first college experience where she trained to be a teacher. It was only an associates degree. One of the courses was College Writing. The stories were interesting, but I saw that I come by my week grammar naturally.
In my father's computer files, he spent a lot of time, especially most recently reminiscing about his early life. He had always been an absent minded professor type, but that became much more so in the last several years of his life. He had multiple copies of his memories, as he called them, because he couldn't remember where he'd saved the one file. Or he'd try to put them in a more chronological order. Or he'd start editing and forget where he'd left off.
So I'm going through all these files to cull all duplicate bits of information. Even in his random train of thought typing he was a story teller. I'm having to compare the same memory found in two different files, written slightly different, to see which one to keep, which is written better, which has the richer detail. And those two things aren't necessarily the same thing.
I'm finding in both cases that I'm learning about my parents. And I'm learning about writing and story telling and that those two things aren't necessarily the same thing either.
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