Your Next Story is a Phone Call Away

Don’t dawdle until the last “dingdong of doom” to get it down.

Image by George Arthur Pflueger Unsplash

Stay in touch and ask questions

Take it from an obituary and eulogy writer: Right now is one of the best times to write about your family, or friends, or your community…while everyone is alive and laser focused on staying that way.

I’m not suggesting you begin taking notes on what you will say at a loved one’s funeral anytime soon. I am encouraging you to take the time now to learn more about your family and your growing up.

Write about the people and experiences that shaped your life before what William Faulkner called, “…the last dingdong of doom.” In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner expanded on his belief that writers have a mission in times of peril, times not unlike the one we face today:

“I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

While you are quarantined you are probably staying more in touch with your kids, your mom and dad and grandparents, your aunts and uncles, your siblings, and your friends than you were when this pandemic drove us all inside. Consider it your mission to alleviate the fears and elevate the hopes of your loved ones by encouraging them to share more than just their worries about today.

You have more time to ask them questions that maybe you’ve put off or not thought about as the day-to-day demands of life/work balance tipped more toward work than life.

We’re all vulnerable

Shad Powers, a columnist for the Palm Springs Desert Sun, put it this way, “For me, what I’ve really improved on during this past month or so, is something I’ve been capable of along, but just hadn’t made it a priority — communicating with my family.”

We’re all feeling vulnerable right now. Those of us in our 70s with grown children and grandchildren scattered around the planet are not so eager to fling open the doors on the first warm day and head to the mall; we are still cautious and a bit on edge.

We are very happy when one of the kids rings us up just to shoot the breeze or tell stories about the grandkids. Now is the time we want to talk about anything other than current events.

Take advantage of these shaky times and raw emotions and apply them to your writing calendar. Note to self: Call mom and dad and ask questions.

The idea of writing about the living as opposed to reconstructing those lives at a distant time when they are no longer with you is packed with opportunities you won’t have down the road. Believe me, in the absence of the original source it’s much harder to write a short story about the lives of those you love, or about the community you lived in.

The idea of writing about the living as opposed to reconstructing those lives at a distant time when they are no longer with you is packed with opportunities you won’t have down the road. Believe me, in the absence of the original source it’s much harder to write a short story about the lives of those you love, or about the community you lived in.

The story behind the picture of my mother standing/dancing on a bar in her wedding dress prompted so many questions, and yielded a treasure trove of follow-on stories about my parents’ wedding day in Hollywood back in 1944. I found the picture when she was in her 60s, so I had time to get the true color of that day; searching out the story after her death in 1997 would have been fruitless.

Learning about life at the obit desk

We all have stories to tell

When I was a new and young reporter for a small-town daily newspaper, I was assigned the obituaries desk — a not uncommon assignment for newbies back in the day of print journalism.

Iwas in my late teens, and the job required reaching out to relatives or friends of the deceased to capture a few lines about that person’s life and accomplishments. With few exceptions, those who I spoke to were too new to the death, still processing their loss, not yet emotionally ready to share much with a newspaper reporter. And that was completely understandable.

But it was also frustrating because I knew that the person who had passed had probably led a rich life, by which I mean a life rich in experiences and memories, rich in family and friendships, rich even in the minutiae and mundane aspects of life that shaped his or her character.

Those were details which at best most obituaries only gloss over, both for reasons of available space on the obit page, and because most information an obit writer gets from a grieving family in a 15-minute phone call is a summary of highlights.

It wasn’t until the family submitted an “In Memoriam” notice several paragraphs long, sometimes days or even weeks after a death, that I saw the richness of the person that I was unable to capture in just a few lines.

Years later, in my work as a writer immersed in the lives of America’s veterans, I had the privilege to meet, work with, and write on behalf of some of the most courageous, colorful, sincere, and selfless men and women who served the country during the two World Wars, Korea, the Cold War, and Vietnam.

Their stories are the stuff of legends, although most combat veterans eschew any sense of legend or hero, which makes them all more legendary and heroic to me.

There were many occasions when I would be assigned to write speeches about veterans — to be delivered by a member of Congress or a cabinet secretary to veterans organizations and civic groups — and most of those speeches usually had at least one story about a veteran or a battle or a turning point in our history.

You can never stop learning

In the process of writing those speeches, I interviewed historians, contacted other veterans, and, whenever possible, talked to the subject of the speech or to family members.

There is something very humbling about veterans’ accounts of their time in war, particularly if you haven’t served in uniform.

I’m the son of a WW II European theater combat veteran, my father-in-law was in the Navy in the Pacific during WW II, and both my grandfathers served in World War I.

I grew up on military bases, and, as a government employee, much of my work involved the military and veterans. But even so, I never wore a uniform, so my interviews with veterans, notably the men and women of the Greatest Generation who are nearly gone from our lives now, were always educational.

I urge you to read or watch veteran interviews collected by the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project.

The best time to get it all down is right now

I mention all of this because my interviews with veterans and their families exposed me to a wealth of knowledge and emotions that only contemporaneous interviews can yield.

The same is true for people in your life. You will always get more to write about if you have the luxury of talking face-to-face (or at least by phone or video) and hearing their stories — not their stories told later by someone else.

Even in the best of times, of which these are most certainly not, family stories and tales of growing up too often lose something in the translation when told by a second or third party (think of the telephone game).

All of which seems excruciatingly obvious.

Except when everyone, including you, assumes someone else is the keeper or chronicler of the knowledge. It can get awkward.

Don’t find out too late that you were the one everyone else was relying on to keep track of the family history. After all, you’re the writer, aren’t you?

Take a break from that great American novel and make some phone calls to mom or dad or whomever rings the bells of your life and let them tell you their stories. Give them an opportunity to fill you in on the parts of their lives you don’t know about (and believe me, there are parts of their lives you don’t know about).

Give them permission to muse on your early days — and what it was like to raise you and what challenges they faced in the process. Ask them about your hometown, the state of the world back then, their poignant moments and times of trial. Be prepared for the unexpected; time has a way of unlocking some memories.

Spot in 1935 (Moore family photo)Add caption

Spot, the wonder dog

For example, my dad had an inch-long vertical scar behind his right ear. I’d noticed it when I was a kid, but I didn’t ask him about it until I was in my 30s and he was in his 50s. Turns out, he got the scar when he was 12.Spot in 1935 (Moore family photo)

He and his dog, Spot, a Jack Russell sort of dog (picture above), were walking along a gravel road in Georgia. A car was coming down the road behind them. Pop didn’t hear it, but Spot did. In Pop’s telling, Spot jumped up and bit into my dad’s shirt collar, and Spot’s weight pulled Pop into a ditch next to the road.

Pop and Spot tumbled down the side of the culvert with Spot still latched on to Pop’s shirt. Turns out, he had also bitten into Pop’s neck in the heat of the moment. Hero dog or just a well-timed turn of events? Pop didn’t know, but he gave Spot credit for saving his life.

The scar that remained for the rest of my dad’s 81 years was a visible reminder of his dog’s loyalty and love.

I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t asked, and, having asked, I got a deeper look into my dad’s life. It wasn’t a eulogy story; it wasn’t part of his obituary. But it was his history, in his words, and that made it special.

The stories you can write about those around you don’t have to be part of a genealogical survey of your family — you can go to 23andMe or Ancestry for help with those details.

But when it comes to getting the real low-down on people, places, and events that are becoming hazy as time zips on by, there is nothing that beats ringing up your parents or siblings to clear up old myths, discard wrong information, and uncover details that eluded you at the time.

Don’t expect closure or accuracy, just open the door to the conversation and write what flows from it

Of course there will still be diverging story lines. My sister and I have distinctly different accounts of an incident that happened to me when I was five and she was nine (and I stick with my version story that she was the one who pushed me!).

“What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?”

One of my favorite lines in a movie was uttered by Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in “The Lion in Winter” when, in the midst of a wickedly crisp verbal duel with Peter O’Toole (Henry II), she says, “What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?”

Of course your phone calls and heartfelt interviews won’t answer all your questions, but they might get you started down a new path in your writing, a path made more clear by first-person accounts.

Just explore the lives around you while they are around you. Challenge yourself to write a story (or stories) celebrating the people in your life while they are in your life.