Beverley Hanna
Trained as an artist in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, I was one of the first creatives to be employed in the computer graphics industry in Toronto during the early 1980’s. For several years, I exhibited my animal portraiture in Canada and the U.S. but when my parents needed care, I began writing as a way to stay close to them. I’ve been writing ever since. I run a highly successful local writer’s circle, teaching the craft and techniques of good writing. Many of my students have gone on to publish works of their own. I create courses aimed at seniors who wish to write memoirs, with a focus on the psychology of creatives and the alleviation of procrastination and writer's block.
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Letters
Gotta love letters — A. B. C.’s. Without ‘em, our civilization wouldn’t exist. Other languages – other letters: Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Chinese pictographs, Druidic runes, Egyptian hieroglyphs. Throughout history, in all cultures, somehow, someone has figured out a way to record our activities in a more permanent way than fickle memory allows. The alphabet used in many modern language groups is made up of 26 letters and has the most versatility, as it doesn’t rely on the principle of one symbol, one concept. Our alphabet, our letters, derive from Latin. The modern English alphabet consists of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. The alphabet’s current form originated in about the 7th…
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Writing Your Life as The Hero’s Journey
You want to create your memoirs or autobiography. You want to write about your life, but it seems like a series of unrelated incidents, random events happening one after another. However, If you look closely, you can see where certain choices and decisions were the key points where your life diverged from one path to a different one. Each of these “inciting incidents”, to use a fiction-writer’s terminology, had a profound effect on you in one way or another, but at the time, you didn’t see them or the effect they’d have on your life’s journey. The Hero’s Journey is a formula for writing fiction that was identified and…
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National Grammar Day
Though a proud member of the Grammar Police, I’m as guilty as anyone for breaking the rules of grammar and punctuation when necessary. However, I strongly believe it’s important to know what those rules are so you can break them intentionally and not simply through ignorance. In the past several years, particularly since global travel has become so accessible and the use of cellphones and the internet have become so all-pervasive, there’s been a wholesale butchering of the English language. I can’t help but wonder how our language will evolve, now that we have instant global communication. Will we all end up speaking one global language? Will emojis take over…
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Writers’ Generic Disclaimer
There’s something that every writer I’ve ever met has, at one time or another, said to their friend, writing buddy or critique group. It’s the dreaded Writers’ Generic Disclaimer, or what I like to call the WGD. The WGD goes something like this: “I had trouble with this piece. It still needs a lot of work.” Another common variant is: “It’s only a first draft,” or possibly, “It’s still pretty rough.” Occasionally you’ll hear: “Promise you’ll tell me if it’s no good, but please, be kind.” There are hundreds of variations on this theme. We all do it. But why? In the vast majority of cases, use…
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The Relevance of Good Grammar
How many different skills have you learned in your lifetime? I’ll bet, if you count them all up, you’ll find you have hundreds, maybe even thousands of life-skills. Many of these skills are acquired by a sort of unconscious osmosis, through societal culture, family habits and traditions or sheer trial and error. Others are the ones you’ll have consciously developed, the better to get a job or a date, be more attractive to the opposite sex, speak more clearly or learn another language, master a hobby or career, even overcome a disability or illness. From the time we’re conceived, we grow and change. From the time we’re born, we…
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Creative Obsession
Everyone’s creative. In our own way, each one of us has a creative drive within us. For some, it manifests as painting, music or theatre. For others, the pursuit of science, city planning or auto mechanics. Even serial killers perfect their art, sometimes over years and dozens of iterations, each time trying to get it perfect. Who you callin’ obsessed? While the drive towards creativity is inherent in all of us, not everyone pursues it to the point of obsession. Those of us who do, often jump back and forth from one creative discipline to another, jacks of all trades, master of none, never really finishing things, and procrastinating…
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New Year’s Resolutions
Why do we want to start over and remake our lives every January 1st? Is it guilt for overindulging over the holidays? Is it disappointment that we haven’t achieved what we imagined to be our true potential? Or self-pity, shame, self-hatred, or doubt about our own self-worth? When did it start? Is it all the negative little voices in our heads that point out all our faults? Perhaps in the distant past, long before we were able to form a coherent thought, someone indicated that they didn’t approve of something we’d done – pooping in our diaper or making too much noise crying. Maybe as we grew…
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Preserving Our Legacy
With the recent availability of DNA kits used to research one’s ancestry, there’s been a resurgence of interest in finding out who our forebears were and where they came from. There are several companies that provide these kits with emphasis on different aspects of our history – some deal with the likelihood of our contracting particular medical conditions, while others focus on cultural migrations and the various parts of the world where our ancestors lived. This type of DNA research, while it doesn’t focus on specific individuals, has made researching our roots a good deal more accurate and provides a lot of information not previously available to us. The Old…
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Organizing Your Memoir
One of the students in my class this week was bemoaning the fact that she didn’t know how to incorporate into her memoir all the material she’d saved over the years. She had, as most of us do, boxes and boxes of old photos, letters, correspondence, keepsakes and masses of other trivia that she wanted to include, but she couldn’t make any kind of sense of it all. What was relevant and what wasn’t? What was valuable information and what had only sentimental value? I blush to admit, I tend to be a bit of a pack-rat. I can’t bear to let go of the things my parents and grandparents…
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Whose Story Are You Writing?
A common question that crops up when writing your memoir is: “What if my sister, my mother, my weird uncle, or whoever else I mention in my story, objects to something I’ve written?” Ask yourself two questions: 1. Is it my story to tell? 2. Is it relevant to my own life’s story that I do want to tell? If episodes of the story centre around someone else’s actions, the second question becomes the deciding factor. Problems arise when you include information that reveals things about other people – things they may not want others to know about. Perhaps your younger sister did something hilariously embarrassing as a six-year-old, but…