Getting it down - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Getting it down

Putting pen to paper is the first step to telling your story. Army Capt. Mike Warren, an English instructor at the U.S. Military Academy who ran a project to gather narratives from soldiers and edit them with his students, has this advice for getting started:

Q. What’s the key to writing your story?

A. We were encouraging the soldiers to write about an event. Because you know, given the idea of a memoir, it’s a little more difficult because they typically think of someone like a general, who has a lot things going on, and to write a memoir that way, they see it as more challenging because they don’t have that kind of experience. But instead we encourage them just to write about an event in their time.

Tie it to a particular moment. [One] of the questions we asked soldiers was, “If you had one thing to share from your experience with someone else, what would that one thing be?”

And then they would tell us, “Always watch out for your buddy.” Well, can you give us an example of that? What do you mean, “Always watch out for your buddy”? Just getting them to start thinking about, if they had to ... tell their kids one day about what happened and they didn’t just want to tell them what happened, they wanted to tell them what happened for a reason, then that’s what they should focus on. Let that direct the story.

How can service members who want to write motivate themselves to do it?

A. It’s having the accountability of a person to share it with, because if you’re writing something that nobody’s ever going to read it, sometimes there’s not a lot of motivation to do it unless you just happen to love writing. I see it with the cadets all the time: they’re not going to write that rough draft unless I’m going to actually read it. I think the biggest thing is to say, “I’m going to write this because I want to share it with my kids one day, I want to share it with my wife, I want to share it with my best buddy who’s about to deploy.” In the English world, we call it finding your audience.

Q. What are the common pitfalls a writer might face?

A. They lack confidence in their ability to do it. “I can’t write, no one’s going to understand what I’m saying, I’ll sound stupid,” stuff like that. ... It’s not so much that they can’t do it, it’s just that they don’t know necessarily how to do it on paper.

Q. How do you find confidence as a writer?

A. [They can participate in] a project like ours, where someone can give them feedback, someone who is willing to say, “Here are some ways that I can help you out.”

Or to just read up on it. Operation Homecoming, they have a pamphlet that gives some tips from various writers that went on the project to help them get started in writing. Each of them wrote like a little essay about how to get started writing.

— Interview by Cecilia Hadley

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Operation Homecoming, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, conducts writing workshops at military and VA hospitals and other locations around the country. Its program booklet, full of stories, poems and advice, can be downloaded by clicking here.