“There is no such thing as great writing, only great rewriting.”

Robert Graves

It has been said that Ernest Hemingway rewrote the final chapter of “Farewell to Arms” 39 times before he found it acceptable. 39 times! If it is that hard for a Nobel prize winning author, it is going to hard for the rest of us. That is good news because it means that when you find it hard to write, you are in great company.

The truth is writing is hard. Hard for everyone. So when you are struggling to get the words down or get them right take great consolation that you are in great company. The most important thing is to just keep doing the work. Put the words down. Understand that they will not be perfect when you write them for the first time. This is perfectly normal. This is part of the process. 

You need to find the method that works for you. Maybe you write a page in a stream of consciousness and then new page gets better and the third page is even better. May be you write a page one day and rewrite it the next day. Maybe you write three pages and then go back and do some editing. It will take trial and error to get your method right. But understand that writing is not an easy process and even the greatest writers of all time have to edit and rewrite their own work.

“Tell me the facts and I will learn. Tell me the truth and I will believe. But me a story and and it will live in my heart forever.”

People love stories, they alway have and they alway will. Before the written word, people told stories for hundreds of thousand of years. We gathered around campfires and told stories over and over again and they were passed from generation to generation. Facts weren’t told at campfires. Statistics weren’t told at campfires. Stories were told. Stories stick more in the heart than the mind.

You will want to tell as many stories as you can in your letter. The stories are going to touch the heart more than anything else. They are the best way to teach a lesson. 

You can write in your letter that they need to let go of the past and forgive before they can move one. But it is much better to tell them a story about it.

There were a very clever tribe of people three thousand years ago that caught monkeys using an ingenious method. The would cut a coconut in half, hollow out the inside, put a delicious small orange in the center and then tie the coconut back together and put a small hole in the top. Then would then hang the coconut in a tree by a string and wait. Monkeys would smell the delicious orange and find there way to the coconut. They would put their hands through the hole and try to pull the orange out. The couldn’t pull their hands out while it wrapped around the orange. The hole was too small. The hunters would wait until the monkey had his hand in the coconut and then they would lower the coconut using the string. Although the monkey could have let go of the orange and simply taken his hand out, he was so focused on the orange that he wouldn’t let go and therefor allowed himself to be captured because of his stubborn refusal to let go of the orange.

By telling a story rather than preaching good advice a person is much more likely to remember the lesson because all people are wired to remember stories much easier than facts.

“Be careful what you put on paper. It can last forever.”

When you write your “Letter to Your Grandchildren” you want to maintain one of your most precious gifts – your relationship with family. You never want to jeopardize your relationship with your parents, sibling, children or grandchildren. Never include something that will make someone mad, even if it is the truth. Not worth it.

Your letter should be about helping people, not hurting people. You should write it thinking every member of my family will read it. A clean conscience is worth more than gold or diamonds.

There is a place for venting and calling people out, but it is not in your letter to your grandchildren. If there is something very important to you that you feel has to be told, but would throw a family member under a bus, find an indirect way to do it. One way is to tell a story about what happened to a friend of yours or that you read about something in a book and felt that the lesson in the story was so important to you that you need to share it your grandchildren. Another way would be to change all the names and details so that no one is being mentioned directly. However you must make sure you that no one would ever know who the story was about.

“When in doubt, leave it out.”

There are many advantages to starting to write your letter early in your life.

The first is can write about things as they happen or shortly after they happen. This will make your writing much more accurate and detailed. If you start when you are 20 years old, you can very clearly remember your childhood. If you start writing about your childhood when you are 75 years old, your memory will much less clear and may even be inaccurate.

When you start writing your life story early, you will actually begin to see what happens to you with a greater sense of time. You will recognize the truly important moments in your life as they are happening and experience them in greater detail because you thinking about how you are going to write them down.

And finally there is the very real possibility of memory loss due to age or dementia. The older you are when you start writing the less you are going to be able to remember. I knew one woman who’s life story would have been very inspiring and helpful to her family to read, but she started when she was too old and was unable to write enough or remember enough. Her story was lost. She passed away. Her story and her amazing life that was filled full of so many stories that I knew about were never written down and lost. I know there were dozens of stories and lessons learned that I never knew about that could have been shared and passed down to future generations.

Start early. Start today.

What to Include

This is the fun part! There are so many interesting ideas for subjects to include in your letter to your grandchildren. It is all up to you. You get to decide and these decisions are like picking out what ice cream to try in case full of wonderful choices. Here is list that may just may be the tip of your imagination.

A chronological history of your life

The funny stories you just have to share

The sad stories that really touch hearts

Character sketches of your parents and siblings

Dating

How you met your spouse and fell in love

How you kept love alive

Your top ten lessons on a happy marriage

Your top ten lessons on failed relationships

Your working career

Work milestones

Challenges in a working life

Favorite books 

Favorite songs, singers and concerts

The really hard lessons

Favorite movies

Your spiritual life

Your health and fitness journey

School

Christmas

Vacations

Great accomplishments

Challenges you overcame and those you didn’t

Fatherhood

Motherhood

The joys of grand-parenting

The struggles of family

Hobbies

Passions

Why you made important decisions

Any lesson that might help you grandchild in their life

Did you find your talents?

A list of lessons learned

Favorite quotes