Thinking about your professional plans and goals for the coming year? One tool for clarifying your thoughts is a written memoir about a few of your experiences as a lawyer.
And one of the easiest ways to write a memoir (as opposed to an autobiography*) about your time in the profession is to collect three to seven shimmering images from your legal career. Shimmering images are seemingly indelible memories that shine when you think of your past. They don't have to be momentous or long, but are little snippets that stay with you. Maybe the expression of a client, something you said during a hearing on a minor matter, a feeling you had when talking to opposing counsel.
Often when you string a few of these together, weaving them into a story, you will gain new insight about your role as a lawyer. What's important to you? What's not meaningful? How can that insight assist you in making decisions about, and in, the future?
Lisa Dale Norton has written an excellent book [first three chapters here] on how
The heart of the book deals with the concept of shimmering images, those that continually rise up in the [your] memory like photographs. The image of your mother standing on the beach in her polka-dot swimsuit, for example, or of your brother blowing bubbles on the lawn. Norton believes that such moments remain in one’s memory for a reason; they are the keys to unlocking meaning and story and are, therefore, memoir’s building blocks.
For those you who do not plan to read the book, Norton has written a blog post for Huffington Post titled Ten Steps to Writing Your Memoir in 2011. Excerpt:
[W]riting memoir is all about change; it is an act of transformation. When you look at your past and write a story about those events, you change your future. There's no way around it. Every writer I've worked with comes to understand at some point that the process of narrative, the actual making of a story line from little pieces of memory, assigns meaning to memory. That meaning becomes your truth about the past, and it affects everything you do in the future. It changes the future.
What are your shimmering images from the practice of law? Maybe you'd like to share just one? I'd appreciate hearing it!
*From the above-mentioned blog post:
Understand the difference between memoir and autobiography: Memoir deals with a slim slice of your life, something intense that changed your life. Autobiography is a chronological record of your life to date.
Note (added March 19, 2012): Click to read an interview of the author of Shimmering Images: Drink Interviews Lisa Dale Norton, Author of SHIMMERING IMAGES (Writing Is My Drink).
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