Hands-on in your life story or memoir

Our hands are the expressive, holy, and devastating tools of our everyday trade. What are your hands doing and saying? How can you be hands-on in your life story or memoir?

START BY BEING AWARE AND FOCUSING ON HANDS

As you very well know hands can talk.

Linking us to our primate past, our hands are essential for our survival as a species but taken for granted in everyday life.

Just consider the following excerpts from writers and give a thought to the role hands play when you describe your life story.

“He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can’t have will fit in a human hand.” ― Barbara Kingsolver

OBSERVE HANDS CLOSELY IN YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE

By observing what you do with your hands for a whole day long, just that, will tell you a lot about yourself. You can expand and watch what other people do as well. Gesturing, communicating, the appearance of your hands and theirs, their strength, or lack of it, the intimacy of touching.

Hands, for example, formed a focal point during 2020, during the worldwide pandemic.

The year 2020 brought a renewed focus on the importance of our hands: “2020 was the year of obsessive hand washing.” ― Steven Magee

 WHY WE SHOULD WORK WITH OUR HANDS

In his groundbreaking book Shop Class As Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford explains how we as a society have come to devalue what he refers to as “manual competence,” or the ability to understand, build, and repair the physical world around us. He argues office work can feel so mind-numbing at times because it fails to engage our basic wiring as humans, the desire to create. For Crawford, manual tasks can serve as an antidote to modern-day ennui, fostering creativity and problem-solving while also providing a richer sense of self and personal agency.
Working with one’s hands promotes mindfulness, offers job security, and provides a sense of personal accomplishment.

HANDS AND PHYSICAL CONTACT

Use your hands to describe how others feel to your touch. Use them to discover and explain textures, pain, and care. In a memoir you are restricted to writing from your own perspective. You can use your hands, to explore and describe your physical attributes as well as the things – good and bad – your hands have done.

“She held out her hand, like a man. He hesitated, then took the hand, and shook it. It was very warm. You could not help but be aware of the wild passage of blood on the other side of its wall, veins, capillaries, sweat glands, tiny factories in the throes of complicated manufacture.” ― Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HANDS

Gestures and body language will give you a lot to work with when you describe scenes in your life story. And use the adage of “showing” not “telling” – a hand movement, the touching of a face, a handshake, can say much more than a detailed description.

“See the hand that nursed the serpent.” ― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

BE HANDS-ON IN YOUR LIFE STORY OR MEMOIR

Be hands-on in your exploration of themes in your life story or memoir. Remember that, as an author coach, I am here to assist you in your writing journey.