The Thingness of Writing
When writers, and especially memoir writers, first begin generating a manuscript, we often understand our words to be extensions of our deepest self. What we’ve written is an external manifestation of our very being. Our identity is bound up in the black print of our creation—and rightly so. This level of over-identification helps invest our words with drive and passion. The best writing emerges when the author’s very being is at stake. Writers are often private about these early jottings; they feel too close, too vulnerable, too precious. First drafts are almost always raw, both in their language and their emotion. Some writers feel they’ve bled on the page, or spilled their guts. There are no boundaries between writer and what’s written. Compare this to a final draft we send to the publisher, or to the print version that arrives in the reader’s hands. Unlike a diary, which never meets…
Revision’s Biggest Hurdle
Here’s a common scenario with intermediate creative nonfiction writers: They’ve gotten over the initial hurdles to writing true stories—fear of what others will think, mistrust of their memories, difficulties establishing the writing habit—and they’ve experienced the rush of elation that comes with drafting. They may have even dabbled in revision and overcome their resistance to meddling with their first words. They’ve fleshed out scenes, added dialogue, paid attention to character development; they’ve fiddled with craft and made worthy changes. But at some point, all creative nonfiction writers (and, I would argue, writers of all literary genres) must seriously consider revising their content as well as their craft. Revision is not simply about evaluating and changing the form of our work; it’s also about adding layers of insight to the content. And when our content is the material of our lives, this means doing serious emotional work. Most writing students quit…
The Devil You Know: Rough Drafts
Poor revision, unfairly maligned due to a quirk of human nature! We beasts prefer prowling on familiar territory, rooting up the same soil with the same scratching of our forelegs. We know the terrain of a first draft: the blank page, the tentative start, the discomfort of seeing our brilliant thoughts so diminished in print, the splash of joy when the words come, the adrenaline rush of stumbling onto insights or memories or characters we didn’t know we had, the satisfaction of completion. We know that landscape and we’re quite attached to it, for good reason–it’s born much fruit and served us well. The gifts of that first draft are worth cherishing. And while we may admit the draft is rough, we also know it sparkles in places, and we’re unwilling to diminish that sparkle with the insult of revision. Lest I discredit the…
Chronology
I’ve recently become a great fan of chronology, the true representation of the order of events. Stories, according to E.M. Forster, are narratives of events arranged in their time sequence, with the great advantage of making the audience want to know what happens next. Beginning, middle, end: the formula is as old as the hills, and for good reason. It works. All writers enjoy playing with chronology, pushing against the natural order for the sake of art. Any deviance from the direct progression of time can surprise the reader, to extraordinary effect. However, I would argue that writers must first know the chronology of their story before they attempt to break it. And I want to caution writers of memoir that the chronology which seems so obvious when we sit down with a memory often becomes severely mangled once we put pen to…
Inherent Wholeness
Underneath the act of writing memoir is an implicit belief: A wholeness exists among the fractured memories of a life. If we didn’t believe this, it’s unlikely any memoirist would take on the endeavor. In fact, I suspect many people write memoir because they long for a complete, unified perspective on their lives and intuitively understand that writing can help them achieve it. Unfortunately, unity rarely makes itself apparent early on in the writing process. As we draft, our story first shows its brokenness. We write random chunks of memories. Or we write in strict chronological order, starting from the beginning, and grow distress by how little life this stream of facts contains. Entire periods of our lives we can’t remember at all, and the images we do remember seem random. When a scene arrives complete and in great detail, it raises reams…
Book-Length Thoughts
Over the course of years of working on my own writing and coaching others, I’ve come to recognize a stumbling place in the process of writing a book. There comes a moment, usually around the completion of a first full draft, when the project seems utterly overwhelming. A new form of writer’s block emerges. Rather than writing forward into an unknown territory, the grand adventure of a first draft, the work of finishing or revising a book-length draft is about completing missing pieces. Every book has an anatomy, an intricate system of organs and muscles and nerves, and the interconnected nature of this anatomy begins to become evident only once a significant portion of it is written. In our first draft, we compose a liver and leg and the sense of smell; we amass chunks or chapters that function well on their own but remain…
The Discomfort of Writing
The greatest nonfiction writers are the ones who are willing to put up with extremely uncomfortable, miserable thoughts, for days and weeks and years on end. –Carol Bly After allowing my novel to rest for half a year, I’ve recently launched back in to make some fairly major changes: restructuring the first hundred pages, shifting the personality of the main character a notch, revising her reasons for making a pivotal decision near the end, along with many small tweaks. In the process I’ve experienced the complicated joy of getting fully immersed. The sensation is one of absolute concentration–I’ve moved into the world of my book and see nothing beyond its boundaries–alongside absolute rebellion. My whole body revolts against this level of focus. I squirm, I want to get a glass of water, and then ice, then a coaster; I need to clip my nails. …
Rejection: An argument for acceptance
“I reject the rejections!” the righteous writer cries; “I will persist!” Hoorah for determination, I say. But before you ritually burn the rejection slips to rid yourself of bad juju, I’d like to suggest an alternative. “Rejection along with uncertainty are as much a part of the writer’s life as snow and cold are of an Eskimo’s,” editor Ted Solotaroff writes. “They are conditions one has not only to learn to live with but also learn to make use of.” What use can we possibly make of rejection? Minnesotans should know that the more time we spend outdoors in the winter, the less bothersome the cold becomes. I suggest we develop a sustainable, positive attitude to this wretched climate. Bundle up, folks! Admittedly, rejection adds insult to injury. Maintaining faith in our work without pay or recognition is hard enough for us sensitive,…
Why is memoir hot?
I was asked this question in class last night, and a lively discussion ensued. There are many reasons memoir is flying off the shelves right now–Americans’ voyeuristic obsessions, our thrill at the democratization of the personal narrative (you don’t have to be a president or have climbed Mount Everest to write about your life), the multicultural movement and our increasing interest at the variety of life’s experiences, Americans’ misguided sense that nonfiction is truer than fiction, our desperation to know that our small lives matter… One answer occurred to me that I want to explore further here: Memoir is hot now because, in this fragmented, frenzied society, we long to know that our lives have structure and unity. We feel scattered. We can’t see the big picture. We read about other, ordinary people’s struggles because we intuit they’ve had to make some sense of them in…