The Overwhelm Factor
Most prose writers at some point get overwhelmed by the scope of their material. Except for those deliberately writing short, stand-alone pieces, writers usually face projects whose scope or subject matter is larger than most human beings can fathom. The memories are too complex, the emotions too fearsome, the pages too many, the themes too interconnected, the motivations too secret. The majority of writers who seek me out as a coach do so because they’re overwhelmed. They want me to fix it. I have two seemingly opposite responses to the overwhelm factor. First, don’t we want our work to be bigger than us? The best writing addresses universal truths; it digs down to the essence of human nature; it asks questions that have been with us since the beginning of time. Literature always connects the personal to the universal, the telling detail to the broadest abstraction. The fact that we’re…
Transformation & Writing
During my first years of serious writing, I labored under the conceit that I was writing a book. The thought was bracing; it motivated me to climb out of bed at 5:30 so I’d have a half-hour of solitary creativity before I had to face a classroom of seventh graders. Only as I entered my third and fourth years on the project, having given up public school teaching and discovered that my memoir was not an adventure story about biking through Wales but rather an uncomfortably revealing story about reconciling bisexuality with my Christian upbringing; only as I revised the book a dozen times did I begin to understand what was really happening. The book was writing me. The primary creation was the self I became because of the writing—a self humbled by the truth of my story and yet less afraid to own this truth; a self no longer…