Giving Your Story a Plot
I can’t tell you how often I read early drafts of memoirs that are thorough, lively recordings of events, great for preserving family history but absolutely unsatisfying as memoirs. First this happened, and then this, and then this… Even when the events are shocking, amazing, horrific, terrifying, or otherwise scintillating, the drafts read like flat historical records. Some authors stop there. Their purpose is creating a record of events, or simply getting down the story satisfies their needs. But a record of events is not a memoir, and I’ve just discovered a new way to explain why. I’m reading Janet Burroway’s master-text, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, awed by how smart and practical her advice is and by the ludicrous fact that this book is no longer in print. Burroway’s exploration of the difference between story and plot is an excellent guide for writers needing to make the…
The Journey from Self-Conscious to Aware
The other evening I taught a lesson at the Loft that was meant to help beginning memoirists distinguish between the character and the narrator in their stories. We create personas for ourselves on the page; the main character in every memoir is the younger self who experiences and is changed by events; we can also portray ourselves as a narrator looking back on these events. For writers who assume the “I” on the page is also the living, breathing self, the lesson was tough. Brows furrowed, baffled questions were asked, small groups struggled to figure out which “I” was which, and despair settled everywhere. I’ve observed this happen whenever I teach some element of craft. Say I reflect on the value of using sensory details; suddenly my students are overly conscious about not using sensory details and assume they’ve failed, or their writing grows ridiculously burdened with sensory details and…
What’s At Stake?
Perhaps the most important question for every creative writer to ask—and definitely the hardest question to answer—is “What’s at stake for me?” For writing to work well, the writer must care deeply. On the surface this question seems simplistic; our care is instinctive, compelling, and unspoken. In practice, the journey through revision is an excavation of the author’s stake, digging below external reasons (“I want to help others; I want to be published”), below the outer story (“I want to explore this memory, character, or idea”), to some subconscious, undercurrent of longing. Our stake is always found in our emotional relationship to the subject matter. Without some connection to our content, we might convey the content to a reader but we’ve no reason to explore it. And passionate exploration is what makes writing great. What’s in question? What are you risking? What of your heart have you invested? A writer’s…
From Rilke, With Love
Whenever I get swept up in the competitive, audience-seeking dimension of the writing life, I turn to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet as an antidote. Rilke returns me to my essential, life-giving reasons for writing. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people. Art-making both awakens and fulfills basic spiritual needs, Rilke says, and that this role is ultimately sufficient. A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. Out of the cacophony of writing advice out there, Rilke stands alone in emphasizing love as the central creative force in our work. We must love our doubt, love our solitude, love the questions, love our subject, and make love our subject. Even suffering in the creative process is worthy of love: Why…
Are you writing?
During a moment of discouragement this morning—others writers have better focus than me, more time to read great literature, no three-year-old pulling love and attention away from the page—I flashed back to college, to what I now realize is a seminal moment in my development as a writer. The world looked bleak (Was it my miserable relationship with my boyfriend? The overwhelming stress of senior year? The overcooked green beans in the cafeteria?); I complained about everying in great detail to my friend Heather, a brilliant mathematician. She finally interrupted me. “Elizabeth, are you writing?” No, I wasn’t. I knew immediately Heather saw an equation I hadn’t: Elizabeth minus writing equals misery. Solitude, a pen and paper were key to my mental health. From that moment forth writing has been an essential activity, saving me thousands in therapy bills. (Thank you, Heather.) Not that writing solves all my problems, but…
Triage
I’m a great proponent of the triage method of revising: Take care of the big problems first and gradually work your way down to the details of language. This is a great policy—in the abstract. If there’s such a thing as a time-saver, prioritizing is it. And generally writers DO pay more attention to word choice, sentence structure, rhythm and sound the closer they get to publication. But in reality writers, to varying degrees, can’t help but pay attention to language from the start. On one extreme are writers who must perfect each sentence before continuing to the next. While this method works for some, I wouldn’t recommend it as it poses far too many opportunities for a new writer to get stuck. Most of us grow attached to sentences we’ve polished and this attachment interferes with our ability to remain flexible and open-minded. It’s hard to fundamentally restructure an…
Playing with Revision
The more I revise and the more I help new writers learn to revise, the more I’m convinced that good revision, like any good writing, is essentially play. Robin Marantz Henig’s recent article in the New York Times , “Taking Play Seriously,” looks at recent scientific studies that ask, What is play’s role in the evolution of species? Of course there are many theories, but here is one from Patrick Bateson, a biologist at Cambridge University: “Play is the best way to reach certain goals. Through play, an individual avoids…the lure of ‘false endpoints.’ Players are having so much fun that they keep noodling away at a problem and might well arrive at something better than the first, good-enough solution.” First drafts are first, good-enough solutions. We adults are particularly prone to false endpoints because we like results and we like efficiency. With writing,…
Process & Product
I’m a tender-hearted gardener. When last year’s cherry tomatoes reseed themselves, I don’t have the heart to pull them out. And so I end up with an abundance of late-ripening cherry tomatoes. What to do? Make tomato sauce. But cherry tomatoes are a hassle to peal, even after blanching, so I choose the lazy route, slice them with skins on and throw them in the pot. The resulting tomato sauce is tasty, but a bit watery and swimming with skins. The process by which we create something helps shape the final product. Our exuberance, laziness, playfulness, discipline, patience, bull-headedness, kindness, skill, and all the other qualities we bring to the writing process play a part in the text we finally create. Just as my choice to give the cherry tomatoes room in the garden rather than planting good saucing Romas contributes to the quality of my spaghetti sauce, each choice…
Authorship
Here’s an observation to chew on: A few times in my career as a writing instructor, I’ve coached retired therapists in writing their memoirs. These are people who have worked with their personal stories over decades; they’ve had extensive experience in therapy and have continued to explore their stories through supervision groups and continuing education. And yet, when they sit down to pen their life experiences, they’re shocked. They remember details that have never before emerged. They pair memories in surprising ways, revealing new perspectives on events. They discover recurring themes that bring unity to their story they never knew existed. This phenomenon is not unique to therapists. Many authors who have done extensive therapy or told their stories multiple times in twelve-step groups make the same observation: writing an experience down changes us in different ways than telling it aloud. Why? Here’s my theory. When keep our stories to…