Why Write?

The act of writing memoir is enough to justify itself. Even when you are writing about what you remember, or think you remember, you often surprise yourself with what you discover. Robert Frost said, “…no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” If the end of all your writing is self-discovery, you have still gained from it. Additionally, whatever experiences you’ve had, there are people who can relate to them and need to hear what you have to say.

Another reason for writing your memoir (or novel, for that matter) is that the act of writing (anything, but I think memoir in particular) changes the brain. It imposes a structure (open to change later) on memories and experience which tend to be much less orderly as lived events. It makes a container for what is naturally fluid. I found an article online for instance, that summarized what one researcher, Dr. Stephen Krashen learned from his study:

1. Writing does not help you become a better writer; reading does.
2. Writing makes you smarter and allows you to solve more complex problems.

Dr. Krashen found that through writing, the brain becomes stimulated. And Ph.D.’s from UC Berkely, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, have found that through stimulation, the mind is pruned to become more focused and attentive. The more your mind is stimulated, your mind grows and increases its ability to focus.

In summary, two important things were discovered about focus through writing:

• As one writes, they become smarter
• As one writes, they increase their ability to focus

·         Through writing, thoughts disentangle themselves. When speaking, thoughts are poured out in real-time. The communication is raw. With writing, however, one has the ability to redraft and refocus their thoughts. This results in a more clear and concise form of communication. This act of organizing thoughts, is a powerful way to enhance the mind. It allows you to slow down and ask yourself critical questions. After making writing a routine, the way you think will change, the way you speak will change and others will sense this change.

And again, patterns and images and themes emerge whether the writer intends them to or not. Like a photograph developing. Then you can ponder, why do peaches show up so often in what I write? Why are all my memories of my cousin centered around watching TV? How come I never realized that my parents put such importance of being quiet? What effects did not returning those phone calls have? When did I realize I was smarter than they were? How did I deal with it? We never talked about his suicide, what does that say about us? Or whatever reading over what you’ve written leads you to consider more deeply. Sometimes it’s best to just keep moving and not look at what you’ve written until it’s cooled off for a month or two. You don’t even have to have answers to the italicized questions, but maybe they will lead to more writing or just stay in the back of your mind somewhere waiting for fulfillment.

Start anywhere. Start small and big will show up, invited or not. What you think you’re writing about and what is the true subject, the subterranean subject, are not always the same. Start with an image. Build it into a scene. Don’t moralize. The more difficult the material, the more traumatic, the more matter of fact the writing should be. Not flavorless, but not overwrought, because that leaves no emotion for the reader to supply. 

Fall in love with what’s in front of you. Is it toast? Start writing about toast. That toast, toasted cheese, triangle toast, rectangle toast, your friend who liked French toast as sandwich bread, who’s been dead for seventeen years now, who you meant to go back and visit and whose books that were loaned to you are still on your shelf, that has about nine books from that period in your life and wonder where that guy’s kids are now, they must be grown, wonder would they like to have his books, but how to find them?

Sooner or later, if you do just that little exercise, you’ll hit pay dirt. Word association will kick in and you’ll remember something you should write about. Just a little exercise like playing scales on the piano or practicing a sport. Keeps you limber for when you need it. And you will need it. You have something important to say.

Playing Doctor

How old were you when you learned the facts of life? Not those facts. The other ones. Beginning with this one. If you want to write, you must learn how to read. Not the way other people read, but the way writers read. Doctors in medical school study (read, if you will) about body systems, organs, functions, dysfunctions, and treatments. The skeletal system, the endocrine system, the spleen, the nerves, the digestive tract, and the uses of antibiotics. They also, (this is very important) work with real cadavers examining the actual materials of their profession and the mechanisms of how things come together or fall apart. Call it an academic autopsy.

Autopsy, by the way, literally means seeing with one’s own eyes. As a writer you should be reading fiction, nonfiction, poetry, advertising, and horoscopes with an eye to autopsy. Play doctor on published writers’ work. Unless it’s a library book or you borrowed it from your cousin, you should be underlining phrases that surprise or delight or that have odd syntax. You should be jotting question marks by bits that confuse or contradict. Writing “ha!” or putting a smiley face where you find the piece fun. “No!” where you disagree. “YES!” where the author put into words what you’ve never been able to articulate. Strike through sentences or passages you find unnecessary. I’ve been caught squeezing “WTF?” on a page when the action or motive or assertion is so totally out there I wonder what the writer can possibly have been thinking to have written it.

Read with a pen in your hand. Use it like a scalpel to peel back the skin of a story and see the supporting structures. For example, Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”* is a story told almost entirely in dialogue. Give it a second reading and see if you can tell why. What effect does it give? What emotional response does so much dialogue produce? Check it with X-ray goggles. What is conspicuously not said? Again, why? Whose point of view is the short story told from? Would it be a different story if Hemingway used a different point of view to relate it?

If you hate a short story (maybe the one above) and you do an autopsy on it, you’ll probably discover the specifics of why it doesn’t work for you. Call it the COD. Cause of Death. You want as a writer to avoid the elements that annoy you as a reader. Learn from the icky stuff. Find out what gives a failed story that bad smell. Figure out how it might have been saved if it had just been re-worked in time. Did the tense kill it? Too much description? Flat characters? Unbelievable dialogue? Other folks may name it their favorite, but if you feel like washing your hands after reading it, don’t duplicate it. Don’t spread an epidemic of bad literature.

If you want to write books, write in your books. Enter into a conversation with the text and it will open itself up to you. Take what a close, forensic look offers you. Use it as you construct your own of body of work.

·        *    http://www.scribd.com/doc/41444129/Hills-Like-White-Elephants-Complete-Story

Exclamation Points Cause Cancer

Exclamation points are the MSG of writing. Put in as flavor enhancers for emphasis.  They are almost always unnecessary if you are using the right ingredients and tools to start with.

Exclamation points are fingers of accusation at the writer. You don’t trust your voice, plot, characters, and description, to convey emotion. You don’t trust your reader to be smart enough to get it. You are lazy! You are guilty of telling and not showing. Unless you are trying to be funny or using exclamation points in dialogue, I don’t want to read anything like this:

O how happy we were! or We were in danger! I began to tremble and sweat! I screamed! He was the ugliest King Charles Spaniel ever! Granddaddy should have loved me! Instead, he betrayed me and sold the dog to buy whiskey!

No. Just. No.

Even worse is the practice of multiple exclamation points crowded together at the end of a sentence like a chorus line of expert witnesses.

I knew we would be together forever!!!!!!

Pffffffoooey.

That one sentence left a sour aftertaste.

Returning to some of the examples above, if you’ve written, O how happy we were! ask yourself (because the reader will) how happy were you? Show the reader what happy looks like. We were so happy we found ourselves giggling for no reason. We were so happy we started a Facebook page for planning our wedding. We were so happy Mike stopped biting his nails and I forgot to be embarrassed by my big ears.

If you’ve written, He was the ugliest King Charles Spaniel ever!; you don’t need an exclamation point. You need a period and then elaboration. ….ever. His under bite made him look like he was chewing his own nose and his ears looked like dirty bath mats. Instead of the soulful eyes typical of the breed, this dog viewed the world with a suspicious squint.

As for Granddaddy selling the dog for booze, the fact that he is the speaker’s grandfather implies he should love the speaker. Instead, he betrayed me and sold the dog to buy whiskey!  The action recorded and the word “betrayal” evoke the desired emotion from the reader. The exclamation point sabotages the drama and pushes it into melodrama. Is that what you want to do?  By the way, if you write, I screamed! an exclamation point is superfluous. A scream is understood to be an exclamation by its nature. It doesn’t need a red bow of punctuation.

If you habitually use more than three exclamation points per double spaced page, please cut back. They’re artificial. They’re not good for you. They’ve been known to trigger migraines. And they leave the reader hungry for what’s fresh and real.

Writing in the Active Voice

First, a word from our sponsor. I recently attended the 2012 North Carolina Writers’ Network Squire Writing Residency at Queens University in Charlotte. Pat MacEnulty, Creative Nonfiction instructor, gave our group a prompt: Writing is…..Ten minutes later we shared our thoughts about writing. To my surprise, I discovered I’d written something between a manifesto and a purpose statement. Now, I share it with you:

Writing is the organization and illumination of human experience. Writing is reaching across the abyss of aloneness to others. It is a temporary restraining order against death. When it’s going well it’s a rush few activities can match. It is an act of discovery, archeology, and creation. In the beginning was the word. “Logos” means more than “word” in Attic Greek. It means an organizing principle.

I read as a writer and write as a reader. If either activity leaves me unchanged, then the text or I, or both, have failed. As a reader, I want to experience three things:

•  Resonance
• Revelation
• Aesthetic pleasure

      As a writer I want to inspire the same three things. 

,    To write in the active voice is to make something happen. It is about taking responsibility. It is not to say, as a former President did, "Mistakes were made"  which is passive, but to say, "Jane started a blog, Writing in the Active Voice, because writing makes things happen.

The Truth About Memoir

I’ve always wondered what the hell I would have to say in a blog and today I realized it is a wonderful space for a foaming rant. Today, I am ranting about memoir and in particular the process of developing a memoir in a workshop setting.

The person who appears in your memoir is not you. They [sic] are one you out of many you/s. The you of your memoir is a persona constructed for the page using the materials of recollection, reflection, research, and invention.

A reader of a memoir has accepted the author’s invitation to suspend disbelief and to honor the presentation of a life, which by its very nature, is a subjective truth. The writer of the memoir, having extended the invitation to such intimacy also has obligations to the reader. And make no mistake, to enter a memoir as a writer or reader is to be in a relationship. The writer must realize that it is not enough for an incident to be true; it must be believable.

Unbelievable events occur in every life. And yet, if they are not supported by the narrative, a reader feels cheated and loses some faith in the credibility of the author’s voice.  At a minimum, the memoirist should acknowledge the reader’s belief may be strained by the depiction of what takes place in the story.

…It was hard to believe that Dwight, fourteen years old, with cerebral palsy, could win a fight with a man twice his age and three times his size. I never figured out how Dwight did it, but after that afternoon, Mr. Oxendine carried a small larva-shaped scar that split his left eyebrow neatly in half…

The more unlikely something is, the more scaffolding it needs to hold it up to the scrutiny of the audience.

In a writing group or workshop, it is the task of the memoirist’s colleagues to suggest places in the telling that could benefit from clarification or from the stated admission that what is true can also be improbable. Always, participants should note sections of a text that are especially skillful and effective. It is not for the reader to assert that the writer can’t possibly remember this or that thing. Memories are specific to each individual and the reader must take on faith that the writer remembers what she says she does. Likewise, a reader must not say, “Nobody could possibly forget a thing like that!” if the memoirist records a gap in recalling something. As with visual art, negative space (in this case, not remembering) can define as clearly as a positive image.

It is essential in a workshop to focus on writing as a made, artistic artifact----a created thing, and not to focus critique on the writer as a person open to judgment. The writer is not the work under discussion. Readers, in critique, keep in mind the author can feel exposed and vulnerable. He will be more receptive to suggestions that encourage. Remember, your story will also be critiqued.

That said, it can be difficult for readers to discern that the person on the page and the person who composed the page are substantially different people. It can also be difficult for the writer to make that distinction, because the personal nature of memoir sometimes makes the two dimensional character (say, Sandy) seem inseparable from the three dimensional author (also, Sandy). Everyone must understand that the character and the author are not interchangeable.

The you of your memoir, the portrait of you at that time, in that place is no more who you are this moment than the photo of you on your driver’s license. Your written portrait may be improved by adding more detail, definition, color, or background. Or your artistic writer self might be satisfied with the rendering as is. Either way, as the creator of memoir, the choice is ultimately and always, yours.