Congrats!
Since you made it all the way through this crazy class, I wanted to leave you all with some closing thoughts and ideas.
Take some time over the next few days to sit down with the pages you’ve written. Read through the work, not with an eye towards what might need editing, just looking for ideas and possibilities, and being impressed with your own effort in crafting these first draft texts. What are the aspects of this class that you could continue on your own? Consider the three possibilities listed below and think about how they might work for you.
1. Writing steadily
For working writers, it all comes down to this; doing the work. Hopefully you have all gotten to experiment this semester with the feeling of writing every day, or at least every week, and you have those rhythms in your body now. Even if generating text was difficult for you, look at the components of inspiration and writing regularly. Try some of the writing exercises that you didn’t yet have a chance to try, or try some of your favorites again. Most exercises and prompts can be done multiple ways, multiple times. Come up with one to two word prompts and/or writing exercises of your own. Keep track of them in a file or notebook. Collect lists in that same notebook, lists of topics, subjects, words you love, words you hate, prompts, people who you want to make a portrait of, character names, locations you are obsessed with, memories from childhood, sounds, colors, objects, first lines, titles, last lines, found fragments, etc. Take that “Idea Book” with you when you sit down to write, and you will always have a place to begin. Keep putting a working title on each text, along with the date the text was written. Keep making big, messy first drafts that are built on possibility, not on necessity. And keep track of your own work, honor it as it emerges, make a sacred and dedicated place to keep all our your texts.
2. Sharing your work with your peers
Most of you probably wrote in a solitary way over the past 50 days, but as we discussed at the beginning of the class, the opportunity always exists to share your creative work with others. It’s an amazing thing to draft texts and take notes while holding the awareness that someone will want to hear what we most want to say. When we begin writing with this awareness, it can potentially add strength and a quiet confidence to our work. Simply reading and witnessing each other is a powerful act, and it is one of the most important aspects of maintaining a writing community. So find other folks to share your work with, either in person or by phone or email. You may choose to schedule a monthly phone call or meet for coffee once a week with a writing friend, whatever works for both of you. It doesn’t matter whether your writing/ reading partner is a novelist and you are a poet; simply try to choose other writers and artists with whom you can make an Equal Exchange. (ie: you send them 3 pgs, they send you 3 pgs) Even before you get the stage of giving and receiving skillful, useful feedback, simply being read by others can be an incredibly important tool. And if you are sitting down for coffee with someone, take 20 minutes and write together! Remember, it is always a revolution to allow oneself to be found.
3. Finding writing exercises everywhere
As you can see from these 50 exercises, writing prompts and ideas are all around us, in both the mundane and the extraordinary aspects of our daily lives. Learn to look at your world through the eyes of a writer and start collecting ideas, prompts, subjects, first lines, last lines, themes and things to try. When you come up with a great one, share it with your writing friends and peers.
If you would like some feedback on your work, please let me know. I'd be glad to read some of what you wrote and schedule a Follow-up phone session to discuss what you got and what the next steps might be. If the structure of a class was useful to you, then check out other writing classes that may be offered in your area. There will be another 50/50 On-line class offered in the Spring, and I might offer an On-line Workshop as well, so keep an eye out for the Spring class flyer and just holler if you have any questions.
Thanks so much for joining the class. If there is anything I can do to support you as a writer, please drop me an email, I am always happy to help. Take good care of yourselves and k e e p w r i t i n g!
Many thanks and many blessings,
Max
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Thinking About Poetry
For those of you who are using the daily prompts to develop your craft and generate work as poets, I wanted to share some ideas and things to consider when working on poetry.
1. Check out Some Recent History
It can be an interesting experiment to find five people you encounter during an average day, and ask each of them to name 5 poets. My guess is that of the 25 names you collect, many of them will be the same, and most will be the names of writers who died 100 years ago.
Unless we were lucky and went to some truly extraordinary schools, we probably didn’t study a whole lot of poetry when we were young. And even if we were lucky enough to be exposed to poetry in school, it may have only been exposure to those poets and poems in the traditional “cannon”, like Shakespeare, Dickinson, Wordsworth, William Carlos Williams or Gertrude Stein. With all due respect to these forefathers and foremothers of poetry, there is a lot of more recent history to explore. Not many folks today have heard of language poetry, the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, The New Formalists, The San Francisco Renaissance, Outlaw Poetry, The Beat Movement, Performance Poetry, Hybrid texts, Experimental Poetry, Multicultural Poetry, Eco-Poetics, and the some of the other important movements and events that continue to shaped our contemporary poetry scene in the 21st century. Check out some of these terms by typing them into Google, and see what you find. Look for the names of poets you have never heard of, and check out their work on-line.
2. Read Widely
One of the most useful, fundamental practices for any working writer in any genre is the commitment to reading widely. This means that we become invested in exploring unfamiliar writers, genres and styles. It means that we suspend our likes and dislikes long enough to truly engage our curiosity, it means we pay attention to wholly unfamiliar work, to see what it might teach us as writers. When you head out to your local big chain bookstore, you might not find much modern poetry on the shelves. Sometimes independent bookstores, college bookstores and smaller bookstores may have a bigger selection. Check out on-line bookstores and on-line book distributors as well. For example, you can check out some great contemporary poets at the website for Small Press Distribution, a very reputable source for small press poetry books and anthologies.
(go to: http://www.spdbooks.org/GENpoetrybestsellers.asp) If you find a book you want to read, go to your local library and look for a copy. If they don’t have it and they don’t want to order one for their stacks, you can always request a copy of it through the Interlibrary Loan program. This program allows one library to access the books or materials in another library on behalf of one of its patrons, YOU!
3. Experiment with Forms
As you know, poetry can take any form you choose. If you have never seen or experimented with poetic “forms” (like sestinas, haiku, acrostics, chants, sonnets, tankas, prose poems, etc.) you can check these out in Teacher’s & Writer’s Handbook of Poetic Forms, edited by Ron Padgett. Or you can check some of them out on sites like:
http://pages.prodigy.net/sol.magazine/pl01form.htm#alterQ
These “forms” do not make a poem any more important that writing in free verse, but they have long and interesting histories and they can be fun ways to keep your poetry practice vibrant and interesting.
4. Make Poet Friends
When you step in and start telling folks that you are interested in Poetry, you may be surprised how many folks who say “Me too!” Poetry can sometimes be a “closeted” practice, all kinds of folks read and write it, but they usually don’t share the work with one another unless they are invited. Check out local poetry groups or classes, usually bulletin boards at your local independent bookstore of library will have some good leads, or you can always look on the internet. Making one or two friends who also have an active interest in reading and writing poems can be a great way to try new things and keep going. We all write differently when we write to be read by others. There are also lots of writing and poetry conferences and festivals that are available, especially in the summer months. You can find a fairly comprehensive listing on-line at:
http://writing.shawguides.com/
5. Make it Do-able
Writing poetry need not be a taxing, intensive experience. One of the best thing about a poem is how unconstrained it is, you can write a “poem” in 3 short lines, or 300 long ones. You can write funny poems, portrait poems, political poems, narrative poems, list poems, poems with long lines, poems with one-word titles, love poems, nonsense poems, poems about the everyday, and any other kind of poems you can imagine. Poetry as a creative art has absolutely no conventional, established “rules”, so bring the full range of your curiosity and creativity to bear and see what happens. Look at the time and attention you have to devote to your life as a poet and find ways to make your practice fun and consistent. Read one new poem by another poet everyday. Write one new poem everyday, even if it’s just 4 lines about what you saw or heard today. There is no “wrong” way to write a poem, and as soon as you write one, you step into a long and vibrant lineage of poets.
Poetry is one of the most fun and versatile forms of literature, so jump in, start a poetry-notebook and start writing!
All the best,
Max
1. Check out Some Recent History
It can be an interesting experiment to find five people you encounter during an average day, and ask each of them to name 5 poets. My guess is that of the 25 names you collect, many of them will be the same, and most will be the names of writers who died 100 years ago.
Unless we were lucky and went to some truly extraordinary schools, we probably didn’t study a whole lot of poetry when we were young. And even if we were lucky enough to be exposed to poetry in school, it may have only been exposure to those poets and poems in the traditional “cannon”, like Shakespeare, Dickinson, Wordsworth, William Carlos Williams or Gertrude Stein. With all due respect to these forefathers and foremothers of poetry, there is a lot of more recent history to explore. Not many folks today have heard of language poetry, the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, The New Formalists, The San Francisco Renaissance, Outlaw Poetry, The Beat Movement, Performance Poetry, Hybrid texts, Experimental Poetry, Multicultural Poetry, Eco-Poetics, and the some of the other important movements and events that continue to shaped our contemporary poetry scene in the 21st century. Check out some of these terms by typing them into Google, and see what you find. Look for the names of poets you have never heard of, and check out their work on-line.
2. Read Widely
One of the most useful, fundamental practices for any working writer in any genre is the commitment to reading widely. This means that we become invested in exploring unfamiliar writers, genres and styles. It means that we suspend our likes and dislikes long enough to truly engage our curiosity, it means we pay attention to wholly unfamiliar work, to see what it might teach us as writers. When you head out to your local big chain bookstore, you might not find much modern poetry on the shelves. Sometimes independent bookstores, college bookstores and smaller bookstores may have a bigger selection. Check out on-line bookstores and on-line book distributors as well. For example, you can check out some great contemporary poets at the website for Small Press Distribution, a very reputable source for small press poetry books and anthologies.
(go to: http://www.spdbooks.org/GENpoetrybestsellers.asp) If you find a book you want to read, go to your local library and look for a copy. If they don’t have it and they don’t want to order one for their stacks, you can always request a copy of it through the Interlibrary Loan program. This program allows one library to access the books or materials in another library on behalf of one of its patrons, YOU!
3. Experiment with Forms
As you know, poetry can take any form you choose. If you have never seen or experimented with poetic “forms” (like sestinas, haiku, acrostics, chants, sonnets, tankas, prose poems, etc.) you can check these out in Teacher’s & Writer’s Handbook of Poetic Forms, edited by Ron Padgett. Or you can check some of them out on sites like:
http://pages.prodigy.net/sol.magazine/pl01form.htm#alterQ
These “forms” do not make a poem any more important that writing in free verse, but they have long and interesting histories and they can be fun ways to keep your poetry practice vibrant and interesting.
4. Make Poet Friends
When you step in and start telling folks that you are interested in Poetry, you may be surprised how many folks who say “Me too!” Poetry can sometimes be a “closeted” practice, all kinds of folks read and write it, but they usually don’t share the work with one another unless they are invited. Check out local poetry groups or classes, usually bulletin boards at your local independent bookstore of library will have some good leads, or you can always look on the internet. Making one or two friends who also have an active interest in reading and writing poems can be a great way to try new things and keep going. We all write differently when we write to be read by others. There are also lots of writing and poetry conferences and festivals that are available, especially in the summer months. You can find a fairly comprehensive listing on-line at:
http://writing.shawguides.com/
5. Make it Do-able
Writing poetry need not be a taxing, intensive experience. One of the best thing about a poem is how unconstrained it is, you can write a “poem” in 3 short lines, or 300 long ones. You can write funny poems, portrait poems, political poems, narrative poems, list poems, poems with long lines, poems with one-word titles, love poems, nonsense poems, poems about the everyday, and any other kind of poems you can imagine. Poetry as a creative art has absolutely no conventional, established “rules”, so bring the full range of your curiosity and creativity to bear and see what happens. Look at the time and attention you have to devote to your life as a poet and find ways to make your practice fun and consistent. Read one new poem by another poet everyday. Write one new poem everyday, even if it’s just 4 lines about what you saw or heard today. There is no “wrong” way to write a poem, and as soon as you write one, you step into a long and vibrant lineage of poets.
Poetry is one of the most fun and versatile forms of literature, so jump in, start a poetry-notebook and start writing!
All the best,
Max
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Thinking About Fiction
Hello all, hope this finds you having a great weekend. I know there are a lot of folks in the class who are working on fiction, whether its short stories, novels or fragments of writing that might someday be joined to make a longer text.
There are a few elements of craft that might be interesting to you, some things to try when launching into the wild and exciting world of fiction.
1. Practice Imagining
Fictional writing is centered in the world of imagination, and your imagination, like your triceps, must be exercises regularly in order to be strong and supple. The world of the imagination is like a vast, undiscovered continent to which we all had passports as children. Inventing and imagining freely is one of the best parts of being a child. But at some stage in our development “making things up” stopped being called “imagination” and started being called “lying”. So as adults, there is not much of a role for imagination in our everyday lives and as writers, we may find that the muscles involved in imagination have fallen out of use. So practice imagining. See those two people sitting across from you in Starbucks? Which one of them is the international spy and what is in the briefcase on the floor? See that guy riding his bike? What did he have for breakfast this morning and what nightmare does he have that keeps recurring? As the poet Mary Oliver said “The world offers itself to your imagination.” Look around you in your everyday world and start seeing past what is actual to what is possible.
2. Create Plots
Plots in fictional stories need not be complicated or overly dramatic, but they should involve some series of actions so as to keep your reader active and interested in the text. Look through the last great novel you read or remember the last great movie you saw. Can you summarize what happened in that book or movie in a single sentence? (Ok, it can be a very l o n g sentence!) For example, the “plot” of the Wizard of Oz might be: “A young girl gets blown by a tornado into a different world where she has to fight an evil witch in order to get home again.” Try doing this to get an idea of the plots of the stories you are reading. See if you can summarize your own on-going story or novel in this way. What happens? Like characters and landscapes, plots too are drawn from our everyday experience of living. Look around you and notice what is happening. If the guy in line behind you in Safeway forgot his wallet, then use that as your launching point and crank up your imagination. Was the wallet stolen if so by whom? Has he lost his memory, and if so how and why? Is he trying to hide his identity, and from whom? And remember, there are some wonderful novels and stories out there that do not have huge or exciting plots, but something always happens, no matter how small.
3. Find Themes
If plots are the tip of the iceberg, the part of the story that is above the waterline, then the Themes of a story are the bigger part of the iceberg, the part that is below the water. What is the Wizard of Oz REALLY about? Is it about going home? Is it about the power of true friendship? Is it about the fact that all the things we most want from others (brain, heart, adventure or courage) are all the things we must find within ourselves? Or hey, maybe its just a big Technicolor cautionary tale about one kid’s closed head injury sustained in the tornado alley of Kansas. The “themes” of any story, no matter how small, are the ways in which the story connects to our universal human experience. Make a list of the themes in the story or novel you are writing. What do you want your reader to see or understand about those themes by the end of your story?
4. Invent Memorable Characters
When you think of the novels or stories you have enjoyed the most, you probably remember the characters in them as if they were real. And “real” characters are those who are most fully human, which means interesting, quirky and unpredictable. As readers, we pay much more attention to heroes who we don’t always love and villains who we don’t always hate. Making a character memorable is often a byproduct of making that character specific. What type of cigarettes does your villain smoke? How old are those cowboy boots she’s wearing? What kind of car does your main character drive? What 5 things does he have in his pockets? What did his father do for a living? Learn who your characters are, and keep track of the information. Go through magazines until you find an image of your character sitting at her desk. Keep flipping through the magazine until you find a picture of the car she stole this morning. Find a postcard of the town she grew up in. Collect all your character data in files and look at how you weave specific description into the story. Look at the “characters” who surround you everyday and create amalgams, take the annoying habit of your next door neighbor and add those fuzzy slippers your roommate wears and then put them all on the body of your 12th grade biology teacher. Make characters we will remember, long after the story is over.
5. Begin to Notice Narrative and Scene
In all types of fiction you will eventually be working with “narrative” (in which you tell us what is happening) and “scene” (in which you show us what is happening).
Narrative would look something like this;
“Over the next 3 years, his family moved four times and each house they lived in was more awful than the last”
Whereas a Scene might look like this;
Brian walked into the living room of the new house and tried to identify the terrible smell coming from under the kitchen door. “What is that?” he asked his brother “Have you ever smelled anything that bad?”
Both narrative and scene are necessary, especially in novels, but every book and story has a different and unique ratio of narrative to scene. Sometimes you will need to tell us the information and sometimes you will have to let us see it (and hear it, and smell it) for ourselves. Start to notice these moves in the books you are reading. How much of the story is accomplished narrative? How much is rendered in scenes? Practice writing both and work intentionally on whichever one you find hardest to do.
6. Detail is Everything
As someone who teaches writing everyday I’ve been seriously considering having this phrase tattooed somewhere on my forehead. But unfortunately it’s true. The details always matter. For example, one could write a story in which “an orphan kid is terrified as he travels to his new school”. Or, (as JK Rowling did in Book One), one could say;
“And the fleet of little boats moved off all at once, gliding across the lake, which was as smooth as glass. Everyone was silent, staring up at the great castle overhead.” By bringing in the sensory details of any scene or moment, you invite your reader to be active, to be a participant in the story instead of a spectator. When you describe an important character or location or series of actions in a story, make sure that you are giving us all the details that are necessary. It is, of course, possible to overindulge in detail, but that’s a Cadillac of a problem to have. Its easier to add too many details and take some away, then to have no details at all and rely on that one lonely blue checkered tea towel to symbolize the entire mansion in the Hamptons. Notice the sights and colors and sounds and textures and objects that already populate your world. And choose your details skillfully, well-chosen and strategic details that we can SEE may relieve you of have to TELL us everything.
As you know from being a reader, well-written fiction has the ability to go places that other genres cannot.
So invent away and have fun!
All the best,
Max
There are a few elements of craft that might be interesting to you, some things to try when launching into the wild and exciting world of fiction.
1. Practice Imagining
Fictional writing is centered in the world of imagination, and your imagination, like your triceps, must be exercises regularly in order to be strong and supple. The world of the imagination is like a vast, undiscovered continent to which we all had passports as children. Inventing and imagining freely is one of the best parts of being a child. But at some stage in our development “making things up” stopped being called “imagination” and started being called “lying”. So as adults, there is not much of a role for imagination in our everyday lives and as writers, we may find that the muscles involved in imagination have fallen out of use. So practice imagining. See those two people sitting across from you in Starbucks? Which one of them is the international spy and what is in the briefcase on the floor? See that guy riding his bike? What did he have for breakfast this morning and what nightmare does he have that keeps recurring? As the poet Mary Oliver said “The world offers itself to your imagination.” Look around you in your everyday world and start seeing past what is actual to what is possible.
2. Create Plots
Plots in fictional stories need not be complicated or overly dramatic, but they should involve some series of actions so as to keep your reader active and interested in the text. Look through the last great novel you read or remember the last great movie you saw. Can you summarize what happened in that book or movie in a single sentence? (Ok, it can be a very l o n g sentence!) For example, the “plot” of the Wizard of Oz might be: “A young girl gets blown by a tornado into a different world where she has to fight an evil witch in order to get home again.” Try doing this to get an idea of the plots of the stories you are reading. See if you can summarize your own on-going story or novel in this way. What happens? Like characters and landscapes, plots too are drawn from our everyday experience of living. Look around you and notice what is happening. If the guy in line behind you in Safeway forgot his wallet, then use that as your launching point and crank up your imagination. Was the wallet stolen if so by whom? Has he lost his memory, and if so how and why? Is he trying to hide his identity, and from whom? And remember, there are some wonderful novels and stories out there that do not have huge or exciting plots, but something always happens, no matter how small.
3. Find Themes
If plots are the tip of the iceberg, the part of the story that is above the waterline, then the Themes of a story are the bigger part of the iceberg, the part that is below the water. What is the Wizard of Oz REALLY about? Is it about going home? Is it about the power of true friendship? Is it about the fact that all the things we most want from others (brain, heart, adventure or courage) are all the things we must find within ourselves? Or hey, maybe its just a big Technicolor cautionary tale about one kid’s closed head injury sustained in the tornado alley of Kansas. The “themes” of any story, no matter how small, are the ways in which the story connects to our universal human experience. Make a list of the themes in the story or novel you are writing. What do you want your reader to see or understand about those themes by the end of your story?
4. Invent Memorable Characters
When you think of the novels or stories you have enjoyed the most, you probably remember the characters in them as if they were real. And “real” characters are those who are most fully human, which means interesting, quirky and unpredictable. As readers, we pay much more attention to heroes who we don’t always love and villains who we don’t always hate. Making a character memorable is often a byproduct of making that character specific. What type of cigarettes does your villain smoke? How old are those cowboy boots she’s wearing? What kind of car does your main character drive? What 5 things does he have in his pockets? What did his father do for a living? Learn who your characters are, and keep track of the information. Go through magazines until you find an image of your character sitting at her desk. Keep flipping through the magazine until you find a picture of the car she stole this morning. Find a postcard of the town she grew up in. Collect all your character data in files and look at how you weave specific description into the story. Look at the “characters” who surround you everyday and create amalgams, take the annoying habit of your next door neighbor and add those fuzzy slippers your roommate wears and then put them all on the body of your 12th grade biology teacher. Make characters we will remember, long after the story is over.
5. Begin to Notice Narrative and Scene
In all types of fiction you will eventually be working with “narrative” (in which you tell us what is happening) and “scene” (in which you show us what is happening).
Narrative would look something like this;
“Over the next 3 years, his family moved four times and each house they lived in was more awful than the last”
Whereas a Scene might look like this;
Brian walked into the living room of the new house and tried to identify the terrible smell coming from under the kitchen door. “What is that?” he asked his brother “Have you ever smelled anything that bad?”
Both narrative and scene are necessary, especially in novels, but every book and story has a different and unique ratio of narrative to scene. Sometimes you will need to tell us the information and sometimes you will have to let us see it (and hear it, and smell it) for ourselves. Start to notice these moves in the books you are reading. How much of the story is accomplished narrative? How much is rendered in scenes? Practice writing both and work intentionally on whichever one you find hardest to do.
6. Detail is Everything
As someone who teaches writing everyday I’ve been seriously considering having this phrase tattooed somewhere on my forehead. But unfortunately it’s true. The details always matter. For example, one could write a story in which “an orphan kid is terrified as he travels to his new school”. Or, (as JK Rowling did in Book One), one could say;
“And the fleet of little boats moved off all at once, gliding across the lake, which was as smooth as glass. Everyone was silent, staring up at the great castle overhead.” By bringing in the sensory details of any scene or moment, you invite your reader to be active, to be a participant in the story instead of a spectator. When you describe an important character or location or series of actions in a story, make sure that you are giving us all the details that are necessary. It is, of course, possible to overindulge in detail, but that’s a Cadillac of a problem to have. Its easier to add too many details and take some away, then to have no details at all and rely on that one lonely blue checkered tea towel to symbolize the entire mansion in the Hamptons. Notice the sights and colors and sounds and textures and objects that already populate your world. And choose your details skillfully, well-chosen and strategic details that we can SEE may relieve you of have to TELL us everything.
As you know from being a reader, well-written fiction has the ability to go places that other genres cannot.
So invent away and have fun!
All the best,
Max
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Thinking About Memoir
Hello everyone and congrats on making it through 30 days of writing!
I wanted to say a word or two about the art of Memoir writing, since I know that a few folks are working on memoirs or memoir-based material. As you probably know, a memoir is very different from an autobiography. An autobiography, in the formal sense, is usually written by someone who is a public figure, a politician, an actor or artist, etc. The subject of a formal autobiography is usually just the story of that person's life, and how they came to be the famous person that they are today. An autobiography is about everything that happened to someone, usually ordered chronologically.
A memoir, on the other hand, is not just about what happened, its also about what it meant. A memoir is about an individual person's relationship to a certain subject matter. For example, Alex Fuller's book Don't Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight, is about her relationship to her family and to Africa, where she was raised. Rick Bragg's memoir All Over But The Shoutin is about his relationship to poverty and how he survived what poverty did to his family. One of the first things to do when you are thinking of working on a memoir, is to write a bit about what relationship is driving the book, and to start collecting the individual stories that bring that relationship to life for your reader.
Its important to note that sometimes you will hear these words used interchangeably, for example, someone famous might be said to be writing their "memoirs" which of course means their autobiography. Or a writer who creates a memoir might include the word "autobiography" in the title, like Lucy Grealy's book Autobiography of My Face, an intense memoir about her relationship with illness, disfigurement and appearance.
Of course all the basic rules for writers always apply when working on text that is centered in the world of memory, (just like work that is centered in the world of the present moment or the imagination) we have to write as if our lives are important and what we have to say has value. We have to acknowledge that we are the only ones who can tell our stories and if we don't tell them then they will go untold. And we have to write as if someone is already out there, listening for what we have to say. If you believe these things, especially in the writing of memoir, then your writing WILL have more power and impact. Remember as you work to take refuge in specificity and uniqueness of expression, rather than taking refuge in abstraction or big words. Make sure we know when and where the stories are taking place and that we can see and hear the people who populate your text.
Learn the skill of using imagination to serve as the mortar between the bricks of your memory, use it to fill in the spaces where you may have forgotten details or conversations. This is very different that using your imagination to invent whole events that never actually happened. Remember that fiction means never having to say your sorry, so if the best way to tell your story is to fictionalize it and to call it fiction (inspired by a true story) then go for it. But if you are choosing to stay in the realm of factual memory, just remember to write fearlessly and edit carefully. Don't try to change all the names of everyone in your past before you even write the first draft of your story. You have the absolute right to write about what happened in your own life and how you felt about it. So don't worry what anyone else will think of the first draft, there will be time and space to make careful choices about who you represent and how, as you go through the drafting process.
And above all, be brave and keep breathing as you write and make it doable. Make a list of everything that you want to include in your book, all the stories that matter most, in the order you want to tell them. This list might change 100 times, but just make a draft of it. This is your working outline for the book. Remember that a good memoir, like a good novel, requires active, interesting scenes. We need action and dialogue, description and visual content. Bring us into your world.
Best of luck with it, and please feel free to add comments here and let us know how the work is progressing. I will add another post soon about writing stories and novels, and of course poetry. Keep at it!
all the best,
Max
I wanted to say a word or two about the art of Memoir writing, since I know that a few folks are working on memoirs or memoir-based material. As you probably know, a memoir is very different from an autobiography. An autobiography, in the formal sense, is usually written by someone who is a public figure, a politician, an actor or artist, etc. The subject of a formal autobiography is usually just the story of that person's life, and how they came to be the famous person that they are today. An autobiography is about everything that happened to someone, usually ordered chronologically.
A memoir, on the other hand, is not just about what happened, its also about what it meant. A memoir is about an individual person's relationship to a certain subject matter. For example, Alex Fuller's book Don't Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight, is about her relationship to her family and to Africa, where she was raised. Rick Bragg's memoir All Over But The Shoutin is about his relationship to poverty and how he survived what poverty did to his family. One of the first things to do when you are thinking of working on a memoir, is to write a bit about what relationship is driving the book, and to start collecting the individual stories that bring that relationship to life for your reader.
Its important to note that sometimes you will hear these words used interchangeably, for example, someone famous might be said to be writing their "memoirs" which of course means their autobiography. Or a writer who creates a memoir might include the word "autobiography" in the title, like Lucy Grealy's book Autobiography of My Face, an intense memoir about her relationship with illness, disfigurement and appearance.
Of course all the basic rules for writers always apply when working on text that is centered in the world of memory, (just like work that is centered in the world of the present moment or the imagination) we have to write as if our lives are important and what we have to say has value. We have to acknowledge that we are the only ones who can tell our stories and if we don't tell them then they will go untold. And we have to write as if someone is already out there, listening for what we have to say. If you believe these things, especially in the writing of memoir, then your writing WILL have more power and impact. Remember as you work to take refuge in specificity and uniqueness of expression, rather than taking refuge in abstraction or big words. Make sure we know when and where the stories are taking place and that we can see and hear the people who populate your text.
Learn the skill of using imagination to serve as the mortar between the bricks of your memory, use it to fill in the spaces where you may have forgotten details or conversations. This is very different that using your imagination to invent whole events that never actually happened. Remember that fiction means never having to say your sorry, so if the best way to tell your story is to fictionalize it and to call it fiction (inspired by a true story) then go for it. But if you are choosing to stay in the realm of factual memory, just remember to write fearlessly and edit carefully. Don't try to change all the names of everyone in your past before you even write the first draft of your story. You have the absolute right to write about what happened in your own life and how you felt about it. So don't worry what anyone else will think of the first draft, there will be time and space to make careful choices about who you represent and how, as you go through the drafting process.
And above all, be brave and keep breathing as you write and make it doable. Make a list of everything that you want to include in your book, all the stories that matter most, in the order you want to tell them. This list might change 100 times, but just make a draft of it. This is your working outline for the book. Remember that a good memoir, like a good novel, requires active, interesting scenes. We need action and dialogue, description and visual content. Bring us into your world.
Best of luck with it, and please feel free to add comments here and let us know how the work is progressing. I will add another post soon about writing stories and novels, and of course poetry. Keep at it!
all the best,
Max
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