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Changing Focus from Why I Can’t to Why I Can

IMG_1423 - Version 2I’m back working at the regular day job as of Tuesday, and I should have taken a picture of how my last day of summer vacation began: a pile of laundry the size of Texas; a to-do list dressed up with a post-it marked up with more to-do’s; and a couple of wheezing kids (mean ol’e late-summer allergies).

But really, this whole day-before-work-begins-again-how-will-I-get-it-all-done (!) frenzy/panic didn’t come out of nowhere. I’d been grooming myself into such a state for weeks. Every time I opened my notebook and wrote for a page or two, I fed the beast.

Monday. Busy. Work, Drs. appts, gymnastics, people for dinner.
Wednesday. Gymnastics. B-U-S-Y. Want a nap.
So much to do, hardly have any time.
Hurried
Rushed
anxious about money
distracted
too busy
feel like I’m procrastinating
Saturday. Focus. I need some.

The gymnastics class was my daughter’s but the angst? All mine, and you can be certain that underneath all that journal-speak was the invariable complaint, “I never have time to write.”

This time of year (and any time of year), I could give you a thousand reasons why I can’t write, most have to do with time or energy or level of confidence. This week, though, I read an email from Notes from the Universe that redirected my thinking a bit:

What happens when someone worries? 

Basically, they think of 100 reasons why something might go wrong.

[or might not happen]

And all of those thoughts then struggle to become things, sometimes overriding their more constructive thoughts. . . . 

Have you sat down yet and listed 100 reasons why it… 

[like writing that novel]

…might come to you easily, fast, and harmoniously?

I think you should.

So, okay. I won’t flood you with 1oo reasons why I–or let’s say YOU–can write, but I’ll get the conversation rolling.

Because you want to.
Because that story idea hasn’t died off yet.
Because you’ve come too far in that draft to turn back now.
Because the other day you wrote for two hours and maybe finished two paragraphs, but they were really good paragraphs.
Because your kids believe you can.
Because your dad believes you can.
Because your kids are old enough to stay home alone for an hour or two.
And there’s a coffee shop nearby.
And you like coffee.

… Let’s hear your reasons why the writing is possible.

Need more pep talks? Check out Lisa Rivero’s “Get Serious About Writing: The Blog Series!”

* * *

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
~ Duke Ellington

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Telling the Truth in Memoir

* Playing off of last week’s post, here’s a reprint of an article I originally wrote for Write It Sideways.

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“Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.” ~Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club

I don’t plan on writing a memoir. My life may be busy and fulfilling, chaotic and frustrating at times, but I doubt I could compile my 42 years into a riveting 300 page book of Me. Still, there are certain stories my gut wants me to put down on paper.

Like the one about the summer I turned twenty-two, when I climbed into the back seat of a tiny Isuzu Trooper and rode all the way from Norman, Oklahoma to the Catskills of upstate New York. So much changed for me during that trip, change embodied in the green hills of Pennsylvania as they rose and fell alongside me like waves. I left in one state of mind and returned a totally different person: tan, nursed by the woods of Rhinebeck, New York. And, in love.

And another about how, the week after my mother died, I desperately clung to whatever artifacts of hers I could, from her Bible to that pair of gaudy glasses she wore in the late eighties. Those glasses sat out on a table at my house for months, maybe a year. Why did she keep them, and why couldn’t I let them go?

As I begin to put some of these memories down into tiny essays, I realize more and more that memoir—in long form or in short—presents an ongoing challenge: that of telling the truth.

The Fact of the Matter

good-prose-cover1It isn’t that I don’t remember the details, or that I worry about who said exactly what. When it comes to memoir and memories, you “tell the stories as accurately and artfully as your abilities allow,” as Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd say in Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction.The Who, What, Where and When of a story shouldn’t vary between two people, but the How or Why might unfold in entirely different ways.

After my road trip from Oklahoma to New York that summer, I flew home to visit my parents and discovered that their marriage was quickly falling apart. Or perhaps, after too many years of strain, the threads holding them together finally unraveled. Either way, in the months that followed, I found myself in the middle of their divorce. By choice, but also because I didn’t know better. Certain events and conversations stick with me in uncomfortable ways, so I’ve tried to write about them. The facts are set down easily enough; it’s everything in between—and the potential effects afterward—that present the hazards.

Emotional Consequences

“There is a ripple effect each time a memoir is published, and while the memoirist cannot fully prepare for it, he or she should expect it.” ~ Anthony D’Aries in Writing Lessons: Memoir’s Truth and Consequences

file0001884795802The ripple effect, that’s what I worry about. How can I write what I saw and heard and felt and avoid shedding negative light on someone I love? Do I need to write those stories? Even more important, must I share them?

I’m a writer. It’s what I do, how I understand the world around me. And, I know I’m not alone in walking this tricky line when writing about personal experiences. So, I’ve been studying books, talking with other writers, and asking for critiques of my early drafts. Here are a few tips I’ve picked up so far:

  1. First drafts are for your eyes only. Sometimes, I have to get through all the weird and uncomfortable and (what feels like) an inventory of wrong-doing before I get to a place of real understanding or peace about an event. First drafts offer a safe haven for such writing, because I’m the only one who will be reading the work at this point anyway.
  2. Check your motives. Through each rewrite after that first draft, I ask myself, Why am I writing this? And, who is the main focus in this story? Never, ever, write for revenge. And, as Kidder and Todd in Good Prose say, “Be harder on yourself than you are on others. . . . You will not portray [them] just as they would like to be portrayed. But you can at least remember that the game is rigged: only you are playing voluntarily.”
  3. Share the story with someone you trust. I’ve requested feedback from a family member as well as other writers on some of my recent work, asking if my story reads full of self-pity or too much criticism of another or less literary and more fit for my journal. When writing memoir, friends or family may be just as valuable as writing partners.
  4. Let it go. After I’ve checked my motives and revised an essay time and again, after I’ve discussed it with someone else (and rewritten it one more time), then I have to let it go. Like D’Aries says, we cannot control what others think or how they see an event in comparison with the way we saw and understood it. But, if we’re driven to put our stories on paper, and share them with others, then we have to be ready to face every consequence—good and bad.

When writing memoir or personal essays, how do you move beyond the anxiety of telling the truth?

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Writing to Remember

hotelI write for several reasons. Some days I write because I’ve stepped into a place, and my heart has stopped. My breathing turns short and shallow and I know there is a story to be told.

And some days I write for a few of the same reasons Margaret Atwood has said she writes:

To set down the past before it is forgotten.
To excavate the past because it has been forgotten.

I am forgetful. Painfully so. I often call one of my sisters or my best-friend-for-ages and start the conversation with, “Do you remember…?” Both my children were born on the 22nd day of their respective months, I am sure, because some power in the Universe knew I would have trouble keeping track of birthdays. On a given day, I cannot recall what I had for dinner the night before.

I accept my cloudy memory. But this past weekend, while on a trip with my sisters and my cousins, it became clear just how insufficient the brain can be when storing and recalling events.

When you’re in the thick of immediate family, conversations turn intimate. One night, we talked about my mother, her death, those days when we went through her things. I brought up how my sisters and I discovered cash in her linen cabinet buried under the towels, waved my hands and talked about it with complete confidence. But then my sister stopped me and said, “No, that didn’t happened at her house. We were at the bank. It was hidden inside her will. In her safe deposit box.” Until then, I could see–plain as day–the three of us standing in her bathroom, a hand lifting the towels, and someone saying, “Look.”

Both my sisters agreed we were at the bank, and of course it makes more sense. As they described their own recollections, my brain began to put the pieces in the right order (and place) again.

Still, it was strange. I kept asking, why when I remember that moment would I put us in the bathroom instead of at the bank?

Today, I’m asking: Does it matter?

Last summer, I took a one-week workshop on writing creative nonfiction with Lisa Romeo, in which she talked about that exact aspect of writing nonfiction: our fallible minds and why some details don’t matter. In her lesson, she asks:

Are you — when you are writing memoir, personal essay and other forms of creative nonfiction — creating an official document, meant to preserve in perpetuity the accuracy of a specific event down to the last detail? …what matters and what doesn’t to the story you are telling?

I’ve written the beginnings to an essay about those weeks after my mother died, partly to “set down the past” and partly to “excavate the past.” Now, when I go back to that piece for rewrites, I will have to ask what helps or halts the story (meaning what do I need to include or what can I leave out). Would it matter to a reader where I stood more than what I saw? More importantly, what is the story I really want to tell? Sometimes in a personal essay, the when and where matter much less than the why.

What do you do when memory fails?