Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew | Spiritual Memoir Author and Teacher

Author: Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Revision Guides

    We can only hold so much information in our heads.  Thank goodness for paper and pen!  I am an inveterate list-maker, and offer the revision guide as a helpful tool for collecting thoughts and steering revision.

    The revision guide is a catch-all, holding our vision for the next draft and a list of changes that will help bring this vision about.  The guide steers rather than dictates our rewriting.  Here are suggestions for what the guide might contain:

    1.    A simple sentence articulating the heartbeat.

    2.    Important themes and questions.  You can refer to this list while rewriting.  Do you stay faithful to your themes and central questions throughout?  Do they change and grow?
    For example, here are some revision notes between the second and third drafts of my novel.  Hannah is my main character; two time frames (one in Minnesota, the other in New Mexico) intertwine.

    •    Hannah:  “I didn’t want faith, I wanted certainty, to know I was making the right decision.”  [In draft three, I wanted to make sure Hannah behaved according to this desire and I wanted to explore the tension between wanting certainty and the need to make leaps of faith.]
    •    Where there’s fear, underneath is the desire to control something.  What does H want to control?

    3.    Movement in ideas and characters.  Where do the ideas you’re exploring begin, how do they evolve, and where do they land?  Who are the characters in your story, how do they change, and where do they arrive?  What is your emotional relationship to these ideas or characters at the beginning, middle, and end of your piece?
    Again, an example from Hannah, Delivered:

    HANNAH:
    NM:  H doesn’t trust self, doesn’t feel she belongs, self-conscious→ H trusts self, capabilities, longings.  Learns that she belongs, regardless.  PRIVATE SPHERE.  Central conflict:  What will it take for Hannah to break free of her constraints?
    MN:  H doesn’t have faith→ H trusts something bigger than herself to uphold her once she’s reached the limits of her capabilities.  PUBLIC SPHERE.
    WHOLE BK:
    1.  H works from a right/wrong, good/bad polarized way of thinking about the world (judging parents, others, self)→discovers realm of faith, which takes us beyond legalistic thinking.
    Creative mobility in this world requires, at crucial moments, the strategic erasure of ethical boundaries.  They lose that mobility who cling to beauty, or who suffer from what the poet Czeslaw Milosz has called “an attachment to ethics at the expense of the sacred.”–Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes this World
    2.  H immobilized by fear→H mobilized by will but governed by fear→H creates false fear structure to give self freedom→H acts from love
    I had to face the shadow side of midwifery, of death being the soul sister to birth.  I could feel the power of fear and it threatened to choke the power of love…I decided to make death a friend, or at least an ally…Rather than ignore or run from it, I learned to acknowledge its presence and to listen to my feelings of love rather than fear. –Sisters on a Journey, 5

    4.    Guidance.  If there’s any material (from your journal, from your reading) that guides your thinking about this project, print it in the revision guide.  Note the quotes I included above; they never appear in the novel, but they helped me think about events in the novel.

    5.    Lists of large changes.  These can be concrete tasks in specific scenes:

    •    Create a clear picture of H right away.  [CHARACTER INTROS]
    •    Have H imagine her birth scenarios earlier, to explain her lack of surprise with Bill.  [CHRONOLOGY]
    Or areas that span the entire book:
    •    Who does H know in town?  Friends? [ROUNDING OUT CHARACTER]
    •    Show H needing affirmation from the midwives throughout [CHARACTER CONSISTENCY]

    Small changes to the text are better kept as marginal notes on a single, printed draft.

    6.    Lists of tics.  We all have writing tics that span our work and tics particular to a project.  These are images, character gestures, word choices, sentence structures, etc., that are repeated too frequently.  Keep a running list to be addressed later in the revision process.  Here are a few of mine:

    •    Straining chairback springs
    •    Emotional swings at chp endings
    •    Face flaring w/ heat
    •    Fists
    And overused words:
    •    Shrug
    •    Dread
    •    Flutter

    7.  Cut passages.  I use the bottom of my revision guide as a purgatory for my “darlings,” those passages I’m attached to but have cut from the previous draft.  This way they are still available to me should I need them—which is almost never.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Others’ Eyes

    The fastest way to see our writing with fresh eyes is to look through the eyes of a reader.  Established authors might profess that they don’t reveal their work to anyone until it’s done, or complain about writing workshops producing works created by consensus.  But writers who are still learning the craft need exposure to the dirty inner workings of writing; they need to see others struggling with their same questions, and they need to learn from others’ mistakes and successes.  It’s possible to receive nourishing, instructive feedback on a manuscript-in-progress.

    Here are some thoughts on giving and receiving feedback that will benefit your work:

    1.  Be careful not to share your work prematurely.  Have you allowed yourself plenty of time in that cloud of safety and unknowing?  Only solicit feedback when you’re genuinely curious about developing your piece.  If you’re looking for someone to endorse your creative process—to say “This work is valuable!”—don’t share it.  No one has the power to validate creativity.

    2.  Choose your audience carefully.  Writing is work; you need work colleagues, not cheerleaders.  The best people to respond to creative work mid-draft are those who are seriously committed to the creative process themselves.  Find peers at your level of experience and teachers you respect.  Note that even excellent, successful authors can lack the skills needed to respond constructively to creative writing, and that the best teachers are not always successful authors.
    Avoid sharing your work with family or friends.  Attachment makes family members, especially parents, miserable critics.  Mom wants to see us succeed too badly; Dad is too worried about what others will think; neither has any objectivity because love and pride and self-consciousness are in the way.
    Another way to say this:  Find readers who can respond to your writing as separate from yourself.  My colleague Cheri Register, an excellent reader, says, “My business as a friendly critic is inherently respectful:  A direct, cathartic cry of sorrow calls for consolation, but a poem offered for critique deserves to be read as a poem.”   The best readers open up possibilities for your text and for personal growth.  If you stop writing after receiving feedback, ask yourself, “Have I stopped because I’m avoiding growing as a person or writer?  Or have I stopped because I’ve allowed this reader’s assessment to knock down my creative process?”  If you answer yes to the latter, fire your reader.

    3.  Ask for stage-appropriate feedback.  Readers of work-in-progress need to know where you are in the development of your work.  Early on, ask readers the big questions.  What is this piece about?  What might it be about?  What themes do you see rising up?  What are you curious to have me pursue?  Midway through, ask questions about cutting and expanding, thematic unity, organization, character development.  Toward the end, ask for feedback on sentence structure, word choice, and other suggestions that will clean up the manuscript.

    4.  Remember that your writing has become a thing.  Others’ responses are addressed to your work, not to you.  When a classmate asks, “When did this scene take place?” she is asking the question of the text.  Write the question down.  Later, consider whether or not to address the question in your writing.  The work, as an independent entity, must answer for itself.

    5.  Feedback matures with age.  For this reason, take notes while others discuss your work.  Initial emotional reactions to comments are not always trustworthy.  Allow some time to pass; reread your manuscript; take notes in your journal.  Then reevaluate the comment.

    6.  Develop your inner tuning fork.  The best feedback resonates—it feels true.  Always assess others’ comments against your own sense of the piece’s heartbeat.  Your job isn’t to address every comment you’re given; it’s to use these comments to help you see your piece with fresh eyes.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Better the Devil You Know: An Exercise

    In a minute you’ll read a writing exercise you’ll hate.  Your hackles will rise and a bitter taste will fill your mouth.  Every bone in your body will resist it.  Here’s my challenge:  Do it anyway.

    A first draft is a beautiful thing.  Drafts are well worth growing attached to; they have raw energy, bursts of bright prose, moments of surprise and delight, and a ton of effort poured into their pages.  A draft bears witness to our creativity:  First there was nothing, and now there’s something.  How thrilling!

    First drafts done well, however, are also flawed.  The language is too loose, we’ve explored only one of a dozen approaches to our subject, we haven’t yet landed on what the piece is really about.  Anne Lamott advises us to write a shitty first draft, but most of us have no other option.

    The tragedy is that most writers stop here, the relief of getting that draft down is so huge.  Our work languishes half-formed between the pages of a notebook or hidden in a computer file.  To give our writing life, it needs revision.

    I’ve come to think of writers’ relationship with first drafts as “better the devil you know”—in other words, we’re familiar with the monster of our first draft and we’re terrified of the one lurking around the corner.  Our attachment mires us.  Suddenly the great adventure of writing ends.  Revision scares us because it’s a whole new challenge, and now that we’ve taken one risk with our first draft we prefer to stay put.

    Which brings me to today’s exercise—an invitation to meet the monster.  Choose a short draft you’re curious about.  Don’t read it.  Sit down with a blank page and write this piece as though for the first time, without ever looking at your draft.  When new material emerges, let it.  If your prose is terrible, keep going.  What Anne Lamott forgot to mention is that the second draft is often shittier.

    A rough draft hacks a path through the dark woods; revision invites us to branch out, to explore the woods, so we can guide our reader with knowledge and confidence.  Simply generating fresh material is one manner of exploring.  Carol Bly wrote that the primary question of this “long middle stage” of writing is “What else do I have to say about this subject?”  This exercise unlocks us from our first attempt at our subject and unleashes fresh thoughts.  So what if the result is abysmal?  If only one brilliant sentence and one a-ha moment appear in this draft, then your next draft will have two brilliant sentences and two a-ha moments, and you’re on the path to fine writing. 

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • 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 we make in the course of writing contributes to the reader’s experience.  Even those choices we reverse, I would argue, build up like layers of paint to affect the final, aesthetic read.

    Other factors contribute to our final product’s shape, especially the content of our story and the voice or persona we use to tell the story.  But our process—all the steps of creating literature and quirky personality who takes these steps—is the factor most often ignored, and from which we can learn the most.

    For example, I worked with a skilled writer who set out to write her memoir of growing up with a father who was the only one of his vast extended family to survive the Holocaust.  His grief and depression profoundly shaped her childhood.  She was adept at writing beautiful narrative chapters about periods of her life, and amassed about 150 pages like this before realizing that she’d avoided writing about her father.  But when she tried to focus on life as his daughter, she got stuck.  “I just can’t find my groove,” she told me.  “All I’ve got are these fragments.”  I suggested she change her process.  Instead of writing long, chronological stories, simply write the fragments.  At first this felt awkward, but eventually the fragments took on a form all their own.  They now act as glimpses into a painful relationship.  Their form—fractured, brief—mirrors their content.  But the writer discovered the form by accommodating her process to the material.

    What works?  What techniques squeeze the content out of you and onto the page?  When I set out to write On the Threshold, I was primarily motivated by abstract questions about spirituality—What does it mean to live a spiritually grounded life?  I sat at my desk and looked around the tiny bungalow I’d just bought.  When I’m stuck as a writer, I can usually get going again by writing about the setting.  I describe place easily and well.  So I wrote about buying that first house and what it took to make it into a home.  My house became my means to explore spiritual questions because it was a process that worked for me.

    As we revise we’re always seeking some structure, some container, to hold our exploration.  But more often than not, the structure emerges through the process.  As committed writers, we must cultivate a lively, healthy means for writing because that means embeds itself in our text.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Revisiting the “So what?” Question

    “So what?”

    Insidious, persistent, biting, the simple question is a brain-bug infecting every writer I’ve ever met.  It gnaws at our confidence.  It stops our pen mid-stroke.  It’s a plague infecting whole classrooms—whole cultures, even, undermining the generative instinct because it assumes a vacuous answer.  There’s no justification for creative work, it seems.

    And it’s the most important question a writer should ask.
    Only the crassest teacher scrawls “So what?” in the margins of a student’s work.  Any mentor with half a heart knows that red ink seeps right through the paper and leaves an indelible mark on the writer’s sense of self.  Now that I have twenty years of teaching creative writing under my belt, I know my primary job—if I care about the quality of literature emerging in the world; if I care about the well-being of the humans emerging from my instruction—revolves around the “So what?” question.  There’s a lot at stake.

    During the day I coach individuals serious about learning the craft of writing; at night I teach adults in a non-profit continuing education program.  The writers I work with are amateurs.  All have the potential to be successful, meaning they can find deep satisfaction in the writing process.  Only some have the potential to publish, and this fact has less to do with their talent than their willingness to sweat.  As a teacher I consider a writer’s journey toward self-discovery and his or her development of craft inseparable.  I try my darnedest to nurture both.

    Which is why, when I begin working with an ambitious and bright-eyed novice who’s setting out to write a novel or an essay or, as usually is the case with my clientele, a memoir, one of the first questions I ask is, “Why?”  This is a kinder, gentler version of “So what?”; it scratches the surface, which is where every excavation begins.

    “Because I want my grandchildren to know me.”

    “Because it’s good therapy.”

    “Because I want to help others going through [treatment for addiction / breast cancer / mental illness / their children’s teenage years].”

    “Because the world needs to hear this story.”

    Good reasons.  With any piece of writing there exist a dozen motivations, all worth airing.  I want to hear the surface explanation—the story the writer tells him- or herself when facing the blank page.  Here is the public face of “So what?”, the explanation to give your in-laws or a politely interested cocktail party guest (who will likely respond, “Are you published?”).

    As honest and important as these first response are, they’re rarely deep enough to sustain someone through the prolonged slog of writing well.  Socially acceptable reasons for being creative are usually thin.  They look self-consciously outward, striving to place the creative urge in a capitalistic context or justify it with the goal of personal betterment.   Nor are they especially instructive.  When a person has carved three hours out of a productive day for writing and enters that empty field of white, he or she needs the guidance of longing to find the way.  Even Strunk and White, those masters of polished prose, advise us to “sympathize with the reader’s plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know the reader’s wants.  Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.”

    What are the reasons behind our stated reason for writing?  What’s the emerging inner story?  That’s where passion and fear and drive reside—motivation powerful enough for the long haul and rich enough to make the effort worthwhile.  “Follow the ache,” my colleague Cheri Register teaches.  So the second question I ask writers is “What’s at stake?”  This is another excavation of the “So what?” question, one that digs past the perceived product into the dirty work of wrangling with content.  I want to know what the author is seeking in the material.  Where is his or her heart on the line?  What depends on this story’s unfolding?  In other words, I’m less interested in the author’s relationship to the product or the product’s relationship to the audience than the author’s relationship to the subject matter.  Underneath every lasting literary endeavor is a person’s genuine engagement with material.  We have to peel away surface distractions (like the ubiquitous, haunting question, “Who cares?”) and grant ourselves permission to explore.

    Answers to the “What’s at stake?” question are useful; they point toward material that matters.  “My life feels so fragmented.  Is it possible to find unity in all my memories?”  “I know my suffering has meaning but I’m not sure what.  I want to find out.”  “I’m curious about how interdependent people are and want to learn how communities work.”  When we explore our personal stake in our material, we fuel the engine that will pull us through the writing and our reader through the reading.  We turn our face away from the audience and look directly at the stuff of our story, with which we can participate in an intimate conversation.  An author’s personal stake determines the story’s honesty.  The more heartfelt the engagement, the richer the truth that emerges.  There’s a direct link between why we write and what we write.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Inevitable “I” Part 2

    In Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, she writes:

    The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void.  The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom—or rather the movement toward it—that counts.

    The world—the context within which the author’s life plays out—must show up in our story as well, and this inclusion requires memoirists to “move toward wisdom”, or, as I would put it, draw connections between one’s private life and the human experience.  The connections are both inherent in the lived experience as well as created in the writing experience.  Gornick goes on to say:

    A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom.  Truth in a memoir is achieved…when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.  What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

    …When Rousseau observes, “I have nothing but myself to write about, and this self that I have, I hardly know of what it consists,” he is saying to the reader, “I will go in search of it in your presence.  I will set down on the page a tale of experience just as I think it occurred, and together we’ll see what it exemplifies, both of us discovering as I write this self I am in search of.”  And that was the beginning of memoir as we know it.
    So the very movement through the self to some mystery lurking beyond is key to good literature.  “Autobiography is the most fascinating thing you can do because you get to touch the human condition,” writes Jim Dine.  “And in the end, what else is there?  To me, it’s the ultimate affirmation of life, and a miracle of this transient, extremely fragile organism.  To celebrate that, I think, is a noble thing to do.”      This touching of the human condition is the opposite of the naval-gazing beginning memoirist fear; it is a profoundly contemplative, creative, and connective act.  When we peer through the details of our lives to address basic human questions—who am I?  what gives my life meaning?—we engage in myth-making, that fundamental act of explaining the universe.

    Conversely, when we bypass the self (out of embarrassment, humility, disinterest, or concern for the reader) hoping to arrive more quickly at some nugget of wisdom, we deny our readers the journey—and the journey is what readers most want.  Sure, we’re curious about what lessons you’ve learned from your breast cancer, your recovery from addiction, your climb up Mount Kilimanjaro.  But we’re more interested in how you learned these lessons, because in reading your story, we might learn them as well.

    Once again, this isn’t just a literary trick to please the reader.  Genuine insights and revelations emerge when we include ourselves, so the experience of writing is more exciting—and scary.  The more we show up in our stories, the more we have at stake.  By this I mean that our investment is greater; we care more deeply about the questions our writing asks and the discoveries the process discloses.  Our work becomes less about posturing and more about the ongoing formation of self, which never exists in isolation.

    In story-telling, the personal doesn’t sit at one end of a see-saw across from the universal.  Rather, the see-saw bends in a surprising circle.  The more heart we put into our stories, the closer we come to the heart of the matter.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Inevitable “I”

    If we show up in our stories as a character, our memoirs are stronger.  Why?  A reader entering a story needs shoes to walk around in and a pair of lenses to see through.  We are embodied creatures.  Even in the two-dimensional world of language, we need bodies or, at the very least, personality.  Every reader of creative nonfiction is aware of the author lurking behind the story and brings to reading the expectation that the author will appear, either as character or narrator.  Graham Swift wrote this about his fiction:  “I favor the first person.  One reason I do so is that I do not want simply to tell, out of the blue, a story.  I want to show the pressure and need for its telling—I am as interested in the narrator as in the narrative.  I want to explore the urgency of the relation between the two.”

    Swift’s words are doubly true for memoir.  Readers may be interested in the story’s plot, but they’re equally (and often more) interested in why the author’s telling this story, how he or she feels about it today, and what meaning it holds.  Likewise, as Swift implies, “the pressure and need” for the story’s telling proves to be exciting territory for a writer.  So much of the mystery of our material resides not in what happened but in what we make of what happened.

    One of the reasons beginning writers don’t show up in their own stories is that they feel self-conscious about placing themselves in the limelight.  Who wants to read about “me-me-me?”  As Alice McDermott writes, “the sight of too many first-person pronouns dribbling down a page tends to affect my reading mind in much the same way too many ice cubes dropped down my back affect my spine.”  (Carol Bly’s response:  “You may keep the self-centered material—that’s all we writers have to work with!—but don’t keep the self-centered language.”) This brings me to my point:  While all creative nonfiction includes the self, the best writing uses the self as a conduit to some other purpose.  When those first person pronouns are the object of a story (or sentence), the result is naval gazing:  “Look at me!”  When they are the subject, they act as windows onto a wider world:  “I saw the northern lights.”  The self conveys the reader outward.  “The real subject of autobiography is not one’s experience but one’s consciousness,” Patricia Hampl said in an interview.  “Memoirists use the self as a tool.”

    Remember that old tidbit of writing class wisdom, “Write what you know”?  We each have a wealth of memories to draw from; we each have the capacity to revisit a memory until it’s fleshed out with details; and every memory has an emotional stake (why else do we remember?) that points beyond the details to some truth about what it means to be human.  The self isn’t just any tool; it’s our best tool.  Don’t be afraid to use it.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • On Length

    I’ve been surprised by how many beginning writers have a strange notion that whatever they’re writing—say, a chapter or short memoir or essay—must be certain length—say, twenty pages—and get tied in knots when their writing doesn’t conform.  Ironically, everyone’s assumptions about the proper length for a piece are different.  Where do these ideas come from?  And why?

    I suspect these assumptions have their origins in twelve-plus years of schooling, during which every bit of writing comes with page expectations.  Our five-paragraph themes had to be three pages long.  Our college essays had to present our response to certain texts within twelve pages.  When I taught creative writing at a seminary a few years ago, I was amazed at how many times my students asked me how long their assignments had to be.  “As long as they need to be,” I answered repeatedly.  In the freewheeling world of creative adulthood, guidelines such as page limits fall by the wayside.  I don’t think my students ever believed me.  Such freedom is frightening, and almost unheard of in an academic setting.

    Honestly, though:  A creative piece should take up as much space as it needs to to be whole, to do the work it sets out to do.  Read Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones’ anthology, In Short, to see just how short creative nonfiction can be.  Read Kathleen Norris’ Dakota or Bernard Cooper’s Truth Serum to see how varied the lengths of individual chapters can be within a book.  Read an essay by James Baldwin to see how long essays can be.  Just as individual sentences can consist of a single word or fill whole pages, the length of creative prose will work if it fits the content.  Length, like any element of structure, must serve the story’s heartbeat.

    That said, a page-count restriction can be a helpful boundary in the same way a sonnet’s strict form can provide inspiration and creative limitation to the poet.  Venue often dictates length; writers who submit to periodicals or contests must abide by word-counts, and writers for the web must keep things punchy, sometimes even within the boundaries of the screen.  In these cases it’s good to keep a rough sense of length in mind as you compose.  The act of reading alone leads to certain strictures.  I once worked with a memoir so long, the author expected it to be printed in four volumes.  Despite his gripping story and outrageous humor, his story would be well-served by the limitations of a single volume.  I say this not because he’d be more apt to sell it this way (although this is true) but because readers need material to be digestible.  Sure, a nine-course meal can be a treat, just not on a regular basis.  Most often the discipline of fitting a story into a reasonable length for a book is good for the story.

    This is yet another instance when we must trust our stories more than our selves.  Like people, each story will grow into its own unique size.  Our challenge as writers is to find the length that serves the story best.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • 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 ourselves, they roil around in our being and exert tremendous control over our lives.  Events from our childhood, conscious or otherwise, dictate current behaviors.  A shameful secret held close over years can eat away at our sense of self; it can govern our choices; it can cause us to generate more shameful secrets.  Unshared, our experiences yield a terrible power.

    Once we begin telling the stories of our life experiences, even with a friend, something changes.  The events that shaped us lose a bit of their control.  When a friend hears our shameful secret and laughs at how silly it is, the shame dissipates.  Or if the friend shares her shameful secret in response, we feel less lonely in our short-comings.  Sharing our stories aloud can diffuse their power.

    Part of the reason therapy works is that the therapist offers him or herself as a forum for working with our memories.  The therapist hears our story, holds it, reflects on it, and helps us to see it in new ways.  In other words, a professional makes room for our story to exist outside of ourselves and helps us to work with that story.  Done well and over time, this can radically change our relationship to events from our past.

    As anyone who journals knows, the blank page works similar magic.  A piece of paper can transform a memory, insubstantial and powerful, into a thing that exists outside of ourselves.  Even a first draft can diffuse that power, because the memory now has form and the writer has gained some authority over the memory.  As we take a memory through revision, however, a remarkable transformation happens.  We make a thousand miniscule choices about how to tell our story—the order, the pacing, when to reflect and when to describe the scene, which themes to pull forward and which to relinquish… We can use the same tragic childhood to wallow in self-pity or to explore the nature of suffering or to ask, “What gave me the resilience to survive?”  And as we make these choices, we become authors of our own identity.  The act of creating a story essentially becomes an act of creating ourselves.  The power exits our memories and enters our being.  We gain authority.

    The page provides a container more solid than a good listening ear.  Written words stay put.  They mirror our stories back to us.  Our stories exist outside of ourselves as things, and the more we write, the more we understand exactly how malleable these things are.  This process is lonelier than therapy and by no means a substitute.  My point is that something different happens in us when we write memoir—the difference between being a self-aware person and the author of one’s life.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • 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 overwhelmed by our work means we’re doing good work, or at least work that matters.

    Second, every project, no matter how overwhelming, has entry points that are infinitely manageable.  I’ve yet to encounter a subject that can’t be broken down into smaller pieces.  An image, a question, a character’s face, a memorable setting—any of these can provide a way in.  Likewise, drafts always have cracks in them where a writer can insert a crowbar.  We can acquire the tools we need to “re-see” our structure or strengthen a plot.  Time—years and even decades—allows us to work wonders with large projects.

    So the key to moving forward on a project is accepting that overwhelming feeling as the nature of writing while at the same time finding these small, practical avenues into the work.  I think this is what Rilke meant when he told the young poet, “Live the questions.”  We don’t want to rid ourselves of the great Mystery; we want to engage it, we want to give our readers a small glimpse of it.  Successful writers are willing to work despite all the discomforts.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew