Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew | Spiritual Memoir Author and Teacher

Author: Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Transformation & Writing

    During my first years of serious writing, I labored under the conceit that I was writing a book.  The thought was bracing; it motivated me to climb out of bed at 5:30 so I’d have a half-hour of solitary creativity before I had to face a classroom of seventh graders.  Only as I entered my third and fourth years on the project, having given up public school teaching and discovered that my memoir was not an adventure story about biking through Wales but rather an uncomfortably revealing story about reconciling bisexuality with my Christian upbringing; only as I revised the book a dozen times did I begin to understand what was really happening.  The book was writing me.  The primary creation was the self I became because of the writing—a self humbled by the truth of my story and yet less afraid to own this truth; a self no longer blindly controlled by events in my past, now able to be an active agent in framing them; a self in conversation with culture and history and my community.  My commitment to the memoir’s craft pulled me out of the closet and into public discourse, albeit in a small sphere, in a way that enlarged my life.

    Bob Anderson, in his memoir Out of Denial, describes the process as being like an Escher drawing:

    A hand holding a pencil is drawing on a piece of paper another hand holding a pencil.  The two pencil points converge, forming an endless loop in one of those curious Escher puzzles:  where does the action begin and end, what is reality and what is dream or intention, who is the drawer and who is the drawn?
    …I am writing, and I am written; I tell my story, and my story tells me.  It’s an endless loop, this act of living and re-membering.

    Embedded in the act of self-understanding is the act of self-creation, the authoring of one’s own being, he writes.  This feedback loop is especially obvious in creative nonfiction, where the subject matter is personal experience and where the author is both narrator and main character.  Montaigne put it this way:  “Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones.  I have no more made my book than my book has made me.”  But all genres have the potential for this intimate connection between text and self, and the best writing emerges when the stakes are high—when the author writes what’s most pressing and heart-felt—regardless of form.  “Follow the ache,” my colleague Cheri Register recommends.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Tie-backs and Through-lines: Writing as Weaving

    I grew up a mile from Philipsburg Manor, a restored colonial farm and mill in the Hudson Valley.  The summer between seventh and eighth grades, I volunteered there as an apprentice to the weaver.  I got to wear a bonnet and bodice, milk the cow, card and spin wool, and I learned to weave.  The loom filled an entire room; the beater was the size of a roof beam.  I slipped the shuttle back and forth, watching the home-spun wool unravel and gradually fill the warp with color.  I pulled the great beam forward and beat each pass-through into place.

    As I continue to work on my novel this summer, I’ve been thinking about that apprenticeship.  The initial drafting of my story was very much like carding.  When you card wool, you use these crude paddles with metal teeth to brush out all the seeds and tangles that sheep accumulate.  The end product is this clean fluff—pure, oily wool.  An initial draft gives you material you can work with.

    The writing of subsequent drafts is like spinning.  You begin to put together a story—to “spin a yarn.”  Characters get developed, the plot gets thickened, themes emerge, and you wind up with a spool of writing.  It’s good stuff, but it’s still just yarn.

    The writing of final drafts is like weaving.  Finally you have vision enough to warp the frame—that is, to set the fiber through the loom so patterns will emerge.  Here you say, “The essence of my story is such-and-such; you will see it here and here.”  The scene that occurs on page three will be remembered on page sixty, will influence the character on page one-hundred, and will resonate under my climactic scene.  The themes that appear within the first fifty pages will recur from beginning to end.  Here you develop the through-lines that bind together your story’s disparate pieces.  Here you include the references that tie back to earlier scenes and bring your digressive elements home.  You’re creating a cloth with texture, pattern, and purpose.

    The writer’s work is to make the story both durable and beautiful, something a reader wants to use.  And by “use” I don’t necessarily mean “learn from” so much as “live with”—a new outlook, a new way of being.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Removing What’s Not Story

    I’ve just cut fifty pages from a polished, 400-page draft—that’s one-eighth of what I’d considered a completed book.  What was in those pages?  A few scenes that slowed down the plot, a lot of unnecessary dialogue, whole paragraphs of exposition, and hundreds of extraneous words extracted from too-long sentences.  Everything I cut was not my story. As it’s very possible there are remnants of not-story remaining, I still have some final combing to do.  And I’ve no doubt my agent and eventual editor will cut even more.

    I began working on this novel in 2005, and I am humbled by how much of the volume of what I’ve written has not been my story.  Perhaps other writers are more efficient and economical; perhaps others have the capacity to anticipate the essence of an emergent story, or focus their work during the initial drafting, or otherwise find shortcuts that don’t shortchange the quality of their writing.  This is my fourth book, and I’ve yet to discover an easier method.  I must generate years of notes and scenes and reflections, and then revise “until kingdom come” as my mother says.  In my final revisions, I mostly cut.  I’m a spring gardener after the bushes have bloomed—hack that lilac down to the ground; give that spirea a deep shave.  The story’s life-blood is trustworthy.  If I’m ruthless now, it will bloom all the more when its read.

    The hardest part of writing a story—the part that takes the longest—is figuring out what the story is about.  How can I say this so beginning writers don’t think I’m crazy?  Stories are mysterious ecosystems, populated by complex, interconnected people and fueled by subterranean forces.  This is as true for memoir as it is for fiction.  We may write to discover what happens next, but we rewrite to discover a story’s soul.  Souls are shy; they flee the spotlight; they are glimpsed best from the periphery of our vision.  Souls emerge only gradually.  A story’s soul shows itself only once the author has demonstrated faithfulness, commitment, and a deep capacity for listening.  You know your story’s soul is shining through when pages and pages of your work seem superfluous, and you find yourself willing to slough them off for the sake of that light.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Sifting

    My daughter, who is almost a year-and-a-half, has discovered the joys of sifting sand.  She shovels it into the colander and watches, fascinated, as it streams through, leaving behind the pebbles which she promptly puts in her mouth.

    After completing a draft, a writer’s task is to construct a new colander, a tool strong enough to strain out what is no longer needed and leave behind the essence of the story.

    The challenge in revision is to set aside our attachments to text.  We’ve written scenes, characters, expository passages that we assume, by virtue of our effort, must belong.  In the last draft of my novel, I included almost twenty pages of conflict around an insurance salesman; these pages were climactic, I thought, and illustrated the hardships all health care workers endure within our insurance-governed medical system.  But when I looked closely at my heartbeat, newly articulated, I was forced to admit the entire conflict did nothing to serve my story.  I’d created it to serve my own agenda rather than to help my main character move through her struggles.  By these new standards, the scene slipped through the holes back into the sandbox.

    My colander is the story’s heartbeat more clearly defined.  Once I’m revising a piece, the bulletin board over my writing desk always has an index card pinned to it with one or two simple sentences—my latest articulation of the heartbeat.  I post it front and center so with every sentence, paragraph, section, and chapter, I can ask, “How is this serving my heartbeat?”

    Once a writer constructs a colander and shakes out the sand, he or she often grows aware of pebbles that ought to be in the mix but aren’t.  The scenes that remain don’t add up.  The text doesn’t reveal the author’s latest insights.  That’s when we have to generate new material, which inevitably is rough and contains lots of sand.  The new material usually shifts our understanding of the old material.  It demands that we integrate the new characters, events, and themes with the old.  Thus we sift and sift again, until what remains is pure story.

    I know a revision is worthwhile when I experience movement—that is, I might grieve the passages falling back into the sandbox, but the stones left behind taste better than any before.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Spoken/Unspoken/Unspeakable

    Mark Doty, in a class on writing memoir, said that three forces are at play in any personal narrative:  the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable.  The dynamic between these triune forces is what gives a story life.

    As I understand it, the spoken force consists of the words on the page—that is, the story as we’ve consciously told it.

    The unspoken force is made up of those emotions and ideas that lurk just beneath the surface of the story; we must “read between the lines” to find what is unspoken.  The author is conscious of this material, but for whatever reason has chosen not to name it.  The “unspoken” is always accessible to the reader who is willing to work.

    In the “unspeakable” realm we find all that material for which we don’t have language.  Sometimes material is unspeakable because no language exists to describe it.  The natural world has a silent, pulsing life that words invariably misrepresent.  The territory of the spirit, of profound emotion, of enormous mystery, of birth and death and love and complicated relationships and profound horror—these are ultimately indescribable.  While we can attempt to represent this realm with words, and can do so with elegance and art, we inevitably fail.  Language can point us toward the unspeakable but never map it.

    The unspeakable also contains material from the author’s unconscious.  Our shadows, our hidden truths, our real brilliance all reside beyond our reach.  The unconscious realm is always evident in creative work, no matter how hard we try to mask or deny it.  Every conscious act carries its subconscious counterpart.  And so behind the words we’ve chosen for the page and behind the words we’ve deliberately not written is a hidden story of motivation, ache, and mystery.

    Doty presented these forces as a dynamic triangle, each point communicating with the others, resonating, hiding and revealing.

    The more I’ve lived with this image, the more helpful it’s become for revision.  Our work in revision is to grow increasingly aware of our material and to be quite deliberate about what appears on the page, what is left unsaid, and what hides below the surface.  In a first draft, we know absolutely nothing about the unspeakable realm.  As we pay attention to what has emerged and as we read between the lines, hints of the unspeakable bubble up.  The unspeakable is not static.  It’s a well, and we can draw from it to add texture and depth to our work.

    As an example, consider a time when a group of people have read your work.  They observe a theme emerging in your story that you hadn’t intended, but that excites and scares you.  This theme feels true.  Or perhaps they ask you to write a scene that’s largely missing from the draft.  When you begin composing this scene, you realize it absolutely belongs; it’s crucial to your piece’s heartbeat.  In both cases, you are mining the unspeakable realm, pulling material out into the realms of the spoken and unspoken.

    Readers know when writers have done this work.  Unconscious motivations and manipulations are no longer evident.  I believe that the more material you pull forward, the more truly mysterious is the material left behind.  A lovely tension emerges, then, between the crafted work toward which you have increasing awareness and authorship, and the depth of the unspeakable lurking under the spoken and unspoken.  The best literature uses language and gaps within language as a container to hold this great mystery of being human.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • What’s at Stake?

    Whenever I begin to work with a writer on his or her project, I always ask two questions.  The first is “Why are you writing this?”  The answers I get are often similar—“Because I learned things from my experience I want to share with others”; “Because it’s good therapy”; “Because the world needs to hear this story;” “Because I feel compelled.” With any one piece of writing there exist a dozen motivations for writing, and I want to hear the surface explanation—the story the writer tells him- or herself when facing the blank page.

    But this first response, while honest and important, is never deep enough to sustain someone through the long effort of writing.  Nor is it particularly helpful.  As a writing coach, I look for the reasons behind the stated reason, the emerging inner story, because that’s where passion and fear and drive reside.  I look for motivation powerful enough for the long haul and rich enough to make the effort worthwhile.  So the second question I ask is “What’s at stake for you?”  I want to know what the author is seeking in the material, where his or her heart is on the line, and 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 and level of engagement in the process.

    Answers to the “What’s at stake?” question are far more interesting.  “I can’t stop grieving my mother’s death, and I hope writing will help me.”  “I’m curious about how interdependent people are and want to learn how communities work.”  “My life feels so fragmented.  Is it possible to find unity in all my memories?”  When we explore our personal stake in our material, we fuel the engine that will pull us through the writing journey and our reader through the reading journey.  We turn our face away from the audience and look directly and the stuff of our story, where we can engage it in intimate conversation.  An author’s personal stake in a story determines the story’s honesty, be it told in fiction or nonfiction.  There’s a direct link between why we write and what we write.

    When my editor at Skinner House asked if I would write a guide to writing spiritual memoir, I initially said no.  I’d taught spiritual memoir writing for years; I had oodles of lecture notes, writing exercises, and literary examples stored on my computer; I knew the subject and could easily have compiled my thoughts into a book.  But the project seemed boring.  Who would want to spend a year putting together already thought-out thoughts?  There was nothing for me to discover.  I had no stake in the project.  Eventually a question emerged:  How is writing a spiritual practice?  While Writing the Sacred Journey doesn’t address this question until the final chapter, I pondered it with every page.  The exploration helped motivate me.

    As I work on longer projects, I ask myself the “What’s at stake?” question repeatedly.  My answers change with each draft—they grow cleaner and more pointed—and they help guide my revision.  Yesterday, after working on my novel for five years, after finding an agent to represent it, and after receiving my first round of rejections from editors, I asked yet again what my personal stake is in this story.  And I came up with an entirely new and surprising answer.  The new insight helps me clarify the novel’s focus, even though my character’s circumstances are entirely different from my own.  I now know a bit better what problem I’m trying to solve through writing, and this guides my revision.

    Any story we put our heart into will kick up layers of memory and emotion.  Revising becomes this lovely, on-going dialogue between the story’s life and our own.  Pretty amazing!

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Generating in Revision

    Carol Bly wrote that the essential question we must ask during what she calls “the long middle stage” of writing is, “What more do I have to say about this topic?”  Certainly this is a good question to ask early on, when we’ve completed a draft and are unsure where to go next.  Usually we’re inclined to begin tweaking the words on the page as we head into revision, but I’d like to suggest instead that the first stages of revision more often than not involve generation.

    First, it’s good to generate journal entries.

    • Why am I writing this?  What’s in it (in the writing process and in the subject matter, NOT in the outcome) for me?
    • How do I feel about my draft?  What are my places of discomfort?  What am I attached to and why?
    • What might this draft be asking of me?  What might it want to become?

    Second, it’s very likely that we need to generate more material.  Here are some common places where material is missing:

    • Have I written a scene that helps my reader understand what’s at stake for me as the narrator or for my main character?
    • Have I written a scene that illustrates the expectations and/or desires of the narrator or main character at the beginning?
    • Have I written a scene that illustrates the consequences of the story on the narrator or main character?
    • Identify places in your prose where you tell rather than show.  Are there details or scenes that might do this work more effectively for the reader?
    • Identify turning points in your story.  Have you done these moments justice by developing these scenes fully?
    • What moments are the emotional roots of your story?  Have you given the reader the history necessary to make sense of the characters?
    • What scenes are you perhaps avoiding because they demand difficult emotional work?

    Even writers whose first drafts are thicker than phonebooks can benefit from this second-stage generating.  Notice how these questions focus on filling in gaps and identifying what’s most at stake—tasks that are difficult in a first draft.  Many writers get nervous about the scattered nature of this kind of generating.  New scenes don’t fit within the sequential, connected first draft; they upset the applecart.  But this is exactly what we’re after in revision.  We want to drive wedges of fresh insight into the old prose to break it up, forcing us to see it anew.

    Philip Lopate describes the personal essayist as attempting “to surround a something—a subject, a mood, a problematic irritation—by coming at it from all angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of the matter.”  This is also a good description of the revision process.  Coming at our story from only one angle makes for a one-dimensional story.  But if we come at it again and again, fleshing out memories, complicating characters, questioning motives, and layering awareness upon fresh awareness, our story grows multifaceted and gripping.   The time for trimming can always wait.

    Essentially, generating in response to a first draft is an act of listening.  We’re listening to what thus far is unsaid, pulling the “unspoken” out into the realm of the “spoken” so we can work with it and craft it.  This listening is deeper and wider than first-draft listening.  We’re listening in the cracks; we’re listening underneath the printed page.  This is both a skill and an ongoing practice, with consequences, I would argue, in other arenas of our life.      –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • The Revision Journal

    The handiest revision tool I know is an empty notebook.  Even the presence of that notebook, silent and full of potential in my desk drawer, influences my writing.  Why?  Because those empty pages, which I’m saving for the purpose of “seeing my subject anew,” exert the same creative potential as the empty pages of my initial draft.  I have this much space (one hundred college ruled pages) to explore my project, adding nuance and insight and depth.  And all that space is removed from the rough draft, which usually resides in a computer file—that is, it’s a space apart from my actual composition where I can be brutally honest and unbelievably sloppy.  The revision notebook is my happy companion.

    What goes in it?   First, I’ve taken a lesson from Virginia Woolf’s diaries and use it to vent about the writing process.  If I’m stuck, I write about being stuck.  If I’m despairing, I make note of it.  Over time, I’ve learned to recognize patterns in the emotional highs and lows of writing and find comfort in their familiarity.  For example, I often feel stymied between drafts, as though I’ll never see my way clear to a new vision for the work.  This awareness, and the fact that the stymied period always passes, has over time eased my sense of panic.  A save space to hash out my process acts as a release valve and makes me more self-aware as a writer.

    Second, a notebook allows us to use our natural voice without having to be conscious of our readers.  In my experience, my clearest, freshest voice emerges when I write only for myself.  When I periodically turn to my notebook to journal about my process or subject matter, I ground myself back in that voice.  Sometimes phrases, sentences, or whole paragraphs emerge that I then transfer to my draft.  More often I simply remember my voice, I shed my pretenses, and return to my writing with greater integrity.

    Third, old fashioned pen and paper allow writers to play with their manuscripts in ways a computer can’t.  I use my notebook to draw mind maps, bubbles of ideas that link and digress and sprawl.  I make timelines to help me sort out chronology.  I sketch visual representations of my work’s structure so I can see its entire shape.  I color-code elements of the story—characters, themes, places—to find gaps and to create balance.  In other words, the revision notebook provides me with an entirely new method to work with my prose.

    Likewise, different material emerges when we use various tools for writing.  My prose is faster, sloppier, and bolder when I compose on the computer.  When I write by hand, I pay more attention to individual words; I pause more often to think; I’m more apt to be honest, probably because I’ve journaled by hand for decades.  Having two modalities increases my chances of getting at the heart of my project.

    Lest you consider me a Ludite, for every project I also keep a computer file dedicated to revision.  There I harbor the “darlings” I’m unwilling to kill—that is, when I cut passages from my draft, they move to the purgatory of my revision journal where they usually languish.  But I am comforted that they still exist, and I always read through them before moving on to another draft to determine whether my judgment was good.  This file allows me to move quickly from draft to journal when I’ve had an inspiration mid-stream but don’t want to interrupt myself.  I write a lot of lists in this journal.

    The journal can act as a retreat place—a haven where we can see our work with fresh perspective and from which we can return to composing with renewed vigor.        –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Why Revise?

    Lately I’ve been feeling like a revision evangelical.  The majority of my teaching time is spent converting beginning and intermediate writers into revisers—that is, into writers who labor beyond their rough drafts into more and more mature versions, taking their creative ideas through the paces of the writing process until they become polished work.  Learning to revise is a huge hurdle to overcome.  Most beginning writers never get past the generating stage because revision is too demanding.  And most writing teachers shy away from teaching the revision process, I suspect because creating writing prompts is easier than helping writers to jettison egos, generate new narrative structures, and discover unifying themes.

    Why, exactly, am I hung up on revision?  I spend the vast bulk of my own writing time revising and feel revision needs corresponding air-time in the classroom.  I’ve grown weary of reading first drafts, no matter how inspired, because first drafts always fail to explore the full complexity of a subject.  Mostly, however, I’m interested in how our small, personal stories can become windows onto a universal story, the story of being human.  Rough drafts of memoirs are invariably self-centered, and rightly so—authors need space to muck around in the stuff of their lives before they can discover anything truthful or timeless.  Revision is essentially the process of digging under and around and within our stories so we can present them in the most thorough, honest light.  I want to bring people, both writers and readers, to this light.

    Lest you haven’t heard enough from this bully pulpit, I’d suggest this as the main reason you should consider revising your work:  If you want the heart of your experience to connect, through language, to the heart of your readers, you must look beyond the first version of your story.  You must ‘see it again’.  Hearts are hidden deep in the body, and a first draft is always skin-deep.
    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Cutting and Expanding

    The vast majority of revision work entails either expanding passages that further your piece’s heartbeat and cutting those that don’t—the old Michelangelo story about chipping away all the marble that’s not the angel.  Both activities are guided by discernment.  In spiritual circles, discernment means careful listening for what the Quakers call way.  What path is opening before me now?  What is my calling?  What is right action in this situation?  How might I be true to myself and my beliefs?  In revision, discernment is also about deep listening.  What is this piece really about?  What might it want to become?  Can I reach another level of truth-telling here?  In other words, what pumps life into this creative work and how can I, its author, help this life emerge most fully?

    Pay close attention to the act of revision and you’ll get all sorts of insights about real-life discernment.  Writing asks that we hunker down in the parts of our story that bring it to life by lingering, expanding, and turning over the details for layers of symbolism.  Conversely, writing asks that we kill the proverbial darlings, letting go of those scenes and sentences we’re attached to but which detract from the piece’s life.  We must enrich all that serves our story release all that doesn’t.  In other words, revision demands that we discern what’s important and why, and then devote ourselves to that end.
    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew