Author: Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

I’ve recently become a great fan of chronology, the true representation of the order of events.   Stories, according to E.M. Forster, are narratives of events arranged in their time sequence, with the great advantage of making the audience want to know what happens next.   Beginning, middle, end:   the formula is as old as the hills, and for good reason.   It works.

All writers enjoy playing with chronology, pushing against the natural order for the sake of art.   Any deviance from the direct progression of time can surprise the reader, to extraordinary effect.   However, I would argue that writers must first know the chronology of their story before they attempt to break it.   And I want to caution writers of memoir that the chronology which seems so obvious when we sit down with a memory often becomes severely mangled once we put pen to paper.   What at first seems like a no-brainer is in fact a tremendous challenge.

Here’s why.   A memory inspires us; we sit down at the computer and begin narrating the external events that compose this memory.   As we write, we realize that certain historical background is necessary to help the reader understand the significance of this event, so we back-track to fill in the reader.   As we progress with our story, we gain new insights–into our motivation, into the various characters and their relationships, into the on-going significance of this memory in our life.   Perhaps we interject these thoughts.   Then we might recall the significance of crafting a scene, and return to the memory to describe our thoughts and feelings at the time.   We might also relate this event to others that occurred afterward.   By the time we hit “save,” we’re mired in a chronological stew–without knowing it.

Our memory likes to skip and jump; this feels normal and natural and very familiar.   But when this process is represented on the page, it makes no sense to an anonymous reader.   This is NOT a reason to constrain yourself to chronology in the first draft.   Limitations like that are deadly. We need the free-wheeling, associative mess of memory to reveal surprising connections and unexpected insights.   However, I would encourage you not to grow attached to this first draft.   Quality memoir taps the wisdom of a first-draft mess and layers it with consideration for the reader.   Which means honoring chronology.

An exercise I strongly encourage all memoirists to try is to take an unconstrained, leaping-and-jumping first draft and make a timeline of the events represented there.   Be sure to identify the chronology of the interior world–the progression of emotions and thoughts–as well as the exterior.   Also note where your present-day narrator, who resides at the end of the timeline, interjects his- or herself into the narrative.   By comparing the actual progression of events to how our draft represents them, we gain two insights:   Our early versions of memories are scattered, richly relational, and worth heeding.   And chronology can wisely guide us in our revision.

Why?   Because the best writing welcomes the reader fully into the author’s experience.   I expect to meet my friend at the State Fair; she never shows up, and I have a miserable time riding the Tilt-a-Whirl by myself.   When I relate this story to my reader, the lonely ride means nothing if I haven’t first conveyed my expectation of company.   The reader needs us to recreate both our internal and external worlds in the order of unfolding to be brought along on our story.   If I wait until the end to divulge that I’m a reporter for the Star Tribune who’s been ordered to write a story on rides at the Midway and that I have a terror of heights, you have been cheated of my story’s full drama.

Only once we’ve been students of our memory’s true chronology and all it has to offer our narrative powers should we begin to play with story-order.   According to Larry Sutin, “Always use chronology unless you have a good reason.”   We need chronology to invite the reader fully into our story and compel him or her to turn the pages.   Only once that progression is in place can we recognize reasons good enough to toy with it.   Forster again:   “If it is in a story we say ‘and then?’   If it is in a plot we ask ‘why?’”   We need to craft a good story before we can dive into the rich terrain of why . –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

Underneath the act of writing memoir is an implicit belief:   A wholeness exists among the fractured memories of a life.   If we didn’t believe this, it’s unlikely any memoirist would take on the endeavor.   In fact, I suspect many people write memoir because they long for a complete, unified perspective on their lives and intuitively understand that writing can help them achieve it.

Unfortunately, unity rarely makes itself apparent early on in the writing process.   As we draft, our story first shows its brokenness.   We write random chunks of memories.   Or we write in strict chronological order, starting from the beginning, and grow distress by how little life this stream of facts contains.

Entire periods of our lives we can’t remember at all, and the images we do remember seem random.   When a scene arrives complete and in great detail, it raises reams of new questions and demands that other scenes be written as well.   Eventually a writer amasses enough material to work with but is absolutely overwhelmed.   So many pages of print, all so messy and disconnected!   In the face of this chaos, it’s easy to despair.   Not only have you NOT found unity in your story, you’ve made matters worse by writing in such a disorderly fashion.

In my experience, this disorder is the necessary precursor to unity.   Writing memoir is an awful lot like creating stained glass; you have to gather the broken pieces before you can envision fitting them together into a cohesive image.   When I’m at this stage of a project, I often revel in the sensation of foreknowledge that comes to me– the whole exists just beyond my awareness.   Intellectually I believe there’s unity to a life because I see it lived out.   We each have a unique and complete personhood infused with personality; despite our brokenness we are each whole, and therefore our stories must be as well.   But I also have a intuitive experiential knowing of unity that doesn’t need my brain.   Whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not, the themes exist within our life stories that will bring them wholeness.   These themes are the questions that flummox you year after year, the weaknesses that plague you, the dilemmas that repeatedly appear in your journal.   These themes reside in your being, and they will appear in your stories.

One task of revision is trusting that unity exists, and then seeking it out.   When you read over your mass of pages, look for those threads that crop up across the anecdotes and speculations.   Make a list of themes.   Draw flow charts that delineate the connections between memories.   This work may not feel like writing, but it is; it’s the deep contemplative work of revision, where we ground our stories in the stuff that makes us all human.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

Over the course of years of working on my own writing and coaching others, I’ve come to recognize a stumbling place in the process of writing a book.   There comes a moment, usually around the completion of a first full draft, when the project seems utterly overwhelming.   A new form of writer’s block emerges.   Rather than writing forward into an unknown territory, the grand adventure of a first draft, the work of finishing or revising a book-length draft is about completing missing pieces.   Every book has an anatomy, an intricate system of organs and muscles and nerves, and the interconnected nature of this anatomy begins to become evident only once a significant portion of it is written.   In our first draft, we compose a liver and leg and the sense of smell; we amass chunks or chapters that function well on their own but remain disconnected.   At some point (different for each writer and even for each book), the writer gains awareness of the need for connective tissue, to hook these organs up and get them communicating to each other.   This awareness comes not by means of any overt evidence on the page but through some intuited sense of the whole, and is usually accompanied by awareness that the draft does NOT represent this whole.   We sense what’s missing but our clueless as to how to fix it.
The terrific inadequacy of our drafts coupled with the mind’s inability to encompass complex, book-length thoughts for extended periods of time causes many writers to shut down.   The work is simply too hard.

There are many tools for handling this stage, but today I’d like to explore what I believe resides behind them all:   a shift in process.   The writing process that serves us so well in generating 200+ pages of text rarely transfers directly to the revision process.   Revision entails shifting how we write, not just what we write.   In my case, I often shift back to pen and paper to generate changes; I no longer can write in snatches of time but need two or three hour blocks; revision work takes me to diverse sections of a manuscript in one sitting rather than proceeding chronologically; I need to work with images (maps, outlines, sketches) rather than words–just to name a few examples.   I’m not suggesting these particulars are true for everyone.   Just as we each must discover and come to peace with our own unique writing process for generating, we must discover and come to peace with a new process for revising.   Often writers don’t recognize this; when the old tools no longer work for them, they presume they’re helplessly stuck.   But the work at this stage is significantly different, demanding new tools and new methods.   An hour spent journaling about the writing process–what might best suit your needs now?–can be hugely beneficial.

Thus we gain versatility as writers, and as human beings.   We’re capable of much more than we initially presume.   The capacity to step back, reassess, and develop a new methodology always serves us well.   –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

The greatest nonfiction writers are the ones who are willing to put up with extremely uncomfortable, miserable thoughts, for days and weeks and years on end.   –Carol Bly

After allowing my novel to rest for half a year, I’ve recently launched back in to make some fairly major changes:   restructuring the first hundred pages, shifting the personality of the main character a notch, revising her reasons for making a pivotal decision near the end, along with many small tweaks.   In the process I’ve experienced the complicated joy of getting fully immersed.   The sensation is one of absolute concentration–I’ve moved into the world of my book and see nothing beyond its boundaries–alongside absolute rebellion.   My whole body revolts against this level of focus.   I squirm, I want to get a glass of water, and then ice, then a coaster; I need to clip my nails.   When these powerful, contrary forces rise up, I know I’m in the heat of writing.

Writing brings peculiar pleasures.   The discomfort of writing reminds me of meditation, how part of me is drawn into the vast, restful realm of silence and another part fights mightily to maintain the dignity of selfhood.   I suspect the same spiritual muscles are at work in both.   When we write, the true self longs to surrender into story where it thrives and knows itself integral to a unified, human story, while the false but righteous self fights to maintain its boundaries.   In such moments, we find ourselves right at the fulcrum of a temporal, physical plane of existence and eternity.   It’s both thrilling and unpleasant, ecstatic and unbearable, not unlike sex.

Carol Bly says the greatest nonfiction writers are those willing to put up with extremely uncomfortable thoughts for great lengths of time, but I suspect the experience of discomfort applies to all creative work and is comprehensive and full-bodied.   A writer’s capacity to tolerate this discomfort determines how deeply and for how long he or she can reside in that generative state.   Fortunately this is a skill we can develop.   I can acknowledge my body’s restlessness without leaving my writing chair; I can acknowledge my ego’s rebellion and still turn back to the work.   While writing I choose again and again to be uncomfortable, going against both instinct and social norms and possibly good sense.   But from my discomfort rises my best work, as well as profound awe for this paradoxical process.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

“I reject the rejections!” the righteous writer cries; “I will persist!”   Hoorah for determination, I say.   But before you ritually burn the rejection slips to rid yourself of bad juju, I’d like to suggest an alternative. “Rejection along with uncertainty are as much a part of the writer’s life as snow and cold are of an Eskimo’s,” editor Ted Solotaroff writes.   “They are conditions one has not only to learn to live with but also learn to make use of.”   What use can we possibly make of rejection?

Minnesotans should know that the more time we spend outdoors in the winter, the less bothersome the cold becomes.   I suggest we develop a sustainable, positive attitude to this wretched climate.   Bundle up, folks!

Admittedly, rejection adds insult to injury.   Maintaining faith in our work without pay or recognition is hard enough for us sensitive, writer-types without the gut-sinking sound of self-addressed stamped envelopes thunking in the mailslot.   But consider this:   Unless a rejection letter is nasty (which I’ve never seen), the rejections themselves are harmless.   They yield only as much power as we give them.   The more we locate authority outside of ourselves– this writing instructor or agent or editor is more worthy   than I to declare a work valuable –the less we learn to trust our own good authority.   The publishing industry is a poor determinant of literary quality.   The marketplace is worse.   As a result, we each must develop standards for our writing and strive to achieve these standards as best we can.   Then we can stand solidly beside our work as we send it out.

As painful as rejection is–and I know; I’ve just received twenty from agents and have another thirty to go–each rejection is an opportunity to learn.   Not enclosing SASEs so you never get rejected or burning your old rejection letters only shoots you in the foot.   First, it’s disrespectful not honor agents’ or publishers’ submissions guidelines.   Some refuse to look at your work if you’ve demonstrated you can’t follow directions.   Second, rejections can give us useful information, about the market or, when they’re personalized, about our work.   Third, knowing your rejection history is important.   I recently dug through my rejections folder and found four slips from agents who liked my writing but wouldn’t take that particular project.   Now I can query them again with this new work.   Finally, denial isn’t healthy.   If we hope to communicate with an audience, we must hold our own vision and standards up against the realities of the marketplace.   Pretending Minnesota is warm in January is a bad idea, especially if you want to go someplace.

Rejections can be invaluable.   While I was writing my first book, Swinging on the Garden Gate , I imagined the story speaking to the mass market.   Two dozen unequivocal rejections from agents and major presses later, I reassessed–mine was a quiet memoir, nosing around the private world of faith and sexual identity and not likely to leap off the shelves to make some agent (or me) any money.   Sure, this realization was a blow to my ego, but it taught me to more accurately assess the marketability of my work.   Note–not the literary value, not the personal or relational value, but its market value.   Next, I imagined a feminist press taking on Swinging as a queer woman’s perspective on divinity.   Nope.   The feminists couldn’t push my work away fast enough.   I learned that most feminist presses treated religion like the plague.   Finally, I identified my ideal audience–people of faith questioning their sexual identity and queer folks questioning their faith–and asked, Who markets books to these people?   The denominational publishing houses?   So I sent off the manuscript and got a few nibbles followed by waffling.   The theology and writing were great, but bisexuality?   Too scary.   I was devastated, but gained regard for those presses willing to undertake edgy work.   Finally Skinner House nabbed the book.  Even though publishing with the Unitarians, who welcome GLBT folk into their clergy roster and bless same-sex marriages, was preaching to the choir, I was thrilled.   An accepting press would escort the book into the world!   Without all the rejections, Swinging would never have been published.

Each rejection is an opportunity to relocate ourselves in faith–not the faith that everything will work out in the end, but faith that our writing is worthwhile, regardless.   Our desire to communicate with others will bear fruit, although perhaps not in the form we originally hoped and after a shitload more work than we expected.   We may need to generate the circumstances with which our writing encounters its readership, whether by rubbing elbows with other authors, writing and rewriting our queries, finding a niche publisher, publishing online, or running off photocopies to distribute at the family reunion.   Each rejection is a chance to hunker down in the real reason we write–because we are helplessly compelled–and trust that this reason is worthy enough.

In the end, I always take my inspiration from the poets.   Even the best among them will never amass enough writing income to buy a used car.   Most won’t get published, and those that do rarely get read.   They write anyway.   They hand out copies of their work at the rail station, asking for spare change.   They read in cafés during National Poetry Month.   The media ignores them, popular culture rejects them, and yet they continue to bear witness.   I suspect that, more than any glossily embossed best-seller, the poets’ quiet, ongoing commitment does tremendous good for the world.   To me, that’s what matters.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

I was asked this question in class last night, and a lively discussion ensued.   There are many reasons memoir is flying off the shelves right now–Americans’ voyeuristic obsessions, our thrill at the democratization of the personal narrative (you don’t have to be a president or have climbed Mount Everest to write about your life), the multicultural movement and our increasing interest at the variety of life’s experiences, Americans’ misguided sense that nonfiction is truer than fiction, our desperation to know that our small lives matter… One answer occurred to me that I want to explore further here:   Memoir is hot now because, in this fragmented, frenzied society, we long to know that our lives have structure and unity. We feel scattered.   We can’t see the big picture.   We read about other, ordinary people’s struggles because we intuit they’ve had to make some sense of them in order to make a book.

If a memoirist has done his or her work, the disparate fragments of life have become something artful and engaging.   How?   Revision!   In fact, revision on at least two planes.   The author must revise how he or she conceives of the life-story, and the author must revise the written version.   Often these two go hand-in-hand.   I can’t tell you how many students of mine are disconcerted when they discover that writing memoir feels like therapy–the tears, the memories they’d rather not face, the hard questions, the digging in sore spots… I’ve worked with therapists writing their memoirs who, after decades of doing their own therapeutic work, were shocked to uncover even more insights and memories in the course of writing.   Like any worthy, emotional work, the only way out is through.   This revision benefits us–we become more self-aware–and it benefits our work.   I often wonder what James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces might have looked like had he not simply lied about his past but also explored why he lied, within the memoir.   We all knowingly or unknowingly fabricate the past.   Had Frey taken the next step in revision, digging into a deeper level of honesty and a deeper level of complexity in his manuscript, he might have created a story that could last beyond a momentary flurry of publicity.

Without seeing our lives and our written work from multiple angles over various periods of time, we cannot find the themes that bind one memory to the next.   Nor can we discover the structure lurking below the story’s surface, nor the movement that has carried us from the person we were into the person we are now.   Revision helps us find a container for our story, and it is this container that readers grab at.   Because if Mary Karr or Augustine Burroughs or Patricia Hampl or any number of seemingly ordinary people can make wholeness of this mess, perhaps we can, too.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew