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 […]
Inevitable “I” Part 2 Read More »
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
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?
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.
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
The Overwhelm Factor Read More »
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
Transformation & Writing Read More »
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
Tie-backs and Through-lines: Writing as Weaving Read More »
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
Removing What’s Not Story Read More »
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
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
Spoken/Unspoken/Unspeakable Read More »