Writing Process

Posts about tools and methods I’ve used in my own writing process

Genealogy

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When I first began writing about my life, genealogy didn’t figure into the picture.  I’d been doing some serious research on my family’s history for some time, but it wasn’t until later that I saw how the two subjects fit together and provided an additional framework from which to view my own experiences.  It was the show, ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ that sparked my genealogy obsession.  The show was really an ancestry.com marketing project – each episode a short documentary that showed a celebrity’s experience tracing some branch of their family tree.  Of course, on the show, each celebrity finds some amazing information with seemingly no more effort than typing a name and birth date into a website.  They travel from city to city, or even from country to country, and have genealogy experts waiting for them at each point to tell them amazing secrets about their ancestors.  That’s not what it’s like in real life.  You can easily spend a lifetime trying to build stories around the names you can find in your family tree, especially if you come from a broken family or a family that doesn’t believe in airing its dirty laundry.  But the show inspired me to start my own research, nonetheless.

I had also been writing a little bit about my life around the same time.  At some point, it occurred to me that writing about my life could potentially save some random relative a few generations down the road from pounding their head on their desk trying to figure out what my life and my family was all about.  I also began to think about the stories of my ancestors – their triumphs and tribulations – the tragedy and stoicism – the good luck and the bad luck – and how they may have influenced me.  Many traits pass themselves down through the generations – some good, some horrible, and I started to see patterns emerging.  The idea of weaving in stories of my ancestors into my memoir struck me as having some additional value, so that’s what I’ve done.  I’ve made some amazing finds, and I’ve run into rock solid dead ends, but the research is fascinating.  I’ll share a few of my genealogy stories shortly.

I am looking at…

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Today I began reading Natalie Goldberg’s books, Old Friend from Far Away, and Writing Down the Bones.  The first writing prompt in Old Friend is “I am looking at…”  My hand ached after writing for ten minutes because I rarely write on paper anymore, and I seem to have lost most ability to write legibly over the years, too.  I’m easily distracted on the computer, though, so I’ve decided to give paper a shot.  Here’s what spilled out…

I am looking at a basket of laundry. My basket is wicker, a smaller oval at its base than at its rim.  It’s full to overflowing with the laundry I washed this morning.  Its contents are organized the way I organize everything that comes from any sort of repetitive task I undertake.  First, at the bottom, my jeans and long-sleeved shirts.  They are the biggest items of clothing I wash (unless you count the towels) because I’m the biggest person in the house.  They fill most of the bottom of the basket, and I fill the leftover gap with socks and underwear – socks that are folded together in a ball, and underwear that’s just tossed randomly into a pile.  Small things that can settle into the space and fill it just right so I can place my next layer of clothes on top.  Next come my t-shirts and my partner’s clothes, which fold up so much smaller than mine do.  I arrange these things to fit neatly, as though each stack of clothes is a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.  Pants here, long-sleeved shirts there, short-sleeve shirts somewhere else.  The top layers are consistent, too.  My partner’s socks and underwear – they have to be folded, unlike mine which I just toss in my drawer.  I stack these near the top because if I bury them, they’d get messed up and I’d have to refold them when I get to putting things away.  Finally, the kid’s clothes and bathroom towels go on top because these have to be put away in different rooms.  When I mount the stairs, I will first put away the kid’s clothes, then the towels, then head into our bedroom.  This order makes sense because the basket will stay in my bedroom.  I start furthest away and hit all three places in a perfect order.  I only have to open each drawer once because I’ve organized the piles as I folded them – all like things together.  All this for efficiency.  I’m obsessed with efficiency.  It’s something I do because I can’t help myself.  I plan the most efficient path through the house, trying to combine tasks logically as I go.  I refine my steps as I repeat things.

The exercise was more fun than I thought it’d be, though I cut myself off after ten minutes because of my aching fingers.  A simple glance at my laundry basket, and I found myself writing about my semi-OCD tendencies.  The quality of the writing isn’t important to me – I’m just working on getting in the habit of writing about random things since I’m giving my memoir a bit of a break.  The interesting part of it is that I can see including a bit about my OCD self in my memoir – it’s an element I didn’t touch on, and one that I could generate some humor with.  Mission accomplished for the moment…

Me and my battle with words

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I’ve chosen to title this blog “me and my battle with words”.  I chose the word “battle” because I view words as elusive.  At least, I view the task of finding the right words as elusive.  It’s a battle I enjoy, though.  Many brilliant authors have found their own ways to master language, though I imagine they feel as I do when they write – that there’s a battle in there somewhere.  Finding a way to tame words to your own purpose takes effort, thoughtfulness, and practice.  I took an English Lit class 20 years ago, and was introduced to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.  In section V of Quartet No. 1: Burnt Norton, I found a beautiful description of words themselves that I’ve returned to many times over the years.

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.

The lines I love most, and the language that has come to represent what I view as my battle with words, is from the above:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

Do you have any favorite descriptions of words that represent how you think about the writing process?

Memoir writing challenges

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Starting the process of writing about my life wasn’t that difficult.  That’s not to say that my first pass was perfect – far from it – but, if I didn’t worry about censoring or editing myself as I went, the words mostly just came.  I find the bigger challenges have to do with the fact that I’m writing a memoir.  First, many of my memories are those of a child, and I’m sure they are not all strictly accurate.  I have probably associated certain events with the wrong places (I moved around a lot as a young kid), and I know my memory is somewhat selective.  There are major chunks of time, and some smaller ones, that have been long buried because they were too painful to remember.  I’ve made a concerted effort to investigate my past as openly and honestly as I can, but it’s hard to dig back so many years and try to relive emotional and challenging times. My perspective is only mine – I occasionally include thoughts and memories from my sister, but those are the result of fairly recent conversations.  Other than that, I’m sure others remember the scenarios I write about differently than I do – I’m not trying to speak for anyone but myself, but I’m also trying to do so without being overly apologetic.

Second, I write about many things that will inherently be painful for others that were involved in my life.  No life is lived without mistakes, and the people around me made many.  I expect to meet difficulty as I put my writing in front of various people and attempt to get their blessing to move forward with my project publicly.  It’s easy for me to discuss my writing with some of the people in it, but almost impossible for me to figure out how to tackle this with others.  I’ve had some very interesting conversations with family members about some of the topics I’ve included in my memoir.  They see certain things differently – and although that’s not necessarily a problem, it has caused me to pause now and then, and question my perspective.  I’ve made a conscious choice to simply write what I remember and what I think about my past regardless of these things, because if my own memoir isn’t honest from my own perspective, then there is no point in writing it.  It has been a wonderful learning experience, though, and has sparked some discussion in my family that I think is very valuable.

There have been other challenges, but these two are at the forefront of my mind, and are struggles I think are common for people writing about the pain of their pasts.  As others come to mind, and as I work through the process of putting my writing in front of relatives or friends that appear in my story, I’ll post updates along the way.

 

Inspiration

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There are a number of things that inspired me to write my life story.  I’ve often been told by others I should write about it because it’s an unusual story.  A couple of years ago, I began to do some genealogy research, and was immediately sucked into it.  I’ve spent tons of time investigating members of my family tree, and working to build the stories of their lives from various records I’ve found.  Many of the most interesting stories involved incredible tragedy, and I started to think about how traits and behaviors make their way down family trees.  I thought about these people in relation to me, or in relation to other people in my family, and felt there was an element worth investigating within the framework of my own life.  I also started going to a therapist for the first time in my life, in an effort to work through some of the issues I face as a result of the way I was brought up.

These three things – my personal history, stories about ancestors I located in my genealogy research, and my experiences in therapy are the inspiration for my writing, and they have become the three main components I follow in my memoir.  It has been tricky to determine how to move between these elements and still create a primary thread that weaves its way through the story from beginning to end.  The structure of the story has been much more difficult for me to plan than the writing itself was, but I enjoy the challenge, and am looking forward to getting feedback – good and bad – about my writing.

Where to start?

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When I finally decided to write about my life, I didn’t really know where to start.  I had plenty to say, lots of stories to tell, but figuring out where to start was daunting.  In the end, I decided not to worry about it, and  just to write.  I made a list of topics – some were people, some were places, some were specific experiences or memories – and I just picked a topic from the list and wrote about it.  Some things were easier to write about than others.  Often, my first pass was absolutely horrible – full of facts and not much else; reading it was like listening to someone read the phone book.  It gave me a framework, though.  I was getting words down on paper (well, figuratively, at least).

The facts were important, though I knew the end product would need a big dose of emotion to bring my life back off the pages.  I spent weeks working on revisions, much like peeling off the layers of an onion.  I had to figure out how to connect with old emotions that I’d long since buried, and that was a chore.  I also had a really long list of topics that I’d written about in no particular order, so I had to decide how to string together all those pieces.  My story still has no title, and also has no ending.  Yes, I agree.  Those are fairly big things to be missing – but, I needed a break.  So, I’ve put it down, sent it to an editor friend whose opinions I trust and respect, and am moving on to do some writing here.

They say to be a decent writer, you have to exercise your writing muscles.  That’s what this site will be for me – my writing gym.  I intend to write about my memoir and post excerpts of it here.  I also intend to write about the events of the rest of my everyday life.  Well, some of them, anyway.  We’ll see how that goes.