How to Write Your World

Look closer...document, observe, trace, use, notice, consider everything. How to find a writing project? Connect meaningfully to the world, by becoming an explorer of your world. Look closer at what you already know, what you love, who you are.

This past week, I found a book recommendation on Maria Popova's truly amazing blog, Brain Pickings. Below are the notes author Keri Smith "scribbled on a piece of paper in the middle of a sleepless night in 2007," ideas that formed the structure of her 2008 book, How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum.  

Embracing Ambiguity in the First Person

Mount Kilimanjaro
photo: Destination 360

In nearly every creative nonfiction class I've taught, at least one writer, ironically, struggles to compose in the first person. I'm not talking about those who have been writing about themselves in the second or third person; I'm referring to those whose memoir writing clearly lacks the sufficient presence of a narrator. 

I understand the challenge first hand. My editor told me, during the process of writing my first book, that the parts that are rough to write--the sections that the memoirist would rather gloss over than confront on the page--represent unresolved situations in the writer's life. Ah, I thought, spot on!  It seems that when we write about any difficult topic or, likewise, talk about one, our fluency is challenged. We stammer and parse, our language tentative, hesitant.

Ambiguity and uncertainty often lie at the root of most memories worth composing. So I understand memoirists whose eyes cloud when I suggest delving deeper into issues that lie scarcely below the surface of the narrative. These issues frequently involve the narrator's internal conflicts that, once explored, can give a story more depth of meaning. 

Yesterday, The New York Times Style Magazine featured Andrew McCarthy's essay "Cold Feat," an excerpt from his upcoming memoir, The Longest Way Home. His essay immediately establishes the presence of the narrator's ambivalence in its opening anecdote. It's worth studying the essay's style as McCarthy creates a sure rhythm of scene, summary and reflection which allows the reader to follow his story and believe its emotional impact.

In the essay, McCarthy wrestles with his "desire for independence and...[his] natural tendencies toward separation." He's unsettled that his "self-reliance has created a justification for a solitary way of living that is not useful in partnership." The narrative willingly and openly embraces a critical task for the memoirist--to wallow in ambiguity. That's where our stories lie--in the writer's struggle to make sense of the uncertainties in life experience. 

The subject of McCarthy's essay is an event--the challenge of climbing Africa's highest peak, but the essay is about his his own struggle to work through his need for independence and his desire for partnership. His memoir essay, thus, contains both a subject and a purpose as it tracks the narrator's physical and psychic journey. 

Actor Andrew McCarthy, then and now
"The further afield I went, the closer I felt to my own life." 

Why Go to Europe for a Writing Class?

Santo Stefano di Sessanio   Photo: Ciao Chow Linda

It's easy to see why an artist would travel to Tuscany to paint. It's not hard to see why a collector would sign up to treasure hunt in Morocco with a well-known jewelry artist. It's natural for a literature lover to join a travel-study group in London to study British literature.

But why travel overseas, or within the U. S. for that matter, just to write? True, a novelist writing a mystery set in the Paris sewers would need to be right in the muck for first-hand exposure. A travel writer whose essay is set in Barcelona needs to walk among Gaudi's wonders in person to sense the magnitude and the artist's amazing courage.

Surely, a memorist parsing teen years dedicated to escaping his alcoholic mother's grip needs to be in his own head. And his head functions as well at home in Philadelphia as it would in a small town in the South of France.

Or does it?

Wall Detail, Santo Stefano  Photo: Ciao Chow Linda

I've thought a lot about this question. Each year as people sign up for my workshops in Italy, I  contemplate their decisions to fly so far away to learn something they could learn at home. But during each workshop week in Italy , all of our lives are transformed in ways small and large. We find out things about ourselves we hadn't known we needed to know.

Firelight, Santo Stefano  photo: Ciao Chow Linda

It has something to do with  getting away from familiar ways of seeing that involve confronting a new and challenging perspectives. It has to do with the intent to focus that I've written about earlier. And it has to do with the forced seclusion of the enchanting, sparsely populated medieval town where the workshop has been held. 

It seems contradictory that a memoirist can access his or her personal history more readily far away from home where handy relatives can answer questions, where ancestral ephemera holds clues. But it happens over and over. 

The Heart of Memoir Workshop, Santo Stefano  Photo: Ciao Chow Linda

Work shopping and writing among other people who understand the task helps. Reading aloud and getting feedback helps. Meeting individually with an instructor helps. Focusing on a goal of composing so many words, pages and memories helps.

Mostly, critical access to personal knowledge results from the solitude a person can feel, even among a group of ten, in a place far away from daily distractions, a new place that challenges quotidian experience, a place where a stone floor below an antique bed emanates ancient soulfulness. It comes in a place where there's nothing to do but learn, progress, discover, wonder, wander and write.

That's why even the memoirist--intent on telling a childhood story--can often access personal narrative so much easier far away from the source of the experience. 

Rocca Calascio   Photo: We Love Abruzzo on Facebook

That's also why the stories in the medieval stones, in the Medici-decorated archways, and the night-time sound of howling wolves start to bleed into the memoirist's composition--because it's nearly impossible to be unmoved by the spirit of a place. 

~~~

If you want to discover your story among the vineyards of the Languedoc in the South of France, challenge your daily perspective while hiking to a castle in the midst of restoration, or become involved in a community of writers making sense of personal experience, join me for 

The Heart of Memoir Writing Workshop with France, In Other Words. There's still room for you and a few weeks left to sign up!

Start from Knowing Nothing

"Femme a la Toilette" Edgar Degas 1886

It is essential to do the same subject over again, ten times, a hundred times..

.I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result 

of reflection and study of the great masters, of inspiration, 

spontaneity, temperament...I know nothing. Edgar Degas

(a few edits since originally posted...)
As I become aware of the process of aging--both physically and mentally--I'm astonished at two things: in addition to the odd things my body does, I'm  becoming alert to the changes in my attitudes. It's not a new story to most people over fifty: the little things that held such urgency in our thirties and forties have lost their lure and are now replaced by interests, for me, that I sometimes imagined but never expected to realize.
One interest I share with many in my "age group" is the urge to purge stuff. After spending my thirties and forties doing what must be biologically-governed--collecting stuff--I'm ready to streamline my possessions.

The humorist Joel Stein in a recent Time magazine article, called "Stuff and Nonsense" (Time allows no link) analyzed the tendency for people to amass clutter. He quotes Jeanne Arnold who explains the habit: "We wrap ourselves in these objects because they talk about our history, and without them what do we have? They're our biographers."  So perhaps our objects, as they evolve, tell the story of our personal transformations.

Yet some people never collect in the first place, and that's too bad because at maturity they don't have a mass to edit in order to make a new whole, to start another chapter in new surroundings (blatant rationalization, I know). Editing, changing, re-creating oneself can be seen as self-indulgence in some sense. For me it's an old draw to the "esemplastic power" Coleridge espoused--to create a new whole from disparate parts. 

As a change addict, I like making new wholes, especially a new structure to my arrangement of living. And every time writers start a new project, they are creating a whole from their own disparate parts--those parts that achieve more depth with age.

In a recent interview Pico Iyer talked about the Japanese aesthetic for finding beauty: start with a large amount and edit it down so only the most powerful is left. He said, "The Japanese aesthetic is about emptiness, and the Japanese way of life as I've embraced it is about doing without things." 

I like Iyer's writing because it's so dense, so full of depth of thought and rich language. It's distilled down to the essence of his subject, empty of non-essentials. Full and empty--a  paradox, for sure.

As always for a memoirist--knowing what to leave out is as important as knowing what to include. Creating shapely negative space is as critical for a writer as for an artist. But you can't leave it out until you have enough to include. So my advice is to write, write, write, draft after draft. Only when you have significant accumulation can you usefully edit. It's critical that you let the story take you where it will, let your memories unfold on the page until you find your purpose. 

Just as dangerous as it is to choose a title before you start to compose is to decide the outcome, theme or purpose before you see what you've got to say. And doing it "ten times, a hundred," yes. Make final shapes, as Degas has here, that contain their own whole, filling the page completely.