New Writer Tips for Memoir

May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

You want to be a writer. It is best then to have a finished and edited piece of work. For you, perhaps,
you’ll write a memoir that inspires people to do the best they can. Following your own lessons and words,
you start with a product. You show the product to people who read or read/write and listen closely to what they say. You might ask if you can give the pieced again once you have taken their advice and made changes.
(Make the ones that seem correct and leave the rest.) So far, these readers are your audience. Your best
audience and they have no reason to fool you. People like to help and want to give positive feedback so make it easy for them with your best writing and listening ear.

Once you have feedback and a corrected or improved manuscript, ask four other friends or readers to read it. Just keep listening and changing the parts that seem to come up to more than one person. Is your plot unclear and seems to have holes in it. Does the time not make sense with two much time gone by in the middle. (We can talk about that later.) Is the main character (you) predictable and how can you change that. The easiest things to change are punctuation so don’t worry too much about that.

When you have the best product you can have, hire a professional coach to help you clear the way for a
great structure and carry through. Once the story and sequencing make sense, you can hire a copy editor to dot your i’s and cross your t’s.

You must have your work edited well if you are going to have a product to self publish or submit to an agent or editor. No shortcuts and why would you want to show what isn’t your best work. So much of writing is chance: who you know or who you meet. If you have a manuscript ready, you can take the chance
opportunity and make it work for you.

Next time we’ll talk about a writer’s life and how following a writer’s life enlivens you. It’s the best
ever, at least that’s what happened to me. We all chose the focus of our life and what we will place in the mind’s eye. A writing life is a blessing and can teach you all you need to know.

Filed Under: Anxiety Reduction, Blog, Books, Communication problems, Creative Life, Drafts, editing, Identity, Transition, Uncategorized, Writing, Writing as Process, Writing Coach

Bhanu Kapil and Voice/Memoir and Counseling

April 27, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Bhanu Kapil was in town from Naropa University and did a performance piece as a red bundle
on the floor. With words from her voice on tape we saw her life as a living body, a body
downed by migration and loss. She shows through the small movement of her body through the
cloth that she is alive and moving but barely so, a human under assault.

The idea of a voice from the body is one that we all need to consider. How would our story
be told from the body? Are you cut off as many are? Would you need to use your body to be
in present time and it would have to be your practice? What words are left out of your
narrative if your body is barely alive? Joyous, liberty, spunk? What verbs are not being
used?

Bhanu has the quality of a writer who writes in a revealed/concealed way where the narrative
takes you along barely allowing you to know the story and yet you respond to it and it
becomes your story along with hers. This is the benefit of having not a full narrative of
logic. This is a voice then that is totally hers and then shared to become “our”.

In counseling the process of being alive or becoming alive after trauma is common. Actually
journal writing helps clarify your concerns. Many find counseling as helpful, journal keeping
as extending the session, and then swimming or walking a way to be in the here and now.
The voice of being is the body, mind and spirit and you can chose to develop the parts of yourself
left behind.

Filed Under: Blog, Books, Counseling, Creative Life, Identity, Intuitive, Memoir, Poetry, Sensate, Stage-of-life crisis, Transition, Writing, Writing as Process, Writing Coach

Collaging Chapters into a Book

December 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

When you write your memoir you can do it by memory and then piece the short pieces together adding transitions between the pieces or chapters.  An important thing to remember is that each piece must start with a compelling sentence that leads the reader into the action right away. It’s like a scene in a movie. If you can see it, you are showing us and not telling us.  Save the telling for connections between scenes. So, start with action, connect with a bit of narrative, more action (scene) and when ready end with a question, a mystery, a conclusion left partly unknown or sometimes with a conclusion. Remember life is really not neat. Life is quite messy. Write so the reader is reminded of this and your memories will ring true. Sometimes to conclude with what you started writing about is satisfying but don’t do it all the time. A lot of the conclusion came in time, another time. The readers want to be with you in the unknowing parts of your life too.

The advantage of writing this way is that it can be done a chapter (memory) at a time.  When you have the time, you can write about how two of you hitchhiked to Florida and ended up in a trailer camp with your own trailer for the summer, free of charge. Was it the summer you learned how to deep sea fish really well and fell in love for the first time?  Then the next time you have a block of time to write, you can go back to your senior year in high school and  show yourself talking to a teacher about  philosophy. Would it be interesting enough to you and  help you find a job you want or will psychology replace philosophy? Maybe a scary event at first college tour you went on helped you make up your mind of what to study. The story may be of how answers come to you when you’re least expecting them.

The disadvantage of this collage technique is that without a clear theme and outline you will find that you overwrote and some chapters are not necessary. Often then is a dip of interest in the middle of this technique, a dip that is less interesting. Sometimes the theme doesn’t show up clearly enough. However, some writers don’t care. They want enough of it down to rewrite and hone it down.

If it feels natural and you’re okay about rewriting, go for it. It’s easier to cut back than to add more information. What counts is not the first draft but the finished draft and you have “miles to go before you sleep” and it can be fun and exciting all the way! Write and enjoy the process.

Filed Under: Books, Communication problems, Counseling, Creative Life, editing

The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes

October 29, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I changed my mind and it feels good to do so. I didn’t enjoy the lackluster voice of the protagonist in The Sense of An Ending until I sat down and read it for a length of time; sometimes reading a chunk of a book at one time makes a difference to me in how I can register a book’s tone and voice. Well, I  settled in with in and came to like this 60′s man who was really an ordinary “every man” who took what life gave him and made it enough. Not pro-active until the end. The book became an alternative to Catcher in the Rye with the same sensibility. The book was forming a puzzle I was unaware of and once caught in the puzzle and given the ending, I find myself rereading the book and enjoying it even more.

The Sense of an Ending is an excellent book for a memoir writer to study the voice of the protagonist. The memoir needs to be written in the author’s natural voice, a tone that includes others and is not too congratulatory. Recently, according to news reports, ex-Prime Minister Tony Blaire wrote a memoir he called The Journey.  After payment of $3.6 million for an advance, at the last minute, he was  asked to make himself less self important. The title was changed to A Journey.

You know what I am taking about. The perfect aunt who could have been a better mother to her niece than her own sister. The older brother who could do nothing wrong in childhood and became a champ in adult life. No stumbles on the way. Sometimes the tone is too self involved, other times the tone relies on editing out difficulties. We’re not interested unless it’s a telling of a the ups and downs of a real life.

Watch any sour grapes. Grapes don’t taste good when over ripe. The tone will put your readings off. If you have been the victim as a child, that’s not your fault. To write only from the victim place as an adult, is hard to believe and read.  If you had a terrible childhood and want to write how you not only survived, but thrived, please wait to write your story, important that it might be, until you’ve done some forgiving of yourself and your abusers. No one wants to read about someone being all bad or all good. It may be how we feel at times, but it isn’t going deeply enough into the experience. You probably need more healing before you’re ready to get it out of your journal. That’s what is exciting about memoir. The author shows others how they left their miserable horse behind and became stronger for the difficulty or more compassionate. Not all healed, no unaffected, but able to make a life for yourself and we want to hear about it.

 

 

Filed Under: Books, Creative Life, editing, Essay, Identity, Intuitive, Memoir, Sensate, Stage-of-life crisis, Transition, Uncategorized, Writing, Writing Coach

Reading and Writing Helps Memoir

October 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Read for Benecia Literary Arts and audience seemed to like the female touch in Salt and Paper: 65 Candles. Cooperative, peaceful, spiritual, living life with meaning of contribution and higher calling.

Reading Julian Barnes for a book group led by Pat Holt, former SF Chronicle’s book review. We’re thinking of what would make a modern classic where woman are portrayed realistically as powerful as they often are. Enough of the put downs of women and what is womanly. Julian Barnes book is The Sense of an Ending and is about memory. I’ll let you know what I think of this novel.

I find that anything I read helps me with my own writing. The Barnes book has a voice I don’t much like but the story is different. I want to follow this voice and see if it takes any turns that makes me change my mind and if I would consider it for a modern classic. More later.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Books, Creative Life, Intuitive, Memoir, Sensate, Uncategorized, Writing, Writing Coach

Dragon Software (Talk Into)

October 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Just read a snippet in the SF Chronicle today 10-14-2012 that there is a version of the Dragon Software that is free and you can talk into it instead of inputting on computer. Anyone know more about this?

Filed Under: Anxiety Reduction, Communication problems, Creative Life, Memoir, Uncategorized, Writing Coach

Jennifer Eagen’s Novels

June 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Eagen won the Pulitzer Price for A Visit from the Goon Squad which is a richly layered character driven book. The “goon squad” is a metaphor for age coming to her characters, some maturing in wisdom and some with quirks of personality. This is book of human nature by an author who isn’t into violence but isn’t afraid of the “shadow forces” in us all. A telling of  people which includes their shadow impulses gives us a glimpse into our common reality not readily shown.

A memoir that includes the difficult parts of your personality will make you more real and will show you more honestly. It takes a healthy ego to admit your faulty thinking and faults. Why write a memoir if it isn’t to present a whole person who had such-and-such experiences and survived. Survival with wisdom and humor is the goal. I suspect.

Filed Under: Aging, Books, Communication problems, Counseling, Creative Life, editing, Identity, Memoir, Poetry, Sensate, Stage-of-life crisis, Transition, Uncategorized, Writing, Writing Coach Tagged With: , , , ,

Writing and the Egrets

June 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Went on a walk in Alameda, CA, about thirty minutes from where I live on the marsh in Emeryville, to see the egrets nesting. Although we have egrets here, I understand there are about twenty places in this San Francisco bay area that they actually build a nest and lay their eggs. They nest in colonies and the trees they pick and return to year after year are often called colonized trees because many nests are built in one tree or an several close by trees.

Last night I saw three huge nests in an evergreen overlooking the swampy canal and about twenty-five snowy egrets and the larger yellow billed egrets building nests in the same tree. The snowy egrets have black bills and black larges with yellow (boots) feet. The yellow billed egret has, of course, a yellow bill and yellow legs. Easy to distinguish by color and size. They were easy to see and fun to watch them gathering twigs and adding to the huge nests and even fighting over a twig or, perhaps, territory.

I had never heard them “talking” to each other and marveled at all the sounds they make as they build a nest. They “talk” in two syllables of two tones so it sounds like Rare-bit or Lar-ry. One unaccented syllable, one with the accented down beat.

How does this related to writing memoir? How can nature make memoir richer? You may already know that part of the magic of memoir is that everything you experience makes you who you are and if you give yourself magical experiences, you become more magical yourself. Your relationship to awe shows in your writing.

In other words, you may never write about the time you went to the marsh to see the egrets, but you have in your body a time of observing nature’s cycle in these beautiful birds, some with fluffy white headdresses and the long s of a neck carrying bits of trees in their long beaks.

 

Filed Under: Books, Communication problems, Counseling, Creative Life, editing, Essay, Events, Hypnotherapy, Identity, Intuitive, Memoir, Poetry, Sensate, Stage-of-life crisis, Transition, Visual Art, Writing, Writing Coach

Alison Bechtel’s new book Are You My Mother?

May 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Just saw Alison Bechtel at San Francisco’s Booksmith Height Street. (What a neighborhood to remind us of the 60′s and the “flower children” we once were.) It was a crowd of all ages and orientations and the store actually felt warm and inviting with the energy of the crowd coming from folks that wanted connecting. This is what Alison does for us. She helps us connect with her experiences of family and allows us to appreciate the truth in what we have lived, rather than the illusions of our defense.

As she tells the story of her mother, she answers the title’s real question, who am I? Her wavering sense of self is displayed and we understand what it’s like to be with her mother and how that relationship helped form her.

As a graphic art memoir, she brings a whole new audience to reading books and shows her talent through text and drawing. She is remarkably talented and a boon to outsiders everywhere. A lesbian who shows who she is and asks us to share with her.

Reading her form from a memoir editor’s eye,I see she plays with time as associated memories, it shows one of the many ways we can approach our own story. She shows us that just as our experiences are unique so can our approach to the retelling be done in our own way.

 

 

Filed Under: "As Told to...", Aging, Anxiety Reduction, Books, Communication problems, Counseling, Creative Life, editing, Enneagram, Essay, Events, Hypnotherapy, Identity, Intuitive, Memoir, Poetry, Stage-of-life crisis, Transition, Visual Art, Writing, Writing Coach

Adrienne Rich

April 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The passing of poet, Adrienne Rich is a milestone. A time that has come to an end when she is among us to talk of sexism and with the courage to “tell her truth.” . She was always the voice of the oppressed and the one of few women let through the “old boys network” to have her work be part of the poetry canon. I believe her talent but also her great intelligence found a way to her acceptance. I met her once in San Francisco at a reading for Diving into the Wreck. She was a wordsmith for sure.

There will be a celebration of her writings at the San Francisco Main Library the evening of April 25, 2012 at 7 pm.

Celebrate the talented among us for they shall lead the way!

Filed Under: "As Told to...", Anxiety Reduction, Books, Communication problems, Counseling, Creative Life, editing, Identity, Intuitive, Memoir, Poetry, Stage-of-life crisis, Transition, Writing, Writing Coach
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