Writing the Life Within
By Francine Brevetti
Part Three — Digging More Deeply
The challenge of writing about your life
Let’s assume that you have drawn all those little bubbles and balloons on your mind map, linked associations and maybe even added cartoons. Now you can dive right into those little squiggles and feel much more confident that you are writing what you know and that it makes sense.
But maybe you still feel stuck. You may feel you have other decisions to make also.
Do you feel impelled to write about a certain era or incident in your life first?
Do you want to write about your life or your family’s history chronologically?
Or do you want to write in a more impressionistic manner or use flashbacks?
Are you an experienced writer and feel prepared to plunge in?
Or if you are reading this series, I assume that you may need some help and guidance. This is what I’m here for. I’ll be happy to schedule a consultation with you.
Let’s say you are not a confident writer. And you’re facing a blank page with nothing but nervousness.
This is normal. Everybody gets this way some time, even professional writers. Some of us all the time!
I would suggest you get a piece of paper and a pen to start out with. If you’re having trouble getting words on paper, avoid the computer at first. Some studies have shown that writing with pen and paper makes the flow of writing easier.
And if you don’t know what to say, just write anything at all. In literary circles, it’s called stream of consciousness. I call it the gibberish method because if you don’t know where to start, don’t feel that you must make sense at first.
Start with whatever is on the forefront of your mind — what you must do at work tomorrow, your grocery list, what you must see the doctor about, what you should have said to Leo last week but didn’t. Anything. Keep your pen on the paper and don’t raise it for twenty minutes at least.
Keep doing this every day until what you really want to write about emerges.
It takes patience but it works.
If you reach this point, you have already had the advantage of having done sensory memory exercises and mind mapping. So, you have a collection of tools and material to mine.
Nobody is looking at your work or grading you. It’s just for you and your own satisfaction.
Because we are all very different people starting from different places in life, I suggest if you are inexperienced, start writing chronologically. By that I mean, going from your earliest memory to the present day. If you want to write only about certain parts of your life, that’s fine too.
A life’s trajectory
While it is not essential to write your story chronologically, you may want to outline that way to begin for the sake of clarity and confidence going forward.
I suggest you make a template to mark certain important phases of your life.
Take a blank piece of paper and at the lower left-hand corner draw a line to the upper right-hand corner. Let’s call this the trajectory of the life of whomever you are writing about.
Mark off with your pen or pencil ten-year spans from the lower left-hand corner to the upper right-hand corner. Or you can do five-yearfive years spans.
In each of these little segments, make notes of the incident or trend that occurred in that time span. For instance, from ages one through five (if you are drawing a five-year span), it might be your first memory from your crib or your first recollection of receiving a gift. The next span might include your first communion rites or your bar mitzvah. This is just another tool to help you reflect, remember and organize incidents that you want to recall and write about.
Or you can use this template:
By now you have accumulated sense memories, drawn at least one, perhaps several mind maps and created a trajectory of the time span of your life or your family’s life.
Now choose one incident or phase of life that you feel compelled to write first or that seems most accessible to you. One you know you want to re-create in your book.
When you do this repeatedly, addressing all the incidents you want to write about, you’ve done your first draft. Congratulations!
What have you learned?
What have you learned to doing this? Did you learn anything about how easy it is or difficult it is for you to write?
Did you learn anything about your feelings about the material that you wrote about? Anything about yourself?
Did you have any questions or qualms about you what you were writing?
For instance, are you asking yourself:
· Was what I remember true?
· Did it really happen?
· If I write this, and share it with my family, will someone disagree with me or even complain? Will they say things happened differently than the way I wrote them?
This is a common issue.
Writer Mary Roach was interviewed on the subject and says:
“… When… you read your stuff to somebody and they say that didn’t happen that way, the only response is: You’re right. It didn’t happen that way to you. It happened that way to me. And the truth is like a big old pizza, and everybody in the family gets a slice, but nobody gets the same one.”
My friends, this is your book. It’s to reflect your understanding and experience of life, not someone else’s. That doesn’t mean you don’t want to do research at some point; we’ll discuss this in the next section. Yes, you still must verify certain dates and names.
If you decide to publish your story, that is, if you go public with your dissimilar views of your life compared to those of your kin, you may want to acknowledge that other people see things differently. After all, you want to maintain your relationships. But you needn’t apologize for your filter on the world.
But your recollections of your life or of someone in the family that you knew and want to write about are valid reflections of your brain, your soul, and your life.
Other people
Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people.”
Your life may not have been hell, but it certain involved other people and you are certainly going to write about them. Make a list right now of those who affected or changed you, loved you or hurt you. The list is not final; it’s just a starting off point.
When you want to write about people make sure to describe the 3P’s — personality, psychology and physiology.
Personality refers to the way individuals present themselves to the world — are they jolly, manipulative, striving?
Psychology refers to the underlying drives in their behavior: what do they want and what do they fear?
Physiology seems obvious — what do they look like? When you are writing about children, notice their personalities and psychology change as their bodies do.
You are also going to be writing about conflict. If you find that you are approaching a subject of great conflict and it seems overwhelming to you, let me suggest that you write it down as you feel it and as you felt it at the time. This is just a practice draft. Put this draft away for a few hours or a few days. Later rewrite that incident as objectively as possible while still acknowledging your feelings without ranting or self-pity.
Here’s another challenge people encounter — writing about someone who has harmed them. Perhaps your parents were hypercritical, or your siblings were jealous, your classmates were bullies.
The harm could be even more serious. Statistically every fourth little girl and every seventh little boy in this country has been sexually molested. I think the percentage is much higher. It is not improbable that you might be writing about such incidents about yourself or someone in your family.
Can you recreate these incidents, or do you even want to? Perhaps such tragedies are best shared with a professional. You don’t have to write about everything that befell you. Your choice.
Whatever was the conflict you had some with somebody, you may be afraid to describe it because the person involved is still alive. Or their relatives are still alive. This is a sensitive area, isn’t it? You may fear if you share your work with other people in your family, you may encounter disagreement and even a rupture of relationships.
It’s up to you to anticipate the consequences of this kind of revelation and how much you want to risk in exposing it.
However, you have not published yet. You may want to record this sorry event or dismal phase of your life but not publish that part, once you’ve finished your manuscript. It’s up to you. It’s your book.
In the next session going to be talking about how to gain material from outside your memory or your brain.
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
Jorge Luis Borges
