by memoircreator on May 24, 2010
Memoir Creator is taking a break while earning an income from a contract. The contract runs until sometime in July. The money is nice, the work is fun.
Life is busy, too busy to write much of anything, hence the blog silence.
Fear not, there are ideas brewing, the occasional draft being written, but there’s not the focus or energy available to do more than that at the moment. Other projects are equally stalled.
Why is it that there is either time or money, but never both at once?
I hope your writing projects are going well. Look for more posts and ideas from me in a few weeks.
by memoircreator on February 23, 2010
Writing a memoir is first a self reflection exercise and only second, a distant second at that, something you may want to circulate to family and friends or publish. There’s nothing that requires you to publish something just because you wrote it.
Memoir writing is a process, and you can stop once the process is complete for you. It is your decision, no one else’s.
You may feel compelled to explore only one aspect of your life. For example, a troubling, humbling or passionate relationship requires you to reflect on it so you can better understand what it means to you and what you have learned or may yet need to learn from it. This exploration and writing is for you alone and there is nothing wrong with that. You may at some future time feel that what you have discovered merits crafting into a story, but that will be a very different process from your initial writing to understand.
Crafting a memoir once you have done the exploration of your life stories, significant events, and themes is a completely different task than writing to see what you think. In the first instance you are an archaeologist of the past working on likely hunches about what there is to find, digging in lots of places, on the chance that you’ll find something of value to you. Once those finds are recovered the hard work of analyzing and integrating them into your life story begins. Finally, if you choose to do so, you can write up your report–a formal memoir, with all the tools of the writer’s craft to help you create the finished piece.
This is always much more work than we expect when first we think we’d like to create a memoir. Rare is the person (and that may be fantasy) who sits down and writes a memoir in one blazing draft. And I wonder, what would be the point of that in any case? There are nuances and gifts in our stories, why would we rush through them and miss all that?
The person who begins the memoir process, will grow in understanding and become a more fully alive and aware adult. For me that’s the point of the exercise. Rushing your exploration notes to print does you a disservice and will only annoy potential readers.
As always, I welcome your thoughts in the comments.
Memoir Creator is taking a break while earning an income from a contract. The contract runs until sometime in July. The money is nice, the work is fun.