I’m so excited to be able to have a conversation with Jane Friedman this Thursday September 2 at the free NAMW Memoir Writing Roundtable!   You simply need to register by clicking here to participate or receive a link via email to download the audio recording.  Jane is a contributing editor at Writer’s Digest, and an energetic, knowledgeable, and inspiring speaker. I told you about meeting her at a conference recently, and how she energized the room as she talked about creativity and publishing. Jane knows so much about how we need to shape and educate ourselves so we can succeed in the professional writing world.
The topic for this week is Evaluating your First Page for Red Flags. Jane will talk about how to take a long hard look at your writing, especially on the vital first page that agents and editors view.
Please join us! Your writing life will benefit from Jane’s experience and wisdom.

By now, many people have heard about the power of memoir writing to help the healing process in mind and body. As I mentioned in a previous post, because of my book The Power of Memoir, I receive many questions about memoir writing and healing, and I’m answering them here through a series of posts.

Writing to heal yourself is a very powerful process. If a writer has a deeply personal and painful story, how should he begin to get it onto the page?

Start by considering the special moments in your life, the turning points that changed the direction of your life in a significant way. Make a list of these moments, at least ten to twenty, and write down the significant event and when it occurred. Memoirists can feel overwhelmed by the large number of memories they have, so the turning point and timeline tools that I talk about in the book help to organize memories. We need to sift through to find the most important stories as a spine around which to build a longer work.

I also suggest that writers keep track of the “dark” and the “light” stories so they are not so overwhelmed by the more painful memories, and make sure they follow a “darker” story with a happy one that allows them to sink into the fullness of a delicious pleasant memory.

Learning about story structure and scenes is another way to contain and put in perspective the events of our lives. A story, unlike a journal entry, has a structure—a beginning, middle, and an end, and is constructed with a goal in mind and a plot with dramatic action.

When we write a scene, we find ourselves in the places and times of our lives in a kind of creative hypnosis. A story uses scenes to bring the past to life. A scene takes place at a particular moment in time, and draws upon the use of sensual details—smell, sound, texture, description, color, and taste, along with characters, dialogue, and action. In a story, we are both the narrator and the “I” of the story—the main character. This dual point of view helps to create a witnessing experience of ourselves as we write from our current point of view about who we once were, an artful weaving of then and now, past and present.

Alice Miller, a Swiss psychiatrist, said that being witnessed is a significant part of the healing process, and points out that while we need others to witness us and our stories, we can witness ourselves by becoming self-aware.
Writing allows us to witness the stages of our lives, and when we read others’ memoirs, we witness and empathize with them, thus deepening our connection with humanity and giving us new ways to think about our own lives.

If you have memories you don’t want to detail in your memoir, create distance. Write about what happened in the third person: “she” or “he” instead of “I.” Write as if you are watching the event unfold in a movie. Write a scene about a difficult incident, but make it turn out the way you wanted it to, ending it positively. Tell what happened before and after a difficult incident. Write around it, but not about the event itself. These techniques are protective–when you are ready to go deeper, you can do it later.

To tune into this powerful work, keep adding to your list of turning points. And remember this: the researchers that explored writing to heal found that writing happy stories was nearly as healing as writing about painful moments.
Remember that when you write your memoir, you are weaving a new tapestry of your life one story at a time.

One of the most important subjects that writers confront is to keep a balance when writing the darker stories that may arise while writing a memoir. In The Power of Memoir I discuss balancing the light and the dark stories and why this helps the writer and the reader. During my writer’s workshop at the National Association of Memoir Writers, we discuss how to keep writing when some of the true stories that need to be written bring us down, tempting us to lose perspective about our stories and ourselves.

Research has shown that writing positive stories about ourselves is as healing as writing about bad memories, but I’ve observed big changes when writers dig in the darkness for deeper levels of truth. We all want to avoid unnecessary pain, yet healing comes from balancing our system and not staying trapped in memories and negative feelings about the past. Our fears, anger, jealousy, insecurity, and hurt are real, but they can interfere with living with a sense of peace, forgiveness of self and others, and juicy creative energy.

Writer’s I’ve worked with find it helpful to weave back and forth between the dark and the lighter stories to create balance, and recover from the heaviness of writing painful stories. The path of emotional healing is like cleaning out an old wound: it hurts while we are cleaning it out but we feel better afterward.

Make a list of the dark topics that you suspect are important, but aren’t yet ready to write. List them by title or theme. Write down the age you were when these difficult times happened. Write down what you did to cope with the event at the time. How do you feel now about the incident? What would you have liked to happen differently? Place these stories on a timeline so you can get a perspective on the clustering of events.

Make a list of the light stories, stories that bring you a feeling of well being, happiness, contentment, and safety. They may include memories about love, spiritual experiences, and miracles. Stand fully in the light of the positive stories and feel them in your body. Hold the images of the positive stories while you consider the dark stories list. This technique helps to integrate the polarities of our psyche.

The reader needs relief too, as most readers will put a book down if there are uninterrupted dark stories. I alternated dark and light chapters in my memoir Don’t Call Me Mother so the reader could enjoy moments of lightness and joy while also learning about the story of abandonment that weaves through the book, and I brought the reader to an ending with forgiveness and healing.

The power of writing a memoir is that the truth really does make you free. You don’t have to share your story with anyone. Having the freedom to express yourself freely and fully can release you from the story you have lived, and allows you to move forward with grace and forgiveness. Keep writing!