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Memoir Writing and Creativity in The Year of the Memoir—2012

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By now quite a few people in my networks have heard that I decided to call 2012 The Year of the Memoir. Why did she do that, you wonder. What will we call next year?? More importantly–what is Snoopy writing in HIS memoir?

First of all, I trust in the powers of creativity. They are greater than I, or you, or anyone, but the deal is, we have to find ways to listen to that still small voice that whispers brilliance in our ears and we need to find ways to bring our creative thoughts and ideas into form in the world. The idea of a baby is quite different than birthing one, don’t you think? The idea of a book is an idea—until you bring it to life on the page. We need help to get our work born, we need inspiration and support. Techniques and goals.

We need to have a sense of being able to do what we want to do—so declaring it is a way to keep ourselves honest. Think of the writers—Dickens, Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck among others—who wrote and shared with other writers their creative experiences, their doubts and fears.  Each of them announced what they were working on and in so doing, created intentionality and a goal. As well as a well-oiled support group. The Impressionists did this as well, discussing, painting, trying, failing, and still they painted and changed the world.

Inspiration and Perspiration—how much of each?

Inspiration helps many of us get ourselves planted in the chair to write, but as you know, writing requires some effort, some perspiration, in order for us to wrestle with the various ideas coursing through our brains. We wrestle with technique, with images, with memories. With the Inner Critic, with the voice of family.

But we keep writing. That’s the only way. We learn from our reading—how did that author keep ME turning the pages? Why do I find it hard to put down some books and others I can’t finish. Ask those questions, learn from everyone around you. Have a beginner’s mind.

I have likened writing a memoir to a journey in other posts. This week I began teaching my online workshops and was so jazzed to hear the eagerness in the voices of the students in the workshop. They are engaged in such a creative dance on their journey to a finished memoir.

Here’s what some of them said:

  • Writing validates my experience. I feel better about who I am when I write.
  • Not writing made me realize how much I need to write to know who I am.
  • Writing my memoir has helped me get along better with my mother and ex-husband.
  • Writing about the past helped me to let it go.
  • The year of the memoir idea made me realize that I want to get my book done this year!

Having a name for the year set an intention for many of these writers.

How do you set your intention?

How do you keep your goal in mind?

Some people journal, some write out intentions and put them up on the wall.

Others put their intention on the calendar and create accountability.

What method do you want to start this week during the first month of the Year of the Memoir?

How many words will you have written by Feb. 1??

Think of Snoopy writing his memoir, and smile. It keeps you open and flexible, smiling. Keep writing!

 

 

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The Year of the Memoir–and Juicy Creativity

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Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem. –Rollo May

 

 

 

It’s the Year of the Memoir—welcome to 2012. At the National Association of Memoir Writers, we are celebrating the full riches of the memoir, and inviting everyone to write their memoir this year.

Writing as you know is about creativity—and keeping yourself creative, actively writing, and engaged with your material. Post-holiday is a perfect time to center on your creative life and get focused.

When you think about it, a large part of our writing lives is spent reflecting, musing, journaling, and being “pregnant” with creative energy and ideas. We need to listen to the voices within—which means we should write, muse, and write some more! We need to stimulate our creative minds, to “fill the well” as I call it, so we have a lot to draw from when we sit down.

The more we use and stimulate our creativity, filling the well with beauty and good ideas, the more it will be there for us when we need it. For inspiration about creativity, I enjoy Rollo May’s The Courage to Create, which I recommend to explore ideas about creativity expressed without jargon. He talks about inspiration and breakthroughs, and explores the role of the unconscious in creativity—one of my favorite sections. 

He makes several important points about creativity:

1.      He says that “the unconscious seems to take delight in breaking through…what we cling to in our conscious thinking.”

2.      The breakthrough shakes up our calm world, the status quo of our thinking.

3.      During the breakthrough, everything is vivid, as we are in a heightened state of consciousness—which intensifies memory and the senses.

4.      The breakthrough comes during the transition between work and relaxation.

Einstein said, “Why is it that inspiration seems to come while I’m shaving?”

Another expert on the creative process, Brenda Ueland, author of If You Want to Write says,

“Inspiration comes very slowly and quietly…the imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling, and puttering.”

So, go ahead and clean your house and prune your roses, while tuning into your creative processes bubbling deep within. Who says that only writers who are avoiding their desks have the cleanest houses? Maybe those who are properly messing about are engaged in the highest level of creativity!

Tips to Enhance your Creativity in 2012

1.      Journal every day for 15 minutes. Writing begats more writing, and invites the flow of ideas.

2.      Immerse yourself in creativity—read a poem, meditate on beauty or something that inspires you.

3.      Go to an art museum and allow other forms of creativity to fill your well.

4.      Take long, or even short, walks, as Brenda Ueland suggests, noticing the details of plants, houses, animals, and people.

5.      Read inspiring literature of any genre. If it is well written, it will fill the spaces within your unconscious mind with good raw material to process.

What is your favorite way to invite creativity?

What are your writing plans for The Year of the Memoir?

 

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Your Memoir is a Gift to the World

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Most writers seem to hate marketing, selling, or publicity. The idea of getting the word out about their work seems kind of—well, rude. Are you one of those writers? You’re in good company if you are, but you need to learn some new stuff about how to think about marketing—that is IF you want to be an author who people actually read. Do you want other people to read your book?

The other day someone told me that I shouldn’t advertise so much, that it was off-putting. I understand all too well that sentiment. Just like many of you, I learned, “Don’t toot your own horn, certainly don’t talk about yourself too much or too often. And don’t tell me I should buy anything!!”

Didn’t most of us grow up with rules against telling others that we have something they might need, that we have created something we’d like them to know about. I know that I did. When I was young, my grandmother used to say, “You think you’re something don’t you? Well, you’re nothing. Don’t get so high and mighty.”

It’s possible that I was being an irritating teenager when she said that, but there were many other comments that told me that my voice, my desires, my thoughts of expansion, or self-esteem were “too much,” shameful, and selfish. And that has happened to a lot of people, and it leaves its mark.

Writers suffer from a great deal of this ailment. They whisper, they find it hard to speak out, to write their truths, to claim their space, particularly women. When you become a writer, you have to learn how to break long years of conditioning to be silent, or if not silent, to be cautious about taking up space, or being too pushy, or obvious or demanding. Of course we need to be aware of our effect on others, but some of these early teachings serve us badly. We learn not to say what we know, we learn to hide our lights. It takes a long time—too long—to claim our wisdom, to know what we know and be willing, even eager, to share it. It gets in the way of our writing, and once we write, it gets in the way of putting our work into the world where it can do some good.

I’ve declared 2012 The Year of the Memoir, which means I’m dedicated to support and encourage creating—and selling—your memoir. This happens in stages.

  1. Arrange your life so you write your memoir. Keep writing, don’t let the inner and outer critics discourage you.
  2. Find your voice, write your truths. Sit down and write regularly.
  3. While you are writing, you need to imagine your audience, those whose lives you want to affect by your work. You are not journaling privately, you are writing a book!
  4. Writing a book, a longer work, a memoir means you want others to read what you have to say and you need to have positive affirmations and visualizations about how powerfully your words will affect others!
  5. Imagining your audience means that you will write scenes, you will bring the reader into the world you create on the page. You will start to see your story with the eyes of an observer, which guides your narration and perspective in your memoir.
  6. Finish the first draft, then start working on another draft or two. Have someone mentor you through several stages of your book. You will be thinking about your reader, your audience even more now, and wondering how you can reach that audience.
  7. Marketing is taking that idea further—that there is an audience who needs your book, people who are eager to read it.
  8. Marketing means getting the messages out there that will INVITE your readers to you. You need to make it easy for them to find you.

We writers need to learn new ways to think about marketing—that it is a way of giving to others, not taking from them. We are offering our readers a way to see the world through fresh eyes, to learn something new, to be entertained, to see life in a new way by reading our work. We will inspire others to write, to create, to bring their own vision to fruition.

Think of your writing, your book, and your marketing as a gift.

Join us at the National Association of Memoir Writers to listen to Lynn Serafinn talk about the Gift of Marketing. Her spiritual, holistic and inspiring way to see marketing can turn your mind around and make you see it through new eyes!

 In what ways have you been reluctant to share your work–for money?

What were the childhood messages you got about selling, marketing, and publicity?

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Memoirists and Plot–Welcome Martha Alderson’s Blog Tour!

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Martha, it’s so fabulous that you can join us today. We have talked in the past about the way memoir writers grow a little pale when thinking about plot. They feel constrained about the idea of thinking about plot, they don’t quite understand what it is and why it’s important.

  1. So my first question is to have you define plot, and tell us why a memoir writer needs to understand why they need to grasp the concepts and skills of plot for their memoir.

Let me begin by saying that plot and structure are not constraining. Plot and structure actually give a memoirist the form and function for her memoir and then leave everything else up to her.

In my new book, The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master, I cover in great detail the benefits of identifying your weaknesses and strengths as a writer and how to determine if you have more of a preference for right brain functions versus left brain dominance or are more balanced between the two.

Don’t get me wrong; the book is not a guide to the brain. It is a book about plotting that also functions as a spiritual or an emotional guide to writing. Writing is emotional. You face obstacles that unleash angst, which leads to procrastination.

My intention in shining a light on how the two hemispheres of the brain affect your writing is to allow you to acknowledge and face the difficulties you encounter, difficulties that are reflections of your strengths and weaknesses. In self-knowledge comes the courage to compensate for your weaknesses and the ability to rely on your strengths.

In every memoir something happens (dramatic action plot) to change or transform the memoirist (character emotional plot) overtime and in a meaningful way (thematic significance plot). Whether you understand that as a big picture concept or as a linear, scene-by-scene idea depends heavily on your strengths and weaknesses as a writer.

(NOTE: In the remainder of my answers, I refer to the memoirist as the protagonist of the story because doing so gives more distance and supports you in considering the story from the reader’s point of view as well as from your own)

  1. Memoir writers think they know the plot because they already know “what happened.” Can you talk about this issue a bit—is that way of thinking useful or should they revise their attitude toward plot.

Plot embodies quite a bit more than more than just what happens in the memoir or a sum of the events. Plot is how the events in the story of your life directly impact the main character or the protagonist, in other words, you.

Always, in the best-written memoirs, the protagonist is emotionally affected by the events of the story. In great memoirs, the dramatic action transforms the protagonist. This transformation makes a story meaningful.

Keep in mind that, yes, you lived the story and the story comes through you. However, when you decide to write that story down, you turn from the one who experienced the events to that of a writer. Your job, then, is to present what you have lived in a pleasing and meaningful form to the reader. This takes setting yourself aside and means opening your mind to receive the greatest good of the story.

  1. Please talk about the emotional, healing, transformation aspects of what you call “universal story.”

The Universal Story delights me. Just as I teach writers to push aside all the words they have written to see the bigger picture of the entire memoir, I also teach writers and anyone else who is interested how to stand back from the drama in their lives to see what is really at play in their own individual lives.

The Universal Story is about evolution, and change is never easy. However, anytime someone grows and changes overtime on a deep and meaningful level from the challenges they confront and then shares that experience others, the memoirist empowers others to believe that such a transformation is available to them, as well.

  1. Explain to us how memoir writers should think of plotting their story—should they write it first then think about plot, or plan it out from the beginning?  (Some will say that planning will get in the way of creativity.)

The most important part is to write the first draft all the way through to the end by any means available to you. An understanding of whether you prefer pre-plotting or you find that plotting as you go works best for you or you find yourself writing the entire first draft by the seat of your pants teaches you more about your preferences and strengths and weaknesses as a writer.

Once you have written an entire draft you are better able to stand back from the story to see what you are truly attempting to say. At that point the real craft of writing a memoir kicks in and a firm understanding of plot and Universal Story serves you well.

  1. What are some steps a memoir writer can take to create a good scene.

Again, as I stressed in my answer to question #4, the first draft is about getting the story down on paper. As you write this first draft, you may find yourself more comfortable “telling” the story in narrative or internal monologue. Even so, every chance you can, attempt to write moment-by-moment scenes using movement and action to convey or “show” the story rather than simply “tell” the story.

The more you practice writing in scene, the easier and more automatic the task becomes to you. Read great memoirs and compare how much of the story is shown in scene versus told in narrative. Compare a chapter you have written to a chapter in your favorite memoir. What is the same? What is different?

When you have practiced writing scenes and want to evaluate them, track each scene or, at least, track the energetic markers and any other major turning points in your memoir. This shows you which plot elements are missing and which are in the scene in its current condition.

Seven Plotting Questions

For each scene, ask yourself the seven essential questions of plot:

1. Does the scene establish the date and setting?

2. How does it develop the character’s emotional makeup?

3. Is the scene driven by a specific character goal?

4. What dramatic action is shown?

5. How much conflict, tension, suspense, or curiosity is shown?

6. Does the character show emotional changes and reactions within the scene?

7. Does the scene reveal thematic significance to the overall story?

Evaluate the scene tracker for your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. If you find your scene tracker has lots of dramatic action filled with conflict, tension, and suspense, but little character emotional development, plan in your rewrite to concentrate on developing your weakness.

Thank you, Linda Joy for the chance to write about plot and the Universal Story and share my passion with other writers. I look forward to visiting your blog today and interacting with your followers.

I know that all the memoirists who have worked with you have learned so much from your wisdom about plot. Of course there are always questions.

So I invite visitors to come to ask questions of Martha here on the site. And let’s all stay tuned for what she has to say. You might think of more topics.

 Here is what people are saying about Martha’s book:

“The Plot Whisperer is Martha Alderson is Obi-Wan Kenobi of Story-Plotlines. Whether you’re writing your first book or your tenth, you deserve tools to make your story engaging, from first page to last. Also you deserve to gain such tools from a seasoned teacher who genuinely cares about helping authors. This empowering book helps you acquire secrets of story-structure and gain personal energy in order to survive and thrive the writing journey.

Teresa LeYung Ryan, http://lovemadeofheart.com

The Plot Whisperer is especially helpful with regard to plotting; not just the storyline but how it impacts the main character. Over time, you come to understand how each scene delivers more tension and conflict, building on the story’s depth, and leading you to an exceptional story. Wise writers will take Alderson’s heartfelt advice and turn it into an action plan.” Helen Gallagher, http://releaseyourwriting.blogspot.com

 Martha has been doing one-on-one writer’s consultations for years and this is what reading The Plot Whisperer feels like—it’s like sitting with her and being coached, psychoanalyzed, pushed, encouraged, and, via all of that, INSPIRED to get down and write. I highly recommend both of Martha’s books, Blockbuster Plots and The Plot Whisperer, to anyone who is actively engaged in writing, or who wants to be.” Shreve Stockton, HoneyRockDawn.com

I have known Martha and her work for years, and have brought many of my memoir students directly to her studio to spend the day learning about plot. Be sure to ask your own questions here on her tour! We are lucky to have her here with us!!

In October through The National Association of Memoir Writers, we enjoyed having Martha present her techniques at one of our Member Teleseminars. You will get the audio to that program if you join NAMW. To learn more about the benefits of membership, click this link. Linda Joy Myers

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