Tips To Defeat the Inner Critic as you Write Your Memoir

Tips To Defeat the Inner Critic as you Write Your Memoir

Aug 17, 2015 | Blog, Featured, Memories and Memoirs, Writing Skills

The idea that you can get stuck in the “Muddy Middle” of writing your memoir came up in teaching Write Your Memoir in Six Months with Brooke Warner. We were talking about the place where suddenly there’s a lag in energy, where the forward motion of the writing slows to a stop. As soon as I said it, we both laughed with recognition. All writers experience some kind of breakdown/slowdown as part of the writing process, but it’s a challenge to figure out what is happening and how to move forward again. Naming the problem is the beginning of figuring out how to solve it. And it often involves that pesky inner critic.

How do you know you’re in the “Muddy Middle” of your memoir?

You start off with a bang, you’re excited and can’t wait to get to your writing, but suddenly something happens. Your energy level shifts when you have gotten into the story but there is so much more to write—and this might happen as early as chapter 2. Your writing doesn’t feel fun anymore and you’re slogging through each paragraph instead of feeling excited and ready to move forward in your story. Your writing feels like a burden instead of a joy. You start to hear voices of doubt, you worry about how revealing yourself the way you have to in a memoir will affect your life. You stop writing, and worrying takes up a lot more time, as does house cleaning and gardening.

It’s important to maintain a positive mind-set when we write our memoir, which means we have to manage the voices of doubt that start to plague us. Mostly we need to not believe them. As you may have discovered, there’s a powerful psychological element to writing a memoir. We’re exposing ourselves, sharing personal details that have been held as private until we put them on the page. Or try to. To write a memoir, we have to pull open the curtains that reveal subjects and information about ourselves and our family and friends that may never have been talked about before. We are faced with whether we should reveal these previously held secrets, we worry about how much we dare tell the private stories. While we think about all this, we re-arrange the spices and clean out the closet.

Like explorers, we venture into dangerous emotional territory when we write memoir. Beyond this place, there be dragons used to be written on maps to show the edges of the known world. This signifies a boundary of risk and danger. For writers, this is where we encounter protective scouts at these edges who come in the form of your inner critic voices.

Writing a memoir means that your inner critic(s) will inevitably show up. Some of you may have a “mild” inner critic, but others—and I’m one of them—have a deadly shaming inner critic. My critic comes from being criticized a lot when I was younger, and I’ve had to do a lot of work to get it to speak more softly and/or show up less often as I developed my voice as a writer. I had to learn how to separate that voice from the “reality” of what I wanted to write, my truth. My story. To help me not just run away from these scary voices, I’d write down what they said, argue with them, and reclaim my intentions to keep writing no matter how uncomfortable I felt. Each time I practiced writing past my nasty inner critic, I made more room for my own voice.

The inner critic makes you wonder if what you’re writing is important or if anyone will care about your story. The inner critics tells you all the reasons you shouldn’t be wasting your time. Whatever voice hinders your writing is your inner critic. Sometimes it’s nice and teases you to not stress yourself, to sit down and have a glass of wine. “You don’t need to write today,” it says. That may be tempting, but if you are not writing, your seductive inner critic is getting in the way. Many people don’t realize their “nice” inner critic is keeping them from writing—they’re on the lookout for the nasty one.

An aspect of the inner critic voices are what I call the “outer critics.” Those are the very real voices of family, friends—people who may indeed be afraid of what you are writing or critical that you are writing a memoir. These voices whisper, “How dare you write that. Your grandmother will roll over in her grave if you she knew you were sharing things like that. You’re shaming our family.” Or “this was my life too. I don’t want you to write about me.” I am not going to get into the legal and ethical decisions you may have to make before you publish, but in the early stages the voices that try to stop you are your critic. You don’t need to deal with family or being published until you write your book. We suggest that you use the first draft to get everything out, and decide what to share and publish later.

These are the kinds of things that I hear people say who are worrying in the Muddy Middle.
1. I’m afraid of hurting someone I love by writing my truth.
2. I know my xxx—fill in the blanks: ex-husband, friends, siblings, mother—will not agree with what I’m writing.
3. Some of my memories are traumatic—I know my family would be shocked.

Sometimes memoirists are tempted to leave out all the difficult parts, yet they know that the traumas and challenges are part of the core of their story.

Follow this tip: the more you want to leave something out, the more likely it’s something important. You need to write the stories you want to hide—they are calling to you to bring the light of day into the darker places. Writing the truth is a very powerful antidote to shame, to staying small, to hiding.

Here are some “anti-getting-stuck-in-the-muddy-middle tips:
• Write your first draft all the way. Put everything in. If the inner critic voices start, write them down, argue with them, and write what you are tempted to leave out.
• Tell yourself it’s your first draft, that you are practicing having a voice, that you will decide later what to publish. No one’s first draft is their final draft—EVER.
• Give yourself permission to say it all. With permission comes freedom, and the doors of your creativity will open once again.
• It’s important to offer yourself support during these tough writing challenges, and also to reach out to other memoirists. To create a memoir community, or join one. I have started the National Association of Memoir Writers as a way to offer something to memoirists they may not get in “real life.”

The upcoming Magic of Memoir conference in Berkeley October 17-18 is another opportunity to join a community of people who are struggling with their Muddy Middle, Beginnings, Writing the Truth, and all the things that memoir writers go through.

Stand strong with your memories and your stories. Defeat the inner critic, and write all the way to the end!

All About You! Yes, a Memoir is About You–So Be Brave and Write!

Aug 29, 2012 | Blog, Memories and Memoirs

 

 

I read interesting post in Highbrow magazine about memoirs with the eye catching title “All About Me: How Memoirs Became the Literature of Choice.” We know that memoirists in the past have been called “narcissistic navel gazers,” and worse, but since more memoirs are being written and sold every year, the pundits who tried to showhorn our genre into the “selfish” corner of the literary world are taking another look, though many of the writers, like this one, can’t seem to help but take pot shots at memoirists, just for the ironic fun of it.

Note this significant bit of data: “The Christian Science Monitor reports that memoirs have seen sales increase from $170 million to $270 million since 1999. Most nonfiction MFA writing programs are geared substantially towards the genre; Hunter College even requires prospective students to submit a memoir proposal as part of their application.”

This is very satisying. When I went to graduate school in creative writing, there was poetry and fiction. Period. So the dissed cousin of “highbrow literature” is now a focus of schools, programs, and the heart center of many bookstores.

The writer of the article took issue with something that memoirists, I thought, have solved and settled as they lay new ground for this literature of choice: creating dialogue; writing about how things feel rather than just facts. This subjectivity seems to still be suspect, as if all of us every day don’t translate the “real” world, whatever that is, into something that makes sense to us in the river of our consciousness. Humans are all about making meaning, and even learning from our fellow humans about how to find our way in this world.

It is understood now that a memoir is a story that is put together from facts, yes they are allowed, interpretation and summary of events, and subjective exploration of memory, time, people, and life itself. It indeed is its own strange genre–one that allows the use of “I”, nay, requires it as the filtering consciousness through which the stories are told.

Memoirists probably will always be some kind of target though–we make people uncomfortable with our personal sharing, how much we reveal, the ways we explore the inner world of the “I.” This is intimate stuff indeed, and that’s why having a memoir community is so important–at least you can hang out with others who feel and write as you do.

When I wrote Don’t Call Me Mother, before memoir was big, before memoir was Memoir, I felt as if I were taking risks, running toward cliffs wearing paper wings not at all sure that I could fly. But what I found is that the effort of writing had strengthened me, and that there was lift in those wings. There is a magical element to writing and exploring through memoir that perhaps those who don’t do this odd, exposing thing won’t understand. All writing is brave, really, but to stand up and say, “This is true, these confessions, these bits of my inner self are Real,” takes a special kind of courage.

I’m glad to know that we can be prouder than ever to be memoirists, though the genre still has its doubters, but they don’t matter. We hunker down in our studio to write, follow the story as it leads us to new layers of revelation, and when we come out finally with a book, we look the audience in the eye and claim our story. We earned it, and our story will touch the hearts of others who come to us with curiosity in their eyes. We are changed by this act, and our words, the way that we have shared a part of our world, changes others. Maybe that is what we are all looking for in the new world of memoir–revelation about life, how to make it better and learn from each other.

I’m going to enjoy getting to know more memoirists in the new course I’m teaching with Brooke Warner starting next week: Starting Your Memoir Journey Now. And next month we are going to make sure you can fly by addressing the Muddy Middle of Memoir.