I have looked for good books about middle-age, but 95% of them seem to be frothy upgrades of young adulthood. [Read more…]
Memoir Writers, You Need to Open a Vein
I apologize, but the link I originally included with this post was taken down. However, if you’re writing anything at all, including memoir, read anything Jane Friedman has to say, and you’ll feel so much smarter. For example, here’s a post called Using the Fallacy of Memory to Create Effective Memoir. Thanks for visiting.
Why We MUST Have Newspapers (even if the online version)
I was watching Morning Joe this morning, and they do this recap of the day’s “papers”. Actually hold up newspapers to show stories on the front page. On the Washington Post today there is a story about the sprawling, mostly secret anti-terrorism operations in the US, so big and diverse it answers to no one, nobody knows who’s running what, how many people are employed, how much is being spent, etc. The number of people with top secret clearance alone is 850,000.
One of the commentators, Mike Barnacle, pointed out that this is why we need newspapers (or, I would add, the online version of them). SOMEBODY funded a two-year investigation, and that somebody was a newspaper. We Americans needed to know about this. Congress and the Prez, also. If not for the WashPo, who would have told us about this? Bloggers?
So here is my point: this exemplifies WHY we need the fourth estate, and I would be willing to pay a subscription to fund a journalistic enterprise. Maybe, hopefully, this is where the future of journalism lies. And now I’ll step off my soapbox.
When I’m Not Writing, I Sew
Why Do I Write? Why Do I Breathe?
I’ve been a writer all my life. When I was a kid I invented genealogies for my “families” of toy plastic horses. I kept records of my scientific experiments in the back yard (How does dirt settle overnight in a jar of water? Can you splice a twig from a plum tree onto a peach tree?) Mostly I kept a journal – one of those small flowery jobs with a tiny gold key for the lock. No, I didn’t save it.
I was always a writer, always kept a journal. I’m in my fifties now, and I have journals going way back. The oldest was written in the hospital when my son was born. He’s in his thirties now. Actually, it’s not a whole journal, just the happy pages I saved.
After my first divorce I wrote about the first house I ever bought on my own, not much more than a chicken coop on a busy highway in a bad part of town. On weekends I’d do laundry and grocery shopping and pay bills and take Danny to T-ball practice and come home and mow and water the lawn and get good and dirty and then shower and change and pour a glass of wine and sit on the porch. I wrote in my journal and watched the sun go down across the freeway.
I wrote about my tough new job in management. Back then there weren’t that many women at that level, and I was only twenty-nine, and kind of stupid about people. And I wrote about being lonely. Boyfriends didn’t seem to stick. I didn’t have time to worry about not pursuing a writing career, but I had gratifications. One day I got a letter back from Barbara Bush. Yes, that Barbara Bush. She liked the one I wrote her about a TV appearance at Wellesley with Mrs. Gorbachev. Said I was “dear to write.” I framed it. Wouldn’t you? Eventually I got my BA, eighteen years after I’d graduated from high school. I know it seems like a long time but I was working fulltime and raising my boy. I was the first and only one to graduate in my family so it hardly mattered how long it took.
I never quit writing, mostly in my journal. I even started a novel: a hundred pages of first chapters, about a lady truck driver. I wrote a letter to a trucking magazine asking lady drivers to write to the shiny new PO box named after the book: “Jackknife.” This was how you did it before email. Along the way toward my second divorce I was filling up the pages of my journals. Another husband without a job. This one slipped back into a pre-marital drug addiction. I wrote and wrote.
After a lifetime spent carrying my own water and everybody else’s, I met a prince. I quit my job and started writing. When I got a copy of The Desert Woman with my memoir in it, and a breezy “Thanks!” from editor Barbara McClure, I pulled over to the side of the road and cried. I got my own regular column: “The Personnel Office” with the Riverside Business Journal. I’ve written for Palm Desert Magazine , and I’ve finished my “practice novel” and am working on Dakota Blues, my first real one. I attend writing conferences whenever I can and work hard to polish my craft. I’m still journaling, maybe more now than ever. I’ve got thirty years of memories in a box in the garage. I tried to put them on my computer recently. Thought it would be a good thing to do.
Wrong. You know how you think you grow and change and get smarter as you get older? What if you really don’t? See, you have your imagination to tell you it has happened, but I have my actual words, written in cursive with a fountain pen, mostly. I had to stop that project. I was having nightmares.
Have you ever asked a writer, “Why do you write?” Go ahead. It’s illuminating in the way they kind of freeze. I couldn’t tell you either, except that writing, the world of writing, and the company of writers nurture me somehow. Why do I write? Why do I breathe?
Writing: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
“You’re writing a book?” A young woman at the coffee shop nearly swoons. “Oh, I would love to write a book!”
“Love has nothing to do with it.” I scowl into my mocha.
Back home at my computer, I fight the invisible ropes that are winching me toward the vacuum cleaner, the garden, the refrigerator. I just finished breakfast, for God’s sake. I’m not hungry. Am I?
Eating would be better than writing. Anything would be better than writing.
Because I am inarticulate. Because my thoughts and words are hopelessly derivative. In fact, for the duration of my novel I should, for the sake of unintentional plagiarism, avoid reading anything that is beautifully crafted.
The phone rings. My hand shoots toward it, ignoring my earlier resolve not to take any calls until lunch break. It’s my father, wondering when my book will be finished. Finally I am able to hang up.
“Bill,” I yell to my sweet, uncomplaining husband, “I said I didn’t want to talk to anybody!”
“Honey, I was going to answer it but you beat me to it.”
I would throw my manuscript in the trash but I am in so deep I cannot withdraw. I have spent four years on this farce. I have written a thousand pages; shaved it down and blown it up and shaved it down again. The remaining three hundred pages are crap.
And I have told too many people that I am writing this book. With my love of drama and showmanship I have convinced them it will be a winner. They all ask about it, far too frequently for my comfort.
I must write this book, but I am a fraud. A couple of well-crafted paragraphs and thirty years of journaling, and I fell into the trap: I believed them when they told me I should write, that I have talent.
I set the timer. I will work for one hour on the chapter about my character’s struggle with existential grief. My protagonist must work through this cerebral logjam to solve the puzzle of her story. I close the door to my office.
Two hours later I am somewhat aware that the door is opening, but I am unable to answer my husband’s question. If I were to tear my eyes away from the computer screen I would barely recognize him, so deep am I in this story. My eyes are dry from unshed tears, and I have lost the ability to speak.
How the hell do I know what I want for lunch?
The real question is, where is the world in which I have lived for the past two hours? What does it mean that I have been so deeply immersed in it that it jars my sense of reality to find myself back in this room when in fact my body never left?
Where was I when the timer went off?
Am I mentally unwell? And how long has it been since I brushed my teeth?
“Whatever, I don’t care,” I tell him. “And shut the door. Please.”
I turn back to the screen. What’s love got to do with it?
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