Your Story Read online

  Praise for Your Story

  “I love this book! Brimming with candor, wit, and surefire advice, Your Story by Joanne Fedler is a rich and juicy guide to writing the memoir you’ve been longing to liberate from your heart. She lays it all out with practicality and leads us within in service of putting it out there. If you are compelled to bring Your Story to the page, and you’re looking for tips, courage, and answers, look no further, everything you’re seeking is right here.”

  —— Nancy Levin, author of Worthy

  “Your story can change someone’s life. Fedler’s message is a powerful reminder that ordinary stories of growth, healing, and transformation are the medicine this world needs now, and that each human life has its place in the great unfolding narrative of our planet. A book that inspires hope and teaches each of us how to use our words to leave a legacy.”

  — Van Jones, CNN contributor and New York Times best-selling author of Green Collar Economy and Rebuild the Dream

  “My favorite line from any book ever is the very last line from Charlotte’s Web . . . ‘It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.’ . . . which is what came to me as I dove in to the first chapters of Your Story. Joanne Fedler is a true friend to her reader, and an amazing writer. She is also a brilliant teacher. Get this book if you’ve ever dreamed of writing a book. It will not only elevate your spirit and teach you that your experiences, your heart, and your soul are a rich and worthy voice—but it will show you exactly how to capture that voice in the written word.”

  — Christine Kane, president and founder of Uplevel You

  “Joanne Fedler is a compassionate word tour guide on the bumpy journey into writing. Her book is a comforting companion for writers as they navigate the joys and sorrows of their internal landscape. Joanne understands the writer’s loneliness and desperate need for belonging. In this book, she has created a menu of encouraging possibilities on how to overcome our fears and dig deep into our souls, so that our true voice can emerge. Thank you, Joanne, for reminding us that though we are writing from our story, we are writing for others.”

  — Nava Semel, award-winning author and playwright

  “[This book] has been life changing, perhaps one of the best books I’ve ever read on writing. Now to actually do some writing!”

  — Kevin Ritchie, regional Executive Editor, Gauteng & Northern Cape, The Star, South Africa

  ALSO BY JOANNE FEDLER

  The Dreamcloth

  It Doesn’t Have to Be So Hard

  The Knot List

  Love in the Time of Contempt

  The Reunion

  The Secret Mothers’ Club

  Things without a Name

  When Hungry, Eat

  Copyright © 2017 by Joanne Fedler

  Published and distributed in the United States by: Hay House, Inc.: www.hayhouse.com® • Published and distributed in Australia by: Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.: www.hayhouse.com.au • Published and distributed in the United Kingdom by: Hay House UK, Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.uk • Published and distributed in the Republic of South Africa by: Hay House SA (Pty), Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.za • Distributed in Canada by: Raincoast Books: www.raincoast.com • Published in India by: Hay House Publishers India: www.hayhouse.co.in

  Cover design: Amy Rose GrigoriouInterior design: Alex Head

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews—without prior written permission of the publisher.

  The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

  Previously published in Australia by Joanne Fedler, ISBN 978-0-9954063-0-8.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress

  Tradepaper ISBN: 978-1-4019-5431-4

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  1st edition, July 2017

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book is dedicated to all my students

  who have shown me the way;

  to everyone who longs to write but hasn’t had the courage yet;

  to anyone who’s ever thought, “I have a story to tell”;

  to everyone brave enough to put feelings into words.

  It’s dedicated to you, my reader.

  Write your story.

  You never know whose life it might change.

  Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.

  - Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor

  You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.

  - Brené Brown

  Contents

  A Note to the Writer

  Part I: Thoughts

  Part II: Trust

  Part III: Triggers

  Part IV: Techniques

  Part V: Then What?

  Appendix: Urgent Books to Help You Learn the Craft

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  A Few Things about Me

  A Note to the Writer

  If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably read way too many books on writing. Most of the time they keep us from doing the very thing we long for, the very reason we are reading a book on writing, which is to actually write. At the same time, as aspiring authors, we do need guidance. We want someone who’s walked the path ahead of us to show us the way.

  As with all life experiences, there’s a fine balance each of us must strike between learning and doing, between research and forging our own path.

  Over the past 12 years, I’ve been writing my own books and teaching others to write. I’ve written in just about every genre (except crime fiction and erotica), and what I’ve found is that no matter whether we’re writing fiction or nonfiction, we cannot escape the fact that we’re writing from our own self—the being who embodies the consciousness that compels us to write as well as the emotional history and sensuous existence from which we write. At the core of all great writing is a deep connection to the human heart. Even when we don’t write about ourselves, we always write from our felt or imagined experience.

  This book, then, is to help you find your way in to that beautiful, complex self and to value all it has felt, suffered, and known. Too many of us discount the victories and tragedies of our ordinary lives. We devalue our pain, we diminish our little loves. But truly, they are the source of any story we write.

  This book is clearly for those of you who wish to write memoir, whether it’s with a view to publication (traditional or self-publishing) or as a private record to leave a legacy for grandchildren. Or perhaps your words are just for you, and given that you’re not one for public-restroom graffiti, writing your story is your way of telling the world, “I was here.”

  But it is also for those of you who want to explore the territories of your life and make sense of all you’ve experienced. What you’ll discover in the writing and the remembering is that your life is rich with stories. And in those stories, you may find the seed of a fictional love story. The beginning of a murder mystery. The whisper of a dystopian young-adult novel.

  As you
begin, it’s important to hold on to the hope that this book will be read by others. As the subtitle of this book indicates, this book will guide you to write your story so others will want to read it. This is not because I believe a book read only by its author is of necessity a sad little book that didn’t get out much. I am not here to judge your book’s karma. It’s because writing for a reader is a discipline. It requires techniques I will share with you in this book. Even if you’re the only one who ever reads your book, I invite you to treat yourself as your book’s author first, and its reader second. And whether your book is read by others or not is irrelevant as long as you write it as if it is going to be read by readers. Chances are if you do, it will.

  I have learned as much about writing from teaching and mentoring other writers as I have from writing my own books. This book, then, draws on my compassion for and love of all people who ache to write. I know you. Your fears, anxieties, doubts, and tremors. This book is intended to hold your hand and your heart through the stages of writing, from overcoming the thoughts that stop you, to the deep inner work of learning to trust yourself and the writing process, to offering you many ways into your story. Finally, I share “the how”—techniques I have developed over the years that I hope will demystify the writing process for you and break it down into manageable bits. If you’ve already read heaps of books on writing or taken writing courses, you’ll find that some of my terminology is not a perfect fit with traditional writing ideas. I’m aware that when I use the term “transition” or “traveled,” I’m imbuing it with my unique take. Originality is sometimes useful in teaching to avoid the dull echo of cliché and to help an idea click in a slightly different way. Stay with me on these. I am not intentionally setting out to confuse you. On the contrary, I want each idea to sprout bright and new for you.

  In my many years as a writing mentor, I have found that 99 percent of what I do is not so much teach the craft of writing as hold the space for people as they begin to believe in themselves. I intend for this book to saturate you with as much as you may ever need to know about the craft of writing. But more than that, I hope it lifts you into the stories of your life with curiosity and sneaks courage into your pockets so you’re able to write fearlessly and with conviction that who you are matters. Though we may never meet in person, we are energetically linked by the book you hold in your hands right now. And so, to the extent that I’m able to be with you in spirit as you read these pages, please know I hold this sacred space for you, and bless you on your writing journey.

  Joanne Fedler

  Part I

  Thoughts

  Be careful how you interpret the world. It is like that.

  — Erich Heller

  1

  Everything is research

  In the summer of 2001, I found myself sobbing into the phone. This was an evening ritual at around 5 P.M. when my two-year-old was throwing bits of mashed potato at me and my five-year-old was drawing on the walls of our rented home with colorful permanent markers. On the other end of the line was the strained, sad voice of my mum or dad, a link from another world, nine hours behind the life I was living. They would say kind things like, “It will get better,” and “Take each day as it comes.”

  I was a new immigrant in Australia with two small kids. Lost and heartbroken about having left behind a life in which I’d been stitched into the fabric of friendship, kinship, and the security of knowing how things work and what things mean, I was clawing my way through each day. I was anxious about money. Schools. My physical and mental health. I found even the smallest tasks and routines overwhelming. It is a lonely business being bereft and inconsolable in ways that are inexplicable. Each night, my parents would phone to find out if I’d survived another day.

  On one particularly bad evening, clutching the phone between my shoulder and neck while I wiped spaghetti off the carpet, I relayed some mundane cruelty from my day—receiving a parking ticket or being denied entry to the free story-time session at the local library because I hadn’t prebooked tickets—my dad, a man with an artist’s soul, said, “My darling, just take it one hour at a time. And pretend you’re doing research for a book.”

  “What do you mean?” I sniffled.

  “Someday,” he said, “you’ll look back on all this and see what great material it is to write about.”

  “A book?” I laughed. “Yeah, that’d be a bestseller, right?”

  I had no idea how prophetic his words would turn out to be. But in that moment, something in me settled.

  Material for a book. Somehow the burden of my life shifted a little. This was just a chapter in a story. A really shitty low point for a character involving carpet stains and grief. Maybe there was something in there.

  2

  The first review

  Despite my dad’s words of comfort, I had no cause to believe then that the dreary details of my day as a young mother on a temporary visa in Australia could interest anyone. Like, seriously?

  Back then, there were many things I didn’t understand. I had no concept of the deeply universal nature of all personal experience. At times I experienced my isolation as oxygen deprivation. I couldn’t see further than the schedule for the next day, which—if it turned out to be a good one—would see me get the laundry done and a quick grocery run in. My life felt mistaken. Why had we left South Africa? Would I ever make a friend in Australia? Would I ever work again? Who was I, now that I was no one?

  But years passed. I lived through the trauma. It found its right place. It became part of my story, winding through the fabric of my being. Oxygen returned. My son stopped throwing mashed potatoes and my daughter learned to draw on paper. I made friends. I made some serious heart-growing-back friends.

  Three years later, I landed a book deal with an Australian publisher. Over the next few years I wrote and published three books, one about the hardships of early motherhood that went on to become an international bestseller. In Germany it outsold Harry Potter for a while.

  Seven years after our arrival in Australia, I started working on a book about losing weight called When Hungry, Eat. Yeah, I know, riveting stuff. All stories need an “inciting event,” and mine began with a visit to a dietitian who told me she wanted me to be “hungry.” As I was writing the book, I realized there was a huge backstory, not to mention a subtext: I had started loading on the pounds after we immigrated. So I wrote about that. It became a cathartic way to process everything that had happened to me and my family. I wrote about how we had finally settled—we’d become Australian citizens, Zed and I had gotten married, and we’d made a sacred pilgrimage with our kids to Uluru, a massive sandstone monolith revered by Australia’s indigenous people, to ask the ancient ancestral spirits for permission to settle here. (We bought a tourist package and stayed in a hotel, just so you understand there is no “epic tale” there.) As I wrote, I recovered. I felt my lost parts growing back. When I finished the book, my grief subsided.

  In 2010, When Hungry, Eat was published. I’d never been so anxious about the release of a book, despite it being my fifth. I couldn’t decide whether it was the most narcissistic, self-indulgent noise no one but my own mother would read, or whether it spoke to a universal story of displacement and making peace with change. Would I be ridiculed? Maligned on social media? Would anyone find anything of value in it? Would you have had to have mashed potatoes thrown at you to relate to it?

  Waiting for reviews was excruciating.

  And then the first one came out in the Australian Bookseller and Publisher.

  It began: “Someone should canonize this book.” It included phrases like “a golden nugget of autobiography, spiritual wisdom and health.” My favorite sentence was “Think Eat, Pray, Love but less self-centred.”

  I cried when I read this. Someone had felt the pain of my silly little life with all its catastrophes. It was the final homecoming I’d needed.

  Since When Hungry, Eat was published, I’ve received literally hundreds of e-mails such a
s these:

  Thank you for writing your story. There were many parts of the book in which you could have been describing my life over the past 4 years—my feelings and experiences of immigration were so similar to yours. . . . I could totally relate to your descriptions of your feelings of loneliness, uselessness, depression, guilt, etc. I was either in fits of hysterical laughter (you are one very funny lady) or sobbing uncontrollably. The rawness of the emotions that you described so well really struck some chords in me and I felt like I had been through an intense therapy session at the end of every chapter. I really needed this book in my life right now and I thank you for that!

  — M

  Thank you for writing this incredible book! I had to put it down many times due to the flowing tears—so much of this could be my story. You have put into words what I have been unable to in the past 18 months since [immigrating]. Finally there is someone who can accurately and articulately describe how difficult it is to leave. . . . This book should be required reading for any new immigrant, even if just to show that they are not alone and that all the guilt, sadness, weight gain (I haven’t yet met another immigrant who has not had this problem) and the feeling that you have lost your sense of self is normal.

  — AW

  Thanks for putting yourself on the line in your lines—it really gave me space to work through some of my own grief.

  — A

  And hundreds of e-mails expressing sentiments like these:

  Your words have tremendous power and they will inspire generations.

  — Sonya

  You have put a lot of truth in that book.

  — Patricia

  And even one like this:

  Since I start reading When Hungry, Eat I have been trying to give up smoking once and for all. Your book is an inspiration! As any smoker person I have tried going cold turkey . . . but in any odd situation . . . I’m back to the disgusting habit. Hugs,