Your Story Read online

  — M

  How is it possible that a small story about such insignificant events could touch so many different people, and so profoundly?

  3

  Your story is never about you

  Here’s the first secret to writing your story: your story is never about you. It relates events and circumstances in your life and the emotional journey you’ve been on, but it is not about what happened to you. It’s about how what happened to you can shed light on what happens to others. Your story is an echo of other stories. If you don’t believe me, check out what Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell had to say about the universal consciousness that binds us all together. Go argue with them.

  If we forget that we are part of a bigger story and fall into the narcissistic slumber of imagining that anyone outside of our immediate family is interested in the details of our lives, we will make the big mistake many aspiring authors do: believing we are celebrities and that people will be interested in us for no other reason than because we’re cool or we’ve suffered.

  In writing anything—but especially memoir—we must never forget that though we are writing from our story, we are writing for others.

  The trick to writing memoir is to connect our own story to the interior story of the reader. Once we understand that our lives are smaller fractals, individual expressions of Life, it becomes easier to accept a) that our story is worthy and b) that others might find something valuable in our rendition of our experience.

  One reader reviewed my book on Amazon like this:

  I wondered if it would only appeal to a narrow group of people who would be able to identify with this context. However, I soon realized that it is a book about life, all our lives, and facing the challenges life throws at us. Apart from merely being entertaining, I found the story inspiring and even potentially life changing with its profound insights.

  So trust me when I say that your story, your perfectly distinctive life experience that is exclusive to you and you only, has resonance and relevance to other people. The trick, of course, is how you write it.

  In this book I will share what I’ve learned about how to use the moments, anecdotes, funny little things that happen in our lives to write a rich, generous narrative that serves those who’ve taken time to read what we’ve written.

  Your story has the power to change someone’s life. Hell, if mine did, so could yours.

  4

  I know why you’re here

  I know why you’re here. You’ve got a form of hunger. A nagging itch.

  Maybe it’s jabbed you to put something down on paper. Or it whines deep inside like a dogged tinnitus. It’s what keeps you up till 4 A.M. turning pages when you have an 8 A.M. meeting. It assails you at odd, inconvenient moments. But no matter how little attention you give it, it refuses to be banished or just die, goddamn it. So here you are now.

  The fact that you’re reading this book means it’s Serious. It is not joking around. It’s not going away. You can ignore it all you like. It’s calling you and has been for a long time. And if you don’t do something about it, you’re going to die with something unbirthed inside you. Am I wrong?

  What’s brought you here is precious. Don’t ever diss it or take it for granted. It’s your longing. And life would be a dismal trot between meals and heartaches without it.

  You know and I know that there’s a Milky Way between longing and its fulfillment. (Who doesn’t long for a carnal encounter with a Hemsworth brother or a lottery ticket made good?) But this is real life and we are not delusional, even as we are still fervidly capable of hope (we must be hopeful if we want to write). The truth is that until you actually write, the longing (like a good idea) stays frozen. No one but you will ever know of it, and certainly no one (not even you) will benefit from it. The only way for you to make that longing mean anything is to get words on the page.

  So what transforms our longing to write our story into something more substantial than a corner in our hearts we visit occasionally?

  I’m going to tell you in the pages that follow.

  But first, let’s deal with the clutter of objections that are getting in your way. Let’s bury those bastards once and for all.

  5

  Here’s why you haven’t yet

  I once posed naked for a photographer (when my body was still an advertisement for who I was), and trust me, a bit of flesh has nothing on writing.

  When it comes to memoir, our terror of exposure and vulnerability is pornographically exaggerated. There is nowhere to hide—no fictional world, no imaginary universe. We assume that if our writing is rubbish, it must mean we are too. This fear of putting ourselves out there is the reason so many people—maybe even you—don’t write their stories.

  I conducted a survey among aspiring writers and asked, “What stops you from writing?”

  People answered:

  Lack of self-confidence that what I have to say matters.

  Lack of belief that I will succeed.

  Self-doubt, self-doubt, self-doubt.

  Fear of not being good enough.

  Do I have anything of value to say?

  Fear that I am not a great writer.

  I am worried that people will think the book is dreadful.

  Fear of not being good enough.

  I am scared to bare my soul.

  Anxiety about the relevance and quality of the writing.

  I don’t believe in myself.

  Geez, but it’s a noisy marketplace of self-directed vitriol in there, isn’t it?

  And so, despite your longing, you haven’t done it yet because:

  you don’t know where or how to start;

  you’re not a “real” writer;

  there are so many books out there, you wonder if it’s worth it;

  you’re not quite sure how to become a New York Times bestselling author;

  you don’t know how to make your writing “clever” and fancy;

  you can’t tell if your story will be interesting to others;

  you worry it’s narcissistic and embarrassing to write about yourself;

  you’re not sure if you have enough motivation to finish writing it (hell, you sometimes leave books half read);

  you wonder what people will think and say about you;

  it’s not all happy stuff—maybe you should wait for your parents to die first;

  you don’t know how to make it sound good—like, how do you use metaphor and shit?

  you don’t have time to commit to writing something longer than a shopping list;

  you don’t really believe you can;

  you’re afraid of failure;

  you have no talent;

  you don’t have what it takes to be a writer; or

  you don’t know enough about writing and need to read this book first.

  Let’s line each of these objections up so we can get them out of the way.

  6

  Could someone just tell me where to start?

  Living a life is a long and tedious business. Looked at this way, our story seems overwhelming. All the days we’ve lived, trips we’ve taken, people we’ve loved and lost, emotions we’ve felt . . .

  So my advice is: don’t take that long view. In fact, I want you to take the smallest snapshot of your life you possibly can.

  The answer to the question “Where should I start?” is . . . anywhere. But as much as this is true, it is also unhelpful. “Anywhere” is too vast.

  We need focus. In later sections in this book I will show you more than 100 triggers. There are many trails inward. But here’s my point: it doesn’t matter where you start. As long as you start small.

  You do not need to—and please, please, for the sake of all of us, do not—write down every detail of your life since the day you were born. Because you’ll write about that and realize you actually need to give some background on your mother, who was anxious, and possibly your father, who was out of work, and then maybe actually your grandmother and grandfather . .
. It can go back thousands of generations before you’ve figured out where your story starts.

  Where you start writing and where your story begins are two different things.

  When it comes to the writing, just pick a day, a moment—any one at all will do. Writing happens in patches. It is haphazard. A bit here, a bit there. It’s a random mulling, collecting, cherry-picking of memories: your eighth birthday when you got chicken pox under your eyelids. The day you waited for the school bus that never came. The night your dog Bobby got run over. That nightmare. That lover. That crush. A conversation with your dentist last Thursday about root canal. A fight you had with your mother about the pickled herring that had too much sugar in it. Find the tiniest scrap of memory, the teensiest moment you can access. Start writing there.

  Then, much, much later in the process, when you have done enough random writing and have plenty of “bits,” you will have to figure out what your story is and how to tell it. You will have to find a thread. You will have to do some big thinking and make narrative choices about where you want the reader to enter your story.

  But not yet.

  Your story will not be the rendition of your entire life, starting with your birth all the way to the present day. Memoir is a tapered, thematic snapshot of some significant part of your existence that sheds light on all human experience. And while it doesn’t matter where your writing starts, it matters a whole big bloody deal where your “story” starts.

  Maybe your story begins with the day you turned 45 and your wife left you and you realized you’d never known real love. Or the day your best friend was killed in a car accident and you decided to live life for both of you. Or the moment you were diagnosed with prostate or breast cancer and you went on a journey to heal your body and spirit. In When Hungry, Eat, I chose the day I visited a dietitian who told me I was obese (which inspired me to find a way to live with physical and emotional hunger).

  Once you have decided where your story starts, you will then have to decide how to move your story from there. But what about what happened before that?

  Ah, that’s what backstory is for. That’s where flashbacks are useful.

  But first, you must write. So pick a place. Any place. A moment. Any moment. It is your provisional starting point. You can change your mind about where you want to structure your story later.

  It doesn’t matter where you start writing, just that you start.

  7

  Stop thinking, get writing

  When I was a little girl, my dad, a brilliant cartoonist, would tell me and my sisters stories of princesses and dragons and castles. He would draw them for us and we would color them in. Watching him, I imagined I too could draw the imaginary worlds in my head—it looked so effortless. But as soon as I tried to get the images out of my head and onto paper, I was bewildered and disappointed.

  That was when I stopped drawing.

  The same thing happens to people with writing.

  One way that we scare ourselves out of writing is that we take it so seriously. We want it to be perfect immediately. We start to feel a story inside us, and then as soon as we try to get it on the page, it comes out flat. Or we start and we realize that it’s not coming out the way we want it to, so we stop and wait until we think we’ll be more motivated or we’ll know better how to do it. That’s when paralysis sets in, because there’s a voice inside us whispering, “This is crap.”

  If you want to write your story, you have to learn how to shut this voice up.

  One way to silence it is to start freewriting.

  Freewriting is writing that’s done by hand (not on computers). Set your alarm for a period of time (5 to 20 minutes) and, using a writing prompt such as “I remember . . .” or “My mother always told me . . . ,” keep your hand moving across the page until the alarm sounds. Don’t stop to read what you’ve written. If nothing comes to mind from the prompt, just write the prompt over and over and over again until your time is up.

  Another term for this practice is “dreamwriting.” When we dream, we don’t analyze what we’re dreaming; associations come and go, bizarre scenarios appear before our eyes, and we participate in our dreams without stopping and saying, “This doesn’t make sense.”

  We need to learn to write like we dream—freely and without inhibition.

  If this sounds like a waste of time, it’s not.

  Here’s why: when we sit down to write, there’s a freight of unspoken pressure we’ve put on ourselves right then. There’s so much at stake, we’d better write something worthwhile. It had better be bloody brilliant.

  This is a flawless recipe for setting ourselves up to fail. The jabbering critics in our head overanalyze and criticize our thoughts as we transform them into writing. Sometimes they’re so powerful they firehose us with self-doubt. To write authentically, we have to feel free. We have to loosen up our writing, like we would a muscle, so we don’t cramp our own style.

  Dreamwriting, then, is a way of short-circuiting the inner judge and setting the words inside you loose on the page.

  We also cramp up with self-censorship because we imagine others reading what we’ve written.

  But here’s the thing with dreamwriting: no one is going to see it.

  The most important rule of this kind of writing is that you are free to write utter crap.

  Sometimes when you give yourself this freedom, you write a few gems in among the rubbish.

  We also have to get used to writing stuff that we’re happy to throw away. This teaches us to become less attached to the words we put on the page. The more unattached we are, the more we realize there’s plenty where this came from. We develop an abundance mentality around our writing and prepare ourselves for the later task of editing, when we have to learn to let go of some of our writing.

  The more we develop these skills, the more of a writer we become.

  If we are precious and neurotic about every word we put on the page, sooner or later that is going to catch up with us. We will get verbally constipated. We’ll develop writer’s block. We will fail to cultivate the mental flexibility and resilience that writers need. The aim is: don’t get stuck. Which is pretty good advice for how to live our lives in general.

  8

  But I’m not a “real writer”

  As far as I’m aware, there’s no body or institution that issues a certificate or degree that confers the title of “writer.” It’s not a nationality. You do not need a passport, or to pass a medical examination or even an English proficiency test. “Writer” is an identity you choose when you write. So start putting words on the page.

  If you’ve never written before, that’s okay. Everyone has to start somewhere. Your longing to write is a sign that this is something you’re supposed to do. Before I was published, all I knew was that I wanted to write. The more I wrote, the better I got at it. Here are some signs that you should at least try:

  You love “beautiful” writing: You appreciate writing that is careful, sculptural. You re-read sentences sometimes because they’re delicious. You sometimes read things aloud, to hear how they sound.

  You underline or highlight words, sentences, or paragraphs in books: You’re not one of those “I don’t mark up my books” people. You have no idea why you do this, except an inkling that someday you might want to come back to the places you’ve marked and re-experience those sentences. You detest e-books because you can’t underline things with your pencil or make notes in the margins.

  You like to eavesdrop on people’s conversations: Sitting in a café or at the bus stop, you listen in on conversations: teenage girls gossiping, spouses bickering, boys flirting, the banal and terrible stutterings and silences that happen between people. Writers are good listeners. We then imagine the stories behind the words. This is how we learn to write characters.

  You love to people-watch: You can sit and watch people go by for hours—the granny walking her wobbly poodle; the chubby guy resting his hand on his girlfriend’s lower back; t
he rabbi in his black furry hat perspiring in the heat; the young mum with her whining toddler, talking on her mobile phone. Writers are keen observers—we look deeply, watching the rhythms and textures of all human interaction.

  You notice the spaces around things: You notice not only what people say and do, how they look and behave, but also what isn’t there. The mother pushing the empty baby carriage. The pregnant woman without a wedding ring. The guy in the bar talking about his family. The newly renovated home that no one moves into. The car parked at the end of the road that never moves. Writers don’t skim across the surface—we look in, around, through, and between things. We look for where stories hide.

  You read books and think to yourself, Even I could write better than this: You get seriously irate when reading a badly written book. Sometimes you wonder, How did this get published? Being able to recognize what works and doesn’t work means you’re reading like a writer.

  Sometimes words make you cry: A sentence can bring tears to your eyes. Words move you.

  You have empathy: If you are naturally empathetic, you’re able to imagine what it’s like to be someone else—a person in a wheelchair, or someone who’s homeless, kidnapped, raped, childless, lost . . . Writers imagine what it’s like to be other people all the time.

  Sometimes, all we have are these cues, nudging us in the direction of writing. So now that you know how to read those signs, catch them. Listen to them. Once you get a few words down, you can call yourself a writer.

  Who’s going to call you a liar?

  9

  Is it really worth it?

  If you’re asking, “Will I get published?” the answer is “There are no guarantees.”

  If you mean “Will I make money?” again, no assurances, and even if you do, it probably won’t be much.