Your Story Read online

  If you want to know “Will people read it?” who knows? We have little control over what happens to our writing when it goes out into the world (though we must be both strategic and proactive about finding an audience for our work).

  If I said to you, “STOP WRITING NOW, for it may go nowhere. It may all just be a big fat waste of your time,” would you?

  If you would, then you should stop.

  If you wouldn’t, because you can’t, then you’re in it, my dear. You’ve got something growing inside you. And unless you want to abort it, tear it out of you like some misbegotten thing that doesn’t yet have an answer to “How are you going to grow and who will you be when you come out?” then stop worrying about whether it’s worth it.

  If by asking if it’s worth it you’re asking, “Will I learn something valuable about myself? Will I create something beautiful? Will I create something worthy and of value?” the answers are YES, YES, and you’d better believe it, YES.

  If “Is it worth it?” means “Is it worth finishing?” the answer is, of course, YES. Work hard. Make it beautiful. Let it shine with the time, effort, and energy you have invested in it.

  That’s what makes it worth it.

  10

  Who will care?

  Your mother, I’m sure. If she’s still alive, that is.

  Some of your friends, maybe.

  But mostly you.

  What is painfully true is that the world is not waiting for our work. We are the only ones who know and care about it while it’s in formation. We are its keeper, its incubator. If we lose it before we have birthed it, like a miscarriage, we are the only ones who will grieve its loss. No one else.

  Our job is to make sure we write it right so that others will care when it comes into the world. If no one cares, we (and no one else) have failed to connect with our readers.

  But don’t get stuck. Start writing your next book.

  11

  How do I become a New York Times best-selling author? (and other distracting questions)

  If this is your main objective in writing your story, my gentle suggestion is for you to let it go. At least for now. It’s premature. To be a successful author, you have to be an author first. Which means you have to have finished a book.

  Not everyone who wants to write a book can, or will.

  Writing a book takes a certain kind of person, in the same way that climbing Kilimanjaro does. I am, for example, not the sort to summit a major mountain, being of anxious disposition, and I have no desire to risk death due to altitude sickness—I have a perfectly wonderful view from my study window. You need to find out if you are the kind of person who can write a book. And the only way to find out is to start writing.

  It’s easy to get too intimidated to write, or, at the other extreme, to think, There’s nothing to it. Both are mistaken. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible. And you won’t get anywhere without hard work, humility, and more hard work.

  “Success” (however you choose to define it) doesn’t flow automatically from knowledge of the writing process, mastery of the craft, and hard work. Maybe, then, we have to forget about success and just focus on the writing that’s in front of us. Maybe, as the Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl reminds us, happiness cannot be chased. By living meaningful lives, happiness will flow indirectly to us.

  So let’s be sure you are pursuing what’s “right” in writing.

  Which is:

  getting started;

  finding your authentic writing voice;

  telling your story; and

  finishing.

  For now.

  Once you’ve done that, then the work of getting the book out into the world begins. Other distracting questions you can shelve for now are: What font should I use on the cover? Where should I have my book launch? Let’s leave those labors for another day, shall we? The best way to get something done is to begin.

  12

  My writing isn’t clever or fancy enough

  Would you go out on a date with someone who was “clever” and “fancy”? Nope, me neither.

  Read John Steinbeck and you’ll see that clean, plain language can be rich and textured when the thinking that accompanies it is clear and sophisticated. Writing is not—and should not be—“fancy.” Whatever that means. We should write like we speak. Finding your writing voice has nothing to do with your vocabulary or grammar. Or spelling, for that matter. Once you’re finished, you will have manuscript assessors, editors, and spell-check to help you smooth your story into shape for a reader.

  If your vocabulary is atrocious and your grammar even worse, there’s a great solution. Read. Write. Get feedback. This will magically improve your writing.

  And by the way, if you don’t read—please, please, don’t write. You expect people to read and buy your book if you don’t buy books, support authors, and read books yourself? Do you see the irony in that? Not to mention the karmic arrogance.

  If you don’t read but you have a great story to tell, start a podcast. A YouTube channel.

  Leave the writing to people who care about books.

  13

  How can I tell if my story will be interesting enough to others?

  Losing weight. Emigrating. Do these interest you much? I didn’t think so.

  It can be hard to tell if our stories will grab a reader.

  While you’re writing your story, you will believe on any given day that it is catatonia inducing. The next day you will know with utter certainty that it’s as good as Angela’s Ashes, maybe even better.

  The truth is that it’s not only the “what” of your story that makes it interesting. It’s how you write it.

  Just as the best joke can be slaughtered in the hands of someone with no sense of timing, so your story—as intriguing, scarring, and life changing as it was for you—must be told so that it lands for the reader.

  Everything that follows in this book is about helping you get this part right so you don’t end up talking just to yourself. And your mother.

  There are two guiding questions when you write: “Who is this for?” and “Why would they care?” No book will be interesting to everyone. So choose your audience. Write for them. The clearer you are about who your book is for, the closer to their ears and hearts your writing will inch.

  14

  Isn’t it narcissistic and embarrassing to write about myself?

  It’s ironic that, despite our staggeringly narcissistic and self-promoting culture of curated Facebook profiles, we’re terrified that writing about ourselves—honestly, vulnerably, and meaningfully—is cringe-worthy.

  Still, gratuitous, untutored oversharing is not worthy of our readers’ time and money. Our internal musings about our childhood, illness, divorce, dreams, or particular form of heartache will invariably bore and annoy readers unless we learn how to shape our writing to connect with them. More than in any other genre, writers of memoir need to keep our “so what?” wits about us. Our dull-o-meters need to be highly attuned.

  We want to watch out for the dangers in writing memoir so we don’t end up wallowing in the mud of our entire backstory. They are:

  writing in a voice that is too interior (musings, ruminations);

  including unnecessary and self-indulgent details that are interesting and important to us, but don’t serve our story;

  not knowing what vision of the world our story is in service to;

  not understanding that we are writing for a reader (and who that reader is);

  not including enough action;

  not creating compelling “characters” (including ourselves);

  not creating an interesting story structure;

  mistaking what to reveal and what not to reveal; and

  not understanding what a story is and how ours must follow the arc of storytelling.

  And most important, we must make the “transition” from the personal to the universal. I deal with this in detail in later chapters.<
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  15

  Somebody’s already written what I want to write

  No, they haven’t.

  No one can write your story the way you can. You are the only one who can tell your story. Your life experiences and sensibility are what make your writing unique, not simply what happened to you.

  In the words of writer Mary Gaitskill:

  Writing is . . . being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page.

  Not to get all Barney the dinosaur on you, but there is no one who has the precise combination of lived moments, feeling, and intelligence as you. Your heart’s shape is as distinctive as your fingerprint. You are special.

  Nobody can write the story you have to tell the way you can.

  16

  What if I don’t finish?

  You’ll never know unless you start. Finishing happens after starting. So focus on the first steps first.

  17

  I’ve been writing for a while, but now it’s gotten too hard

  The middle is not the glory zone. But is it ever? Mid-labor? Mid-life?

  I saw this on Facebook recently:

  Three Stages of Life

  Birth

  WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?

  Death

  Writing’s a lot like this. It gets hard. There’s only one way, and that’s through. My hope is that this book will help you work your way through the “too hard” stage and to the finish line.

  18

  What will people think and say?

  If I’m in a particularly self-torturing mood, I simply head over to Amazon and browse some of the one-star reviews of my books. There may be 50 five-star reviews, but it’s the stingy ones I remember. I did this a lot as a young author. It did not add sunshine to my life.

  So, I’ve developed a 100 percent effective method for dealing with what others think and say about me. I learned this trick many years ago when I was traveling through Malawi with a boyfriend. We met a young man named Binos whom we paid to take us out on Lake Malawi in a dugout, a type of boat that’s a hollowed-out tree trunk. On the side of the dugout were carved the words “Let Them Say.” We asked Binos what that meant. He explained that people in Malawi subsist by fishing. To be a successful fisherman, one needs a dugout. To buy a tree from the Malawian government costs a lot of money. Those Malawians rich enough to buy a tree know that behind their backs, people will say, “That man is rich.”

  Let them say.

  We have no control over what others will think or say about us once our work is out in the world. Worrying about it is a waste of precious writing and creative time and will only sabotage our efforts to keep writing. I’ve just chosen not to hang with that kind of crowd anymore.

  What will people say? Who knows? Maybe nothing. Maybe they’ll trash-talk about us, in private or in public. What others think and say about us is none of our business. I create. Others criticize. I choose to be on the side of creation. There are always trolls and haters in the world. But I am too busy creating to be a troll tamer. And so should you be.

  Let them say.

  19

  Should I wait for my parents to die?

  Another reason you may not have written your story yet is because basically you’re a nice person. You don’t want to hurt your kids, your ex, or other family members who are implicated in the story, especially if your story is a hard one—abuse, addiction, gambling, drugs, murder, suicide, psychological damage. I get it. This is a tough one.

  Every family has secrets. We all have tales of horror tucked away in our past. Sometimes these stories aren’t even ours to tell; maybe your grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, or your best friend was raped, or your brother was a drug addict. You may feel that although you were shaped, scarred, even mangled by these circumstances, you were just a witness.

  But your story as a witness is interesting and valid. It is a particular point of view that deserves a telling.

  Nevertheless, you may still need to think carefully about how you approach this.

  Some solutions:

  Ask permission of the family member to tell their story. I have done this with many of my books (Secret Mothers’ Business; When Hungry, Eat; and Love in the Time of Contempt), knowing that if someone said no, I just wouldn’t use their story.

  Write a similar kind of story, but change important facts, working thematically rather than factually (as I did in my book Things without a Name).

  Use a pseudonym if it is published.

  Change details to protect the identity of certain family members.

  Write your life story as fiction or fictionalize parts of it and alert the reader up front by saying something like “based on a true story” or “largely based on events that took place.”

  I suspect that sometimes we use not wanting to hurt other people as an excuse for not writing. Fine, if that’s where you are, move on. Write science fiction. Erotica. Crime thrillers.

  But don’t confuse writing your story with getting published. Once you have a completed manuscript, you can start to think about ways of sharing your story that are safe, legal, palatable, and manageable for you. There’s a big difference between what you bare on the page and what you share. You cannot make sharing decisions until you have done all the baring first. If you don’t get that part done, you don’t have to worry about sharing. You need to pour it all out before you pare it all back. Think about the right things at the right times. Don’t preempt, assume, or imagine a future that isn’t here yet.

  So it comes down to this: you can bide your time and wait for family members to die, or you can write your story anyway and trust that you will figure out the problem of how to share it later on.

  20

  Do I need to use metaphor and shit?

  You don’t have to use metaphor, simile, personification, or any other narrative flourishes. But you do need to work the craft. Author Malcolm Gladwell put a number on it—he said that to become an expert at anything, you need to devote roughly 10,000 hours to the task.

  I guess that weeds out those of us who were hoping for a shortcut.

  Some of us think that somehow we will escape having to do the time, because we’re talented and we’re the exception to the rule.

  This may be the case for a lucky few, but for the rest of us schmucks, there’s only one way to get to where we want to get to—and that’s by learning our craft conscientiously.

  Ira Glass, the American radio personality and host of This American Life, said that when we begin creative work, no one ever tells us that there is “a gap” between our “taste” and our output. What we create has potential, but it’s “just not that good.” The reason we’re so disappointed is because we actually have good taste and we know we’re not quite there. Right here is where many people quit. They don’t know how to push through. But the only way to close the gap is to keep creating and refining.

  Writers who succeed know that there is a craft that has to be learned, and they learn that craft diligently. No matter how brilliant or compelling our story is, we have to find ways of writing it so we can share what is implicit and subtle in our experience so it connects with others. We do this by making conscious narrative decisions.

  We may instinctively know that a protagonist or narrator needs to change from the beginning of a story to the end of the story, but do we understand why? And are there ways of structuring our story more intentionally to create a more enriching experience for the reader? We may know that short, sharp sentences are better than long-winded ones laden with adjectives and adverbs, but do we understand how to implement this in our own writing?

  If this sounds nerdy, become a nerd. There’s much to learn about how to write well, how to improve your writing, and what makes writing powerful.

  Learning the craft will help you figure out:

  where you
are in the writing process;

  the basics of good storytelling (how to structure a story);

  how to create fascinating, complex characters your reader will care about;

  how to write great dialogue;

  the difference between plot and structure;

  what point of view is and why it matters;

  the pros and cons of using a first- or third-person narrator;

  the difference between showing and telling and when to use each;

  what is unique about the genre you’re working in—in this case, memoir;

  what your story is about, what the “concept” is;

  what your themes are and how to enrich your text with them;

  how to improve your language;

  how to eliminate cliché;

  how to decide what to include and what not to include;

  how to get your writing to shine, sparkle, and shimmer with your individual take on the world;

  how to take an abstract idea and make it tangible, sensual, human; and

  how to take a concrete idea and give it texture, color, and depth by finding abstract themes, images, metaphors, and paradoxes.

  There are hundreds of fabulous books written to help you get a grip on the mechanics of writing, and an appendix at the back of this book lists some of the best ones that have helped me. Study the craft.

  Learn what you need to know. It will empower you.

  21

  I don’t have time

  There are things we all want in life—to lose weight, live a healthier life, meditate more, be kinder, spend more time with our kids, make an effort to see friends, be tidier, or meet our soul mate. There’s only one thing that stands in our way: what we are prepared to do to get there. Only when we take ACTION do our “wants” turn a corner. They change alchemically from heart fluff into heart muscle. They solidify. The universe has to accord them gravity and space and to take notice of them.