How to Write an M&Memoir
How to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or candy coating to mouth
Think of this more like a board game - chutes & ladders - and less of a chronological step-by-step list. I’m very permissive with my ‘rules’ of writing engagement, as you’ll see…
Live a very bizarre and extraordinary life
You have already done this - you’re doing this now! How do I know? You’re here reading something other than twitter! And also? There is some stuff you would really, really like for other people to know about you AND that stuff is layered between the delicious layers of secret things you very much hope no one ever finds out about you. Sound familiar? You’ve got fodder for the autobiography! Kudos - you’ve got what it takes to be a writer.
Write that shit down, now
For many people this step appears to be the troubling one - pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, hieroglyphics to edifice. Whatever is your style. You can even audio record bits, but you have to get that sweet trifle of incredible and inconceivable out of your sweet mind. As my ex-husband once cleverly mentioned, “who is going to publish the nothing you’ve written?!” Painful, but true. Our software isn’t as nimble as your hardware, so ya gotta word it out.
For me, this is not a pleasant thing, but is a necessary thing. I don’t write because I **love** to write, because I feel most alive when I’m writing, or because I think I can make clever in font. Negatron. I word because I must - it is a reflexive, vomit-like urge. Undeinable and unstoppable and better in the rearview. This is counter to the sweet folks in the memoir structuring course I took weeks ago - those folks seemed happy and pleased to write. How odd!
My best writing happens on airplanes or in hotels, or on cafe patios facing water. The romantic writerly life isn’t the thing for me, but if I’m going to let all of the internal baggage out, I might as well be in a kind space.
Your writing process might be different - I experience magical thinking whereby if I do not write about the weirdness of my life, it will continue to get weirder. How’s that for motivation?
Recognize, acknowledge, and embrace your own writing process
I have never interacted with a single human (real or imagined) for whom the writing process is exclusively writing or reading or research. It often involves very strange and bizarre birdwalks. For example, this week, in addition to structuring and re-drafting, I also sorted all of the heinous blue M&Ms away from their medicinal cousins. Anne Lamott speaks of M&Ms as a sort of communion, giving them a rather mystical significance. I don’t have that, but I do believe wholeheartedly that the introduction of blue was an abomination, and that sorting gets my brain sorted for wording.
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