The Million-dollar Question

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“How do you know you have a personal story that’s interesting to other people?”

This question popped up at a LitFest panel I attended in Edmonton last month, and then in a conversation at a family dinner. The panelists’ answers and my own were vague and unsatisfying.

When I’m writing a personal story, I try not to think too much about who will be interested in reading it until after I have put the experience on the page. Still, the question lurks. How do you know?

Lately, I’ve been unable to resist reading the remarks of contest judges. If I wrote my personal story according to who likes what and why, could I be more sure of making it interesting?

My unscientific sampling of jurors turned up as many personal preferences. One judge admired “discipline and restraint” and the “notable (and refreshing) absence of simile and metaphor.” One was partial to “trustworthiness,” another “ambivalence.” Another favoured innovation over “straight-line narrative,” and still another preferred “writers who aren't trying to be too cute with structure.”

Perhaps these are all facets of the winning qualities of a personal nonfiction narrative but mostly they remind me that a reader’s response to a story has a lot to do with taste. In that case, the answer to the million-dollar question is to stay in the game, put rejection in perspective, and keep sending work out.

On the excellent Essay Daily blog, the editor Stephanie G’Schwind offers another possibility.

“It’s one thing to have an interesting story, or perhaps we should say experience. But that’s not the same thing as having an interesting essay.” Sometimes, amazing experiences “don’t translate into very interesting essays.”

G’Schwind considers a few of the personal essays she has published in Colorado Review, and how the writers transform the particular into the universal. (Her thoughts on parallel narrative – the story on the ground, and the story in the sky – are a must-read.)

Over at Write Nonfiction Now, Dinty Moore suggests intention is critical. He quotes Richard Hoffman: “If you want to be a writer, at some point your allegiance must shift from experience – what is important to you, what happened to you, what you saw – to artifact – what you make of it.”

Moore says writers of memoir aren’t recording machines: “We are artists.”

And, making art is something a person can learn how to do.

I can’t help but think of Alistair MacLeod and his advice: “Write about what worries you.” If you craft a personal story about that idea or memory or experience that wormed its way into your head, it will almost certainly resonate with someone else, too.

So You're Writing a Memoir

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My colleague, Barb Howard tells me the memoir manuscripts are pouring into her Writer-in-Residence office at the Calgary Public Library. She recently asked me if I had any suggestions she could pass along to would-be memoirists.

Here are my top three:

(1) Read Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and The Story

This is a classic text, referred to often and always by people who write personal nonfiction. It’s not the book to read when you’re starting to write, but it’s an excellent gate to pass through once you’ve hammered out a first draft.

Gornick’s book is dense and a little obscure in places. It took me a while to understand what she was talking about, and then more thinking to apply it to my own memoir-in-progress. Time well spent when I was ready to sort out the difference between the circumstances of my narrative (the situation) and the insights (the story) I was trying to express.

(2) Check out Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories

I stumbled upon this book almost a decade ago when I realized I was not a fiction writer. I turned the pages and felt like I had walked into a friendly and encouraging writing workshop. I still refer to Roorbach’s chapter on scenemaking (“scene is nearly always what’s missing when a piece of creative nonfiction fails to come to life”). His exercise on teasing out the big ideas in a personal story gave me the tools to do the work Gornick insists upon.

(3) Read as much excellent memoir as you can.

Sue William Silverman’s reading list, which includes memoirs of all stripes, is a good place to start. Check out the personal narratives shortlisted for the Canadian nonfiction prizes. Memoirs of this caliber offer all sorts of answers to the problems that can come up in your own story.

Writing a memoir means spending much of your time diving deep into your own life. It’s important to come up for air every so often. Consider these reading suggestions as an opportunity to remind yourself what the world has to offer. And a chance to breathe.

Thoughts after a flooded, fallow summer

 Fields, Kazimir Malevich, 1878 - 1935

This has been an unusual season. Strange weather, outside and in. I am in a new limbo: waiting to hear from publishers about a manuscript query, I’m impatient to figure out what my new project will be.

When the rains stopped in July, I took myself and my notebook outside. I pulled a pashmina around my shoulders against the cool Calgary mornings, sipped hot tea and wrote al fresco. I was looking for the Next Big Thing, but could only see the backyard. I tried to focus. Maybe while I waited for a real project to emerge, I could tease an essay out of the cotoneaster hedge, the geraniums, the fucking magpies. Always, my attention slipped back to the unsettled noise in my head. My notebooks flooded with the usual complaints; I stumbled into sinkholes of self-doubt. What if there was no next big project to get started on? What if there was only this piling up, and burying, of false starts, abandoned middles and dead ends? I clung the good, old advice. Read other people’s books. Keep writing, even if the notebooks feel like pages of sodden garbage.

I found company on the Internet. Three hours up the road in Edmonton, the poet and essayist Shawna Lemay was finding her way through her own soggy season. On her blog, she quoted John Steinbeck: “Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.”

I committed Steinbeck's words to my notebook, considered his conviction. He doesn’t mention that letting yourself “go fallow” is hard work.

When a farmer decides to let a field rest, does he leave it as is and let nature take its course? A fallow field, the dictionary says, is plowed and harrowed first.

The soil rests, but the farmer works.

Scribbling on my patio every morning didn’t feel like work or rest. It was yet another limbo of the many I’ve waded through as a writer.

This month, sensing the snap of September, I moved inside and started my own back-to-school project: reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit.

Tharp calls the first steps of a creative act “scratching.” You can’t control this “wildly unruly process” or insist on knowing where you’re going.

Scratching is improvisation. “Let it be awful and awkward and wrong.”

Tharp makes an interesting distinction. “Don’t scratch for big ideas…There is always an ulterior motive behind a big idea.” Posterity, ego, money. “Scratch for little ideas. Without the little ideas, there are no big ideas.”

I gather up my al fresco notebooks and comb through the pages. And then, I begin to see them, mixed in with the mounds of garbage: promising bits, tiny, green ideas.

And there is a sensation, too. The click of small possibilities snapping together, poking through the weeds and brambles, taking me who knows where.

Intramuscular Stimulation

I’ve been seeing the physiotherapist this summer. Tightening the loose muscles, loosening the tight ones. My physio is petite, young, inquisitive. She pokes needles into my leg and lower back, and asks me about my work.

How many hours do you spend writing every day? Are you able to work outside and enjoy the good weather? How do you know if what you’re writing is any good?

This last question sinks in.

I’m lying on my belly, my jaw squeezed into the table’s oval face hole, my back muscles in spasm. I take my time answering.

How do I know a piece of writing is any good?

It’s a question knit into the deep tissue of my writing life. Like the ache in my lower back that I ignored for months, this question about quality is always present. Most often, it drives me to work harder. Occasionally, it manifests itself as self-doubt that twitches and aches, and occasionally threatens to hobble me.

But I’m not going into all that on the physio table with my tender backside exposed to a stranger. Instead, I tell this curious young woman about my circle of trusted readers who let me know whether a piece is working or not.

In between pokes, I remember the index card posted above my desk: notes from a video interview with grammar guru Constance Hale about her seven-draft process.

Seven drafts? the physio gasps. I could never be a writer.

She’s spent years learning the intricate mechanics of the human body, but the idea of revising a piece of writing that many times horrifies her.

I brace myself for another twist of the needle and try to remember Hale’s seven stages. The high of getting the first draft down, then figuring out what’s missing. The shitty draft in the middle, followed by “true depression.” Then, finding the places that click, playing with sentences, and the final, delightful polishing.

If I’m patient enough to take a piece through every one of the seven steps, I tell the physio, I’m pretty sure the writing will be good. Or at least, good enough to send out into the world.

At home, I melt into a Magic Bag and contemplate the new leg exercise I have to add to my regimen. Next week when I visit the physio, I’m going to tell her there are similarities between what she does for a living and what I do. Both involve “good pain,” a series of incremental steps, and, most important, no shortcuts.

Alas.

Photo credit: Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons