The Write Stuff

I’ve been trying to write my memoir for a long time. I think the first version, which was absolutely horrid and about 100 pages, was written in college. I called it, “Why I Hate My Mother,” and thought it was brilliant, a nod to David Peltzer whom I never read because I was still too close to my past to see it in other’s writing. I really wish I had a copy now. It was on a disk, somewhere, and none of disks from those days work anymore. Corruption.

Over the years I’ve written fiction that were thinly veiled stories of my past. A mother and two children, a girl who tries to make it on her own, is forced to become an adult by the time she can walk. Thankfully, in terms of real fiction, I’ve worked past that although similar themes show up throughout.

I started this blog as a way to get back to writing my memoirs, to figure a lot of stuff out as I go through therapy, to search for evolution of myself and my writing. But it’s the cohesion that’s eluding me.

Recently, knowing that in a couple weeks I’ll be homebound a bit, I enrolled in an online writing class. I’ve taken classes in this particular school offline in NYC, so felt confident in it. The previous instructor really helped me realize the rut I was in – that of creating a passive observer as a central character. That is – me- the child who lives internally which, while good for a bit, can’t sustain the action needed in a story.

That’s the part that gets me, thinking of my life as a story. Granted, I always have. A fairy tale, a fable whose moral I’m trying to still figure out. Something written by someone else, like the Book of Life. I dream somewhere is a giant library with a book for each and every person and I so want to break in and read the author’s notes to my book. I want to read the interviews, see what, or if, that person was even thinking of. (Yes, I saw Stranger Than Fiction and really liked it.) But where does the protagonist act? Where do I act in life? What did I do besides watch and retreat? Is that in any way interesting? Where is the narrator now, as she reflects on the story?

Maybe I’m not ready yet. I keep stalling. When I really sit down, when I really concentrate and think of all the literary devices to use, when I think of form and structure I lose it. Not mentally, I just stop a few pages in. When I stop thinking I realize I don’t want to think about such things. I’ve got bits and pieces all over. I’ve had opportunities to write, recently turning down a fellowship to go to the backwoods of the Deep South to write for four years because I felt all my writing was a lie. But I push it off. I'm afraid. It's a tough business.

This was all supposed to be a preamble to something else, but it looks like this took over.