Writing is Hard!

When it comes to writing, memoir has always been my greatest challenge. I don't know how to write it. I'm always torn between trying to report accurately and trying to convey such accuracy into something cathartic and meaningful. Flannery O'Connor once said that anyone who survived their childhood had enough fodder for good memoir, but I always look back on my own childhood, and feel that it was generally happy and uneventful.

I once started writing about my short stint at a Lutheran school, and the narrative turned into me befriending a deaf kid who had auditory hallucinations, and how a lack of proper communication between us destroyed our friendship. Only, the story took off that way on its own. There was no deaf kid. There were no hallucinations. In the fourth grade, I was friends with a boy named Donovan who made fart noises during class, and I thought that was hilarious. That is all.

The other thing about memoir is that I stayed away from it on purpose because of how gendered it was considered in literature. Though there is plenty of memoir written by male authors, there's still this idea carried over from the early 20th century that men write the crazy-big fiction, and women write about their lives. At the time, I was afraid of being just another lady who wrote about her life, but now I understand that tackling memoir can be an even bigger project of its own, and perhaps more deserving of respect. And it makes me anxious because my tried-and-true approaches to fiction writing never seem to work on memoir.

Recently, my boyfriend asked me to edit a story about his grandfather, and all the changes his family inherited after his passing. I remember him saying to me, frustrated: "I hate memoir. Whatever you do with it, it always comes out sounding like a draft."

"What if you wrote everything and then pared it down after?" I suggested. It was usually the thing I did when I had too much to say and didn't know how to say any of it.

He looked at me, disbelieving, and said, "How could I possibly write everything?"

Yeah, I had no idea what I was talking about. It's hard to capture a person you've known your whole life in a limited number of words. It's hard to put real catharsis into language. Because in those real moments, you're not thinking in words, only feeling. And you're not imagining, only remembering. And though imagination has always been a nice place to retreat, in this case, I always feel like there's nowhere to retreat to.

My internship with OLL ends this week, and for my last blog I wanted to share with you something that's been obsessing me like crazy. So no advice this time, just questions: What's your writing roadblock? And do you have any specific tips on writing in this genre? Or any genre, for that matter.

– Ari

Photo by Flickr user Lionespa