How to Write a Memoir by William Zinsser

"My final reducing advice can be summed up in two words: think small. Don’t rummage around in your past—or your family’s past—to find episodes that you think are “important” enough to be worthy of including in your memoir. Look for small self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you still remember them it’s because they contain a universal truth that your readers will recognize from their own life...

Remember: Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance—not what you did in a certain situation, but how that situation affected you and shaped the person you became...

Here’s what I suggest.

Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory. What you write doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. Tuesday’s episode doesn’t have to be related to Monday’s episode. Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past.

Keep this up for two months, or three months, or six months. Don’t be impatient to start writing your “memoir,” the one you had in mind before you began. Then, one day, take all your entries out of their folder and spread them on the floor. (The floor is often a writer’s best friend.) Read them through and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge. They will tell you what your memoir is about and what it’s not about. They will tell you what’s primary and what’s secondary, what’s interesting and what’s not, what’s emotional, what’s important, what’s funny, what’s unusual, what’s worth pursing and expanding. You’ll begin to glimpse your story’s narrative shape and the road you want to take.

Then all you have to do is put the pieces together."

A Student of the Scriptures

A Student of the Scriptures

(I wrote this for the Relief Society newsletter)

“The difference between good and poor learners is not the sheer quantity of what the good learner learns, but rather the good learner's ability to organize and use information." Frank Smith

It was my first year teaching the Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, and we were well in to the book and had already gone through class period after class period trying to move beyond summary and even identification of themes in to discovering how the author uses language and images to create an intended effect. It was at this point when a quiet student in the back slowly raised his hand, then put his hand back on his lap, only to raise it again with a little more courage the second time. He had noticed that the end table next to one of the characters’ bed was made of drift wood and wondered if it connected to the death earlier in the book which happened on the shore of the ocean. All the other hands in the room went down as every student looked back at their book with silent respect, wondering both why they hadn’t noticed it and what this could mean about the character. After a fascinating and rather lengthy discussion on the motif of the ocean, another student, more brazen than the first, raised her hand and challenged the entire discussion. “Did Amy Tan really do all of this on purpose or are we simply overanalyzing?”

We discussed that question that day but I still think about it frequently and the conclusion that I have comfortably settled on is that finding connections between things is important as readers and even if Amy Tan, or any good writer, did not intentionally create the connection, because of the nature of being a good thinker she had been unconsciously creating connections between everything in her life and mind as a matter of routine and this manifested itself in her writing. I have also settled on the importance of our own efforts to create connections between the things that are important in our life. How does the lesson in Sunday School connect to the difficulties I am having with a teenage child? How does a scripture I just read inform my ability to achieve a goal I just set? What do the instructions in the temple have to do with the areas my marriage needs improving? How does a conversation with a stranger connect to a prayer recently offered?

To get the most out of our experiences with the gospel texts and religious practices we should be fostering an intellectual process in which we can connect those things with the experiences in our day to day life. When we find these connections we will find answers, solutions, and richness to many of the things that had previously left a feeling of isolation. Heavenly Father will help us to see more and be more as we turn to him for guidance putting the pieces of our experiences together to create something that teaches and enriches, not unlike a good book.

Balance between Recklessness and Control

"I was ready, however-or maybe I should say I was ready to be ready-for Woolf's sentences. I had not only never seen language like that; nothing I'd read had prepared me for the fact that a human being could do what she had done, line by line, using the same ink and paper available to anybody. I had neither read nor conceived of sentences that complex and muscular and precise and beautiful. It may, preversely, have helped that I didn't quite understand what the sentences actually meant. It may have helped free me to better appreciate their tones and variations, the sheer virtuosity of their structures and sounds. I remember thinking, Hey, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. Riffing, that is, as only a genius can; finding over and over again an exquisite balance between recklessness and control, between chaos and pattern."

-Michael Cunningham, on reading Virginia Woolf for the first time at 15. From Mentors, Muses, and Monsters:30 writers and the people who changed their lives.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Words That Don't Exist in English

Image from Suavilogy

I love this post by Terresa Wellborn at The Chocolate Chip Waffle

L’esprit de escalier: (French) The feeling you get after leaving a conversation, when you think of all the things you should have said. Translated it means “the spirit of the staircase.”

Waldeinsamkeit: (German) The feeling of being alone in the woods.

Meraki: (Greek) Doing something with soul, creativity, or love.

Forelsket: (Norwegian) The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love.

Gheegle: (Filipino) The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute.

Pochemuchka: (Russian) A person who asks a lot of questions.

Pena ajena: (Mexican Spanish) The embarrassment you feel watching someone else’s humiliation.

Cualacino: (Italian) The mark left on a table by a cold glass.

Ilunga: (Tshiluba, Congo) A person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.

Schadenfreude: (German) the pleasure derived from someone else’s pain.

Age-otori (Japanese) To look worse after a haircut.

Arigata-meiwaku (Japanese) An act someone does for you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favour, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude.

Image from here

"I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that Stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the trust as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel global doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don't have any doubt." Richard Bausch from Off the Page

On Starting Your Memoir by Abigail Thomas

Take any ten years of your life, reduce them to two pages, and every sentence has to be three words long—not two, not four, but three words long. You discover there's nowhere to hide in three-word sentences. You discover that you can't include everything, but half of writing is deciding what to leave out. Learning what to leave out is not the same thing as putting in only what's important. Sometimes it's what you're not saying that gives a piece its shape. And it's surprising what people include. Marriage, divorce, love, sex—yes, there's all of that, but often what takes up precious space is sleeping on grass, or an ancient memory of blue Popsicle juice running down your sticky chin. When you're done, run your mind over everything the way a safecracker sandpapers his fingers to feel the clicks. If there is one sentence that hums, or gives off sparks, you've hit the jackpot. Then write another two pages starting right there.

On Writing

From a New Yorker interview with Joseph Cuomo

"As you walk along, you find things...by the wayside or you buy a brochure written by a local historian which is in a tiny little museum somewhere...and in that you find odd details that lead you somewhere else, and so it's a form of unsystematic searching...So you then have a small amount of material and you accumulate things, ...and one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between...things. If you look for things that are like the things that you have looked for before, then, obviously, they'll connect up. But they'll only connect up in an obvious sort of way, which actually isn't, in terms of writing something new, very productive. You have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn't done before...So let's think more, ponder, wonder, meander, maunder...I'm addicted to the world's whisper"

On the infinite possibilities that life offers for thought and writing

"It is the very extent of human life, the infinite number of things contained in it, its contradictory and fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another, the hours, month, years spent in one fond pursuit after another [that], baffling the grasp of our actual perception make it slide form our memory...What canvas would be big enough to hold its striking groups, its endless subjects!...What a huge heap, a "huge, dumb heap," of wishes, thoughts, feelings, anxious cares, soothing hopes, loves, joys, friendships, it is composed of! How many ideas and trains of sentiment, long and deep and intense, often pass through the mind in only one day's thinking or reading, for instance!" William Hazlitt

“ Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

Sylvia Plath 

Words to love

I went to a writing workshop on Friday and one of the suggestions they had was to keep a list of words you like. It was so fun to hear published authors read parts of their lists. They all sorts of words - big words, funny words, words that are fun to say, and even ordinary words that look cool.

So I am starting to collect:

reciprocity

ethereal

charade

braver

froth
revolves
suffer