Telling Tales from Life

The WIP I just revised (FIERCE) started life as a memoir.

Incidentally memoir is a really good way to start digging into writing, and there seem to be more memoir writing groups around than other genres, BUT be cautioned that it is exceedingly hard to get published with an autobiography unless you are a celebrity (minor, reality tv, ok) or some truly catastrophic things have occurred to you.

Simple drug and alcohol addiction or I was a teenage Madame don’t cut it anymore.

In fact I think they made an after-school special out of the latter.

But as a tool to get yourself writing regularly and with some discipline, waxing eloquently about oneself works well. Must be the driving force of the ego again (see previous blog).

So about six years ago I started working on this, and I wrote it pretty much straight. A series of remembrances loosely strung together. I thought the rough, non-linear approach worked well with the edgy subject matter, plus it was easier to write that way.

I was early in my writing apprenticeship and still inclined to be lazy. And I wasn’t really writing it for anyone but me.

It was cathartic. Therapy in the rawest sense of the word. So yay! for Jo getting out these difficult feelings and yay! possibly for my writing group too because they got to see how Jo was as a young adult and that’s always interesting in a weird sort of way. Like going through a friend’s wardrobe or their bookshelf and discovering surprises– although this was more of a skeleton/closet or car crash sort of a thing.

Anyway, enough of an interest to keep going. So I did, and I wrote about 250 pages before deciding that was enough. I had achieved my therapeutic goal.

Then, periodically, over the next few years I’d think about it but I was far too busy writing fantasy fiction and having fun with my middle-grade characters. And then there was another adult-type thing which didn’t work, and then the YA idea that got me my new agent and the Scholastic deal.

But it always niggled at me. There was something there.

Something I could tell, but it was not an expose of my life replete with shocking detail (though not so shocking in this day and age after all).

It was a story of a different kind. Something had changed. I had grown away from the tale. And this is a good thing. Because I had also a few more writing chops under my belt by this time.

So I began again, and I told it a different way, weaving in other things, bits and pieces of fact, and a lot of made-up stuff, and my characters became composites of other people and of me and of beings pulled out of my imagination and god-knows-where-else such things come from…

I was freed up to tell the story the way I wanted to tell it. I didn’t have to conform to what actually happened. It became a piece of fiction but rooted in truth. Truth. As I saw it. Remembered it.

No two people ever remember the same thing the same way. Our recollections are so colored by the people we are now and the people we were then. My truth is not your truth. I can only approximate this sort of feeling that may or may not have existed. A sense of the time.

It’s freeing to just tell oneself that this is the story the way I am going to tell it. And included within are all the messy bits, the details, the things left out, the things put in, that make it something that I am uniquely qualified to tell.

Maybe it’s the raw material for all stories? Simple as that.