The picture above could be an illustration of my writing process, flowing forward and then doubling back and then forward again, and then back, forward, back, forward, forward back, forward back.
Every part, every chapter, every paragraph, each line, each sentence, every word gets considered, mulled over, replaced, taken out, put back in, tried in a different order.
What you don’t see in this picture is the uphill climb. The aerial overhead view distorts that climb. When is the last time you stepped on a treadmill. It’s easy. Now crank the elevation setting up to 15 or 20. Feel that in your legs? Yeah, now you’re working. That’s revision.
In the best book about writing I’ve ever read, George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, he says there are two things that “separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t”:
First, a willingness to revise.
Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causation. (p. 226).
Mary Karr says, “Scriveners tend to arrive at good work through revision.” (Bartleby just laid down, just stopped what he was doing, preferred not to, and look what it got him. He died.) Karr writes,
Look at Yeats’s’ chopped-up fixes in facsimile form, or Ezra Pound’s swashbuckling edits of Eliot’s Waste Land. Without radical overhaul, those works might have sunk like stones.
In fact, after a lifetime of hounding authros for advice, I’ve heard three truths from every mouth: (1) Writing is painful—it’s “fun” only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standard for quality.
It’s like Karr pressed her nose against my window and watched me for 3 1/2 years.
My Memoir Writing Process
For the first time ever, I’m going to share my memoir writing process with you. Grab a fresh cup of coffee. You may wish to subscribe for this, either the free or paid version. But of course, with the paid version, you get cookies with your coffee or tea, for only the price of a cup of coffee per month!
A. Write The Stories - Freewrite the Stories
Like most people, my life has occurred in a series of episodes, some memorable, some not. I have a better-than-average memory, but that doesn’t mean infallible. I’m as prone to memory mistakes as most people, and the little fish I caught as a child grew to enormous sizes with each retelling of the tale. So first I write the story as I remember it, with varying levels of detail.
B. Outline To Choose Which Stories to Keep and Which to Delete
Not all of my life stories have a place in my memoir. My memoir is confined to an 11-year period of my adult life. It’s not about a rotten childhood. I had a stellar childhood filled with love and an epic place to live and grow up. The roots of the 11-year dysfunctional period stretch back into other parts of my adulthood, but they aren’t all pertinent to my particular story. One must pick and choose the stories one tells.
I compared some notes with my sister until it became clear that we had different memories about events in our shared lives. The book is less about telling “the truth” than it is about telling “my truth” and “Truth” with a capital T. I don’t veer off the factual, but our truths about some events are different. As they should be. She doesn’t live in my skin, and I don’t live in hers.
So deciding which stories to keep and which to delete came down to - does the story fit the the GMC (Goal-Motivation-Conflict) of my memoir? Does the story help elucidate the theme of each section of The Waste Land as it serves as a structural principle of my book as a whole? Does a reader need this story?
C. Revise, revise, revise
I know many writers who don’t revise. What? Language doesn’t arrive at someone’s tongue or pen fully polished. It’s just not the way it works. Kerouac students and studies does all of us a disservice. (You do know that Kerouac revised On the Road for 7 or 8 years before his “automatic” writing got published, right? Here’s one writer’s account of the revisions: Revisions of On The Road).
Stories can be told in any number of ways. The perspective can be changed. Distance or intimacy can be minimized or fully embraced, adjusting view like focusing a microscope, or telescope. I like to include what Mary Karr calls “carnality” in my stories, the body and the senses. I go back through my stories to make sure all of my senses are involved. What do it look like, sound like, taste, smell, feel like?
And then I dive deeper, into the emtional feelings, the interiority. How did something make me feel? How did it make me feel then, vs how do I feel about it now, as the writer writing about something from long ago? What is most true about this scene?
I dramatized most scenes, worked on dialogue. Remember the part about having a good memory? When you undergo traumatic events, your memory plays hell with you. Fortunately, I’m a keeper, meaning, I have emails about my life extending back into the 1990s, neatly organized into folders. I can look things up and remember what was going on in my life at the time. When people in my life said “oh, that didn’t happen,” I could trot out an email and say, “yeah, it did.”
Holding people accountable for their misdeeds is not something to take pride in. But it sure helps you to not feel crazy when others gaslight you or live in a world of denial that they can’t even remember their own shit.
D. Link the Stories Through Larger Context
Setting the scene of my stories is important to the entire book. Where did the events in my life happen? Who was there? Who were the primary actors? What was the larger sociocultural context?
A work like My Own Private Waste Land obviously calls attention to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. My story was set primarily during the greatest drought (up to that point) in known history in Southern California. The reverberation between Eliot’s poem and my own lived experience of drought (moral, spiritual, ethical, physical) deepens the entire work.
E. Layer Allusive References
My memoir thrives on literary references. They are not requied to understand the uniqueness of my story. But works of literature played a role in my own life, and thus, they have a role in this story as well. They help to deepen the meanings of scenes. Most of the literary references are explained in the Notes section (yes, my memoir has a “Notes” section just like Eliot’s great poem). If one were not familiar with the reference, it is explained in a note.
But the entire warp and weave of my memoir gains from the allusive quality of the work. I’m able to draw on themes and imagery that apply to my own life from some of the greatest literature ever.
F. Revise, Repeat; Revise, Repeat
Like the road in the picture, I write and then double back. I read over the whole and change things and move forward. The next day, I read over the whole, change things, and move forward. I followed that pattern for a year or so. And then the work grew too large to do that.
I outlined, made a list of plot points to get from one scene to the next. I looked at the whole maybe once a month as I wrote out new scenes, adding and adding, subtracting and subtracting. It’s my favorite part of the job.
Here’s a picture of my drafts:
You can see an outline that helped with “The Cut” on the top of draft 7.
G. Cut and Splice
At the end of the first full draft, I had two books: 203,000 words, 50+ pages of appendices and notes. I threw in several kitchen sinks, screenplays, epic poems, counseling sessions rendering as T.V. teleplays or movie scripts.
Getting at the kernel of the story meant putting it all down on paper, the entire 11 year period and then whittling away at the log. What remains is hard as nails, hard fought, a statue, an icon to invulnerability. And yet, until it’s published, it’s all still malleable.
It’s now at 98,000 words + 6,000 words of notes, and still experiencing weight loss.
Every time I cut a bit, I make sure to stitch it back together, like sewing a rag doll.
I’m ready for an editor (post-contract) to say, “So let’s try something else here” and make some changes.
There you have it. My writing process for my memoir, My Own Private Waste Land.
And here it is:
So the writing process contains so much more than that. What you don’t see are the days of writing, scribbling and typing frantically, followed by days staring at the ceiling and learning to play guitar for inspiration and dragging my ass to a dead-end soul-sucking job at night during a pandemic. What you don’t see are the lists and lists of tasks and the reading of memoir craft books - thank you, Zinsser and Goldberg and Silverman and Larson and King and McPhee and Lamott and McCann and Karr. I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few who are buried in my two row-deep bins of bookshelves. Or the reading of memoirs, never-ending.
Thank you for reading. We’re within a week of the Christmas holidays, which means one more substack post before Christmas and then the inbetween. Since we’ll be traveling for the holidays, I may actually do something this week that I haven’t done before - pre-write my substack posts for the week between Christmas and New Year’s.
Of course, I’ll fire up the ol’ substack chat and we’ll keep things going that way.
Happy Holidays to you all. It’s lazily snowing here in Seattle today with snow piling up on the bows of pine trees outside my window. The ground is covered, but we live in a microclimate where the snow is light. Over the hill to the West I’m sure the snow is heavier.
Stay warm and read good works. If you liked this newsletter, please share it with others. Or give the gift of a subscription to keep your friend warm all year long.
We’ll chat again soon. Until then, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!