I thought after yesterday’s rant, we should have something slightly more inspirational and upbeat.

Wayson Choy:

In all my writing, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, my feeling is I’m building a bridge. I’m a unique person in my way, as other people are unique in theirs. And when I read a book I always say to myself, “I want to understand this particular uniqueness that’s not me but that is part of the range of human behaviour.” And so when I write my books I hope that somebody reads my book, crosses boundaries that they hadn’t thought of before and explored, and was empathetic to a human being that really is an awful lot like them.

[...]

I would say your story is absolutely worth telling. Don’t even hesistate to think otherwise, but remember you can only tell your story if you have the craft and learn the craft of writing. Because it is an artform and having said that, I think you deserve the chance to tell your story and you should. I think some people say, “Nothing happened to me.” But if they really think about – especially when they realise how they got to where they are now, and they are honest – they have much to tell and they should tell it.

Wayson Choy is the author of Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying.

Choy almost died. Twice. After suffering multiple heart attacks and a severe asthma attack in 2001, he literally had to learn how to relearn how to speak, write and walk.

So whether I write 50,000 words this month or not, I take great comfort in the knowledge that I didn’t die… or almost died.

Related Posts:

• I Sacked My Writing Coach!
• Write What You Know. Write What You Feel.
• Minor Memoirs
• When No One Cares…
• Classroom Community Of Writers

I should warn you. What follows is disgruntled, self-pitying and inspired by an inability to actually confront my increasingly vexing NaNoWriMo project…

I am reminded of the lyrics of The Sunscreen Song, that novelty record ostensibly by Baz Luhrmann, with words taken from Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich:

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

And then there’s Merlin Mann’s advice about advice as it relates to NaNoWriMo:

And, the warning? Don’t read too many blog posts like this.

The hounds are out this month, guys, and they smell your fear and self-doubt. So, shovelbloggers will be offering you a tantalizing Vegas-style buffet of endless writing “help” that will range from the indispensable to the stupid to the unconscionably poisonous. And, smile though they might, those folks could care less if all those page views end up killing your word count or distracting you at the one delicate moment you were about to figure out your troubled third act. Their job is to make you stop working. Don’t let them. Okay?

I am an exceedingly awful writer, truth be told. NaNoWriMo has made me realise this. Not because I lack ideas, not because I can’t string a sentence together. But because I really don’t like ‘showing up.’ I like writing blog posts. I find something quite wonderous about them. I’ll start with a vague idea and somehow by the end of it, almost despite myself, I will have arrived at the end of that thought process, I will know what I now think, I will have expressed it and actually the prose itself isn’t too bad either. But for one reason or another, NaNoWriMo has been a grating experience. I secretly want to punch the next teenager who remarks on how much ‘fun’ it is.

Yes, I have next to no willpower. I’m not having fun. So ocassionally I will seek encouragement from various sources… But advice, as Mann and Schmich have observed, isn’t always helpful. You could imagine the solace (or lackthereof) I received when I went looking for encouragement to continue with my memoir project and came into contact with this from Jurgen Wolff:

The one area I would warn most people away from is the memoir. Unless you have been in the public eye or have a truly remarkable experience to relate, it is difficult to interest people outside of your immediate family in your life story (sometimes it’s even hard to interest people inside your family…) Of course, you have the option of self-publishing such a work and distributing it to friends and relatives.

This wonderful quote is from a book titled, “Your Writing Coach: From Concept To Character, From Pitch To Publication.” The tag line of this book is: “Everything you need to know about writing novels, non-fiction, new media, scripts and short stories.”

I guess when it comes to writing memoir everything you need to know is essentially ‘don’t bother.’

But Wolff taps into a much greater anti-memoir sentiment that I have noticed elsewhere and often. I’ve observed it in writing podcasts where hosts tell the memoirist that their work “… is a memoir but it has the devices and language of fiction” as if that made up for the fact that the author dared to write from their own experience. [So widely shared is this belief that authors have taken to calling their works 'creative non-fiction' to try to combat it.] There was also a suggestion that there should be “more novels, less memoirs” because “if you’re working in fiction, good for you, because as far as I’m concerned that’s how to get the truth.”

I get it people. Fiction is the order of the day, and Twilight and Harry Potter the centre of the universe. That’s fine. [I've not read either, though looking at the Twilight movie posters I can't help but think shirtless men - vampiric or otherwise - probably do speak to great life truths. Erm, somehow.] Kudos to everyone whose passions revolve around those things – no, really. I am very happy for you. But lived experience is what interests me. And actually there’s a really good chance I will never finish this memoir, there’s a good chance I will not make 50,000 words by the end of this month. There’s a good chance this will never be published, that it will never see the light of day. So, you know, you won’t have to read it. You probably won’t even have the opportunity to read it. And in the meanwhile it keeps me off the streets and from J-walking or loitering or something…

Related Posts:

• When No One Cares…
• Wayson Choy: Your Story Is Absolutely Worth Telling
• Minor Memoirs
• Classroom Community Of Writers
• The Conditions For Creativity

So NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, is almost upon us. I have decided to participate in 2009 and I just wanted to take this opportunity to talk about my motivations, previous experience and what I hope to get out of this process.

For me NaNoWriMo 2009 is mostly about cultivating creative habits, about getting into the habit of writing every single day no matter what. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the mood, if I’m inspired or not – I have made a commitment to write every single day.

But as well as that it is about proving to myself that I can write a piece of at least 50,000 words. I have never written anything this large and last year the prospect of such a large project freaked me out and rendered me completely useless.

The project I am going to tackle in November isn’t strictly a novel. It is actually a memoir, and during November my primary concern is about collecting anecedotes that relate to the subject matter of the memoir. I am not going to labour too much about narrative structure, timelines, flashbacks. The goal here is to get the raw information onto the page so that I have something to work with in subsequent revisions.

You can follow my progress on the NaNoWriMo website.
You can subscribe to this blog via RSS for updates.
You can follow me (@johnlacey) on Twitter.

Are you doing NaNoWriMo in 2009? Is this your first time or are you a seasoned professional? Why are you doing NaNoWriMo? What do you hope to get out of this process?

Leave me a comment – I’d love to hear from you!

Related Posts:

• NaNoWriMo 2009: Week 1
• Classroom Community Of Writers
• All I Want For Christmas
• NaNoWriMo 2009: Week 2
• Wayson Choy: Your Story Is Absolutely Worth Telling

Continuing in what seems to be an unintentional series of blog posts inspired by my childhood, while sorting through old papers and documents I found something quite interesting. My autobiography. Well, at least between birth and the age of 12 when my first high school English teacher insisted I wrote it. It is a remarkable and hilarious document that I earnestly typed out (with a typewriter) and stuck photographs – and other artifacts of my childhood – onto. It consists of the following categories:

1. Birth and Background
2. My Early Childhood
3. Early Schooling
4. Outstanding Memories and Incidents In My Life
5. My Family Today
6. My Friends
7. Interests In Life
8. My First Impressions Of High School
9. Hopes For The Future
10. Special Things About Me

This Is Me Then: Some photographs from different times in my life.

One of the understandings I arrived at doing the morning pages is that moods and thoughts are transistory. I often forget things as quickly and easily as I think of them. Writing them down for future reference can be a fascinating exercise and taking time to document your life at different stages can help build the narrative of your life and give your life today some sense of context. For example this is what I wrote for my Hopes For The Future:

I hope to get good grades in the following years and to go on to complete my six years of school. Then go on to work in a radio station.

I graduated high school and got grades I could feel proud of, but I actually found myself in a radio station before I even left high school. It was community radio, an unpaid gig certainly, but the point was I was doing it. I was music director, producer, researcher, announcer for various radio shows as a teenager and even now there is a Listener’s Choice – Best Production award on the bookshelf beside me from that time. Often when you sit down to a creative endeavour the fears that impede your work don’t have any sense of reality or of history. They don’t consider what you’ve done before, how resourceful you’ve been. Indeed when presented with my current memoir project I had no memory of this other memoir project from years gone by. Now I realise I’ve done it before. I also realise it won’t be hard to better my last attempt. This is encouraging!

I wanted to also note something similar to this that my primary school got us to do. Each year we were given a form to fill in, documenting our then favourite things – foods, activities, friends, music, films and books. This took hardly any time to do and yet builds such a vivid picture of childhood development. I hope schools still do this.

Related Posts:

• Wayson Choy: Your Story Is Absolutely Worth Telling
• I Sacked My Writing Coach!
• When No One Cares…
• Classroom Community Of Writers
• Write What You Know. Write What You Feel.

Today I start work on a new project, tentatively titled Heartbroken and Grieving. (An hour and 13 minutes have elapsed since writing the first sentence of this blog entry and the second; procrastination is a formidable opponent.) It is something I have been thinking about for months but ‘thinking’ isn’t the same as ‘doing.’ And even now that I have resolved to do it, there is still considerable resistance.

Heartbroken and Grieving is essentially about love and loss – unrequited love. It is a memoir. It is about a dream I once envisaged that didn’t materialise. It is about the grieving process, grieving that person as much as the idea of you and that person. It is about the whole journey, all the little details. Even sitting here now writing this blog entry over a salad with tuna in it, I am reminded of that person. (They were a vegetarian. I doubt they would approve.)

I’ve often recorded important aspects of my life online – in blogs and videos, particularly. Because of this I have a lot of source material for this project. Though frankly I am scared to revisit it. I feel that enough time has passed that I am in a really good place, mentally, with regards to this experience. I have a new perspective garnered over a couple of years. Though I am still fearful of getting sucked back into that emotional black hole. And so I wonder…

I don’t want to misrepresent myself here. I don’t do things like this out of a need to be masochistic. Ultimately these projects do offer me clarity. They are frequently cathartic. When I was younger I bottled every emotion I ever had up inside. Eventually I came to understand that spilling out onto the page could keep me sane.

But there are still moments when I wonder why I’m not say drawing a comic about a cat who likes pizza and coffee. Not that I’m implying that’s easier, but I imagine it would be a lot less emotionally taxing. (Pizza and coffee have never made me question my self-worth or inspired any personal aneurysms.)

So… do you suffer for your art?

Related Posts:

• When The Student Is Ready…
• A Creative Catalyst
• Sister Wendy: Art Changes But It Doesn’t Get Better
• 2010: Back To Work
• Felicia Day: Celebrate People Not Waiting For Permission To Make Their Art