The writing life

Curing the Mean Girls: A Review of Curing Season

| Michele Sharpe

Have there always been mean girls, or was that an invention of the 1990’s? Based on my reading habits, I’d say the mean girls have been with us for centuries, from Becky Sharp (no relation!) to the Heathers in Daniel Waters’ film of the same name to Regina George in Tina Fey’s film, Mean Girls.

Kristine Langley Mahler’s essay collection, Curing Season: Artifacts offers an exhumation, an exorcism, and a bit of anodyne in response to questions of whether people can recover from toxic, obsessive friendships, and whether those of us who’ve felt out of place can find ourselves at home.

Forced to move with her parents from an idealized Oregon to the foreign country of the Deep South, Kristine’s journey through adolescence is complicated by the difficulty of breaking into an established brood of upper middle class, middle school girls. Worse, on visits back to Oregon, her old friends have changed. Some people don’t remember her, but she remembers her life, past and present, in shining and precise detail.

This skill (or inborn talent) ends up giving her the tools she needs to write these essays: a deep understanding of how details fit together to form meaning, of how artifacts reinforce memory and reality, of how relationships, and the stories we tell ourselves about them, both leave marks.

Praised for its masterful inventions in essay form, Curing Season is often as intriguing in its formatting as it is in its narrative. It’s written in such a diversity of forms, the figuring out of each essay’s pattern is as pleasurable as solving a puzzle. The essay “Creepsake” employs my favorite form of the collection: making up a word, and then writing narrative definitions of the word. So cool and inventive! Here’s an excerpt:

Creepsake

  1. a memento growing along a wall, like a vine

I left things behind, fetishes tied around the fences I wanted to infiltrate. I pushed my copy of The Baby-Sitters Club Super Special #1 under the dust ruffle of Heather’s bed after a sleepover . . . I thought my “misplaced” belongings would be magnets, inexorably pulling relationships back to me . . .

Available from the publisher, WVU Press and the usual suspects.

Writing Memoir: Against Procrastination

| Michele Sharpe

A sloth hanging out in a tree, probably just being a sloth and not procrastinating at all. Photo by Javier Mazzeo on Unsplash

Sloths get a bad name. They move slowly, it’s true, but they’re animals, for goodness sake. They don’t have deadlines or to-do lists.

I’m big on deadlines and lists when it comes to my writing. Although I don’t always live up to the goals I set down, my production would no doubt be lower without them.

Because writers love to write, just plunking down in front of the notebook or computer and getting a few words written is often enough to set the process in motion. The writer’s brain wants to write, like the runner’s body wants to run.

Setting precise goals has helped me overcome procrastination because they jump-start me. Most people who write do so because they love to write. It’s head-games like insecurity, fear of facing some truth, and impostor syndrome that make us procrastinate when we’re otherwise healthy and able to write.

Setting goals that are in tune with the current stage of writing is key. Stages of writing a memoir can include:

  • generating,
  • revising,
  • seeking feedback, and
  • submitting for publication.

The ambitious goal of “I’m going to write a memoir” can be overwhelming. It’s far more manageable when broken down into goals for the first stage: generating. Some general goals for that stage might be:

  • Setting aside time and space to write
  • Collecting materials like journals, diaries, letters
  • Enlisting the support of loved ones
  • Resolving to write for a short time each day.

Some writing coaches believe that writing at the same time every day can condition your brain and spirit to be ready at that time. And if procrastination is a habit, it stands to reason that a new habit can replace it.

Breaking my goals up into smaller goals — what some people call “chunking” has been helpful. For example, instead of swearing to “finish my memoir by X date” (although I do that, too), I’ve set goals about how many words to write in a day.

The words-a-day goal is great when generating new material. But since revision can and often should include cutting material, words-a-day doesn’t work well for the revision stage.

In the revision stage, I’ve turned to a minutes-a-day goal, and for me, that’s been 90 minutes, which is not terribly ambitious. On a few days, I’ve spent less time, but on many days, I’ve spent more than 90 minutes.

[Note: I quit my day a year ago and don’t have childcare or elder care responsibilities.]

I’ve written elsewhere about using a time tracker for accountability and for figuring out when I write best. When procrastination threatens me, though, I’m ready to chase it off with my goals.

Just 500 words now, I tell myself, or Just 30 minutes now. Usually, I end up becoming absorbed and plod past my goal — because I really do love writing.

New Essay – A Short History of Fraud

| Michele Sharpe

This memoir excerpt about discovering I was adopted was coincidentally published during November, which is National Adoption Awareness Month. The piece is also about the “secret mission” my adoptive father went on when I was ten years old.

If you’re reading this as an adult, you may already guess that the secret mission was not the heroic event I believed in as a child, but a story fabricated by adults to cover up a shame. Much as some adoptive parents (ncluding my own) kept adoptions secret to cover their shame at infertility or some other perceived inadequacy, the secret mission was a way of explaining a long absence. Hint: it invovled the FBI.

If you’re a writer who aims to be published, take heart from the publication of this essay. It was rejected at least 40 times before finally finding a home at Signal Mountain Review. From the time I first drafted it out in 2010 to this month’s publication, it went through many, many revisions. To some extent, getting published is about being tenacious and walking the fine line between believing in your own work and being willing to consider criticism.

You can read the full essay here.

Writing Memoir: The Arc of Grief

| Michele Sharpe

“A little figure toy sitting in front of a window on a rainy day in Indonesia” by Rhendi Rukmana on Unsplash

In fresh grief, writing can bring a sense of calm, and order, and even, for a time, a sense of closure. It can help us navigate different stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

In the midst of fresh grief, or in the memory of grief, writing can be a way to move inward, and it can also be a way to come up for air.

Grief informs many memoirs, whether the writer is grieving the loss of a loved one, or the loss of health, or a lost innocence or a lost opportunity. In my current memoir project, the central grief is the loss of my mother, or, more accurately, the loss of the opportunity to meet my mother. We were separated by adoption when I was an infant, and she passed away just a year before I was able to find my family.

This past spring, the goal I set for myself was to finish a first-but-coherent draft of my memoir of reuniting with my birth family. It took an extra month for me to finish that draft, and the rest of the summer to revise it. It’s a bit over 80,000 words, most of which has been published as stand-alone essays.

My biggest challenge in combining these essays has been to locate the narrative arcs between the conflicts and the resolutions. Today, while working on revisions, I began to see the arc of my grief for my mother, which first cut into me when I learned I was adopted, and has never really ended.

Grief has an arc, but like most complex emotions, it often has more than one arc, and sometimes, one arc repeats in a story, over and over again. In writing about my family and how I fit with them, I learned that as each of my five brothers passed away, I relived all the regrets I had about not searching for my mother before she died. Those regrets, which began with my inaction or procrastination, sometimes resolved when I took a positive action. Sometimes they resolved in acceptance. And sometimes, a regret stuck, and didn’t resolve. These are all possible arcs.

But the main arc of my grief is my search for a ghost-woman who held me as a secret and who died young. I’ve found bits of her in the gestures and expressions I share with my siblings, in my own laughter, which they say mirrors hers, in the physical characteristics I see repeated in her grandchildren, and in our family’s legacy of addiction.

Will I ever find enough pieces of her to feel my search is complete? Probably not. I think this searching arc will keep repeating. Whenever I feel that I’ve found her, she slips away. Whenever I accept that we’ll never meet, I find myself denying that I ever missed her.

Maybe grief is an emotion that resists a narrative arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I’m interested in your thoughts.

Writing Memoir: The practice of revising

| Michele Sharpe

“A fuzzy shot of a man’s hands on the keyboard of a piano” by Isaac Ibbotton Unsplash

Does genius make practice unnecessary? Do great writers do it right the first time, so they never have to do it again?

As a young woman in the 1980’s, I was a Boston Celtics fan. My favorite player was Dennis Johnson, who was known as a “money player,” a guy who came through when it really mattered. I admired how he could turn his talent on, seemingly at will.

But the most well-loved Celtics player from that era was probably Larry Bird, who combined unquestionable talent with a legendary work ethic.

Bird practiced methodically, taking as many as 500 shots from the foul line in a single practice session. In his mind, there was always room for improvement. Johnson, a gifted player, was not as methodical as Bird, but the two men worked so well together, they were likened to great musicians playing a duet.

It’s understandable that after the difficult work of getting a vision down on paper by writing the first draft of an essay or a short story or a poem, a writer wants to feel finished. We invest so much heart into our writing.

But first drafts are rarely the gems we think they are. If you’re like me, whatever you’ve most recently written is the best thing you’ve ever written. From talking with other writers, I know this is a common phenomenon.

To use the language of biology, the phenomenon seems adaptive: writers who adore the last thing they’ve written keep writing. Imagine if we thought the first thing we’d written was the best — we might despair of ever hitting that height again. We might give up.

Revision — a writer’s practice — is what keeps us striving to be better. By examining and re-examining our work, sharing it with other writers, and working to make our vision more and more accessible to readers, we keep feeding the flame.

I loved Dennis Johnson’s style and his heart and his drive to win. But in my writing life, I want to be more like Larry Bird: a methodical, believing that there’s always room for improvement.

Writing Memoir: Going on Retreat

| Michele Sharpe

Thanks to the generosity of my friend Corky who shared her house for the weekend, I went on a writing retreat with three friends. We all write poetry, and some of us write prose, too.

When we all arrived, we talked about our goals for the weekend, and then we set up a schedule for the day. It’s a good thing some of us are task-oriented, unlike me, the scatter-brain.

Today’s schedule started with private writing time for three hours on projects of our choice. After this, we came together to talk about how that went. Hearing everyone’s thoughts on what they’d accomplished helped me to see what I’d accomplished, and it helped us all to create another set of goals for the next round of writing later in the day.

Other activities in our schedule include reading poems aloud for inspiration, using a prompt to create lines for a collaborative poem, and a formal feedback session where we’ll share some work we produce here.

Writing retreats can be very productive times, especially for people working on particular projects, like a memoir. Without the distractions of my home, my garden, my husband, my dogs, I have no excuse not to write.

For some people, being in a beautiful place is inspiring. For others, it can be distracting. Corky is lucky to live on a small lake in North Central Florida, so the view is inspiring for me. I love North Florida more than I love jelly donuts. But because I live in this area too, it’s not so unfamiliar to me that I feel I have to get out and explore.

Writing retreats can take many forms. I’ve done the “staycation” retreat when my husband is out of town, hunkering down by myself in my home with a writing goal in mind. Those have not always been as successful as I’d hoped in terms of production. Those darn distractions. I know I’ve hit rock bottom when I find myself cleaning the bathroom instead of writing.

Writing retreats taken away from home can eliminate those distractions. One year, I went to a motel with my friend Sandra. We had separate rooms, and we got together for lunch and dinner, again to discuss our progress and goals. Having a time to meet with another writer gave me a sense of accountability.

Some of my writing friends have gone on retreats that are managed by writing teachers or coaches. These sometimes include workshops or seminars on particular topics. An example of that is the Iota conference retreat that focuses on very short nonfiction. It’s held in the beautiful downeast region of Maine.

Of course, you have to be able to afford those professionally managed retreats, or get a scholarship to attend one. If you can’t, going off with a few friends seems to be a good solution. You can have time to write, accountability, inspiration, and positive feedback and camaraderie.

Some elements of a successful group writing retreat include:

  • Private time for writing
  • Time for reading inspirational work, either in a group or individually
  • Using prompts to create new work
  • Formal feedback sessions to share work produced on the retreat
  • Comfortable accommodations, either at home or away
  • Accountability

Food and drink are required too, of course. If possible, it’s also helpful to have a mascot to bring good luck, or a familiar, or a spirit companion. We’ve been fortunate to be visited by these sandhill cranes.

Writing Memoir: Fact or Fiction?

| Michele Sharpe

A doll with a cracked face. Photo by Aimee Vogelsang on Unsplash

Do you remember the popular memoir, A Million Little Pieces? Written by James Frey, it was a national best seller. Then, it was revealed that Frey had made up many of the book’s juiciest parts.

The book became a literary sensation. Originally an Oprah’s Book Club selection, Oprah brough Frey back on her TV show where he confessed.

Today, the book is still listed as nonfiction in most libraries and bookstores, even though Frey and his publishers acknowledged that Frey fabricated numerous events in the book, including a criminal record. Admissions about the fabrications were included in subsequent editions of the book, which continued to sell well. Frey’s statement, in part:

“People cope with adversity in many different ways, ways that are deeply personal. […] My mistake […] is writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.”

Since then, the question of truth in memoir has been raised by readers, writers and publishers everywhere. Answers have varied.

For memoirists who strive for honesty, one issue has to do with composite characters. About ten years ago, I was in face-to-face writing group with other English faculty at a university in the Pacific Northwest region of America. One of the nonfiction pieces I brought to the group for critique ran for about 6,000 words, and 8 different people appeared in it. A colleague suggested that there were too many people in the story, and that I could combine several people into one character to avoid confusion. She called this creating a “composite character.”

I was astonished. I was writing nonfiction, and to me, the very definition of that was, well, non-fiction — true to life and not made up. But others in the group assured me that the emotional truth of the piece was truth enough, and that tweaking the facts a bit for ease of reading was okeedokee.

I knew, of course, that art, and writing, are not the same as real life, which bumbles along without any particular order. Art, and writing, require selection: we select scenes and images and dialogue from reality to include in our memoirs and essays, and we don’t select other scenes and images and dialogue.

There, in my opinion, is the problem with composite characters: in selecting material for our memoir and other nonfiction, we need to draw from the well of what really happened and who was really there.

But maybe I’m not as self-righteous when it comes to reproducing dialogue in memoir. I remember conversations, maybe not word for word, but I remember them. When I can’t recall exactly what someone said, I will, sometimes fill in the blanks.

Now I feel hypocritical.

Memory is not perfect, and different people will remember events differently, or not at all. As memoirists, we have to do our best to relate the truth as we remember it.

Where do you draw the line in your own nonfiction writing?

Writing Memoir: Starting Small

| Michele Sharpe

Photo by John Moeses Bauan on Unsplash

Lots of people start writing memoir as a book length project, but there are benefits to starting small with personal essays and “flash” memoir.

Essays are usually 2,000–8,000 words, while flash or micro-essays are under 2,000 words. The excellent online magazine Brevity, looks for flash nonfiction pieces (or “micro essays”) under 750 words.

One benefit to starting small is getting our work published quickly, whether on Medium or elsewhere. A book-length manuscript can take over a year, or more, to wend its way through a publisher’s many departments.

Having short pieces published can create an audience for our work, and it can help us become “known.” Book publishers and agents are often leery of “unknown” authors, and even when a writer appears to have sprung from nowhere on to a bestsellers list, that writer usually has a history of publishing short work.

In terms of craft, starting small can also be of benefit. It allows, or even forces us to focus on precise details and images. For folks who are unfamiliar with short nonfiction and micr-memoir, the aforementioned Brevity is a good place to get acquainted. Local libraries have anthologies of short creative nonfiction like In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction. These books will often provide observations about the genre and the craft, like this excerpt from In Short.

Zeroing in on a small moment is manageable in a way that a book length manuscript is not. But it also provides excellent practice for writing longer works, which also require attention to physical and emotional details.

In short (hahahaha), the small details can, or perhaps must, be interesting. That doesn’t necessarily mean pretty, although it certainly can. As an Asian history major in college, I came across this curse from Imperial China: May you live in interesting times. As in times of famine, flood, political upheaval, drought, and all the plagues suffered by the people of that vast country.

If you’ve read any of my personal essays, you know I and my family have had interesting lives, which has been both a blessing and a curse. Last year, I had a micro-memoir published (originally in Grist and then on Medium’s HumanParts) about a selfie posted by one of my beloved nieces.

As mentioned in another post, we like to get to know characters in fiction or memoir in the same way we get to know people in real life: by an accumulation of details.

My niece’s selfie included details that made me fear she was using drugs. Those details sent me back to her childhood when she had a scab below one eye that she picked at nervously. The scab looked like one of those teardrop tattoos you see on guys who’ve spent time in prison.

A scab is not a pretty detail, but in this situation it was interesting, and it revealed something about my niece’s character. The micro-memoir about the selfie and the scab doesn’t end happily. But a year after it was published, my niece read it aloud to her cohort as she graduated from a drug treatment program.

And that’s another benefit of starting small — kids these days! And adults. We’re all influenced by online interactions to read short works.

Write on. And read on, too.

Writing Memoir: Sending to Publishers

| Michele Sharpe

Woman wearing a t-shirt saying “SEND IT.” Photo by Drew Farwell on Unsplash

Submitting work to journals and contests and publishers (lions and tigers and bears) is one big pain in the butt. It’s also a time-tested way of opening yourself up for rejection. More on the rejection part later in this post.

Once your work is safe for human consumption, the first step is to locate journals or publishers or agents that are a good match for your work. For memoir excerpts and personal essays, my go-to spots for info are:

Another effective way to match your work with a publisher is to read widelyin your sub-genre. When you’ve read something you admire that’s got elements in common with your own work, consider submitting to that journal or magazine — or that agent. Writers will often thank their agents in the acknowledgements section of a book.

Following other writers and writing coaches who post about publication opportunities can also give you valuable information about where to submit your work. One of my favorite bloggers to follow is Erica Verrillo, who writes here on Medium.

Once you’ve found places to submit your work, then come the tasks like record-keeping and filling out online forms. What makes submitting easier? Two things come to my mind: a system and some sisters. Or brothers, colleagues, a network, whatever face-to-face or online communities appeal to you.

Some writers use Duotrope as a system to keep track of their submissions. Many of my writer friends use Duotrope and love it. I’m too cheap to pay the $5.00 per month fee. If you submit only to publishers who use Submittable, that can be a complete (and free) tracking system. And some writers use their own record-keeping systems.

New online communities for writers seem to pop up daily. I’m drawn to those that are created by and for women, like Women Who Submit on Twitter, which offers info on open submissions and “submission parties,” both F2F and virtual.

Other online communities exist on Facebook. Most are “closed groups,” which means you must request membership. This process helps to insure that all members are real people with an interest in writing. If you see a group that looks interesting, ask to join it. You can always leave a Facebook group if it doesn’t work out.

The rejection part: Kim Liao’s post about aiming for 100 rejections a year says it all, and says it so well that it went viral. The gist of Liao’s argument is that aiming for 100 rejections means you are sending your work out. And goals are important.

“Collect rejections. Set rejection goals. I know someone who shoots for one hundred rejections in a year, because if you work that hard to get so many rejections, you’re sure to get a few acceptances, too.”

Where do you go for information and strategies on sending out your work? Help us out here, so we can get back to the fun part — the writing.