It can be hard enough writing when everything in your life is going smoothly, but what about when you hit a rough patch?   In truth, completing a memoir (or any work of art) is a triumph.  If things took their natural course, nothing would ever be completed – the odds are against it.  The writer has to assert her will over illness, inertia, accidents, backed-up drains, financial worries, and telemarketers.

By observing myself and interviewing other writers, I’ve come up with five strategies for helping you write through tough times.  I hope you’ll find them helpful and that you’ll enhance our list by sharing some tips of your own!

1.  Go portable

Writing is an admirably portable art whether you use a pen and paper or a laptop.

Years ago, I was undergoing a medical procedure that required me to get up at 4:00 every morning, leave my peaceful farmhouse, and take the train to Philadelphia.

I was not happy.  What would happen to my writing day?  To the quiet moments conversing with the beloved maple tree outside my window?  I decided I would keep a journal to entertain and distract myself.  At least I would be writingsomething.

Rather than concentrating on my own thoughts and feelings, as I had in earlier journals, I resolved to make this new journal an exercise in observing.

“I want to see everything, to notice every detail of the world around me in these weeks, describe everything I see in vivid clarity…I look out the train window and imagine the young man standing on the platform lighting a cigarette is my son.  He’s Asian –  Japanese, perhaps –- and I imagine he’s leaving, going away from his family and home.  It’s 1944 and we’ve been in an internment camp.  Now my son has a chance to leave, to go to war for his country.  As his mother, my feelings are mixed as I watch him on the platform – my son.”

These reflections took me out of myself, and trained me to observe more sharply.  It was the beginning of a journal I’ve kept faithfully ever since, one I may never have started if  I had stayed home in my quiet writing room.

You can also write while walking.  When I was living in Florence, I walked up into the hills overlooking the city every afternoon while dictating my journal into my tape recorder.  (If anyone came along, I just pretended to be talking on my cell phone.)  The writing I did while walking had a gentle, rolling gait.  Now when I read my impressions of an early spring walk, I feel like I’m right back there again.

“The lane dips down here…I wonder what’s around the corner.  The sound of a spade hitting rock…the smell of newly turned earth…scurrying of lizards in the ivy when my shadow falls across the wall.  In the meadows, bird song and pealing of church bells.”

2.  Make the act of writing bigger than yourself

My friend Nancy says, “During tough times I visualize myself as a conduit for another human being out there who may be suffering as much as I am. I then can choose my mode of connecting depending on what I need for comfort.  Do I need empathy? Do I seek inspiration to lift me out of my own negativity?  Do I want humor to charm ‘Miss Grumpy Pants?’ By making my act of writing bigger than myself… I find motivation to ‘apply the seat of my pants,’ as my junior high teacher told us, and just do it.”

3.  Write about what you’re going through, while you’re going through it

When my husband was undergoing heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic last year, I invested in an iPad and emailed friends and family as events unfolded.  When someone you love experiences a health crisis, events are so obviously out of your control – that is, fate is so obviously at play – thatnarrating what is happening at the very moment it is happening can be liberating.  You get caught up recording odd bits of dialogue, gossip between co-workers, the facial tick of the relaxation therapist.

4.  Find the humor

As my husband recovered from surgery in the hospital, I decided to have an endoscopy I’d been putting off.  The nurses at the Cleveland Clinic were kind enough to let me use my iPad as I waited to be wheeled into the operating room for the procedure.

I don’t do well with medical procedures.  I always imagine the doctor will give me bad news.  In my mind, I hear him saying, not very sympathetically, “Now I don’t want you to panic, but there’s a problem with your test.  Let’s take this one step at a time.”

I was getting more and more agitated by my vivid imaginings while I waited to be wheeled into the operating room.  Meanwhile, I kept tapping away on my iPad.

“I’m thinking of having a panic attack, but I’ll wait until they wheel me in,” I emailed a friend.  “No reason to rush it.”

I was laughing at myself in the midst of my terror and entertaining my friend in the process.  That helped me get through.

5.  Just one page

Author Elvira Woodruff told me about her own strategy for writing during tough times:

“I’ve written through some hard times over the last twenty some years – divorce, a cancer scare and operation, a toxic relationship, and worst of all my son’s descent into drugs.  There were many days when I felt as if I had no control. I wrote because I needed to make a living, not realizing that writing through tough times is what gave me strength…and by doing that I gained composure and confidence to face the negatives that seemed to be swamping my own life story.

“One thing that really helped was setting smaller goals. Instead of four or five pages a day I’d say to myself just one page.  Just showing up for the one page settled me down. I wrote two books of letters through one rough life patch and that was a godsend, because I’d say to myself, One letter. Just write one letter today.

DEAR LEVI: LETTERS FROM THE OVERLAND TRAIL by Elvira Woodruff

“I’ve always found that writing helps me to clarify what I’m thinking and feeling,” author Pat Brisson writes,   Putting nebulous, frustrating, angry, raw emotions down on paper forces me to organize them, capture them and deal with them.  I feel as long as I can give a name to something, it loses some of its power over me.”

The very act of writing during hard times is healing because it compels us to organize the seemingly random and chaotic events of life into a thing of beauty and economy – a story.

Note:  This and all posts on this site were originally published by womensmemoirs.com.  Please visit womensmemoirs to view posts by Pamela Jane Bell and the creators of womensmemoirs, Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been intrigued by banisters and stairways leading to rooms perched high above the treetops. I can spend hours poring over blueprints or photos of stairs, lofts, and attic rooms in various designs and configurations.  Whenever I think of my perfect writing space, I picture myself in an upstairs room, writing dreamily while the voices of my family drift up from below.

I didn’t know or even think much about the source of my stairway fantasy until I happened to catch an old movie on TV.  I Remember Mama (1948) depicts the ups and downs of a Norwegian family living in San Francisco around 1910.  The film generated a TV series of the same name that I’d loved as a child of three and four.  I remember how intrigued I had been by the big old-fashioned house and the stairway leading to the oldest daughter, Katrin’s, attic room.  The film brought it all back again.

Photo from the film I REMEMBER MAMA. You can glimpse a bit of the stairway in the background

Each TV episode, I recalled, began with Katrin, now a grown woman, returning in her imagination to her room looking out over the hills of turn-of-the-century San Francisco.

“I remember the big white house on Steiner Street, and my little sister Dagmar, and my big brother Nels, and Papa.  But most of all, I remember Mama.”

Once again, Katrin is fourteen and stealing a few moments from busy family life to write in her journal.  From downstairs we hear her mother calling.

“Katrin!”

“Coming, Mama!”

We know this is the voice of the past, the voice of memory and imagination.  In both the TV and film versions of the story, Katrin is simultaneously a young girl living her life, and an adult looking back on her childhood. In other words, I Remember Mama is a memoir*.  As a child, what really intrigued me about the series, I realized, were the parallel worlds of the writer – past and present.  And the attic room where Katrin wrote her stories and eventually her novel-memoir about her family was the physical embodiment of those worlds.  It was there, gazing out over the hills of the city, that

Katrin writing in her attic room

Katrin gained the perspective that allowed her to recreate the landscape of her past.

Like unlocking doors to hidden rooms, each discovery I made about the source of my stairway fascination led to an even deeper insight.  After seeing the film, I remembered how thrilled I was as an older child to discover that one of my favorite authors, Maud Hart Lovelace, understood the mystery and allure of banisters and stairways.

In Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, Betsy and Tacy go from house to house to collect names for a petition:

“Opening doors gave glimpses of strange faces, of banisters leading mysteriously upstairs, of an organ, of a hired girl in a cap.”.

“Leading mysteriously upstairs” is integral to the magic of stairways.  Like prop stairs on a stage set, a glimpse of a disappearing staircase and voices calling off-stage, hint at a world implied but not seen, and inspires us to imagine.  What do these hidden rooms look like?  Who are the people living in them?  What is their story?

When I designed my writing room, I made sure to add a stairway and banister

The final revelation about the origin of my stairway obsession was the most important of all.  Though I could not have articulated it at the time, watching I Remember Mama as a little girl led me to realize that the ordinary events of family life could be shaped into a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.  And so the world of the story-teller, and a fascinating and functional piece of architecture fused in my imagination.  Happily, knowing this does not diminish my fascination; in fact it makes it even richer and more intense.

Memoir takes you deep into your interior to a mysterious place where memory is transformed by imagination.  In the process, you sometimes uncover long-forgotten sources of the stories or settings that intrigued you as a child and continue to influence and inform your writing as an adult.

What enriched your creative vision and inner world as a child, and how has it shaped your writing, and your perspective?  Was it a particular color of a princess’s gown, a window seat, or a mysterious garden?

*Mama’s Bank Account by Kathryn Forbes is the original novel that inspired the film.  The book is based on Forbes’ own life growing up in San Francisco.

“Dreams are real while we have them; can we say more of life?” –anonymous

My seventeenth year was a nightmare (a waking one!) My parents were in the middle of a bitter divorce, my mother had recently had a nervous breakdown, and my dad was having an affair. Late at night, through the heating vent by my bed, I could hear my father’s angry voice and my mother’s sobs in the downstairs rec room. It was a painful and volatile time but my older brother, who was away at college, kept urging me to keep our parents together and our family intact. I had no idea how I was supposed to accomplish this. Further more, I didn’t want to.

“I’m not interested in all this parent shit,” I wrote back. “I just want to get out of here.”

It would take me decades to discover that this was not the voice of a callous teenager but of a heart-broken young woman who cared passionately about all that “parent shit.” I did not learn this from distance and adult perspective; I learned it from my dreams.

When I was beginning to write my memoir and examining this chapter of my life, I returned again and again in my dreams to the brick bungalow in suburban Detroit where my family and I lived when I was a teenager. In these dreams, I begged my father to buy back our house (it had been sold shortly after I graduated from high school.) It bothered my dream-self that my family had been shattered and our home sold when I was fragile myself, and most needed the structure and protection of a home and a family.

“Our family is splintered,” I told Dad in my dreams. “We need a physical place to come together in dreams, to act out old dramas and try out new ones.” (Interestingly, I found out later that our old house was actually up for sale again while I was having these dreams.)

It took a lot of arguing to persuade my dream-dad to buy a dream house. When he finally gave in and bought an old frame colonial with a massive front hall and a fireplace (truly a dream house for me) I felt a deep sense of healing that spilled over into waking life. I was piecing myself and my life back together again, both in my dreams and in my memoir.

In other dreams, I’ve revisited scenes from the past with a joyous sense of immediacy not accessible in waking life. This is especially true in lucid dreams (dreams in which you realize that you are dreaming.) Recently, I had a lucid dream that I was walking down the familiar streets to my old high school. Everything around me – the dappled sunlight, the brilliant green trees, the shadows on the sidewalk, my very awareness – was sharper and more vivid than in waking life. I was waking up in my dream, and in the dream of life, to all the possibilities and insights I’d missed before. Like writingmemoir, dreams allow you to inhabit the “here and now” of the past.

Here are five tips to help you use your dreams to deepen and enrich your memoir:

1.  Remember your dreams

Dream memories are fragile and easily disintegrate when you open your eyes. Some people keep a pad and pencil nearby at night to record their dreams. I like to use a mini-tape recorder because turning on the light chases an elusive dream memory further into the shadows. Later, you can transcribe the dream into your journal. What does it bring to mind? What would you like to explore further through writing? Dream recall followed by reflection is a fertile exercise for writing memoir.

2.  Recognize your dream symbols

If you want to experience the euphoria and heightened awareness of a lucid dream, train yourself to recognize objects, people and places that show up repeatedly in your dreams. These are your own unique dream symbols and their appearance could be a sign that you are, in fact, dreaming. For me, houses in my past with new, unexplored rooms, nineteenth century costumes, and old watches signal a possible dream-state.

3.  Test your reality

If I find myself gazing at an antique watch or talking about dreams with a friend, I try to remember to test my state to see if I am dreaming. (Don’t assume you are not dreaming even if you are convinced you’re awake. If you dismiss the possibility during a waking state, you’ll do the same in a dream.) One way to test your state is to jump up in the air and see if you can fly. If it takes you a fraction of second longer to drift down to earth, you are definitely dreaming. (Don’t jump out of any windows though, until you’re absolutely sure.)

Another way to test your reality is to glance at a digital clock, look away, and then glance back. If you’re dreaming, the numbers on the clock will look skewed, wiggle around, or suddenly jump an hour ahead.

By the way, don’t believe people who insist you’re being silly to test your reality because (they say) you’re obviously not dreaming. Daytime skeptics inevitably show up in your dreams and you’ll be sorry later that you listened to them.

4.  Ask yourself why

Both in waking and dreaming states, remember to ask yourself, why am I here? What can I discover or investigate?

Do you want to relive a chapter in your life to gain insight? Imaginatively “overhear” a conversation you missed the first time? Talk to someone who is no longer living? These questions will yield treasures both in dreams and writing.

5. Don’t try too hard

Trying too hard to have a certain dream or to dream lucidly is like trying to fall asleep – the more you try, the more elusive your goal becomes. Just do the exercises faithfully and then forget about it. Your dream work will come to fruition in its own time.

Dreams are an invaluable source of healing, insight and revelation. Use them sparingly in your memoir, however. Other peoples’ dreams are rarely interesting to readers unless they are a deeply compelling, integral part of the story, as in Amy Tan’s essay, “A Question of Fate.”*

Writing and dreaming Prompt:

Look around your environment. Let your attention rest on something you’ve never contemplated before – a branch moving in the breeze, a rusty wind chime, a forgotten souvenir. Resolve to look more penetratingly into your world and to question your assumptions about what you see. Then, before you go to bed, remind yourself to bring this level of scrutiny and observation to your dreams. Watch and see if your dreams become more vivid and evocative, and how this in turn deepens your writing.

“Modern…writing consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug –“ George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language.”

Again and again we hear injunctions about how we should think, live, and by implication, write.  Rather than gluing together long strips of words as Orwell charges modern writers with, today’s cultural clichés string together pre-thought thoughts that come bundled with their own strips of words like “be in the present” and “write from the heart.”  There is nothing inherently wrong with these  suggestions except that they’ve lost their authenticity and meaning through overuse.  What do these expressions really mean?  More importantly, what do they mean to you and your work?

1.  Stay in the moment

I don’t mind staying in the moment, but I like to choose which moment to stay in – past, present, or future.

I think of staying in the moment – no matter what moment we’re talking about – as expanding time, making it fuller and richer through reflection and recollection, such as recollecting where I put my glasses at the very moment I set them down, or recalling exactly what I was doing this time last year.  In writing a memoir, we bring the reader into whatever moment we’re describing.

As a little girl, I wanted to remember everything in the story I was telling myself, especially my own emerging consciousness.  Crouching behind a tree, clutching a pine cone, I vowed never to forget it.  Of all the hundreds of pine cones in the world, this was the one that would live forever.  I would make it live forever by remembering.

“I will never forget you,” I vowed, cupping the pine cone in my hands.  And I will never forget what it’s like to be me right now.”

2.  Write what you know

How, exactly, do you define “what you know”?  Does it include what you might find out or what you don’t know you know?   A writer is an explorer of continents, known and unknown.  Through writing your memoir, you may find the familiar landscape of the past changing as you work, revealing new depths and untraveled terrain.

I’m writing a memoir-travelogue about the three years my family and I lived in Florence.  I’m not sure exactly what Italy meant to me and why it was so important, but by writing the book, I’ll find out.

3.  Think positively

DON’T THINK OF A MONSTER!

The minute someone tells me to think positively, I immediately conjure up a giant negative image.  You can’t force yourself to think positively.  You can, however, use negative thoughts productively in your writing, or give them some pasture andlet them run around until they’re worn out.  That clears the way for a natural buoyancy and resilience that will reflect in your work.

4.  Write from the heart

An author friend told me she gets tired of hearing “Write what’s in your heart and don’t go by the marketplace,” especially when she writes her heart out and then her editor says that her book isn’t commercial enough.

The truth is that you can do both.  A piece of writing begins in the heart, but you can choose to take the market into account as you develop it. Women are good at multi-tasking (to use another popular cliché.)  You could write ten different books about the same period in your life by changing the focus of your story.  If you know that the market is saturated with one type of memoir, you can shift the emphasis to make yours more marketable.

5.  Don’t dwell on the past

“Our best times together are when we speak of the past,” Vivian Gornick writes about her mother in her memoir,Fierce Attachments.  “It is only the present she hates; as soon as the present becomes the past, she immediately begins loving it.”

I chuckled when I read that.  I suspect that, like me, most memoirists luxuriate in dwelling on the past – in a productive way of course (though occasional hand-wringing is permissible.)

***

Recently, I told a friend about how sad I felt that my husband is retiring at the same time as our daughter prepares to leave for college next year. My friend suggested that I separate the two issues in my mind.  I thought about that for a while, and then I realized I couldn’t, and in fact didn’t want to separate them.  My husband’s job held out the possibility of returning to Florence to live.  Now that door would be closing at the same time that our daughter  prepares to head to Florence for her freshman year.   The two themes – my husband retiring and Annelise leaving for college ­– are thematically connected.  After contemplating this, I realized that Annelise’s going to Florence on her own is the perfect ending to my book.  It resolves the story beautifully which helps me come to terms with the collision of two momentous events in my life.  As writers we find our own meanings and our own connections.  That’s why we write.

How do you see it?  Do you find that your truths are different from those modern culture espouses?   How is your unique point of view reflected in your writing?

Editorial direction – conveyed in a mysterious language all its own – can be daunting. What does she mean I need foreshadowing? What the heck is “pointing?” How am I supposed to do more “weaving?” Authors who work with editors have to figure out how to translate abstract concepts into concrete changes. Here are five tips for surviving the revision process – that unsettling time after you get comments from your editor.

[By the way, I explain "pointing" and "weaving" at the bottom of this post.]

At times I have read an editor’s suggestions with total dismay. Not only did I feel my work was a failure, I also had no idea how to make the changes the editor wanted, or even understand what she meant. Below are the first five of 10 tips for how to successfully survive the revision process with both you and your memoir intact and improved. These are strategies I’ve discovered through thirty years of working with editors on book revisions. And believe me, I still need them myself (the tips and the editors).

1. Don’t try to take it in all at once

A long letter or (as in my case recently) several single-spaced emails filled with editorial suggestions can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re reading at the end of the day, or when you’re about to take your dog to the vet after he ate your daughter’s earphones and her retainer (true story). Glance over the editor’s letter or email. Then put it aside for a quiet moment when you can really think about what she’s saying.

2. Break down the criticism

It’s helpful to separate the editor’s suggestions into steps, or arrange them in a list. This gives one side of your brain something productive to do while the other side is panicking. A list will also help you to see that revision isn’t an utterly unfathomable process, but a logical step-by-step procedure.

3. Find alternate ways to make the suggested changes

Let’s say your editor wants to know more about a person in the first chapter of your memoir or autobiography. What does the person like to eat, what are her favorite books? These are questions you may not be interested in exploring or that you don’t feel are relevant to your narrative. But chances are your editor is on to something. Listen to her suggestions and find another way to address them that is uniquely your own, and that will take you deeper into your story and your characters.

4. Request clarification

If you are really having trouble understanding what the editor is asking you to do, ask her to clarify. For example, your editor may ask you to drop a hint that the you are hiding something from the reader. Ask her how many sentences she imagines you will need to accomplish this. “Oh, three or four,” she may say, and suddenly the elusive “foreshadow” becomes a much more tangible concept. Most editors are happy to expand on their suggestions.

5. Ask the editor for concrete examples

For me, concrete examples are more helpful than something general, such as “show the narrator falling in love.” Sometimes I even ask the editor to write a few sentences to illustrate what she means, however rough or unpolished. For instance, “She tossed and turned all night, thinking of him, trying to picture his face.” You won’t use what she writes, but it can give you a template to help shape your own language. The template functions like training wheels on a bike; they help get you started revising your memoir until you’re moving along confidently on your own.

*Pointing refers to trimming and shaping your memoir to illustrate its theme – the story you have come to tell. Weaving is taking a thread of your memoir – for instance, how you felt invisible in school – and making sure the issue of invisibility is touched upon or revisited consistently throughout the story.

5 Writing Tips So Those Great Ideas Don’t Get Away

It was an idea on the edge of your consciousness; a thought you almost had; a book concept you came up with but dismissed because you figured it was dumb, or not marketable, or had already been done. And then someone else writes a book based on your elusive or discounted idea, and it’s a best-seller.  Now you feel really dumb.

It can happen to any one, even to memoir writers.  You could have an insight for an original way to lay out your narrative, for the angle of your story, or even the title (although titles can’t be copyrighted, you want yours to be unique.)

Below are five tips to help you capture that brilliant idea before it slips away.

1.  Don’t make any assumptions

Occasionally I read about a new book and think, I had the same idea!  But I didn’t do anything about it and now it’s too late.  That sets you up for making the same mistake again.  Never assume it’s too late.  Even if you think your idea is similar to someone else’s, your execution will be different.

Take Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes, and Too Much Tuscan Sun by Dario Castagno.  Although the title of Castagno’s book is a take-off on Mayes’, Castagno’s memoir is a highly entertaining read, told from a fresh perspective.  Castagno went on to write a successful sequel.  What if he had dismissed his title and his take on life under the Tuscan sun (whether too much or just enough) because it had already been done?

2.  Never discount the obvious

Think of how many hundreds, even thousands of ideas flit through your mind in a single day.   You dismiss most of them because they seem so obvious or unremarkable that they don’t strike you as ideas at all.  But the appearance of obviousness might actually mean that your idea is universal.  It’s what everyone is thinking but what no one has thought to write –the clue hidden in plain sight.

3.  Develop your ideas

Years ago a mentor gave me some advice.

“Talk to the writing,” he said.  “If it is real, it will talk back.”

At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant.  But I have since discovered that you can have a productive dialog with your writing.

You’ve heard the saying – “It’s O.K. to talk to yourself, as long as you don’t answer.”

But what’s the good of talking to yourself if you don’t answer back?   Writers have many voices within, and they all have something to say.

Give your ideas a chance to breathe.  Take time to develop them in your journal or manuscript.  Explore them, play with them.  Talk to them, and let them talk back.

4.  Ignore anyone (including yourself) who says your idea has already been done

This goes back to not making assumptions.  Even as I was writing this blog, I got an e-newsletter from a children’s bookstore announcing a book about a cat who runs for president.  As it happens, I also wrote a children’s book (as yet unpublished) about my adorable but totally lethargic cat, Mittens, running for president.  And right away, when I read the newsletter, I started to make the mistake I’m telling you here to avoid.  It’s too late!  I thought.  My idea has already been done.

Then I did a little investigating on-line.  I read the summary of the book advertised in the newsletter.  It was about a cat running for president in a community of other cats.  I compared it to my own manuscript.

(In the following scene, Annie has just told her family about her plans to interrupt Mittens’ twenty-two hours naps by compelling him to run for president.)

“He’s very cute, that’s a good quality,” said Annie’s mother, looking at Mittens thoughtfully.

“He’s not terribly smart but he would have good advisors,” added her father.

“He sees both sides of the issue,” said Annie’s brother, Jason.  “First he wants to go out, and then he wants to come in.”

“He can retract when he’s make a mistake,” added Annie’s mom.  “He’s always coughing up hairballs!”

“And the campaign buttons would be so cute!” said Annie.

Looking over my manuscript, I realized it was more of a political satire than a children’s book, and would attract a very different audience.  Don’t bury your ideas in the “it’s already been done” graveyard.

5. Write down your five absolutely dumbest ideas ­ – then take a second look.

Recently, my friend Debbie (Writing into the Sunset) read an essay in a popular magazine  describing the author’s experiences studying French in Montpellier.  Debbie, too, had studied French in Montpellier, and had brought back many entertaining stories of her adventures there.

“Why didn’t I think of writing about my experiences?” Debbie said to me.

Why didn’t she?  Why I didn’t I think of a million ideas I could have thought of?  Because I assumed a particular idea wasn’t funny or entertaining or poignant enough.  I thought no one would be interested or that it had already been done.  Or maybe (and this is hard to accept) I simply didn’t think of it at all.

We all think differently – that’s the beauty of our minds.  But I suspect that many of us dismiss our best ideas even before they rise to the surface of our consciousness.  In other words, we pre-dismiss them.

Slow down and take a deep look at all those ideas floating by – the obvious, the mundane, the bizarre and the brilliant.  Take time to talk to your ideas.

Then listen to what they have to say.

Diane Keaton in "Radio Days"

“…I recall so many personal experiences from when I grew up and listened to one [radio] show after another…

now it’s all gone, except for the memories.”–Woody Allen, Radio Days

When I visit schools as a children’s author, I tell the kids about how, back in 1970, the hunter’s cabin I lived in burned to the ground on Thanksgiving day. I was twenty-five at the time and in the process of divorcing my first husband. Just the night before, I had sat curled on the braided rug in front of the glowing woodstove thinking about how, in years to come, I would tell my grandchildren the story of the winter I spent alone in a rustic hunter’s cabin with no running water or electricity. It would be a story of survival, endurance, and triumph.  

I was out feeding the horses when the cabin caught fire that Thanksgiving morning. A passing hunter discovered the blaze and called the fire department. It was a good thing I wasn’t home. The fire was so hot that the cabin literally evaporated. The cinderblocks that supported it turned to dust; even the glass melted. While I was thankful to be alive, I was devastated by the loss of all my stories, journals, and poems – dreams turned to dust.

At this point in my school talk, having already illustrated the importance of imagination, I point to my head and say, “There was one thing I didn’t lose in the fire. Can you guess what it was?”

Once, when I asked this question, a little girl waved her hand wildly in the air.

“Your hair?” she said.

Pamela Jane at an author visit

I laughed. “Yes, I still had my hair,” I admitted. “But I also had my imagination – and my memories. With these things, which took up no space in my little Volkswagen, I moved across the country to San Francisco.”

I go on to tell the kids about how hard I worked on my writing after the move. In truth, it took many years to recover from the loss of my writing. For me, the cardboard box full of papers that went up in smoke was a history of who I was and where I had been. Most of all, it was the hope of what I might become.

Twenty-five years after the fire, I was happily married, and once again living in the country and writing. It was 1985, and I was waiting for my first children’s book, Noelle of the Nutcracker, to come out. One October day I walked down our long dirt driveway, past glowing maple trees to the mailbox where I pulled out a large brown envelope from my publisher. Standing there, I ripped it open, my heart pounding. I pulled out my first book – a living, palpable thing I could hold in my hands, the child of so much heartbreak, despair, and love.

Noelle of the Nutcracker Houghton Mifflin illus copyright 1985 by Jan Brett

When Christmastime came, I went into New York and peered into the glittering windows of the bookstores on Fifth Avenue. There was Noelle. I had often dreamed I would have a book of mine prominently displayed in store windows, but never thought it would actually happen.

For many years after the fire, I had a recurring dream. In my dream, the hunter who had discovered the fire went into the burning cabin and was overwhelmed by a feeling that something was asking to be saved.   The dream-hunter rescued my childhood china doll, Rosmyrelda. I had her again, whole and unharmed – her smooth milky face, her shiny auburn hair with her china waves, her calico dress and her soft cloth body.

“But didn’t you know that my writing was also asking to be saved?” I said to the hunter in my dream.

Eventually, I came to understand that the doll was my writing; it was my childhood the hunter had saved, and the memory of a beloved doll that would one day inspire my first published book for children.

When I lost my writing that long-ago Thanksgiving, I didn’t realize that the true treasures – my imagination and my memories – were within.

But I have to admit, I’m glad I have my hair, too.

When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little,without faith and without hope…suddenly the work will find itself.–“ Isak Dinesen

Jane Austen probably knew that her novels were works of genius even as she composed them. That may itself be a quality of genius. But how many of us have written something in state of mild euphoria, convinced that our writing was brilliant, only to find that it was deeply flawed, or readers didn’t respond the way we expected? Perhaps our mood betrayed us, or possibly we only thought we had conveyed the fire, depth, and intensity we felt at the time.

The realization that a positive and confident mood doesn’t necessarily reflect the quality of one’s work can be daunting, but more often we under-estimate our writing because of a discouraged or self-critical state of mind.

This came home to me recently, after I wrote a children’s book about a second-grade girl who is writing her memoir. I got the idea largely from my own childhood. I used to imagine myself as the central character in a great novel I was writing in my head. It was a serial story and I must have been turning out at least thousand pages of mental manuscript a month. In my imaginary novel, the small dramas of day-to-day life were not obscure, unrecorded episodes in the life of an anonymous little girl, but events of universal interest and significance. I pictured people all over the world waiting breathlessly for the next installment. Talk about positive visualizations!

I was in a dark mood when I started working on the children’s book about the little girl writing her memoir.  I’m not normally depressed, and I can’t even remember now what was getting me down. But the truth was, I was feeling hopeless. Writing a light, funny book began as a way of amusing and distracting myself.

I wrote the first chapter, read it over and thought, wow, this is the biggest piece of #$@% I’ve ever written. But what the heck, I figured, I may as well write another chapter. And so it went, chapter by tortuous chapter. I recited no positive affirmations, visualized no great success. I didn’t do anything. Just wrote another lousy chapter.

When I finished the story, I put the manuscript away for many months. Then one day, almost by accident, I found it and read it over. Hey, I thought, this is kind of cute. Maybe I can make something of it.

And so for several more months I worked on revising my manuscript. Then I submitted it to several publishers. Two editors expressed interest in publishing the book as the first in a series featuring my character, so I acquired an agent to help me sort things out. As it turned out, the plot needed work, but both my agent and the editor we ultimately submitted to were happy to help because they liked the character’s voice.

Now my manuscript is making its way through the convoluted acquisition process at the publisher. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But whatever does happen, this experience has taught me that mood is not a reliable judge of my writing or the final arbiter of my work. A story I thought had no virtue,not one redeeming quality, piqued the interest of editors, and helped me find an agent.

What I learned – perhaps belatedly – is true for many writers. While the unbelievably brilliant novel you wrote might need (just a little) tweaking, the disastrous first draft of your memoir could be a potential treasure.

In the meantime, the fate of my children’s book hinges on the wild swings and fluctuations of the publishing industry. If you ask me, the publishing industry has real mood problems. In comparison, writers are models of composure and stability.

How do moods affect your writing and your perception of what you write? Do your moods help your work, or do they get in the way? Are you able to see beyond moods, especially negative ones?

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Writing distractions – they’re fun, seductive, and definitely addictive. But there’s a flip side to these ten deliciously dangerous distractions that will making indulging in them guilt-free.

Almost.

1. Searching on the internet for people from your past.

You can spend hours hunting for a long-lost boyfriend, classmate, or cousin. Perhaps writing a vivid scene in your memoir made you long to contact this person from the past. But beware! Your search can shift imperceptibly from the friend who loved listening to your mother’s stories to the boy in the marching band who moved away in ninth grade and is not even remotely connected to your memoir. But hey, he was really cute!

2. Fanaticizing about becoming an extremely famous author with fans for your book signings lined up around the block.

Being famous isn’t easy! In fact, you’re so hounded by fans, photographers and reporters, that you become slightly reclusive. And now they want to make a movie of your memoir. Not only that, but you get to help decide who will play you!

You spend hours finding just the right actor.

3.  Visiting real estate websites and fantasizing about moving.

Maybe you’re wondering what it would be like to move back to your old neighborhood. What is your childhood house worth now anyway? How much money would you have made if you stayed there and sold it today? And why have housing prices gone up so much in the next house you lived in?

4. Fantasizing about adopting a homeless dog or cat

My writing would go so much more smoothly if my cat, Mittens, would keep me company instead of disappearing in the morning for a twenty-two hour nap. Maybe I should get a dog. What about that adorable puppy I saw last week on the SPCA website? I wonder if he’s still there? But then I’d have to get an electric fence. What do electric fences cost anyway? Better research this.

5. Day dreaming about your vacation next year

You just paid off last year’s vacation, but that leaves you free to think about next year. And it’s not unrelated to your memoir because you could take a road trip through the past. Definitely worth spending time on this one.

6.  Rating films on Netflix

This might seem far-fetched, but watch out. This distraction can appear in the form a harmless email that you spend a few minutes on before getting to work. The problem is, each time you rate a movie, Netflix will throw you five more to rate. If your teenager likes horror films and you like historical dramas, the Netflix team gets confused. Netflix doesn’t like being confused and will present you with even more films to rate. The next thing you know an hour has gone by.

7. Strolling through old neighborhoods on Google Earth

Imagine being able to explore from home the physical landscape of the past, three dimensionally, as if in a dream. Just launch Google Earth on your computer, type in an address, and then click on the little camera icons. You’ll find yourself walking through the neighborhood you grew up in, or past the schoolyard where you broke the jump-roping record in third grade. I tried this myself just now. A few clicks transported me to a familiar tree-shaded corner in a Midwestern suburb. Once again I was eleven, and heart-broken that my family was moving, leaving behind forever the labyrinth of sidewalks, basements and yards that held the secret language of childhood.

8. Thinking

This one is really dangerous. Thinking is bad for writers. You start thinking about if your memoir is working, or if it will get good reviews when it comes out. Stop thinking.  Just write.

9.  Researching old films, TV programs, or songs

Fifteen years ago, if I wanted to see an episode of “I Remember Mama,” a favorite TV program when I was four, I had to visit the Museum of Broadcasting in New York. But the web has made such research nearly effortless, and exemplifies the lovein my love-hate relationship with the Internet.

10. Blogging, commenting, and commenting on comments.

We all know how appealing writing online is, and we all have different feelings about it, from intense attraction to total repulsion and sometimes both in the same day, or even the same moment. Commenting on someone else’s article is more seductive than working on your own. But it’s writing, you tell yourself.

Turning Distractions into Attractions

Guess what? Every one of the ten distractions has a positive side. Connecting with friends from the past, envisioning success, thinking deeply about your memoir, and blogging are all rewarding activities whose efforts ripple outwards in unanticipated ways, connecting us to those we’ve lost touch with, our writing communities, and our work. (Well, except for rating Netflix films.) The trick with distractions is not to let them take you too far afield. In other words, don’t let the distractions distract you.

I have a confession to make. I indulged in every one of these delicious distractions when I was writing this piece (even the Netflix ratings.) But I had to do it for research. Really I did!

What are your most tempting writing distractions? Do they help or hinder you in your work, and how do you deal with them? Let me know your thoughts in the Comments section below. I promise, this isn’t a distraction. It will help you focus on what works or doesn’t work for you on any given day. And by sharing, we can help each other reach the goal of a finished memoir.

Pamela Jane has published 26 children’s books with Houghton Mifflin, Atheneum, Simon & Schuster, Penguin-Putnam, HarperCollins and others. Her new picture book for children ages 3-7 is Little Goblins Ten (Harper, illustrated by New York Times bestselling illustrator, Jane Manning) is a spooky twist on the classic country rhyme, “Over in the Meadow.” Little Goblins Ten was recently recently received a starred review from Kirkus, and was reviewed in The New York Times. 

Note:  The above post first appeared in womensmemoirs.com on September 4, 2011.

We are so often admonished to "stay in the moment," to "be in the here and now" that it's become a cultural cliché. “Don’t look back,” we are urged, slightly frantically. “Forget about the past,” and even, “get over it!”

But for memoir writers returning to the past is staying in the moment, as we breathe brilliant color into shadowy scenes of yesterday.

Historian and memoirist, A.L. Rowse, wrote: “To hear about the old days and the old people, sitting by my father… opened a window into the realm of the mind away from the present which I never liked much. It needed to become the past before it had much savor for me.”

I’ve always felt guilty about feeling this way, but I’m glad Rowse said it, loud and clear, and unapologetically. I cannot appreciate the “here and now” in all its fullness and complexity until it begins to recede into the past. I need time to play with the moment, to see it up close and then faraway, from one angle and then another.

In her children’s book Arthur for the Very First Time, author Patricia MacLachlan writes about time and perspective when Arthur goes to the country to visit his great-aunt and great-uncle during a difficult summer at home:

“Uncle Wrisby handed the binoculars to Arthur.

“Look in the little end if you want to see things close up,” he said. “The other end makes everything far away.”

“Far away? Why would you want to see things far away?” asked Arthur.

“Sometimes you see just as well,” said his uncle. He looked at Arthur thoughtfully. “Sometimes better.”

Although, like A.L. Rowse, I appreciate the present more fully when it becomes the past, there have been rare instances when I recognized a timeless moment while it was unfolding. It happened once in 2005 when my family and I were living in Florence, Italy. Our daughter, Annelise, was eleven at the time. One April afternoon the two of us went on a hike in Fiesole, a hill town above Florence. On top of Monte Ceceri we met Anita, a German woman, and trekked with her to the neighboring town of Settignano. We walked up and down gentle hills, through orchards and olive groves, past fields and farms with red poppies blooming against ancient stone barns. I looked at Annelise running and laughing, seeming to skim weightlessly over the shining fields. As I watched her, I thought, I will never forget this moment. In that fleeting instant, I entered a new realm of time. I was watching my daughter run through the fields in the past, present, and future. Time stretched and touched all three dimensions simultaneously.

Maybe because I’m a memoir writer, I love time-travel movies, rich with possibilities for contemplating overlapping dimensions of time.

In Somewhere in Time Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) uses self-hypnosis to travel through time back to 1912 to find his lost love. He does find her, but he loses her again when a 1979 penny accidentally drops out of his old-fashioned suit pocket, shattering the illusion of living in the past, and hurtling him forward to the harsh reality of modern-day 1980.

In Peggy Sue Got Married, Peggy Sue, played by Kathleen Turner, goes back to her high school days with her adult sensibilities and perspective, and discovers the secret sorrows and ambitions of her estranged husband. Inevitably, the movie makes you wonder what you would do if you could return to an earlier era in your life? What would you say to your family and your friends? To your little sister, your first love, your ex-husband? Would you speak up, or would you simply watch and observe, keeping the delicious secret of time travel to yourself, while perhaps choosing another fork in the road? Most importantly, what would you say to yourself?

Big starring Tom Hanks reverses the Peggy Sue premise. In this film, Josh acquires an adult body while remaining a thirteen-year old inside. Ultimately, he makes the choice to return to his childhood and live the years he missed. In some sense all of us are children in adult bodies, longing to go back to savor or reexamine the years that went by too quickly and with too little consciousness of the irremediable passing of time.

All three films play with time and urge us, each in their own way, to go back to the past to unearth its secrets and bring back wisdom. And the wisdom is for now – it’s for the present.

For memoir writers returning to the past is the ultimate way to be in the moment – long ago, in the here and now.