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DIVING DEEPER: A Writing Workshop

Do you feel compelled to write,  but something is stopping you from getting on with it?

Do you feel you have a story to tell, or simply something 'to say' but don't know how to start, or how to continue?

Are you looking for a deeper connection to your self, or a sense of fulfilment?

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Here are Sandra's Notes Along the Way on the Diving Deeper process and how to support each other through our commenting (NOTE: commenting and constructive criticism guidelines live in this room! ).
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  Sandra : Inspirational Ambassador

Diving Deeper: Notes along the Way #4 - memoir vs fiction

Sandra said Jun 8, 2007, 12:00 PM:
 
Diving Deeper: Notes along the Way
#4
memoir vs fiction

“Each of us carries in our chest a song
 that is singing and crying at once”
F.X.Alarcon

If you have been reading my earlier notes you will know that I encourage you to write “what you know.” Even if you want to write fiction, the best way to learn about the craft of writing is to write your stories of your own life. You will learn about character, dialogue, scene, plot, and tension – without even trying to.

If you write ‘what comes up’, rather than according to a plan, more than likely you will have scenes and memories tumble into your mind. We usually push these aside, thinking they are boring, too risky, or that we have ‘done with’ them. No more therapy, we say. No more soul-searching, it’s time to be a ‘real’ writer and make something up - (or write something 'important' - I'll come to that in another Notes Along the Way!)

All too often a writer delves into the world of fiction too early. I’ve seen this in my writing groups again and again. I’ve done it myself. You can tell because the writing lacks something – something almost indefinable. Perhaps it doesn’t quite hold your attention, perhaps it is too easily forgotten. It is as if you’ve skimmed the froth off a cappuccino and there’s no coffee underneath. It’s good, it’s tasty and you could even have more, but you are not really satisfied.

Many of us have travelled a long path of self-discovery. We are tired. We want to find new pasture, we think are done with our ‘stories’. I believe if we listen to this voice, we do ourselves, our writing, and our readers a disservice. If you think you are ‘over’ your story, I suggest this is a signal that your story has more to say. And quite, frankly, it always has more to say.

If you are willing to use your own lives as your palette, the richer the writing, the richer your soul-speak, the and the you as a writer will discover your ‘authentic voice’. Think of it as a play-ground rather than somewhere to dig up, once again, our past.

“Anything becomes interesting if you look at it closely enough: realism is all the novelist needs, not fantasy or escape from the real world.”
~ Ian McEwan

I would say that the best fiction is thick with the personal experience of the writer. I will also say that the best memoir is that which does not attempt to tell ‘the truth’.

I’ve said before that I do not make much distinction between memoir and fiction. Of course there is one, but for the purposes of the Diving Deeper process I encourage you to put aside ideas of what you are going to write about. You will discover this as you go along. If you label what you write as ‘fiction’ right off the bat, you put a cork in the muse’s mouth. How do you know what she wants to say? Let her speak. All you have to do is listen.

If you do not feel that your life is your treasure chest, endless and overflowing, then its time to look again. Sit down, face a blank page and see what comes.

“How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love our your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”
~ Ray Bradbury

I've quoted May Sarton before. She said we are an “instrument for experiencing”. “Life – all of it – flows through this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art.” This instrument is not only your conscious life, but your unconscious life. In fact it is the unconscious that is your strongest writing ally: it is the sponge which soaks up the full multitude of flavours – the ones which your conscious self missed, ignored, or turned a blind eye to for fear of discomfort.

You don’t have to have a good memory. I have a terrible one. All you need is one image, one thought, one taste, that is yours. Start there, write it down. Open yourself and write what happens next.

Some part of you will guide you, if you let it. Do not try to ‘tell the truth’. Just wait, and let the story unfold. You don’t need to know, it will be known.

What is ‘the truth’? What is memory? What do you actually know?

I do not believe memory is truth. How often have you recounted a story of ‘what happened’, only to be told by someone who was there at the time that it did not happen that way?

“What we, or at any rate, I, refer to confidently as a memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of story telling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the story teller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”
~ William Maxwell

What we remember and write down as ‘our story’ may not be ‘what happened’ – but our memories hold another truth: the truth of our psyche, or what I sometimes call ‘emotional truth’. Writing is never about getting it 'right' according to what happened. It’s about discovering with new eyes and hearts something fresh and alive in the life you already think you know.

“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
~Marcel Proust

If you are writing down a memory and then come to a block and cannot remember a specific detail or what someone said, do not write: “I don’t remember” – make it up. This making it up *is* truth – it’s what we are doing all along. What we remember, what we make up, comes from somewhere: maybe from your intuition, maybe from your dreams and nightmares and thoughts; maybe it comes from an understanding of “what happened” which transcends the facts. Perhaps it comes from the collective unconscious or simply from your soul’s eyes.

Sharon Butala, in her keynote speech at the Narrative Matters Conference in 2004 said:

“..,there’s a way in which all non-fiction is fiction: the backward search through happenstance, trivia, the flotsam and jetsam of life to search out a pattern, themes, a meaning is by its nature an imposition of order onto what was chaotic. It’s an attempt to give a linearity to events, many psychic, which had no linearity, which, if anything were a spiral, or had more the hectic quality of a dream. What is true are thoughts, dreams, visions. What may or may not be true are the order and timing of events, the perception and linking of them. If it’s true on the one hand that everything is what it seems to be, and I constantly remind myself of this, on the other, there is a way in which it’s also true that nothing is. I begin to think like the Bushmen as Laurens van der Post reports them as believing, that in the beginning a dream was dreaming us, and like Clifton Fadiman who said that the older he gets the more his life seems to him to have been, rather than a series of actual events, one long, interesting dream. In writing what the world will call autobiography, I am torn between facts and history and the truth of the imagination, and it is to the latter, finally, in terms of my personal history, that I lean.”

And what about fiction? Amy Tan writes:

“I’ve heard people refer to the difference between non-fiction and fiction as “telling the truth” and “telling lies.” But for me fiction is never about lies; its purpose is to find personal truth. The process of writing itself is an attempt to find truth that expresses the human experience, which is always amorphous and changing. The form used is the story, also known as fiction, which only implies it is not a report on real people and actual past events. For me, the process of writing is more interesting and exhilarating than the finished work. The finished work leaves out the mistakes, the search for soul, the constant tests of what is honest, what is my essential self and not someone’s perception of me. The art of story telling contains emotions, ideas, ordinary and extraordinary situations, memory and notions about human nature. Imagination is my way of falling more deeply in to that risky unknown place where I can find the imagery that contains what is felt and still not wholly expressible. None of that is a lie.”


I believe Sharon Butala and Amy Tam are essentially expressing the same thing: speak your heart and what you write will be true.

Do not attempt to find out what this truth is before you write. Do not attempt to make choices about what should or should not be written – take the time to tell the whole story, and risk not knowing what that is or how it ends. If you slow down and savour all the details, something will  arise which is ‘more’ than just what happened. If you try to figure this out before you write, or even you are writing, you risk getting in the way of what wants to be written, and what you end up with on the page will be what you already know, and you will stop writing, because there is no point in a journey without discovery.

“When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.  The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out.  But something forces you anyway.”
 - James Baldwin

When you sit down to write, do not attempt to summarise or conclude.

“When stories are shortened to “bytes,” all the most profound symbolic language and themes – and thereby the deeper meanings and nourishments – are left out… a longer piece… invites the psyche to enter the story, to immerse in the undergirdings and nuances of another human being’s wild fate.” 
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

So, open the door to your life's treasure chest and go forth as if you are travelling into completely new territory, even if you know the names of every detail within that territory.  Let the dream dream you, and be willing to write until the story is done, no matter how long it takes. We are not here to win a race, we are here to write.


Writing Assignment:
Spend a few minutes writing down a simple list of some of the memories you have. Do not write the memories down, just a word or two, or perhaps very short phrases. Here are some of mine that spring to mind in this moment:

Cat's tongue
Fairy Liquid cake
Only one chocolate
The Holly
Big Wave
Lost my voice
Musical chairs
Road Monster
The Piano teacher

Choose one (on your own list). Write for 20 minutes, going straight into a specific scene. It might not be the one you thought of when you wrote the list, or it might not unfold the way you remembered it. Just let the words take you in, and keep writing. Do not look for an 'ending', write until your 20 minutes are done. You may continue, then or the following day, if it calls to you, but do not try to wrap something up. Post the first 20 minutes of work in my Optional Assignments board.

Put the list away, but add to it every so often. Keep it for inspiration.
  Tom : Mesocosmic Traveller

Re: Diving Deeper: Notes along the Way #4

Tom said Jun 9, 2007, 7:08 AM:
 

Ouch. Boy that was painful. Check me off on the crying side o' things this morning.

Do I really have to write about something that doesn't pique my curiosity to become a good writer? Reality has never been much of an interest of mine. I don't like to experience it, why would I want to read about it, nuch less write it? I'm a fantasy, sci-fi, and historical fiction guy. You can keep reality. Dreams are my game.

Same with my life. Not really interested. There's nothing there but a bunch of dreams. Unless I can write a story about a TV show I watched. If Note #4 is true, I'm totally screwed.

A totalizing discourse is the last thing I ever expected from you, Sandra. I always hoped that - unlike what it said in the many writing books I've read, in which the author generally thinks everyone needs to write like him (the process that is)  - writing is like everything else, there's innumerable ways to do it, and if the end product works, then it doesn't matter if you wrote it with the pen sticking out your butt.

I don't like reading short stories, so I never wrote any. They're too short, no satisfiction there. I had maybe three under my belt when I started writing my novel. I figured I could learn as I wrote and then go back and fix the crappy parts later. But if it's impossible to write well with revision as one's main tool, then I've just been spinning my wheels, wasting my time, and have to start a twenty-year project from scratch.

I guess I can do it, but it seems a tad onerous. Joseph Campbell said one should follow one's bliss. That would be following my hell. Is it really so terrible to have only one thing to say? When we dive deeper, it can't only go to one place can it? I know my place is weird, but isn't there room for it, maybe off in the corner?

I tried doing this exercise last night and couldn't finish it. Too boring. I'm going to take another whack at it this morning and will finish it come hell or high water. I can handle twenty minutes of torture, though flushing a life's work down the toi-toi may come a little harder. I just don't understand why writing things we hate - in this instance, my past - is a necessary component of diving deeper.

When I write details in an exercise like this one, the details are just as fictional as they are in my fiction, just sadder, so might it not be possible to use fiction as a diving suit, if God is in the details? I guess you think this might be a method of avoidance. But isn't it natural to avoid pain? I came here for joy not pain, with which I am well supplied already. Mary thinks we should try to keep from giving pain to one another. Wouldn't the same thing hold true about oneself?

I have more questions but can't think of them because I'm too sad.

Way,

Tom

PS. Just kidding about the sad thing. A passing cloud on a sunny day. No work today, Saturday and all, and when I'm not working I'm automatically 85% happier than when I am, regardless of outside circumstances.
 

Re: Diving Deeper: Notes along the Way #4

Gabriele [no longer around] said Jun 10, 2007, 3:49 AM:
 

dear Tom,

I'm touched reading about your concerns and thoughts that are triggered by Sandra's latest suggestions in her Notes Along the Way. you made me think once more about what we're doing here and how different we all are, yet, coming together here in our passion for writing and supporting each other in going new ways.

when Sandra says, the best way to learn how to write fiction is writing about what we know, that doesn't mean everybody has to go and write memory stories now, no matter what. I love that you are taking writing and learning more as seriously as you do, I feel very connected to you in that.

and I know you have gone and done it anyway, and I love that, too. I often have a spontaneous 'NO WAY' to suggestions made to me, and one ot the things I have learned to really appreciate is an easyness in me to either let myself try them out anyway, or stay with my no, may it be resistance or avoidance - whatever feels right at the moment.

to me it doesn't matter much whether not wanting to go somewhere is avoidance, lack of interest, or it's just not your thing - if you don't want to go there, you don't have to go there.

I have no worries that  you are never going to be a 'good writer' if you don't do your memoir practice properly. you ARE a good writer already. please keep your novel away from toilets and alike!

I totally agree with Sandra about writing memories - how writing about what you know is teaching us everything that makes a story really work. I mostly agree because that is how it works for me, and I have seen it happen a lot in the groups we have done. to most of us it comes naturally, sooner or later. the deeper we dive, the more likely we are to come across our ghosts from the past.

and you don't have to. I would do anything I can to support you trusting your own process. if writing memoir is not up for you, go and find something else that makes you excited and write with passion and joy. go on and tell me how that wonderful novel of yours continues, for example…! ;)

we are all so very different and, to make things even more complicated, at completely different points in our writing. this workshop has the almost impossible task to come up with inspiration and support for everybody around here. it's up to us to pick what we feel drawn to, what makes us either sweat or dance or bleed or laugh… it's always our choice. it's your path alone, and to me, if that counts for anything, you're doing great, memoir or not.

the one thing that always works wonder in Diving Deeper is, we don't push anything. there may be suggestions and 'rules' and ideas and intention and focus and whatnot else - but when it comes to writing, butt on seat, empty page in front, all that counts is what occurs. whatever.

with love and tremendous appreciation for you being you,
Gabriele
  Sandra : Inspirational Ambassador

Re: Diving Deeper: Notes along the Way #4

Sandra said Jun 10, 2007, 10:49 AM:
 

Tom - I'd love to hear more from you about all this. I can't quite read between the lines — and I wonder where you are today with it all. Your post felt like an 'in the moment' thing, and I'd like to know if I'm wrong.

All I can say right now is similar to what Gabriele said.

I suggest what I do not because I think it's “The Way”, but because it's worked for me, time and time again.

And it's worked for many others who I know. I'm not suggesting you *have* to write personal stuff. I am suggesting over and over again that you write 'what comes up'. This is the first precept I learned from Barbara Turner-Vesselago, and it has been the greatest gift any writing teacher has given me. This combined with the suggestion to go 'fearward', also from her, has brought me again and again to the 'bliss' of writing. The pure enjoyment of it, nothing to do with end product. It's also produced some good work, autobiographical and fiction.

When I steer away from these suggestions, and write what “I think” I want to write about, my boat begins to slow, get boring, stale, dry, and I start to question myself.

If we are willing to write whatever comes up, it is inevitable that scenes from our own lives will appear. They can't not, quite frankly. And if you decide off the bat not to write using these scenes as material, I'd say you are locking away one of your greatest tools - not only a writing craft tool, but a tool for your own expansion and opening.

I don't hold any attachment to definitions of 'reality'.

Are 'our lives' reality? Who knows. But if you have an image that arises from your past - and for now we will just pretend there is such a thing as 'the past' - and it has some resonance - and you say no to it, you are 'controlling traffic'. You are assuming *you* know what is good/fun/right to write about. Do you?

I love that you enjoy writing sci-fi/fantasy. As I've mentioned, I've just read Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing. The writing assignment suggestion in my Notes #4 is his. He is one of the master's of sci-fi/fantasy. He repeatedly talks about how life - all that you  experience  -  is what feeds the muse.  He begins with what he knows - characters/situations/feelings and lets the story run by itself. In his case it does not run towards memoir, but in another way it does. His stories tell a deep truth about his life, about who he is as a unique being.

“It is in the totality of experience reckoned with, filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in the world…

…what we all have in us..has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice. When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange - we're so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.”

I suspect some of us choose not to write about 'personal' stuff because we think it will simply be too painful.

It is my experience that it is never too painful, but we won't know this unless we take the risk. Because we are writing down 'what happened' - or a version of it, creative or otherwise, we are engaging an “adult”part of ourselves, a part that is clear & strong, a part that is simply there. If we are writing about painful memories, yes, old wounds may be opened, a child-self may be re-awakened, or 'grown up' self that has been hurt, but the fact that we are writing at the same time as we remember, keeps us grounded.

Yes, there may be tears and emotions, but if you keep writing, it is as if you are being held by this 'writer self', as if you are in a safe space to let the energy go through your body, and perhaps even wash through those wounds in a way that they never fester again.

What can I say? Please try it.  You don't have to write about the most awful thing that happened to you, you can start slow and easy. And if it doesn't arise, then you won't be writing about it. Even in the suggestion in my Notes # 4 - the suggestion is to let the words you wrote down in your list of memories trigger something - it may have nothing to do with the memory that those words originally referred to.

And  - I've had some of the most fun I've ever had writing down episodes of my life - very painful ones; rediscovering them with new eyes, appreciating what I went through, what others went through in a way I did not before writing them. I feel freer, and more loving of myself. And.. the icing on the cake is that these scenes have inspired and given my fiction depth and complexity.

I am not saying you have to re-write your book, dear Tom. Not at all. And, what is next for you as a writer? I don't know the answer to this. I would love you to be willing to be open for anything…

Love,
Sandra
  Tom : Mesocosmic Traveller

Re: Diving Deeper: Notes along the Way #4

Tom said Jun 10, 2007, 11:07 AM:
 

Thanks Sandra, I knew you would come through. One thing I know, whatever you did to get to be the way you are now is what I want to do too.

So I'll take the parts of your wisdom I am able to apply and let the others go with love, and the understanding that you like me even when I'm a dickhead.

Love,

Tom
  Josy : Poet, Dreamer, Threshold-Girl

Re: Diving Deeper: Notes along the Way #4

Josy said Jun 10, 2007, 4:00 PM:
 

just a side-note~I tend to believe that the world we live inside of us, in our minds and hearts, is just as real and beautiful as the flesh and bone one.  I also tend to agree with Sandra…..about memories and how they are really, mostly personal perception.(Please, feel free to correct me….if I missed the gist). So, Tom…..and anyone else who may be reading…..if you don't like your “real-world” past…..why not use your “fantasy” past ? After all….I think the point here is to learn to put yourself into your writing, and that world you have going on inside of you is a huge part of your “self”.


Of course….I could just be talking out of my derriere here….in which case, you may feel free to disregard this post! lol!
  Tom : Mesocosmic Traveller

Re: Diving Deeper: Notes along the Way #4

Tom said Jun 10, 2007, 5:22 PM:
 

Don't worry Josy, if any words come out of your derriere I'll be listening intently, with an awe akin to rapture.

These unfortunately were not that kind, just your usual sensical, modest, and wonderfully wise words expressed in a normal manner. 

Darn.

Thanks for your loving wisdom. I like your idea.

Tom
  Sandra : Inspirational Ambassador

Re: Diving Deeper: Notes along the Way #4

Sandra said Aug 16, 2007, 2:24 AM:
 

Josy, I missed your post when it arrived.. life has been so full on I don't know whether I'm coming or going sometimes. No, you didn't miss the gist at all.

My sense is that our pasts are neither real nor fantasy, we can try to make them one or the other…. but if we simply sit down and write - using whatever memories, images, sensations etc that arise while we write, then.. well then… we are writing what 'is'. If we avoid anything that arises, be it a personal situation or feeling, or a dream image, or a new idea that feels too terrifying to even begin, if we avoid writing 'what comes up', then something will flatten out in ourselves and our art. It may not happen at once, but if we keep avoiding, it is as if we are saying 'no' to our selves, no to being who we are, and the 'still small voice' inside starts to give up.

Sending love to all,

Sandra
  jenni : hello

Re: Diving Deeper: Notes along the Way #4

jenni said Aug 15, 2007, 4:56 PM:
 

I have read Notes before. The first time just briefly- skimmed it. the second time i read it because i needed to. The second time it spoke to me so deeply. I wrote to Sandra to thank her and want to do so again as a post. I can’t even find the words to describe all of what she touches. Let me see. what struck me. I should have taken some notes, but i couldn’t find a pen. oh there is one. too late. the fact that we can write of what we know. I can’t conceive of writing fiction, my own experience is daunting enough, but to know that i can start with that is a relief to me. somewhere to start. the fact that the process itself is the point, not the end product. It is almost like a meditation in that respect to me. All the various quotes are so wonderful and helpful. Letting the unconscious take over. Letting in just happen. Not to try too hard. Well, I had to read it a third time and will surely read it again, Sandra. Thank you so much. Jenni oh and one more thing, to just say it, even if it shocks you. not to have any constraints- what Ray Bradbury said. Great quotes!!!!!!!
  Sandra : Inspirational Ambassador

Re: Diving Deeper: Notes along the Way #4

Sandra said Aug 16, 2007, 2:30 AM:
 

Thanks for this Jenni!

The Notes are pretty dense - even I have to read them a few times to get what I'm (is it me?) saying.

From what you write it really feels like you have 'gotten' it - which is just amazing as it's not easy to get, this thing of letting go of ideas of what we should write or how we should write, and just let ourselves write - not to mention, as I say over and over again, to allow our own lives and experiences to be the seeds for our art.

Love,
Sandra

p.s. Yes, and write it even if it shocks you (or your mother.. or… ), in fact write it especially if it shocks… you may not show this to others, but if you allow yourself to write 'anything' then you are saying to yourself I'm open to everything - I'm available to be a witness to whatever wants to come up. This can be a life-changing choice, actually.
  michaelsits : in spite of myself

Re: Diving Deeper: Notes along the Way #4 - memoir vs fiction

michaelsits said Jun 4, 2008, 9:55 AM:
 

Thanks for directing me to this Sandra.  This is helpful.  The Amy Tam quote i really  connected with.

It reminded me of an activity we used to do at a halfway house for drunks and druggies i used to be a case manager at. Whenever a resident would be caught up in “telling the truth” from their perspective when everybody else could clearly see something else took place,  I would ask them if 77,000 fans at a football game would all describe the turning back being tackled the same way?  Besides, our memory lies.  I could write more on that but just stating it lies covers it.

A good reminder also if the fact that my version of my story changes through age, maturity, loss of memory and growth.  there is little from childhood or early adulthood that i tell the same way i did even five years ago.

I can see how this allows fro the writer to fee themselves from the constraints of “perfect accuracy” in recounting experiences AND gives permission to let it be what it is fro that moment and that period of pen and paper.  It also would allow the stream to continue without needing to change brain rhythm and consciousness by returning to “factual” thinking.  It keeps the energy flowing and present.  i understand this from other creative practices.
So, now that i get it, we'll see how doing it goes…
Peace and love, michael