7 Things I Learned from Writing a Memoir
Writing one is like living life 2.0.
1) I’ve learned how hard it is to write good. (I know…‘well’.) Writing is hard. It takes lots of practice. I wrote 750,000 words to come up with 65,000 publishable words for my memoir. I took classes, reached out to classmates with good insight, pestered friends, then lost some friends, found critique partners, paid editors, and wrote and wrote and wrote.
When you read a quality author, like Hemingway, it appears effortless, even easy—like watching Roger Federer ballet around the court. But when you try to do it yourself, humility is thrust upon you; it beats you down; it keeps you pinned to the mat and holds you down until you cry ‘uncle’.
2) Many people like strong coffee. My book’s a strong cup of coffee and is not for everyone. I get that. But a lot of people dig openness and vulnerability and desperation. They are drawn into a story of someone who had high aspirations and fell very short. Not just because they’re voyeuristic—but because it makes them feel a little better to see how one man found his balance in trauma and found a creative way to connect with a lost son. They want to see how a marriage survived and, perhaps most of all, how to not dissolve into bitterness with God.
3) I’ve learned that I’m tightly wound. I am. I’m in my head an awful lot. I doubt myself. I think about things and rethink them and then think through them again. I’ve taken the Socrates quote and flipped it. He said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I say, “The overexamined life will make you crazy.”
4) A lot of people are like me—tightly wound. I think we’re all a little out there, a little overly critical, a little unsure of how weird we are. We wonder, how do I really measure up to other people’s mental health? And that’s why writing and reading is so good for us—we find commonality, we gain perspective, we find out that our weirdness isn’t so weird.
5) I’ve learned what I did wrong as a dad. I know, you’d think I would have known what I did wrong before I wrote a memoir about letters to a son in prison. But no, I didn’t. It was all cloudy to me, the past was, like a swirl of black dust that I looked into and couldn’t quite make out memories and see what happened, when things turned, who did what, and when, and why. It wasn’t until I started writing scenes and sharing them with my sons, that the memories came back. I remembered how I handled a big talk my son and I had at In-N-Out. I remembered how I lit the rebellion fuse when my son asked to go the high school Winter Formal. I remembered when my wife lost confidence and started to lean into her mama bear.
And it was through the remembering and the processing and the discussing that I crystallized what I had done wrong. (Which, in a nutshell, was that I didn’t listen to my gut; I didn’t heed the voice inside of me that knew how to handle my particular kids in these particular situations.)
6) I’m pretty scrappy when it comes to relationship with God. My approach isn’t always elegant or along the party line, but I find my way with him. I’ve learned that I need music, and time outdoors. I need CS Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time) and other thinkers. I also need silence so I can hear the Spirit of God moving within me.
7) And finally, while I write for everyone, it’s always one person in my head. It’s the person in my mind as my fingers tap the keyboard; she hovers over me; she’s always there, always near, anxious to read what I write next.
My wife.
It’s weird, but I want to make her cry; I want to make her laugh; I want to make her draw five stars next to a sentence, or a smiley face; I want to make her think about life and family and God.
I’m so needy that even when I finished writing this paragraph, I wanted to print it out, run it over to her, and wait for a little rub behind my ear. I’ve become like Ralphie in A Christmas Story, goofily standing in front of his 5th grade teacher, waiting for her to acknowledge his Hemingwayness.
But it’s this desire…to touch her and touch others, that keeps me clicking away. It’s why I wrote a memoir. It’s why I bore my soul. I wanted others to cry and laugh and lean more into life and lean more into God like I had. And based on the responses so far, more than a few people have done that.
I’ve learned that writing a memoir may be one of the most special things I’ve done in 64 years.
Link to: “My 2 Cents on How to Write Your Own Memoir"