I was reading a book on writing memoir earlier today and the author said she recommended starting out with a small section. Forget about everything leading up to the section. Assume your reader already knows the people, places and things they’ll need to know. Then dive right into the action, into the heart of the scene or story. If someone’s falling off a cliff, start where they fall and pretend like your reader already knows how they got there, etc..

So I tried her idea. There was a scene that I’ve known I’ve wanted to write about for a long time, but I would get all bogged down in leading up to it, introducing the people, setting the scene, explaining things. This time I started right into the action. I wrote three long-hand pages with no trouble at all. And it was powerful to write! It’s a very disturbing thing that happened when I was in Junior High. And I finally have the core of it out on paper! The rest of the details can be filled in later.

Wow. I really learned something today. Oh, and the author also said to take about twenty minutes prior to writing, basically sitting quietly and meditating on what it is you want to write. I felt very clear-headed about how I wanted to approach it after I sat with it for a while.

She also said that hitting an important scene like this can cause a lot of emotion. I felt tears, I felt angry, I felt empowered. And I still feel kind of shaky and breathless.

Diving into the heart and heat of it. Then fill in the details later. Wow. So simple. But perhaps proving to be so effective.

When I think of writing, I tend to think in terms of book-length projects. Or the other extreme of short little blog posts.

I just had an “ah ha!” moment while doing my morning journaling. What about working on something in between? Like short stories or essays?

For example, I have a memoir in mind but it’s such a big project, it overwhelms me and I don’t even start. But what if I took one element or one scene and wrote it out as a personal essay? A collection of those could become a book later, but even if they just stand alone, it might be a way to break through the writer’s block that seems to have hit with the memoir idea.

Maybe I’ll go back through past issues of The New Yorker and read their personal essays to get a better sense of what that looks like. I feel encouraged and maybe even a little inspired.

On the topic of memoir, I’m reading the classic memoir A Childhood: A Biography of a Place by Harry Crews. It was recommended to me by someone who claimed it’s the “greatest memoir ever written!” Well, I don’t know about that yet, but it’s definitely good so far. 🙂