Carving something out of existing material vs. painting on a blank canvas. Photo by Julien
There was a time when I would have never considered writing a memoir. This was back when I was an MFA student at Cornell who thought of fiction as the highest prose form, one that didn’t have to rely on the tawdry details of one’s life to be effective. But as I began to write personal essays around 2015, at a time when the general public had a lot to understand about trans issues (and still does, actually), I also grew to recognize that the two literary forms aren’t all that different, though they do require distinct habits of mind.
With fiction you’re staring at a blank narrative space, one that you as a writer have to decide to fill with your own imagination. You create your own parameters and can change them at any time. This is why I liken fiction to painting; you’re only limited by your own decisions about what the painting should look like on the canvas. It’s your decision whether to make it abstract or figurative, monochrome or saturated with color, and you can shift those decisions mid-stream.
Memoir isn’t all that different, in the sense that you’re also trying to shape the narrative into something beautiful and insightful, one that people would want to stay with for a long time. Except that instead of a blank canvas, you’re starting with the already formed material of your own life. There were a lot of woodworkers where I came from in the Philippines, so I often picture a block of wood when I think about what type of material I want to shape into the sculpture of my memoir. And just like any natural material, the wood already has pre-existing properties, places where it varies in texture and weight, knots that you have to work with and chisel around.
I grew to enjoy that process of working with a pre-existing material and shaping it into something worth looking at over and over again. It’s a different kind of challenge than making up a whole narrative, but it’s just as fascinating to me that there are clear, fixed elements of my life that I can’t conveniently change—my albinism, my transition, the fact that I grew up in a Philippine village and ended up at Harvard—and that the process of writing a memoir is one where I have to carve around those hard realities to find the soft edges around them that needed to remain so that I can communicate their meanings and resonances effectively.
I’m working on a novel now, and have been enjoying the freedom of not having to deal with those knots in the wood. Yet the further I get into this new book, the more I realize that it’s creating its own set of parameters for how I should write it, knots that themselves grow increasingly harder to untie without risking everything falling apart. Maybe fiction is even more similar to memoir than I thought, and that artmaking is, in the end, a matter of exercising our varied creative capacities; it’s just the balance of them that’s different across mediums and genres.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
I received multiple requests for last week’s workshop materials over the weekend so I’ve decided to email them out to the list earlier, which means there are weeks when I’ll be emailing twice instead of just once a week. I apologize to folks who expected me to email less frequently—I was expecting to email less frequently too! But I’m realizing that I have too much material to send in just one email per week so I thank you in advance for your understanding.
But what this also means is that I’ll have a bit more space to do things I’ve been envisioning, like talking about wonderful success stories I’ve been hearing from workshop attendees (email me if you have one!), recommending things I’ve been reading and watching, and also doing discussion threads where we can talk more as a group.
As this newsletter continues to grow, I’ve been realizing how important it is to support a virtual writing community and I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to do that, though also know I can’t do it alone. So if you’re interested in helping to make this group feel more like a community, reply to this email with ideas and also if you’re willing to volunteer time and energy to help make those ideas happen. My current thoughts include doing confab sessions over Zoom on weeks when we don’t have worksop, and possibly starting a Slack channel dedicated to this community.