Since the Fairest Writer community has been going for a few months now, I thought it would be fun to invite members of our little band to reflect on some of their experiences with the group. Here’s Jamie Beth Cohen on using email to open up your writing process. Also a reminder to join our Facebook Group if you want to stay in touch more regularly. -M.
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Memoir Writing: I just wanted someone to tell me how. And then someone did.
by Jamie Beth Cohen
When I decided to write a memoir about my dead dad -- the gambler, the embezzler, the addict, the identity thief and the liar who I love and miss -- I thought the story would write itself. But when I sat down to an empty screen, I realized it was going to take craft, a ton of it. Writing a memoir isn’t what I had imagined it would be -- an exercise in what would be on the page and what would be left unsaid -- it's about characters, a narrative arc, a point. And dear gawd, I didn’t have a point, or maybe I had too many.
A few days into my panic, a friend in my writing community who is a memoirist and writing coach reminded me that people can write more than one memoir. I didn’t need to sum up my life -- or even my relationship with my dad and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death -- in one book. Her advice to focus on a central question -- what I wanted my readers to walk away with -- set me in the right direction. I quickly developed an outline, but just as quickly, the actual writing fizzled.
That’s when I turned to craft books, which I generally hate. I found a lot of what I would call “cheerleading” in books by famous memoirists (and a few valuable exercises), but that wasn’t what I was looking for. I didn’t need anyone’s encouragement TO write a memoir, I needed someone to tell me HOW to write a memoir. I wanted a step-by-step guide that I could follow. I wanted assurance that I was on the right path. At least when I wrote novels, I had a sense of the characters and where I thought the plot might go. I also had the latitude to change facts, timelines, and characteristics of these “people” I had created if I needed, or just wanted to. Conversely, with a memoir about my dad, all the characters and events already existed in reality, but I didn’t know who or what might show up in the narrative. Strangely, for a set of events that actually happened to real people, I didn’t know how to begin it, or end it, or how to get from point A to Point B.
So I filled my “creative time” during my pandemic days with classes and workshops and readings, and convinced myself that this was the same as writing, or, at least valuable in its own right. For something I naively assumed would be easy, it was kicking my butt, zapping all my creative energy and what little creative time I could carve out from my family and my day job. It was almost as if my dead dad was taunting me: “You think I put you through all of that just so you could write about me after I was dead? Good luck!”
And then, during Meredith’s workshop on “Memoir Techniques for Fiction, Fiction Techniques for Memoir” she suggested that if the idea of writing a book was psyching you out, imagine writing it to a friend, like a letter, a tactic Jennifer Finney Boylan had used.
Something cracked open inside of me.
“Write a series of emails to dad,” I scrawled in my notebook.
It turned out this advice solved all the problems I was butting up against. I didn’t need to know where anything was going, I just needed to write -- the scenes or essays or moments -- as if I were writing them to my dad. Sure, he knew what he had done, but he didn’t know how I felt about what he had done. Sure, he had been dead nearly fifteen years and never had an email address in his life, but my dad, a classic narcissist, would love receiving emails about himself. There was a waiting audience for my missives -- albeit a dead one -- and all I had to do was write them.
They poured out of me. I’m closing in on 10,000 words. I have no idea if the end product will exist as a series of emails, but I don’t need to know that right now. What I do know is this: the technique Meredith suggested has helped me write words and has eliminated all of my excuses not to. I write emails all the time, so I know I’m capable of writing these. Sometimes, between my day job and life and my kids’ virtual school day, I only have twenty minutes to myself, but I know I can write an email in twenty minutes. These missives, even if they end up only being pre-writing, will help me figure out the point, the central theme, the throughlines, and the arc. And once I know that, I’ll be able to move these short, self-contained “emails,” around like puzzle pieces, to tell my truth.