Unravel Yourself
Exclusive Writing Lab on the heavy emotional mantle the memoir writers carries
Definitions on the terms process and processing, three ways to look into the reality of your emotional processing while draft your book, defining and understanding compassion, and accepting processing as a natural and necessary component of creation.
There is process and there is processing. For memoir writers, both play an integral role and feed off each other.
Process, from a writer’s point of view, has to do with how we get our work done. This is what other writers often talk about in interviews which is their method for generating, finishing, refining, and even publishing work.
I think about my book for a couple of months and while thinking, I will see the ending in a full scene. That’s when I start writing… backward to my beginning. ~ John Irving’s process.
I sit down and write forward, only going back one paragraph in the previous day’s writing, making a few edits, and then starting up again. ~ Jane Smiley’s process.
Collaging & sitting on a dock. ~ Sue Monk Kidd’s process.
Getting up before the kids. ~ Tony Morrison’s process.
There are as many processes as people, but the memoir writer…because she is processing while writing, faces a unique emotional challenge that other writers…fiction writers specifically…may not.
Gauntlet:
a: a double file of men facing each other and armed with clubs or other weapons with which to strike at an individual who is made to run between them
This processing issue was clarified for me while writing Flight School posts about getting Blackbird through the gauntlet of publication. And I mean the above definition, too, which is that I felt thoroughly battered.
The thing is that I forgot, or I told myself that I was “so over” those experiences.
Ha ha ha ha.
How simple the simple mind.
How quick to toss aside that which breaks our heart, confounds our soul, and batters the spirit.
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