Writers in the Storm

by Jenny Hansen

A little over ten years ago, I wrote a post that changed my trajectory as a writer. Writing this post literally pulled me back from that edge of giving up the thing I most love to do. It was January, 2011 and one simple resolution saved me. In these crazy pandemic times, I thought perhaps someone else could use the words of encouragement.

Some background on what was going on with me...

• I'd just lived through the kind of pregnancy where the chance of everyone dying is incredibly real and I had a mild case of post-partum depression.
• That baby I worked so hard for was about eight months old.
• I was really really ill with what I realized later was an insane allergy to gluten.

You'll read the rest in the post, but I was very much in danger of losing my writing. The details and the chaos of my life were pounding against my creativity, washing it away like waves on the sand, and I didn't have the mental or physical resources to turn the tide.

The Post...

Woody Allen said, “80% of success is showing up.”

My New Year’s resolution for 2011 is to show up for my writing. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? I thought so too until I spent 2010 showing up for everything else but my writing.

Now mind you, many of the things I showed up for were huge, life-changing events: a high-risk pregnancy, the birth of my first child, the loss of a treasured pet, the loss of my husband’s mother, our last living parent, moving from the home where I’ve lived for more than ten years. Plus there were the usual work, church, friend events that are important in keeping the day-to-day wheels of life running.

I continued to attend writing events where I could. Of course, I keep in close communication with my fellow members of Writers in the Storm, but I did not show up to my own works in progress on a regular basis. And it showed.

Laura Drake, our goal-oriented mover and shaker here at WITS, started making noises on New Year’s Eve for all of us to post our writing goals for the year (hers – in plural – were done). With the daily added tasks of a new baby, along with a husband and a job, her initial enthusiastic encouragement sounded like a loud, jarring squawk.  Writing goals for the YEAR? I could barely get to a writing goal for the week and my personal goals read something like “start exercising and get some sleep.”

Still, my Christmas present to myself was taking time each day to read at least two essays from Julia Cameron’s “The Sound of Paper” and I was immersing myself in the delight of her pages each morning for about 20 minutes while I ate breakfast. She discusses at length that “the role of an artist is to show up for the work and allow it to move through them.”

I sat weeping at my breakfast table on December 30th as I thought about this very simple answer to my writing angst – a derivation of the answer that I give to people starting out in a new career. "When you aren’t sure what to do, do something. Even if what you’re doing isn’t “THE” thing, you are out there showing up each day so you will be ready when the perfect thing comes along."

My Epiphany

I was crying because I hadn’t been following my own advice, especially when it came to writing.

I hadn’t understood that I just had to show up. I thought I had to build a writing temple, a schedule, a process, develop some sort of structure, all so the muse would have a set destination to show up to (and yes, I’m aware about how colossally dumb this sounds now that I’m writing it out loud for you).

My tears sprang from the joy and relief that I didn’t have to be somebody who had it together. My creative spirit could find me anyway. I just had to plop my overtired, cranky, insanely disorganized self down in front of whatever writing surface was handy, as often as possible.

That was it, my huge epiphany that year:

Show up to the page and the creative spirit will move through you if you stop trying to tell it how it needs to act, who it should be and what it should be saying. Park your inner control freak somewhere far from the page and just write. The rest will come.

My Resolution

With the above lesson in mind, I made a writing resolution that could fit into the life I had, rather than the life I wished for. (Of course, that dream life was filled with huge blocks of free time.)

My vow? Show up to the page for five hours a week.

As my daughter learned to crawl, walk, and run, I wrote. Sometimes it was a blog, sometimes it was a scene or a story. Whatever it was, I sent all my previously ordered notions about specific numbers of pages or chapters to the thrift shop for poor writerly habits and dead goals, along with all the other items I’d outgrown or stopped using. All those "shoulds" and negative self-talk ever did for me was stress me out during what was already a full-up busy, blissful, chaotic time.

Five hours a week -- or three, or even one when my baby girl was sick -- was a decadent gift to my creative self. Even when I had to break the time into twenty-minute chunks and set a kitchen timer, getting back to the page was an act of defiance and beauty and love. And for this new mom, it was as luxurious as a long, hot bubble bath.

Have you ever thought of chucking your writing over the proverbial cliff? What pulled you back from the edge? How did you get past it?

About Jenny

By day, Jenny provides corporate communications and LinkedIn advice for professional services firms. By night she writes humor, memoir, women’s fiction, and short stories. After 18 years as a corporate trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.

When she’s not at her personal blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Facebook at JennyHansenAuthor or at Writers In The Storm.

Top Image by David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay

by Ericka McIntyre

I’ve spent much of our Covid year learning about, editing, and writing my own memoir. Memoir is a form I think every writer should try to tackle at least once. Everyone has a story to tell. The exercise of writing a memoir can sharpen our memories and force us to write outside our comfort zones—always good practice for a writer at any level. If you want to craft a memoir that is truly a page-turner, you can and should use many of your fiction writing tricks.

First Things First: What a Memoir Is and Is Not

It is important to know what a memoir is and is not. A memoir is not your autobiography. A memoir is a slice of your life at a particular time, in a particular place. It is literally your memories put to paper. Some memoirs cover a year in a person’s life. Some memoirs cover several years. Think in terms of a season of your life, rather than a finite block of days on the calendar.

Many new memoirists hamstring themselves by feeling they need to tell their entire life stories, nose to tail, David Copperfield-style. You do not. A memoir focuses on a theme, on a particular red thread that has wound through your life thus far. It is not a full accounting of all your sins and wins!

A memoir is not a journal entry, even though it is your story. You must write it so that a reader can benefit from it. There must be a compelling reason to keep them turning the pages, such as a lesson they can learn or inspiration for them to find. Memoir can feel navel-gazey in the writing process, but it should never feel navel-gazey on the page. (Yes, I know this is daunting! But persevere.)

What holds a memoir together is a story—your story.

Remember as you write each page that you are telling that story, not making a police report. You can change names to protect people’s privacy. And since you are working from memory, the story will have your slant—don’t feel you have to get every single angle on it. If you ask your family about the picnic you had that one day in 1972, you will get a different story from each member about that day, told from their perspective. Somewhere in the middle lies the truth.

Discover what your truth is and use your memoir to tell it.

An Inciting Incident: You Need One

Telling us about the time you went to the market after work and ran into a friend you hadn’t seen since high school and you exchanged pleasantries with them is not  a gripping inciting incident. Telling us about the time you went to the market after work, ran into a friend you hadn’t seen since high school, and found out they needed a kidney is a start. Deciding to see if you were a match to help them because of that one time in school when they saved you from being assaulted by a teacher? That is a gripping inciting incident.

Don’t invent something that isn’t true, but when you sit down to comb through the sand of your life, you are searching for the pearl that you will hand to your readers. Think of the unusual things. If you don’t think there are any of those pearls, think again. Everyone has as story.

Once I sat in a hotel bar on a business trip and met seven different travelers, from seven different age groups, seven different places, seven different walks of life. Each and every one of them had a compelling story. You do, too. And if you write it well, people will want to read it.

Build Characters

Many new memoirists neglect to see that what they are crafting are characters (who just happen to be real people). You are the “main character” of your memoir.

This is tough for many writers. Do we ever really see ourselves completely objectively? Probably not. But we must do our best. Use the same techniques to craft interesting characters in your memoir that you do in your fiction writing. Make a list of who will appear on the stage of your memoir, and sketch them out, just as you would the players in your novel.

Some prompts:

• Did your fifth-grade teacher always smell of hard-boiled eggs?
• What type of sweaters did your mother wear?
• How did your first husband’s patterns of speech differ from those of the man you left him for? (Yes, we can be the villains in our memoirs.)
• What is your college roommate’s backstory?
• What seemed to make your stepfather abusive/wonderful/hilarious/boring?

Use significant details to build distinctive characters that your readers will cheer and jeer at in your pages. Each person will be painted as you saw them, of course, but make sure they’re unique individuals, and not just slices of your own id on parade.

Paint Scenes

Here’s where the old saw, “show, don’t tell” rears its exasperating head yet again. It applies to memoir just as much as it does to novels. Memoirists can take license to paint scenes for their readers, and they absolutely should. The day you meet the person who changed your life forever? I want to see, smell, hear, taste, and feel everything about it.

Don’t say, “I went to audition for a play and I met the director who later became my best friend.” Craft an entire scene, from the moment you got ready to go, to the way you got there, everyone who was there with you, to what immediately struck you about the director. Did you stumble through the audition or did it go off without a hitch? What was your first conversation with this person?

Show us all of it, with action, with sensory detail, and with your “characters’” speech. These scenes need to have the same kind of active pacing you’d place in your fiction. You can use foreshadowing in them, just as you would in your novel, too. And you can tell the truth while you’re doing all of this.

Craft Dialogue

A lot of first-time memoirists feel that since they’re telling a true story, they can’t use dialogue because they don’t recall everything that was said to a T. Not true! You’re writing your memories of events, to the best of your recollection, not testifying under oath in a court of law.

You remember how the people in your life spoke. You remember their verbal tics. You remember their accents. Stay true to those things and the events as you recall them, and use them to rebuild conversations that you and they had. Your mother may have said “but” instead of “however,” but you’re not going to be called to account for that. You won’t get billed five bucks for every adjective or preposition you don’t get exactly right, so loosen up!

It’s important to note too, that dialogue becomes easier to write the better you know and have crafted your “characters.” When you have drawn who a person is, how they sound, what motivates them, it is easy to imagine what they would have said. Take the layer from your memory and fill in the surface losses, adhering as closely to the truth as you can.

Summing Up

If this all sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it is. But writing a memoir can be some of the most rewarding work a writer can do. Even if you never publish that manuscript, you can use it as practice to hone your writing style, find your voice, and sharpen your skills. That is always worthwhile. You never know what may come tumbling forth from your mind when you try to remember your own life—I have been astonished at my story many times in the process—the themes that have revealed themselves, the synchronicities I never was aware of before. I have even gotten several novel and short essay ideas from the work of writing my memoir. Anything that gets a writer’s mind turning in new ways can be beneficial.

Have you written a memoir? Does the thought excite or terrify you? A little of both? Tell us in the comments.

About Ericka

Ericka McIntyre is a freelance writer and editor. She has over twenty years of experience working in media and publishing, for a wide array of employers and clients. She is also currently Editor-at-Large of Writer’s Digest, a 100-year-old brand serving the writing community. In her current work, she focuses on writing for a handful of regular clients, with a heavy emphasis on editing and book coaching for independent authors. She works on fiction and nonfiction, across multiple genres. She development edits, copyedits, and proofreads. Learn more about her and her work at www.erickamcintyre.com.

by Ellen Buikema

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.”

– Plato

Music, the art of sound through the use of rhythm, harmonies, and melodies, is food for the soul—divine, effective, mathematical – the science of sound. Its language is universal.

A tuneful writing exercise

Music has the ability to spark our imaginations. Here’s how to channel that muse into inspiration for your writing. Turn on a tune that you love and listen carefully.

• Where does the music take you?
• What memory does the music send you to?
• How does the music make you feel?
• Now use that song to envision a character or setting.
• Then take a few minutes and write what the song inspired in you.

Music to get us motivated

For those weeks full of Mondays when nothing is going right, turn on a get-moving playlist to drag yourself to your writing space.

I’m a fan of “Happy” by Pharrell Williams. This song always brings a smile to my face and makes me feel peppier. One writer and filmmaker recommends “In One Ear” by Cage the Elephant, a very high energy, edgy sound. Here are 52 motivational songs to get you pumped.

Score your novel

Many writers choose music based on the mood of the scene they’re developing. While listening to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” conjure writing scenes of slicing through the waves via tall ships or helicopters soaring through clouds on the way to battle. I’ve tried this but it doesn’t work for me. I always hear Elmer Fudd singing, “Kill the wabbit …” when I listen to this piece of the opera Die Walküre. I guess I watched too many Warner Brothers Cartoons growing up.

For romance, light classical music works well. “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, used in the movie City of Angels, is a fine example. Here are 24 lovely examples in a one hour set to help with the mood.

Soundtracks swell as they maneuver your protagonist through a crime scene. Check out this crime thriller background music.

Australian science fiction author A.C. Flory uses music that fits the mood of what she’s writing. Every once in a while she shares the music she’s found that fits the mood of the piece perfectly. Here’s a recent example.

Music can transport you just about anywhere. I can remember slow dancing (okay, it was that eighth grade hug-and-waddle) to “Knights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues. If I need to return to the emotions of that time all I have to do is hear the tune and it all comes flying back to me. Not that I really want to revisit adolescence and all that teen angst.  Ew. But if I need to make my way there, music is a fast ride back.

Songs from long ago or far away

If your setting is in a foreign land, music from that nation will help you get a feel for your characters and scenes. Let’s say that you are writing a scene that takes place in the American Southwest. An easy way to travel there is to listen to Native American music, deep and hauntingly calm.

If your setting is Spain, the Spanish guitar may lend inspiration. I chose Andrés Segovia for an example as I have seen him in concert and he was marvelous.

For scenes in the Australian outback listen to the drone of the didgeridoo. Lewis Burns, an ambassador of the Aboriginal Tradition, uses circular breathing for continuous sound. I can’t imagine how difficult this is to do.

Should we write while listening to music?

Neuroscientist will answer a resounding “No.” According to these scientists when we try to multitask, like write while listening to a song, or texting a friend and listening to a family member, our brain burns glucose at a faster rate and releases cortisol because our brain tries to give equal attention to all the incoming stimuli. They posit that writing while listening to music induces stress. That said, this does not seem to be the case.

Classical music played at a low volume may increase concentration. Low level ambient sound may improve creativity.

A friend grew up near an opera house in New York City. She did her homework while listening to the loud music emanating from the stage and orchestra pit. She prefers to write while listening to classical music set at a high volume. Experiences differ.

Music with or without lyrics

Instrumentals like jazz and classical can allow the world to slip away. Music with lyrics seems to be the problem child as songs with lyrics cause some writers distraction. There is always the possibility of the lyrics finding their way into dialogue.

An odd music related aside

According to one study published in 2012, people who ate at low-lit restaurants where soft music was played consumed 18% less food than those who ate in other restaurants. Not so good for the restaurant, but I wonder if writing in a low-lit writing cave while listening to soft sounds will cause less snacking.

Whatever you decide, the music you play while writing must inspire you and your book.

Do you listen to music while you write? Which comes first, the tune or the tale? How does music affect your work?  Do you use music local to the story to help you get in the mood for writing those scenes?

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About Ellen

Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written non-fiction for parents and a series of chapter books for children with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Works In Progress are, The Hobo Code, YA historical fiction and Crystal Memories, YA fantasy.

Find her at http://ellenbuikema.com or on Amazon.

Top Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay