How I Wrote a Memoir: Part I
In this blog series, I will explore my writing process from my first workshop to completed manuscript.
In 2007, seven years after completing seven years of college, I decided to take writing seriously. At thirty-four, I was a Southern California woman living in a small Georgia suburb north of Atlanta, in love with a man who’d soon give me a giant ring I would return before my thirty-fifth birthday to move home. When I believed I was in Georgia forever, feeling homesick, not writing, and longing for a creative community, I signed up for an online UCI Extension Creative Writing course. Connecting to my alma mater from afar, I didn’t know what I wanted to write. I only knew I wasn’t nurturing a gaping hole inside that writing fills. At the time, calling myself a “writer” felt like a lie, so I didn’t. I was a writer who didn’t write, and I was about to begin the arduous, wonderful process of finding my voice, determining my trajectory, and completing a memoir manuscript, at least half of which consists of life experience I hadn’t lived yet. Writing a book was a vague, lifelong dream that didn’t seem feasible for an edit-as-you-go perfectionist with no deadlines and a comfortable, unchallenging full-time editing job. It was easy—yet joyless—not to write.
Everything Saved
My first post-university creative writing class was one of many online and in-person workshops, lectures, and mentorships—and I have saved nearly every assignment, note of feedback, related email, discarded essay, published essay, handout, and unusable paragraph I kid myself into thinking I will still use someday. I have one hundred pages of an abandoned novel, several versions of my nonfiction book proposal, and an entire essay collection I scrapped to rewrite the still-living 66,000-word “completed” memoir manuscript I’m now submitting. No writing time has been wasted, nor will it ever be.
Perpetual Persistence
Fast approaching fifty, while I have yet to publish my first manuscript, I will not give up, and with a well-respected publisher recently saying my memoir is “compulsively readable,” I have another nudge to keep going, however long it takes, as frustrating and painful as the interminable wait is. I may have to write another book first. I may have to publish that one essay or op-ed that gets the right attention. I may have to go viral on the now-unraveling Twitter or Gen-Z-inundated-TikTok, a platform to which I fear I am too old and uncool to contribute. I may have to revise my proposal with updated comp titles for the umpteenth time—for the love of fuck—but if that’s what it takes, that’s what I’ll do.
After fifteen years, countless hours, nine workshops, seven lecture-based classes, five conferences, a magical book coach, an insightful “book doula,” a lifelong mentor, two consistent beta readers, thirteen public readings, a defunct seven-year blog, a current blog, more than twenty published essays, ninety-six agent queries, twenty-seven independent press submissions (three pending), monthslong excruciating breaks, and over two hundred literary rejections since I started sending out my work, I have a lot to say about how I wrote and revised a memoir. After watching one too many episodes of The Bachelorette, I hate the word “journey,” but that’s what it’s been, and that’s what I want to share, starting with that ten-week creative writing class in 2007.
Editing Advice for My Younger Self: A Blog Series
When I thought of the idea for this blog series and began locating and reading everything I’ve written since I was thirty-four, jotting notes about what I did right from the outset and where I went terribly wrong—my current self now the developmental and line editor for my younger self—I thought, “Oh crap, this is another book.” I also thought the examples and stories I plan to elucidate may be valuable. Plus, I see firsthand how far I’ve progressed. While I will always compare myself to better writers, of which there are many, I am a much better writer than I was in 2007—when I never met a torturous simile I didn’t find “clever,” hadn’t mastered the art of cutting superfluous words on any level, and had little grasp of the story under the story. (What is this really about?) It’s both cringey and reassuring to read my old work—some of which is downright insensitive, but I’ll get to that later.
Sixteen Years of Writing
I never received an MFA, a possibility I still research online at least every two years until I consider money, but I probably have roughly the equivalent experience. (I was once told in jest I have an “honorary” MFA.) Looking at my notes from that first workshop, I realize, if given the opportunity, I could teach a college-level writing workshop now. So, in this space, I plan to talk my way through the last fifteen (almost sixteen!) years on the page, with no idea how many posts it will turn into or how long it will take. Since I never want to stop learning, and I apparently haven’t fully abandoned the part of me that taught high school English for two years in my twenties, I hope this series turns into something useful—or at least will be somewhat amusing, even if I’m the only one reading it. In any case, next time I will reveal what I learned about writing when I was starving for creative kinship in Georgia when I had much less gray hair; my jeans were five sizes smaller; and I was planning a second wedding that never happened. Part two: coming soon.