Still, our household had been the site of some flaming jackpots. Asked once how a bullet hole landed in a kitchen tile, Mother said, succinctly, "He moved." And that wasn't the only firearm incident. My sister once quipped to Mother as the tile guy fingered a bullet hole, "Isn’t that where you shot at Daddy?" and Mother came back, "No, that’s where I shot at Larry. Over there’s where I shot at your daddy."
(Which also tells you why memoir suited me. With characters this good, why make shit up?)

During my short college stint, every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me—later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish. 130

The talk of my barroom aficionado daddy ran rich with figurative language. If a woman had an ample backside, he might say, "She had a butt like two bulldogs fighting in a bag, which—believe it or not—was a positive attribute. 141

When there was a thunderstorm, Daddy might say, "It's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock," which, for all purposes, is a line of poetry. The crisp image jolts a little. It yanks you out of the quotidian. It operates just beyond the bounds of propriety, as poems should. Plus, the minute you laugh at it, you become loosely complicit in the speaker’s offensive speech. This binds you to the narrator. You’ve bought in. 141

I spent nine hard, exasperating, concentrated months on the first chapter of Liars’ Club alone, which was essentially time developing that voice—a watchmaker’s minuscule efforts, noodling with syntax and diction. Were I to add on the time I spent trying to recount that book’s events in poetry and a novel, I could argue that concocting that mode of speech actually occupied some thirteen years (seventeen, if you count the requisite years in therapy getting the nerve up). What was I doing during those nine months? Mostly I just shoved words around the page. I'd get up at four or five when my son was asleep, then work. I’d try telling something one way, then another. If a paragraph seemed half decent, I’d cut it out and tape it to the wall. 144

In terms of basic book shape, I’ve used the same approach in all three of mine: I start with a flash forward that shows what’s at stake emotionally for me over the course of a book, then tell the story in straightforward, linear time.
I wouldn’t suggest that shape for everybody, but I would say you have to start out setting emotional stakes—-why the enterprise is a passionate one for you, what’s at risk—early on. That’s why the flashback structure, which I borrowed from Conroy and Crews (among thousands of other storytellers), is a time-honored one. It’s sitting on the coffin, telling the tale of a death—or rebirth, in my case. 147

In memoir the heart is the brain. It’s the Geiger counter you run over memory's landscape looking for precious metals to light up. A psychological self-awareness and faith in the power of truth gives you courage to reveal whatever you unearth, whether you come out looking vain or conniving or hateful or not. Any memoirist’s false selves (plural) will take turns plastering themselves across his real mouth to silence the scarier fact of who he is. Writing as directly as possible out of that single "true" core and nascent ability will naturally unify pages. Otherwise, there will be inconsistencies that read as fake.
False choices based on who you wish you were will result in places where the voice goes awry or the details chosen ring false. 151

Many of the truths a memoirist starts out believing morph into something wholly other. Again: anybody maladroit at apology or changing her mind just isn’t bent for the fluid psychological state that makes truth discoverable.
You think you know the story so well. It’s a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I’ve ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it’s like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside. 152

Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it. In fact, usually it growls like a beast and stinks of something rotten. Age and practice help you to rout out vanities after you've ruined perfectly good paper setting them down, but you can't keep them from clotting up early drafts. 159

Can you guess what my fear is? What kept me generating diddly squat on this very text for months?
That I lack the credentials to write anything with authority. Reared in the Ringworm Belt, I am a dropout. The grad program I went to folded the day after I got my MFA. And yet | planned this book as a work of aesthetics and literary history and phenomenology and neurobiology and yahditah yahditah blah blah.
And this is the self-consciousness that haunts every book! You'd think I could spy the wrong road without first traveling halfway down it. You'd think I could—after decades of tricking myself over the same fear—head off the pretentious bustling that precedes my writing anything and always winds up in the trash.
And yet writing has never been linear for me. I always circle my own stories, avoiding the truth like a pooch staked to a 160 clothesline pole, spiraling closer and closer with each revision till—with each book—my false self finally lines up eye to eye with the true one.
I threw away over 1,200 finished pages of my last memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind. If I had any balls at all, I’d make a brooch out of it. 161 160-161

It’s tough to keep going when you hit a roadblock in your own work. Many beginners just need to keep their heads in the game and their hands moving across pages till they gain traction. Some people tout writing exercises, but they never yielded squat to me. I’d encourage you to find intellectual enterprises to keep you studying craft. Maybe try some of the tools I’ve used to keep my ass in the chair, learning from my betters. Some of these involve writing longhand, shoving a gel-tip across an expanse. It will slow you.down as typing can't.
1. Keep a commonplace book: a notebook where you copy beloved poems or hunks of prose out. Nothing will teach you a great writer’s choices better. Plus 171 you can carry your inspiration around with you in compact form.
2. Write reviews or criticism for an online blog or a magazine—it’ll discipline you to find evidence for your opinions and make you a crisper thinker.
3. Augment a daily journal with a reading journal. Compose a one-page review with quotes. Make yourself back up opinions. You can't just say, "Neruda is a surrealist"; you have to quote him watching laundry "from which slow dirty tears are falling." And you have to look up something about surrealism to
define it. oe |
4. Write out longhand on three-by-five-inch index cards quotes you come across—writer’s name on the left, source and page on the right. (Stanley Kunitz taught me this circa 1978. I now have thousands of these, from which I cobble up lectures.)
5. Memorize poems when youre stuck. Poets teach you more about economy—not wasting a reader's
time.
6. Write longhand letters to your complicated characters, or even to the dead. You'll learn more about voice by writing letters—how you arrange yourself different ways for each audience—than in a year of classes. 171 171-172

Dumb hope is what it hurts most to write, occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades, the blind alleys, the cliffs we stepped off. If you find yourself blocked for a period, maybe goad yourself in the direction of how you hoped at the time. Ask yourself if you aren’t strapping your current self across the past to hide the real story. 180

Those of us who grew up with seductive narcissists in the family know that they capture you not with their bullying but by somehow making you pity them in private. So you imagine youre the sole confidante of this individual’s inner misery. She needs your fealty, and you give it repeatedly despite brutal evidence that doing so puts you in danger. 182

190-191

So Herr’s tiber-trippy view actually came off as "truer" than the other war noises we'd heard: but his was that new truth— it came with quotes around it. I sometimes wonder if Dispatches doesn’t mark that place in history when subjective truth began its rise to supplant historical and religious certainties—a trend that helped the current craze for memoir along. Coincidence doesn’t imply causality, but still. However a warped memory might have marred Herr’s unique take on that bloody patch of history, we trusted him more than we did officialdom, perhaps because he wrote like he was on acid half the time. He lacked the steely piety of official government dispatches. And his passionate sense of his own moral culpability—even for just watching the war—affirmed our national feelings of shame about the conflict. 195

In fact, after a lifetime of hounding authors for advice, I’ve heard three truths from every mouth: (1) Writing is painful— it’s "fun" only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality. 211

Reading through history cultivates in a writer a standard of quality higher than the marketplace. You can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history. History's harder, but also more stable—and the books are better because they’ve been culled over time. Yes, the canon remains deeply flawed and has only begun to open up, but it’s invariably true that work that’s lasted for centuries has been sifted through over that time. Compare this to current work written to express a current trend or fashion—writing about 9/11, say. Writing to try to endure forever also lifts your eyes from the fickle vicisSitudes of the wickedly unfair (and often way-dumber-thanyou-are) marketplace, which is populated by loads of frauds and charlatans. 212
Before you can work consciously, though, you go through a phase of developing a critical self, which makes a writer wicked self-conscious. Some students in our three-year MFA program come in defending every word; by mid-term second year, the more determined ones find themselves in despair at their own pages. Through reading and thinking, they've raised their taste beyond their skill levels. So when they stare down at their pages, they can no longer superimpose what's in their heads onto the work. 213 212-213

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