What's the Primary Environment of Your Book--Physically, Emotionally, Intellectually, Spiritually? And Why Does It Matter?

A new author wrote me this week. She'd read my writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, and it helped her realize which book project she needed to focus on first: a self-help/memoir hybrid. But she was confused by my chapter on finding the primary environment of your story. How did this apply to her book?

Every book has an environment that it lives in. I think of it like a lab where the experiment lives in a beaker or container.

Everything happens within that container.

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Strictly Accurate Memoir? True-Life Novel? How Close to the Line Do You Ride?

Camilla was a writer in my New York classes many years ago. She completed a memoir about her family in Italy during World War II. I remember it as a rich and interesting tale, full of great descriptions and intriguing characters. I also remember the dilemma she faced when she began sending it out into the world.

She wrote me, "I have been struggling with pinning down the genre, as memoirs are rarely taken if the person isn't famous. Although calling it a novel seems untruthful. In truth it is a bit of a hybrid, with scenes and dialogue created around facts, and my part of the story is 99 percent factual. I spoke with a published author who was very lovely and suggested I call it historical fiction. Yet is it remote enough in time, being about World War II? 

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Memoir's Primary Argument--How to Make Sure Your Memoir Has Universal Meaning

Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, once said, "The most powerful strand in memoir is not expressing your originality.  It's tapping in to your universality."  

A.M. Homes said, "Memoir is about more than you."

My aunt, who is in her 100th year, wrote her memoires.  It was fun to read them, and I learned things about my father's family that I never knew.   This style of memoir follows the Anglo-French definition:  an "account of someone's life." A wonderful gift to pass on to those who know you and who want to hear your past.

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Rest Breaks for Creative Artists--How to Get Your Mojo Back

Perhaps you know these important signs of creative burn out:  an overactive inner critic, a blue feeling about one's work, a sense of deep depletion despite relative safety and well-being.

Of course, relative is the word these days.  But each of us has our baseline.  And if the summer is rolling around with all of these symptoms, you might be giving so much out in your life, you haven't replenish the part of you that brings the good things back.

I've been noticing this myself.  Whenever I'm teaching a lot, as I am now, and my private coaching schedule is full, I see my own burn out happening.  My book-in-progress doesn't work, never will.  I can't find time to write or even think about being creative.  

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Anger and Grief and Their Place in Writing (an Actual Technique I've Used)

During the height of the riots and fires, I sought ease in mind-candy movies.  One was Tootsie, from the eighties.  It kept me entertained, and although I moved on to another similar film very soon, one scene from Tootsie stayed in my mind, reminding me of a great writing technique I'd used during time of intensity and crisis.

Dustin Hoffman, who plays the lead, is teaching an acting class, trying to get one of his students to feel and act her rage.  She can't.  He provokes her, she gets mad, and the acting blooms.  

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Jennifer Egan and Susan Choi on Productivity (or Lack of) during a Pandemic

One of my writing students sent me a link to this wonderful podcast, perfect for our chaotic times--which have only gotten more so.  If you're concerned that you haven't made progress on your epic novel or other masterpiece, you're in good company.

Listen here.  If the link doesn't work, go to bookable.simplecast.com and search for the authors' names.  (And thanks to Gail for the link!)

Writing through Anxiety--Write On! Video Featuring Author Shelby Kenney-Lang

I love these videos from the writing school in Boston, Grub Street, featuring their instructors sharing techniques they're using to keep writing during these unprecedented times.  

Here's video from author Shelby Kenney-Lang, who describes a technique he used to write a new essay that was published in the Green Mountain Review.

Link here

Unexpected "Container" in an Award-Winning Novel: An Interview with Ginger Eager

Not just because she's a generous, insightful member of my monthly writer's group.  Not just because her book won the coveted AWP award for the first novel. I fell in love with Ginger Eager's The Nature of Remains for the strong female characters and the unique place she writes about.  

Not unusual for a Southern novelist to be enamored with place.  Ginger Eager comes from Georgia and she set her novel in the fictional Georgia town of Flyshoals, but the larger setting of the book is its geological history.  The soil in that part of Georgia is riddled with amethysts.  The Nature of Remainsis about the people who circle that geological wealth, both the criminals who dig and sell it, and the families affected by their passion.  

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Using the Enneagram's 9 Personality Types to Create Vivid Characters in Fiction and Memoir

No one likes to be categorized or typecast, but when it comes to creating vivid characters on the page, I find the personality system of the Enneagram a life saver.

Twenty-some years ago, when I first began studying this system, not many people knew about it.  It had no huge institutes or psychologists tooting it, as it does now.  It was Greek and new age, a little odd.  My introduction was through Eli Jaxon-Bear, whose book, From Fixation to Freedom, promoted an Eastern approach that appealed to me.  Later I discovered the more Western approach  used like Myers-Briggs typing and promoted by Don Riso and Russ Hudson in their Enneagram Institute.  

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Unexpected Blessings of Writing by Hand: What Other Writers Find in Their Handwriting That's Not on Their Computer

Do you know "BrainPickings," the online newsletter/digest put together by Maria Popova?  (If you don't, it's worth a look.)  Popova recently wrote about her favorite books from 2019 and one was by the poet Ross Gay, called The Book of Delights.  In this article, Popova discusses Ross Gay's enjoyment of writing by hand, something not usual to writers in this super-fast electronic era.  

Writing by hand is slow, thoughts can come faster than they can be scribed.  But I read about more and more writers who swear by the practice.  Either for early drafts, sketching out ideas, even revision.

A colleague in this club tells me her handwritten scenes always contain unexpected blessings--ideas she would never have encountered otherwise.

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