Tag: writing challenges

The Bookee

The way I see it, if KN Literary Services is a purveyor and “booker” of book coaches, then I am a “bookee.” Yesterday I had the long-awaited ZOOM consult with KN Literary Services. It was productive. I met with Publishing Consultant Sarah Bossenbroek. I was heartened when our fifteen minutes expanded to half an hour without protest or polite dismissal.

Mutual respect is essential to a fruitful working relationship. My conversation with Sarah felt like a promising start in that regard. Sarah went over the challenges she sees in my writing project that we both feel I face when writing this memoir.

To start, the acknowledgment that there is much too much material. To address this, she advised me to think about this memoir as step one and park the remaining eras on the back burner once I’ve wrung all the juice out of one of them.

Sarah identified three distinct “eras” and stages in my life that she feels will be worth exploring: 1) Childhood 2) Young adulthood 3) Early days of parenting.

Each of those life chapters presented unique challenges and lessons for me. All were teaching experiences, eventually. Exceptionally well-disguised at first. What I took from Sarah’s summary was that creating an outline would be an effective place to start. I could then make lists of scenes, stories, and incidents from which I can pick and choose. I get to decide which scenes to develop and which to leave on the literary cutting room floor. I have to say that sounds like it would be helpful. I’d been leaning that way anyway.

I was also heartened to hear Sarah already has someone in mind with whom I might be a good match. Once I put a deposit down on our contract, Sarah will connect me with her and see if we are a good fit. If her first book coach pick doesn’t work out, Sarah assures me she will seek out another. And so on until I have an official book coach and partner

This book-writing project is getting real, folks, now that there is money and a contract involved. As my husband said to me early in our courtship, “You know a man is getting serious when he lays money on the table.”

I have moved out of the giddy excitement phase about starting off on this book-writing path. I am moving inexorably into the “real work” phase. It is odd how my mind processes words differently when it knows one day there may be in front of an external reader out there. I am having more internal discussions about what to include and what to exclude from the narrative. What moves the story along. What is extraneous and what is interesting enough to keep in.

Earlier I made a comparison between book writing and making a cake. The “birth-day” is today. I have to assemble the ingredients. I need to decide if I will proceed with KN Literary Services to commit and engage a book coach.

Where I did say earlier that engaging a book coach might be premature, I now believe the investment might be the difference between getting the book done or not.

Going forward, I will let you know what I decide. Full disclosure, I am leaning heavily into the “onward” camp. I’ve come this far.

Graphs and Goals

In writing memoir, it is useful to have a tool to help you plot out the course of your life. It doesn’t mean everything that happened in your life will go into your book. Heaven forfend. But it is like taking a sentimental refresher to remind you where you were, what happened, and how it affected you.

Memoir is not an autobiography. Frankly, most of us don’t rate a fully-researched, detailed book that combs through every age and stage of our lives. That is reserved for global movers and shakers like presidents and Nobel prize winners. Most of us wouldn’t want that type of scrutiny anyway. I sure know I wouldn’t. What I do know is that there were key incidents in my life that shaped me. That mantra I had in the 80s about women “having it all” ruled my life for years. Turns out it wasn’t fully true.

Only in retrospect can I see what a bill of goods we women were sold. As we are just living our lives and trying to make ends meet, it is hard to see the significance of the events happening around you at the time. The power of hindsight is 20/20, so we can look back and see more clearly how a particular thing happening led to what happened next. And so on and so on until you die.

So at the suggestion of author Joanne Fedler, I am setting out to create a graph of my life from birth to the present day. Fedler advises us to create a spreadsheet starting with the year of your birth, your age in each year, significant events that occurred in your life, and also what occurred in the world at large. I remember how significant Woodstock was to me in 1969, mostly as a war story reported by those who had actually attended. I was dazzled by their coolness. Looking back now, I see it was a significant cultural event for a whole generation and marked an era of widespread social change. The music of Woodstock was just the tip of the iceberg.

I find it fascinating to reminisce with old friends about how we were and what we lived through. We had all the perfunctory life milestones to go through at the same time as big things happened in the wider world: marriage, babies, career-building, loss of parents, then friends. The predictable trajectory was often marked by outliers such as random tragic deaths close to us, a random financial windfall or reversal, or stupefying betrayals that shook our belief systems to the core. No matter how charmed, few of us get through life completely unscathed.

So I suppress my intense hatred of MS Excel to capture the signposts I need to guide me on my memoir journey. Signposts and goalposts. That is what comes next. By when will this book actually be written, revised, and published? Those goalposts keep changing.

I started this blog with the goal to have my own book in my hands within a year. I might not need that much time. The truth is I have been writing this book all my life. I filled countless journals as I struggled to make sense of the family craziness going on around me. I sent so many emails to friends that I’m convinced that by printing them all out and doing a deep edit, the book’s salient plot points would emerge. I have signed up for a couple of online challenges with the expectation that I’ll have a working first draft in a few weeks, not months. We’ll see about that.

I already know the theme of the book. Surviving the unsurvivable. Gratitude for life in spite of it all. Looking at brokenness with compassion and empathy – for myself and for others. There is so much out there about the value of forgiveness and to me, it’s pretty easy-peasy. You forgive your enemies not for their sake but for your own. I don’t want the damaging people in my life to take up any valuable real estate in my head any longer. I won’t likely have coffee with them, but I have forgiven them.

Effectively it has been a series of choices to get better instead of bitter. The only bitters I enjoy are Angostura in a glass of tonic water and ice with a generous slice of lemon. That is a beverage I fully plan to enjoy at each milestone that this book-writing process occasions. Chin-chin.

NaNoWriMo – Redux

At first glance, this looks vaguely like an obscure Hawaiian greeting. In reality, it turns out to be much more straightforward but infinitely more challenging. NaNoWriMo is shorthand and an acronym for National Novel Writing Month. I would like to tell you that poking around the NaNoWriMo website was fully illuminating. It wasn’t.

I did learn there are one-month writing marathons held at least once a year wherein fledgling authors commit to writing 50,000 words in 30 days (anywhere from a full manuscript to at least a third of it). The next one starts April 1, 2023. You sign up to become part of the NaNoWriMo community. There is a place to announce the intention of your writing project. There is even a tracker where you can faithfully record your progress and how many words you’ve written that day. Additionally, there are chat rooms and forums and FAQs, and all manner of other things you might need to help support you in this book writing challenge.

I was struck that NaNoWriMo even offers a six-week preparation course before you write a single word. What the actual rewards of winning this contest are are still not clear to me. Something about access to another part of their website with gifts and tips for successful writers who achieve the requisite 50,000-word count. I admit I am relatively new at this book-writing avocation. And if, by chance, any of you know more about this process and how it works, please share. I am keen to bear down on the manuscript and have been in fits and starts. I seriously considered signing up for NaNoWriMo knowing full well the power of deadlines.

However, out of all this seeking, the next great lesson learned on the book writing path is discernment. Someone I know in my 3X Weekly Writer’s Accountability Group signed up for NaNoWriMo in the past. They experienced burnout about halfway through the month. I have a feeling that happens a lot. Turns out, there is not just a little help out there on the internet to aid in the book-writing process. There is an absolute tsunami of options.

Many of those offerings are very useful and have already helped me clarify many of my start-up questions. For example, the Perfect Your Process Writing Summit last weekend created by Daniel David Wallace was excellent. I bought the USD$67 package so as to have future access to the presentations.

There is one throughline that I keep coming back to in this journey toward the holy grail of eventual publication. The bottom line: Shut Up and Write. That is italicized, of course, because, of course, there is a website for that: http://www.shutupwrite.com This resource connects you to a myriad of free, online meetup events near where you live. The only expectation and the only cost is your time and commitment to writing. That sure sounds like the best way to go. That is, once I have fully arm-wrestled the procrastination demons into submission.

The things I am learning about book writing.

https://nanowrimo.org

Just Great

The much-anticipated meeting with memoir mentor Nancy Reddy here at the Murphy Writing School in Florida took place yesterday. I had previously supplied Nancy with the requisite 1000-word memoir draft excerpts for her review to make the most of our brief time together.

We had an animated discussion about the genesis of those childhood “scenes” and what they said about how I got here (to adulthood) from there (that childhood). She then articulated a challenge I hadn’t fully grasped that I have. “You actually have too much material to draw from,” Nancy intoned. “You will need to decide and get clear on your focus and throughline and a theme for your book.”

“It could be fractious and conflicted mother-daughter relationships. It could be the limited availability of helping options in toxic mid-century WASP North America after World War Two. Whatever else, you should choose to focus on the transformational aspect of your story. How you developed skills that helped you survive what otherwise might have been unsurvivable.”

Great… just great.

I grant you, an unstable childhood riddled with physical violence, sexual molestations, alcoholism, sex addiction, neglect, prescription pill addiction, my mother’s serious suicide attempt when I was 11, and, eventually, a jagged divorce between my parents that was never really final is a lot of material to wade through. And a lot of material to choose from. Hell, it was a lot to live through!

Nancy advised me to make essential choices to get organized and clear about where to focus my story’s stories. The dutiful student that I am, I hied me to a stationery store and loaded up my cart with index cards (white and colored), highlighters (multi-colored), looseleaf paper, and a binder to hold it all together. Holding it all together has been another repetitive throughline in my story. I have embarked on the book organization path before but with less gravitas and focus. Now, this truth must out.

I expect the book to be a shout-out of encouragement to other “identified” black sheep family members. The hope is that other survivors will read and resonate with what I went through and how I managed to survive. They may be emboldened to tackle and break down intransigent and seemingly immutable patterns of intergenerational trauma in their own families as I have tried to do in mine. No mean feat I assure you.

But explore it I shall with all the heart and humor and love and discipline I can muster. I could just walk away, of course, and coast happily to my grave. No one would notice or care. Author, Joanne Fedler wryly argues, “So, you want to write? Steal time. Make time. Sneak time. Take time. No one gives it to you. Or just don’t write. The only person you will make miserable is you.”

I sigh in resignation and remind myself again that I chose this path. With cause.