The Grasshopper on Writing, 2A

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This article originally appeared on Medium.com

Writing Down Your Life

Did I really do that? 

I’m not big on confessional writing. I seldom read it and when I do I wonder if I'm being used as a reader. Used as a form of therapy maybe. Or that maybe the writer is transferring something to others who may be susceptible to things that they have no defenses against.

But mainly, I just don’t find my inner life all that interesting. Or maybe it is and I prefer to keep it to myself. Memoirs seem to be something people tackle for their first book, which makes no sense to me, especially when a twenty-five year old is writing them.

I don’t know about you, but in retrospect I knew nothing about myself back then. In fact, everything I thought I knew was embarrassingly wrong. And, honestly it’s not that interesting. And I had a pretty interesting creative thing going playing music and living out a fantasy.

But when I look back on that I was just a guy in a band, a pretty good band. The rest of my life was a typical twenty-something mess. Not a glamorous mess, not a dramatic mess; a boring mess. Trying to make a living of sorts like everyone around me.

Why would I write about that? Why would anyone want to write about that? Yet I’m guessing there are a lot of manuscripts out there about growing up in your twenties.

Ugh.

There have been great memoirs that deal with early youthful experience. Hemingway’s Moveable Feast comes to mind, a truly beautiful book about his life in Paris as a young writer. But he wrote it near the end of his life. It was, in fact, his last completed text. But he was also Ernest Hemingway. Most of us are not.

But I do write from personal experience and observation, in my fiction. My first novel is told in the first person and there is a lot of me in that character, but he is not me. He is a character in a story, a very made-up story. To be honest, I wrote a story I’d like to have experienced, although it went to darker places than I expected. But a good story isn’t all sunlight and roses.

And my character was in his forties and feeling it. Bored, not happy with his life, but also not unhappy. I was in my late fifties when I wrote it. First novels are a heavy lift for a writer and it took me a while to find that voice. So, using a voice not unlike my own was a helpful device for kicking the thing further down the road.

But I’ve never been tempted to write a memoir in that voice. The reality is that I wrote a more interesting story in my novel, a lot more interesting because it became exotic, entered a different reality, and we met some fascinating characters, unpredictable characters.

These things happen in real life, but it takes a genius memoirist to tie these stories together into a unique narrative. It’s a rare talent and point of view. 

My suggestion if you are young and considering a memoir is this: write a novel. Pull elements from what you have experienced, but leave it open to go to places you have not. And don’t ever think about whether anyone will read it. You can worry about that later. At this stage, writing a story is an evolution of your experience, not the making of a product.

It is an exploration of your potential, not what you think you know.

I can honestly say that writing the two novels I’ve completed has been a transformative experience. Oddly enough I have not attempted to get them published, though I know they have that potential. I don’t keep a journal. You see most of my personal writing here or on Medium.com.

I think having a platform that is not judgemental is incredibly useful for a writer. Years ago, when I played and wrote music, we felt it was meaningless if we did not perform. We started playing out very early in our evolution as musicians. In hindsight, this was the most important aspect of that creative process.

Memoirs are about memory. But they are an art form that accepts that memory changes over time. My memory of playing music is very different than it would have been when I was doing it. I think it would be more interesting to me given the distance I have from it.

I guess the point of this ramble is that when you are young and collecting experiences, immerse yourself in them. Don’t reflect too much. You’ll have time for that later. But don’t be surprised if they no longer have the same meaning. It took Hemingway 35 years to realize how important those days in Paris were and how unique. A time you can’t have again.

Image copyright 2019, Martin Edic