Insecure Writers Want to Know: How has your creativity in life evolved since you began writing?

            How has creativity in my life evolved since I began writing? I expect more from myself with anything I write. And I feel others expect more creativity from me once they learn I’m a writer. Whether it’s a letter [remember those?] or a response to an e-mail, a blog post or even an answer to an essay question, I feel pressure to create something pithy, something memorable, something witty.

Creativity to me is like leaves in autumn. Some seasons are better than others. Whereas trees need successive days of sunshine and warm weather during their growing season for colors to be their most radiant in autumn, so too does my creativity require days of sunshine—or at least  calm—and the warmth of positive thoughts for my stories to become the best I can make them.

            Positive thoughts. Calm. It’s what every person needs—especially writers.  How can we become creative if we don’t believe in ourselves? How can we remain calm?

            Don’t get me wrong. Life’s not meant to be easy; at least mine isn’t. But neither should our characters’ lives be easy. Our own struggles help us to create stories with meaning.

            I remember learning in my Story Genius course that writers need to make things as bad as they can for their protagonists. Thanks, Lisa Cron. And then, she adds, make things even worse.

I have this problem about being mean to people. And our characters are people. At least they are to me. I feel sorry for anyone who’s having a bad time in life.

I know. Why am I a writer, then? It’s a good question. The answer is: I feel compelled to write. I can’t just not write. This makes life a bit more difficult for me. When my life is exploding all around me, I fight with myself that I must write. I need to accomplish something worthwhile in the writing realm; whether it’s a blog post, a eulogy, or a short story.

My battle lies clearly defined between trying to find time to write and trying to find time to maintain [or is it create?] a social media presence so that when I ever finally finish the next [hopefully better] draft of my memoir story about attending college as a mother of five children, I have the necessary connections and presence to submit it, either for critique or to publishers.

            But I need this time, in my writing life, to concentrate solely on my memoir. And I need to truly recall the events during those frustrating college years when things got harder and harder for me [the protagonist in the memoir] at college or where family life—or the guilt of not finding any “down time” to spend with the family—lodged deeply in my psyche, almost paralyzing me from moving forward with my college career.

            The best thing for authors to realize, when creating story or memoir, is when they need professional help for the book to come to fruition. I feel I’m at that stage. I’m seriously considering becoming a part of Author Accelerator where each writer has his or her own professionally trained editor offering concrete feedback to the manuscript. I need someone to help me find the “because of this, the next event happens” structure to the college memoir.

            Where or who do you look to for professional guidance in preparing your story? Please share any information here at Adventures in Writing.

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This post was written for the Insecure Writer’s SupportGroup. We post on the first Wednesday of every month.  To join us, or learn more about the group, click HERE.  

Critiques: A Necessary Part of a Writer’s Life

Testing the waters of critique.
It’s deep and luminous in there.

Why is it easier for writers to see what’s not working in other writer’s work but not their own?

            *Sigh*

            This is why all writing needs to go through critique, because more often than not, writers may not be able to unlock the problems in their own writing.  It’s probably because as writers, we are so married to what we wrote, we can’t see past it.  Having someone who does not know our story look at it with fresh eyes is extremely necessary for all writing.   

Take my “collection of anecdotes,” ahem…I mean my memoir.  I know the memoir is mostly a collection of anecdotes, but they’re funny anecdotes.  However, I also know that anecdotes alone do not make a memoir.  At this point, I’m just not exactly sure how to fix it.

            Organization and pacing is what’s needed according to Kate, my super Author Accelerator editor. 

            People come to memoir looking for personal connection with the author, she reminded me.  Readers are looking for my progress as a human being and not just a progression of college courses.  Just as in story, the protagonist needs to grow and change.  I knew this, too, and in my memoir I certainly grew and changed.  But it seems that I didn’t put in enough whys and whats and hows and a consistent overarching theme that affects the plot arc.  

I have so much work to do.  

           

            But I need to help Kate understand that no one was abused or tragically died in the making of this memoir journey.  Well, except for that shy and unsure mother who was afraid of her own intellect in the beginning of the memoir.  The mother who emerged at the outset of this college journey is a more confident woman. 

Or at least she was…until the critique of the memoir came back.

            Does there need to be more substance in the memoir?  For sure.  How do I do it?  Um…that’s what this next leg of the journey will be about.   

This is when, my dear followers, I dry my tears, blow my nose, and consider and decide and revise.  I haven’t even gone through the entire manuscript critique yet.  I’ve only read the summary of the critique.  I need to remember this will take time and lots of intestinal fortitude. 

You have all been very helpful with your insight.  Do you have any advice to share regarding these points?

The Narrative Voice in Writing

The narrator guides readers through 

the story journey just as a trail guide 

leads hikers through the forest. 

The narrative voice is just as important in memoir as it is in fiction, for memoir is a true story. 

Writers need to think who is telling the story. 

What point of view should they use? 

First person; I, me, through the speaker’s mindset only. 

Third person; he, she, Victoria, through his or her mindset only. 

Omniscient; think God here, the narrator knows all and can think and see the action through the minds of more than one character. 

This is just a quick stroke from the point of view narrator palette.  The main point is for the writer to focus in and realize whose eyes the writer is looking through to make the story exciting for the reader. 

A good way to find the narrator of a story is to determine who changes the most in the story.

Most times, memoir is a first person account of a particular time in the writer’s life.  Remember that memoir is only a slice of life story and not the entire life of the writer.  Sometimes the writer can act as an observer of another in a third person account of the time being remembered.  For my memoir about attending college as a mother of five, I am the narrator who is experiencing each of the lessons in the story as they unfold.

Like any important character in the story, the narrator must be well-developed for readers to stay connected.  He or she needs to be the guide in the story, taking the reader along the journey of events.  The reader needs to be immersed in the scenes, feeling what happens.    

To do this, the writer must provide specific details to flesh out the scenes and make the world real to readers, details that encompass the senses—not forgetting taste and touch.  The narrator’s primary job, according to John Gardner in The Art of Fiction, is to convince the reader that the events she recounts really happened. 

                                                                                                       

Beth Kephart says, in her book Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, the narrator needs to remain vulnerable in order to learn, along with the reader, on the journey of the story.  The narrator must discover something new, something surprising—even to her.  This shows the growth and development of the narrator character throughout the manuscript.  The narrator can find the order in the disorder of story life.

This is how good authors write.  We want the readers experiencing the drama right along with the narrator. 

            Is it easy to do?  Hardly!  If it were, writers would have a seamless time of it.

            By the way…my “seams” are in tatters after all the comments made in my synopsis. 

However, instead of revising and getting yet another copy of the same manuscript with the same flaws, I decided to send my 73,099-word, 237-page memoir about attending college as a mother of five for a developmental critique by professionals.  The Author Accelerator group says it will take about a month to get back the critique.  I’ll let you know how it turns out. 

In the meantime, do you have any thoughts on the narrative voice that you’d like to share?  They would be greatly appreciated.