What is Life Writing?
Life writing is writing about your life. It covers a range of sub-genres from travel and sojourn writing to memoir, autobiography and meditations on places or people. It can take the form of a personal essay, an anecdote or vignette. You can even use letters to tell your story.
Here is an example of a delightful meditation on a life moment. A couple of Scottish writers (James Boswell and Samuel Johnson) came up with the idea while lounging about a Scottish inn on a lazy Autumn afternoon, in 1773. It appears in Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and is far more than a simple record of an event such as ‘I went to…’. Notice how it evokes place, awe and wonder for the reader with a touch of humour.
MEDITATION ON A PUDDING Let us seriously reflect of what a pudding is composed. It is composed of flour that once waved in the golden grain, and drank the dews of the morning; of milk pressed from the swelling udder by the gentle hand of the beauteous milkmaid, whose beauty and innocence might have recommended a worse draught; who, while she stroked the udder, indulged no ambitious thoughts of wandering in palaces, formed no plans for the destruction of her fellow-creatures; milk, which is drawn from the cow, that useful animal, that eats the grass of the field, and supplies us with that which made the greatest part of the food of mankind in the age which the poets have agreed to call golden. It is made with an egg, that miracle of nature, which the theoretical Burnet has compared to creation. An egg contains water within its beautiful smooth surface; and an unformed mass, by the incubation of the parent, becomes a regular animal, furnished with bones and sinews, and covered with feathers. – Let us consider; can there be more wanting to complete the Meditation on a Pudding? If more is wanting, more may be found. It contains salt, which keeps the sea from putrefaction: salt, which is made the image of intellectual excellence, contributes to the formation of a pudding.
When you write about your life, prepare to strip bare.
Why is Life Writing Creative?
In practice, life writing explores ways in which we construct and contest identity. It reflects the way our subjectivity becomes dislodged and reconstituted in the course of a lifetime. We construct our idea of self through stories, believing them to be real. Our identity, then, is a type of fiction. This means that we can approach writing about our lives much as we do a novel. Indeed, if you want readers, you will have to.
Life writing and the novel. Are they different?
Milan Kundera tells us that a novel —
…examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities…But again, to exist means: ‘being-in-the-world’. Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities. The Art of the Novel, London, Faber and Faber (1986:42)
As for a novel also, the art of life writing is about making a narrative, but it goes further. Etymologically, the term ‘narrative’ connotes ‘knowing’, so the process of writing about your life can mean ‘coming to know yourself’.
In psychological terms —
…narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self — the self of autobiographical discourse does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative. (Making Selves 100)
In other words, there is no such thing as a stable, enduring or fixed self. As Buddhist teachings might say, the ego is a merely collection of stories we tell about ourselves. Many are contradictory. None is absolutely real. Michael Taussig puts this nicely —
Now the strange thing about this silly if not desperate place between the real and the really made-up is that it appears to be where most of us spend most of our time as epistemically correct, socially created and occasionally creative beings. We dissimulate. We act and have to act as if mischief were not afoot in the kingdom of the real… (Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, Routledge 1993).
The Benefits of Life Writing
Creative life writing does two things.
- Emotionally, it takes you to places you may never have been aware of. Life writing is a craft as well as an art. While it can be used for therapeutic purposes, it is not therapy. Nevertheless, it uncovers new layers of meaning and deep personal insights that lead to understanding and forgiveness for yourself and others.
- Writing about your life provides an opportunity for you to open up to yourself; to examine your experienece on the page. At its best, it allows you to explore literary techniques to make your narrative sing; to attract, fascinate and perhaps even enlighten your readers.
Where to Start?
Life writing must start with the intention to be honest on the page. Without that commitment to emotional truth, your stories will be lifeless. To quote Virginia Wolf, ‘If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about anyone else.’
The process has four essential steps.
1. Identify a good story
To do this, you need to avoid chronology, specified topics and ‘remembered’ stories. The latter are the tales we love to tell and change to suit different occasions and audiences. Most of these are the stories sedimented as ‘me’. We use these constructs in daily life as part of our presentation of self. They are underpinned with the idea, ‘I am a person who…’. Therefore, they do not entertain our readers.
To avoide these pitfalls, we can stimulate our deep or original memory, and find aspects of your life you had forgotten, often in unexpected places, you need to work with exercises. As I will explore next month, the second step will the be to explore creative literary devices and techniques to enhance your story.
I’ve listed some readings below to help you on your life writing journey and here are two exercises to give you a taste of how this works.
Exercise One: The Senses
Imagine a moment when you were a child, hiding or holding back in some way. Take yourself back there with closed eyes. Meditate on it for a minute or two.
Where are you? What happens? Who is involved? What do you see, hear, touch, taste and smell?
Open your eyes and write as fast as you can for about 5-7 minutes.
Exercise Two: Turning Points
A turning point involves a moment of revelation, an instant when you change your mind. A student of mine described her most important turning point being the morning when her abusive husband brought burnt toast in bed. In that instant, she decided to leave him. You might think of a turning point as a sliding-door moment. You need to identify what happened to cause you to change from from one way of being to another.
Write for ten minutes.
Exercises like this may seem random, but themes will begin to emerge over time. You may even surprise yourself if you write for two minutes on how your like your eggs cooked, and why.. Writing little pieces like this helps you to find themes which will help when you start to put your biography or memoir together.
2. Tell the truth
The first draft of our first attempt at life writing is often a self-oriented ‘splat’ on the page. It contains all the raw, emotional truth of the original happening or moment, the golden nuggets of life writing.
However, If you write chronologically, your story will sound like a child’s recounting of an event: ‘and then, and then, and then’ which is tedious to read. Working with exercises to jolt your mind bypasses the emotional outpourings and captures the original moment and your original memory will bring back sensory data and emotional depth. In those details lies colour, richness and your unique voice.
3. Contextualise
No story exists in isolation. Life is always personal, political and historical. We therefore need to situate our stories in time. This includes relations to others in our lives and, by research, our historical and political contexts. If you write about friends or family members there will be ethical issues. You’ll need to ask whose story it really is an whether you have the right to talk about others without their consent. I have touched on that before here.
4. Create a compelling narrative
Once you have a collection of stories about significant moments in your life, you will have the raw material to bring together. Themes will emerge over time to help you decide the best genre and style to use if you want to publish.
A Checklist for New Writers
Create a special writing space for you alone.
Create a ‘do not interrupt’ time out for writing.
Show up on the page every day for a specified time or number of words.
Keep a notebook (or recorder) with you at all times to record observations, ideas, thoughts or feelings, anything that takes your interest or fancy.
Write three unedited Morning Pages* longhand first thing to free up your creativity: anything goes, you can just grizzle on the page if you like
Take yourself on a weekly Artist’s Date,* (just you) – visit a special place that thrills you or gets your creative juices flowing – a flea market, aquarium, museum, bead shop, fabric store, garden centre, botanic park, art gallery, antique shop, pub, tourist venue…go sky diving if you want to!
For further inspiration, go to a favourite café or nook to reflect and write
Remember writers block is a caused by conflict between the creative mind and the rational editor – tell the editor to mind her business until your creative mind has finished what it wants to do. There is no such thing as a bad first draft!
Books to Get You Going
Patti Miller Writing Your Life: A Journey of Discovery (2001)
Patti Miller The Memoir Book(2008)
Carmel Bird – Writing the Story of Your Life: The Ultimate Guide 2007
*Julia Cameron’s famous self-help book that many published writers I’ve known started with, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path To Higher Creativity. First published in 1992, the latest reprint was in 2016. An evergreen text still readily available online and in bookstores. This is where you’ll learn about Morning Pages and Artist Dates mentioned earlier.
Another evergreen influence on the craft of writing from the guts is Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. It came out in 1986 (latest reprint 2016) and has sold in excess of a million copies in translation around the world. It’s still on the shelves and online.
There are no doubt other, more recent works on the topic of life writing, but these books are groundbreaking, seminal works to help you get started.
Live — Read — Write well
To be continued in June
A final note: If you want to start a life-writing club, you will find tips here.