Post by Vicki Mayk on Mar 3, 2019 22:56:24 GMT
Hi, Everyone,
I can't believe we are at Week Three already. Thanks to everyone for commenting on each other's work. I'm truly enjoying everyone's writing. I'm so impressed by the range of topics and the risks people are taking in writing about some challenging memories.
Here are the class materials for this week, with exercises and prompts at the end. There are a couple of warm-up exercises as well as three prompts to choose from. I have also attached them as a word document. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out!
Best,
Vicki
Feeling Vulnerable: Writing About Sensitive or Tough Subjects
The stories that we’re often most drawn to write about are sometimes stories that make us feel most vulnerable. The list of these sensitive topics is long. Maybe it is domestic or sexual abuse. Maybe it’s about being abandoned by a parent. Perhaps your first marriage ended when your spouse left you for someone else. Or you flunked out of college. I could go on listing possibilities forever. The very nature of memoir often means writing about life-changing experiences. That’s why I’m devoting a week of this writing workshop to stories that make us feel vulnerable when we write them.
Giving Ourselves Permission
The questions I’m most often asked in my memoir classes have to do with how people in our families will react to us telling certain stories. The reaction might come from writing about a family secret. Or perhaps it has to do with revealing something about ourselves that no one in our family or circle of friends knows. Whatever the situation, people wonder about how to handle the reaction of family and friends. Just this week, I was fortunate enough to hear the writer Dave Eggers mention this subject when he spoke at Wilkes University. And he summed up one solution this way: “Write after mom and dad are dead.” That’s one option that memoir writers are often told – and it applies more to publishing what you have written than to the act of writing itself.
I like to separate the act of writing about tough subjects from the topic of publishing those stories. I tell people in my writing workshops to give themselves permission to first write about these topics for themselves. How to handle the opinions of others after publishing these stories can come later. I prefer to think that we should write these stories because they are stories that are most important to us. Writing is a way to heal. I’ve actually done a whole writing retreat that explores healing from our stories. For now, in this workshop, we’re just going to give ourselves permission to write one story that is a tough one for us to tell or that makes us feel vulnerable.
How do we do that? I’m going to offer a couple of ideas for getting ready to write about hard topics or sensitive memories. Then I’m going to suggest some prompts that will offer ways to do that.
Note: Maybe you feel you don’t have a sensitive or dramatic story to tell. If you are sitting there thinking, “I don’t have anything in my background like abuse or addiction to write about,” I want to say that stories that make us feel vulnerable can cover a whole range of things. Here are some examples of other kinds of stories that can make us feel vulnerable to write about:
• Did you ever have an experience in school that made you feel vulnerable or embarrassed in front of the whole class? In my life, I felt like the nuns in my Catholic school often went out of their way to embarrass me.
• Perhaps you have a learning disability. What was it like to learn to compensate for that?
• Or did your family have more limited financial resources than the families of your friends? Was that sometimes hard for you?
• Did you make a mistake or do something you regretted later, such as destroying a sibling’s toy or telling a lie that was never discovered? I’m always amazed about how we tend to carry those memories with us and leave us feeling guilty or ashamed.
Those are just examples. I cite them to give you an idea of the range of stories people have to tell that might make them feel vulnerable or exposed. It covers a broad spectrum.
Getting Ready to Write
Sometimes getting ready to write about the hard moments in our lives is part of the process. Here’s a suggestion about how to prepare to do that before we get to this week’s prompts:
Idea #1:
Make a list of the reasons why you're scared to write secrets. Then, make a second list enumerating why you think it would be a good decision to tell these secrets anyway. Which list, in balance, makes the stronger argument?
Sue William Silverman. Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir (Kindle Locations 1657-1658). Kindle Edition.
Idea #2:
Write a list of subjects that you would “never” write about. Begin each line in the list with “I would never write about.” Look back over the list and see what aspects of these topics you might be willing to write about. Are there scenes or parts of these subjects that you would be willing to tackle?
Now that you are “warmed up” by thinking about challenging topics, here are this week’s prompts. You only have to choose one and whatever you write should be no longer than two to three pages double spaced:
Prompt #1:
This first prompt is based on one from Sue Silverman in her memoir craft book Fearless Confessions: Write a short essay about something that you were afraid to tell your mother growing up. Or you can take it another way and write the one thing that you were most afraid to tell your mother growing up – and perhaps still haven’t told her. The range of incidents that this might cover is broad – from stealing something from a store or breaking Mom’s favorite vase to the fact that you were sexually assaulted in college. The degree of the seriousness of that “something” is up to you and your willingness to write about it.
Prompt #2:
Sometimes there is a single element of a story that we feel uncomfortable writing about. In other words, we can write everything about a day in our life or a particular incident except this one detail. For example, when I wrote about my daughter’s struggles with mental illness, it was hard for me to admit that I read emails she sent to a friend without her permission. If you have a detail like this that you struggle to include, try this approach: Write the scene and then write one of these transitional sentences: “Now here’s the real truth” or “Now here’s the part I never told anyone before,” and then move on to include the detail or part of the story you are afraid to tell. You can choose to comment on why you’ve never written about this before.
Prompt #3
When we write memoir, we most often write in the first person. However, when we are writing about something that is especially difficult or that makes us feel vulnerable, sometimes it’s most helpful to write in the third person. Using the third person sometimes gives the distance from the scene that enables us to write about it. Try using the technique of writing about a story from your life using the third person. (Yes, this means referring to yourself by name instead of using “I.” In my case, if I was writing about reading my daughter’s emails, which I referred to in Prompt #2, I would write, “Vicki had written down her daughter’s password and used it to open her email account to read her emails, hoping to find some clue there about her life.”)
As in previous weeks, this assignment is due at 12 midnight on Saturday – or 12 a.m. on Sunday morning.