Part one features Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, and AL Kennedy.

Part two features Hilary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, and Jeanette Winterson.

There have been some interesting articles about memoir kicking around on teh internets recently, which I will collect here for your delectation.

First Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing in the UK’s Independent newspaper, gives a rousing “publish and be damned” call to arms for all memoir writers. Alibhai-Brown is responding to the bru-ha over in the UK about Lady Antonia Fraser’s memoir, which recounts her marriage to the late Harold Pinter. I haven’t read Fraser’s book yet but apparently it’s not a even tell-all – it’s a rather tender and well-written portrait of an unusual marriage (according to reviews here, here and here.) Pinter’s plays, which I studied in high school, had a lasting effect on me. In particular, the distinction he made between the dash and the ellipses. This was revolutionary for me at the time — that so much could be conveyed through punctuation!

Then there’s this juicy piece in the New Yorker, a review of Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History.

And then a completely asinine memoir attack piece by Taylor Antrim in The Daily Beast, followed by Stephen Elliott’s Antrim smackdown on The Rumpus.

No distribution information or date, though, so maybe the film is…bad? Watch and decide for yourself.

If you live in or near New York City and you need some motivation, structure, feedback, encouragement, community, and good, solid, craft discussion, please consider joining me. I’ll also supply tasty snacks, of course (anyone who has been in my classes before knows I have a mean addiction to Kettle brand sea salt and black pepper crinkle cut chips, among other things…)

Here are the details:

• These will be craft-focused workshops, open to fiction and nonfiction writers, limited to just six writers per group (so you get more individual attention).
• You’ll get eight sessions, total, and we will meet every other week (so you’ll have structure and feedback over a sixteen week period).
• Each session will last three hours and include some in-class writing and discussion of process (so everyone will engage with their work and leave with a goal).
• Everyone will submit four times, a maximum of 25 pages (so you could produce and workshop up to 100 new pages).
• Everyone will get a one hour phone or in-person consultation with me over the course of the workshop.
• The price? Just $595.

I’ll be running two sessions. One will start the week of September 14 and one the week of September 21. That means I’ll have space for twelve writers this fall. I did an email to my current and former clients about a week ago and there are now only six spots left open. If you are interested in one of them, email me at nancyrawlinson@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to answer any questions and give you information on how to reserve a spot.

If a workshop doesn’t suit you right now, I’m still available for one-on-one consultations. Contact me at nancyrawlinson@gmail.com to discuss the options or check out my website, nancyrawlinson.com, for more information about my services and fees.

All this business development is making me reassess various aspects of my self presentation – including the name of this blog, which you’ll see has changed. Look for some more posts on what makes for a good workshop experience soon.

This interesting article from the Wall Street Journal should make anyone (like me, for example) who seems to spend hours in unfocused thought feel a little better. A couple of quotes:

…our brain may be most actively engaged when our mind is wandering and we’ve actually lost track of our thoughts, a new brain-scanning study suggests.

And:

By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.

A third? If all is going well, I’ll spend longer daydreaming than that, mate. There’s nothing like a good daydreaming session to make me feel productive. The brain mechanisms that this article talks about might also be the reason that I get great writing ideas when I run. As I’m plodding round the park, sometimes, admittedly, I’m listening to 1980s rave tunes and reliving my clubbing days. But other times, my mind enters a fugue state and, well, I just realize something. That scene I have been stuck on, about my grandmother? It’s really about my father. Aha. Of course.

Haruki Murakami, a novelist I admire, is also a runner, and his book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, contains his own treatise on why running is good for the writer’s life. In this quote from an interview on the Runner’s World website, he seems to describe the same experience that I have had, and that the researchers in the Wall Street Journal article are talking about. Murakami says:

I try not to think about anything special while running. As a matter of fact, I usually run with my mind empty. However, when I run empty-minded, something naturally and abruptly crawls in sometimes. That might become an idea that can help me with my writing.

Our next challenge is to pay attention to that thing that has crawled in. Write it down. Follow where it leads.

“It’s time to kill, and to enjoy the killing.”

“Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.”

Scary! But fascinating! Read more here.

Update: Of course this idea is already at play in popular culture — hello, Dollhouse! Check out this excellent blog post about why this series is and yet isn’t and yet is worth watching.

To which I can only say: Yay! Looking at all the exhibits was like walking around inside a bunch of intelligent, creative minds. Now, I’m not an overly technical person, so much of the programming part of what these people were doing was totally beyond me, but what I found so fascinating was that they were all making interesting connections. Taking a concept from one area of thought and applying it somewhere else. Twisting ideas around to get new, more interesting ideas. And, along the way, quite possibly coming up with products that will be part of our daily lives in the near future.

Take Amanda’s project for example: Urban Windchimes. It’s so awesome. Check out the website for more info, but the basic concept is that, in our urban environments, people don’t always want to listen to other people’s windchimes. With this invention, you can place a wind sensor on your window ledge or fire escape and pay the chimes through your computer. There’s the possibility of placing sensors all over the world — ever wanted to listen to the wind on Mount Fiji? Or in the Bahamas? How cool would that be?

Then there were a few projects that were dealing, in one way or another, with memory. And this got me thinking about the connection between memory and technology, and how the digital revolution means we might well remember things differently in the future. This, in turn, has some pretty interesting consequences for future memoirists.

Already, online social media networks like Facebook provide a digital archive of our lives that just didn’t exist a few years ago. Want to know what you were doing the summer of your junior year? Check your status updates! Can’t remember when you started that college internship that proved to be so formative? Check out your LinkedIn page! Personally, I have long been haunted by my future memoiristic self: I can’t throw away my old Filofax calenders from 1995 or my journals from when I was twelve, just in case I’m working on some future project and I need an aide memoire, or to fact check my own life. But soon I won’t need paper records at all — it will all be online.

Here’s a project from the ITP show that takes it to the next level: a social network site combined with google maps to created an online memory repository. It’s called remmbr.

And here’s another project from the show that plays with how memory is linked to technology — and the idea that both can degrade: portrait of a memory in vhs.

Now all we need is a chip inserted into our brains that will record every memory we ever had, right? Scary thought, but perhaps not too far off. The question is, though: would this actually hinder memoirists? After all, creating memoir isn’t just about what you remember. It’s not just the facts — it’s what they mean. It’s being able to plumb memory for meaning. And we are able to do that, partially, because certain memories loom large and take up more room than others. What we recall, and the level of intensity with which we recall, is a guide to what’s important to us. It helps us piece together significance. If everything is retained without differentiation, wouldn’t we be autobiographers rather than memoirists? Perhaps one of the most important aspects of writing memoir is what we don’t know and so must create.

Rhythm in writing is [...] a completely intuitive matter. I don’t really understand the process. It’s related to the substance of Flaubert’s famous letter to George Sand: “When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is also harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not, in this precise fitting of parts, something eternal, like a principal? If not, why should there be a relation between the right word and the musical word? Or why should the greatest compression of thought always result in a line of poetry?” This is crucial stuff for me. I write intuitively, not knowing where I’m going, not knowing what the next sentence will be until this one has guided me there, and knowing how the sentence goes begins with my hearing its rhythm in my head, and then filling in the specific words. If the sentence is cloddish and clunky, it’s simply wrong—and not just wrong-sounding but wrong in its meaning.

I can’t think of a better reason for paying close attention to the construction and flow of every single sentence. Ugly sentences, the ones that don’t scan, the ones that the reader stumbles over? No less than a failure of meaning.

The instinct might be to fix the sentence: rewrite it till it flows. I’d suggest stopping and thinking and getting clarity on what it is you are trying to say before you do that. As Flaubert says: The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Find the idea and the words should, in theory, take care of themselves.

Ah yes, you say, but what if you don’t know what you want to say? What if the idea is elusive, impossible to pin down? Isn’t that one of the reasons why we write in the first place? To discover what it is that we feel and think?

To which I say: that’s what first drafts are for! Write it out in order to know it, to understand it (whatever “it” is here: story, idea, feeling). Then write it again, with this new knowledge having been dredged up and placed, to some degree, at the front of the mind. These two documents might have very little in common. The first enables the second, and the second isn’t so much a rewrite as a re-imagining.

That’s my thoughts on process for today folks, inspired by Flaubert, care of Luc Sante, care of Guernica magazine.

Anne Enright says you must not to listen to that internal voice, but instead practice some “mood management.” You must “…wrestle [your emotions] down to something roughly the size of the page.” While I do think that this is solid advice, there are ways that you can, with some practice, learn to assess your own work.

These methods I’ll call developing your intuition, developing your powers of assessment, and building an external feedback loop.

Developing Your Intuition

How do you know when you have done a good job at something? Think of a non-writing example here — something to do with your day job, perhaps, or some task you may complete regularly around the home. I’ll use an example from my own life: how do I know when I have done a good job with editing someone else’s work?

This is how I know: I have an internal feeling about it, a kind of satisfying recognition that yes, I have fully engaged with the work, understood the author’s intentions, and helped them to be realized. It’s a definite kinesthetic feeling in my case, a solidity and warmness in the gut. Just thinking about it causes it to kick in a little. It feels good. I think it’s a form of intuition.

Try this for yourself. Go on, try it. Think of something that you have done, recently, that you know you have done well. It doesn’t matter what kind of task it was — small, domestic, physical, cerebral, creative — there must be something. Now, pay attention to how it feels inside. Isn’t there a feeling of recognition? Don’t you just know that yes, that was a job well done?

In my opinion, this information, that kind that comes from the gut (or the core, or the heart, call it what you will) is solid and trustworthy and true. As writers, though, we tend to discount it. We let the bullying voice of our doubts stomp all over it till we loose touch with it all together. We are doing ourselves a disservice.

When you get a flash of contact with your writerly intuition, listen to it. Trust it. It is, by its very nature, trustworthy. That inner feeling will not lead you astray. By paying attention to it, seeking it out, and respecting it, it will grow and guide you.

Developing Your Powers of Assessment

This one is easier to write about because it’s less of the body and more of the mind: sharper, intellectual, definable. If you have a voice inside telling you that your work is a piece of shit, you can work on training up that voice. Learn to understand the mechanisms of writing. Understand what makes for successful or unsuccessful prose. These are learnable skills — any good craft-based writing class will help you. It’s like practicing your scales as a musician or studying the history of art as a painter or any other solid, craft-based, artistic application.

Though, yes, it will always be harder to assess your own work than it is to assess the work of others, if you have a solid understanding of technique and craft issues, and you understand what it is about other people’s work that makes it tick, the bullying voice of doubt should turn into a more detached, incisive and useful teacherly voice instead.

To use my own example again, I know when I have helped a writer improve their work because, after years of editing, my critical faculties have become pretty honed. If an author has a problems with transitions, or with characterization, or with story arc, I can understand it, and talk about it, and provide counter examples. I’m inside the work, I can see the mechanisms working (or not) and I can help the writer take the piece apart and put it back together again, in the same way a master mechanic can strip and rebuild an engine.

With that knowledge comes a certain confidence which is an invaluable resource to fall back on when the doubt kicks in.

Building in an External Feedback Loop

We all need feedback. Seeking out trusted readers who can be guaranteed to give you honest but non-bruising feedback is essential. It can take a while to get this set-up, but once your have established those resources, they are invaluable, and they tend to endure. Try taking some workshops. Ask other writers that you meet if they would like to exchange work. Set up your own writing group. Hire a freelance editor and coach like me. Use family members or friends, as long as you can trust them to be honest and not overly harsh. Get some real, critical-but-supportive feedback. Be prepared to learn, and revise, revise, revise.

If you work on these three things, that nagging voice of doubt might never fully go away but at least its power will be diminished — and you should have some solid, true and useful ways to judge the worth of your own work. My point is that there are things you can do. You don’t have to let yourself be cowed by the bullying voice of doubt!

And what if, using these feedback methods, you discover that your work is not as good as you’d like it to be? Well then stay true to the force within you that pushed you to create it in the first place, and learn, and revise, and move forward. That’s all that any of us can do.