CHEAP NOTEBOOKS ENJOY the singular fame of being one of only two things you need to be a memoirist. The other, of course is a pen. You can add index cards to the list, but if you go out into your daily rounds carrying little more than a pen and a notebook you can write memoir. And you know what? You don’t have to believe me. This time, I’m bringing in a reliable witness.

It’s The Pink of Perfection, and with a blog name like that, you can believe every word.

I’ve written before about the small toolbox needed to write memoir. But here, for the record, is the very best testimony I’ve seen in, well, forever. Read up, memoirists, and get to work.

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NO MORE WRITING EXERCISES. Have any of those stupid prompts or morning pages ever gotten you published? Has writing from the right side of your brain, or getting in touch with your angel’s feather, or scribbling pages put you where you want to be as a writer? I doubt it. I suspect that those manners of nonsense have instead stolen what little time you had for writing. How do I know? Because the memoir class I’ve taught for 12 years is filled with people recovering from those very exercises, people whose sole relationship to writing was practicing, not writing for real. Right now, I’m running two Master Classes consisting of a total of 24 people who have made the New Year commitment to finish their books by the end of June 2010. They are writing for real. Want to join the wave of success?

Of course, if you’ll just sign up for the weekly newsletter from TSP (hint, hint), you’ll get all the upcoming memoir tips delivered to you regularly, though right now, why not just get writing? You can, that is if you are willing to:

• Write it down: The what and how to writing for real is right here. It’s easy to start.

• Think in propinquities: How to get a unique slant on your pieces. It’s worth the effort.

• Look deeply in a family photograph: You’ll get more than you ever expected.

• Make lists: Utilize the device of lists to make them unforgettable pieces of memoir.

• Take notes: At family holidays, and every day.

• Get over it: That block you have about there being another version of the same family story.

• Make nothing up: Never again be tempted to make up another single detail of your life.

• Chop it down: Learn to edit as you go.

Write on.

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WRITER’S BLOCK? NONSENSE. There is no such thing. Despite the fact that writing books are chock full of time-wasting exercises with all manners and ways to get you to emerge from that supposed thing, I say nonsense to all of it since there is no such thing. Don’t believe me? Well, come along with the sisterhood of writing and we’ll change your mind.

I am firmly convinced that “writer’s block” is a phrase initially invented by someone who wanted to sell someone else some cockamamie product disguised as something designed to unblock the blocked. But in reality it was something to get you to buy something else, and keep on buying instead of writing; something invented by some devious writer who didn’t want the competition of your good work.

Then, immortalized as it has been by story, as well as no fewer than 33 film versions of blocked writers, as listed here, the concept has become so accepted that some people actually take haven under the shelter of supposedly having no more to write.

Well, it’s nonsense. Because no sister in the world would let you get away with it if you were, in fact, blocked. I know. I have a sister, we are both writers, and neither one of us has ever let the other stay blocked for more than a few moments.

What do we do?

Are you ready?

It’s diabolical.

It’s ingenious.

It’s called research.

Writer’s block melts away when you recognize that you simply do not know what to say next. In memoir writing, this is fixed by picking up the phone and doing a little research.

“Margaret?”

“Yes.”

“What was the name of the boy who rode the bus with me every day to school?”

“You mean your imaginary friend, or the real children, Marion?”

Ooooh. Nice. That got me going.

Two weeks later.

“Margaret?”

“Yes?”

“Were those blue-sashed Christmas dresses Grandma made us made from the drapes?”

“Those were Easter dresses, Marion. And Marion, that was Scarlett O’Hara who had dresses made from drapes. Not you.”

Yes, well. But there’s something to write about. And I did.

Some time later.

“Margaret, what’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?”

Stony silence, followed by the kind of inspiration that feels ever so much like an inspirational smack on the head.

As you can see, you don’t always get a direct answer. But you do get inspiration. And you move on. Because sisters make you move on. In fact, I’d say that you know you’re a sister when there is one particular person in your life who can get you to move on.

So go ask your sister. Biological, adopted, recently made. She’ll have something to say.

And write on.

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EVERYONE HAS A STORY. It’s true. And the evidence has never been more obvious. Have you seen the size of the scrapbook aisles at Michael’s or A.C. Moore? Have you read any blogs today, or watched as the number of printed personal essays continues to climb, even as the number of pages of our newspapers and magazines continues to decline? But are we writing it as well as we’d like, or are we just saying more? Would some how-to tips help, perhaps?

To ensure that you’re not just writing for height and distance, but actually saying something to your audience, is what separates those memoirs of interest (printed or digital) from those that just blah-blah blah all over the page. We know the difference when we read it, of course. But how to foster that ethic as we write?

To help, I am offering memoir tips, honed from my 11 years of teaching a memoir class to more than 500 students who have assuredly taught me more than I have taught them. The sisterly thing to do, of course, is share those things that have been shared with me.

One of the first things I learned teaching memoir is that most people are hung up on the fact that there are two sides to the story. Yes there are. At least.

If you live in a family you know that even the dog has his point of view. So, with that in mind: How do you get those competing sides under control? Try this tip. And now, how to get only your side on the page? This might help.

And with all those versions whirling around, whose story is it, by the way? Asked and answered right here.

Is your sense of privacy being sorely tested as you write your family’s tale? You’re not the first writer to consider this. Maybe this will help.

As I write this, I realize I’m really suggesting that there are guidelines for writing memoir, and that they include everything from what makes good memoir, to how to shape your characters, even if you know them well.

These guidelines include:

• Writing it all down. Keeping notes and how to organize them.

• Learning that just because something happened doesn’t make it interesting.

• Choosing topics that are right under our noses.

• Selecting details that enliven your pieces.

• Wrestling against that great desire to make it all up.

• And my very favorite device of all devices: making lists.

How is your memoir going, whether it’s an actual manuscript, or a particular series of blog posts, perhaps? Need some help? TSP is dedicated to helping our sisters and brothers get their story on the page, or screen. Keep coming back. There’s lots more where these came from.

Write on.

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WHAT MAKES GOOD MEMOIR? I get this question all the time when I teach. And reading your comments on this makes me think it’s time to limn that line between what is merely some great scene versus a scene that is ready for the writing.

At some point in every memoir-writing class, I tell my students about a male architect I barely knew when he married a friend of mine. For their wedding he not only designed, but also sewed, his wife’s crushed white velvet, floor-length, cut-on-the bias dress, and made her white pillbox hat to match.

Consider that scene for a moment: Another bride, another groom, another musty old church filled with people in their 30s shooting looks at the dress, the hat, this Olympics of sewing on the part of the groom, the guests getting real wide-eyed at one another, raising their palms skyward and their shoulders to their ears. Here comes the bride, and is that groom in the tux and the slender Italian eyeglass frames straight or what?

Great scene. But what is it about? A fine collection of images, but what does it illustrate? Is it a tale about the way we live now?

Just because something happens doesn’t make it interesting. Don’t believe me? Tell someone your dreams. Unless you’re paying them to listen or haven’t slept with them yet (but might), chances are they’ll go to some lengths to avoid this download of your subconscious. Call my husband. He actually gets up and leaves the room if someone tries to tell him a dream. I think that’s why we’re married. So I don’t always have to be the rude one. He looks at this watch, nods, and actually says, “Oh, look at the time,” and leaves.

What is this about? The illustration–the crushed-velvet wedding dress, the tall groom, the whispers rocketing around the old stone church–needs a context, a frame. Ever notice how the perfect frame can bring out the color in your oil painting, your photo? Same with writing. The frame, the reason for the tale, is the same thing. And the question you now must tape to your wall is, “What is this about?”

What is the wedding story about? I have no idea–yet, at least–though in the 13 years since I delighted in witnessing it (and their happy marriage), I have picked it up a thousand times and had a look, each time putting it away again. It is gorgeous, it is there, and one of these days it will tuck into a tale I’m telling, but until it makes sense, in context, it’s just a spare part waiting to be sewed onto something else.

I’ve got a million of them, thank goodness. And so do you.

_______

For those of you on your first visit, or who haven’t read them before, my series On Writing Memoir is here.

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ARE YOU WRITING SOMETHING? Oh, come on. You can tell me. Everyone else is writing about their lives. You can, too. But which story? And how to tell it? I teach memoir, and while my class is off for the summer, I’ll continue posting memoir tips here on TSP, hoping you can find the time to get to your story and that I can be of some help. My theory is that anyone who survived childhood has enough material for several books. So let’s get to it. Here’s an exercise; read along and let’s see if it gets you going.

The way I see it, we had long, lovely trips during we learned a lot. There was that cruise on The Queen of Bermuda when we were maybe 7 and 9. The ship had a saltwater swimming pool. High tea was served at 3. A solid wood library was below decks in which the books were kept on their shelves with elastic cording in front of each subject row.

Those are the details, but where’s the story here? Nowhere, as far as I can see.

So let’s try this:

When I was 13 there were two trips: The Easter vacation (as it once was called) to Puerto Rico, during which time President Eisenhower died of congestive heart failure. I remember reading Ike’s obit with my father. The second trip that year was to meet relatives I never knew we had. They lived in Colorado, which is where I observed hailstones the size of golf balls, Pike’s Peak, and the curious marriage of my mother’s cousin. I took notes on them all.

In between Puerto Rico and Colorado, both my mother and Margaret had gotten Vidal Sassoon haircuts. Angular, severe and precise, these cuts both delineated their separate jawlines and distinguished them from me in yet another way. We three were de-identifying then, and we were all glad to shrug off a piece of the other, I think, on the path to becoming our own women.

There is a difference between the two italicized paragraphs above, and that difference points out a basic rule of memoir, which is this: Just because something happened doesn’t make it interesting. You might think that everything you do is fascinating, and good for you, but to make it work on the page for someone else it must illuminate something, illustrating something universal, telling a tale that at the very least provokes us to think.

Look back at the first paragraph. There are lots of details: A ship’s name, a saltwater swimming pool, tea, books, shelving. They are decoration, nothing more, driving no story forward, ultimately giving it light and color, sound and taste. Same thing with paragraph two, at least until you get to the haircuts, and the subject of de-identification comes in. Then we are on to something that may or may not interest someone else.

What we are “on” to here is the mission of She Said, She Said-those differences established because we grew up in the same household. In my previous memoir writing posts I’ve discussed small aspects of how to write memoir. This is a big one. This is about territory.

What essay or book are you writing? What was your assignment? On TSP, for me, it is to illustrate those separate aspects of the same families. And unless you are a very famous person who has lived a very interesting life, you too must make a large decision about your memoir to narrow it down from a mere retelling of your life’s facts. Only those very public few whose lives have been littered with close encounters with other famous moments and people can sell books in which they merely chronologically relate their lives, their autobiographies. For the rest of us, we must choose a narrower field of vision-parenting, recovery, our dogs, being the winner of the Becky Crocker cooking award, losing a sister, being a sister, living green–to name but a few.

What is your essay, book or story about? You must ask yourself this question and be ready to narrow your field to one topic only. My assignment being very clearly set in my mind, I can then search my memory for only those things that will bring to life how it is we live separate lives under the same cover of family.

What are your ambitions when you sit down to tell your tale? Let’s talk about them here and see if we can’t get you writing that story you’ve been meaning to write.

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WRITE IT DOWN. I tell this to my memoir students all the time. Carry a notebook, index cards, write on your hands if you must, but write it down.  Keep notebooks in car, next to your side of the bed, in the kitchen; tuck an index card into your back pocket, jacket pocket, jeans pocket. And carry a pen.  And they do, and then right around the third class, someone asks, “Write what down?” Ah, what good students. I was waiting for that.

I’m always grateful when the question is asked. After 11 years of teaching, and more than 500 students, you’d think I might be tired of it, but I never am, because what we write down versus what we do not need to write down is about as important a distinction you’ll need to grasp to write well about your family.

The first thing to know is just because someone is going to dispute it, does not mean you don’t write it down. Margaret and I have lots of topics on which we do not agree. We’ve made lists. (Here’s hers).  We’ve disputed one another’s facts. She even thinks I make things up and that I have done so ever since I had an imaginary friend. No matter. We write things down, she and I, always have, scribbling away, as you can see here, when we were first thinking about what TSP should be, writing, writing, always writing.

But what do we write? Key phrases, the look of a room, bits of dialogue are good places to start. For instance, many of us have just enjoyed (endured?) the Spring high holy days—Easter and Passover—during which we got together with family. Ah, family. Why have them if you can’t write about them? My sister and I have felt this way since birth. Right, Margaret?

And yet, when I wrote about the holidays recently for TSP, it was another sister I wrote about, a non-biological one, but a sister, all the same, the piece written from notes I took at the time of the event that were stored by subject in a file. Among those notes were the details of my daughter’s imaginary friend, along with details of a Passover spent at a generous sister’s home. I had jotted down a few things that night in my notebook. For instance, to remind me what she cooked, I wrote down, “homemade tortellini.”  That detail tells us that it was not traditional Passover fare that was served that night, and is important to the story, since it heightens and adds to the theme of the non-traditional. So: details. Details are good.

How were your holidays? Now is the time to write down details of them so that next year, as these days again approach, you’ll be essay-ready with your version of the tale. It was those notes of Passover at a sister’s gracious home that allowed me to share mine with you.

What’s in your notebook?

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Years ago Marion's shrink told her she needed to come up with a version of her childhood she could live with. She thought he said "aversion," and promptly took hold of a hideous tale of woe she particularly liked. It was thousands of dollars later that she finally sorted out the distinction. (Sloane Tanen illustration.)

I TELL STORIES. That would be Margaret’s version of our tale, the suggestion being that she writes the truth. For me, even that distinction is a story. About 30 years after riding the bus with Andy, and on the couch of a good psychiatrist, a question arose about my childhood that made me realize I was in the right hands, professionally speaking. The doctor was not one of those who wanted me to relive everything, instead wanting me to move on with some alacrity. I liked that, especially when he summed up his outlook for his clients this way:

What he apparently said was, “You must get a version of your childhood you can live with and live with it.”

But I thought he said something else altogether, and said to him, “An aversion to my childhood. Nice. Somebody pays you for this advice? My sister has an aversion to our childhood. I don’t need one too.”

“A version,” he repeated, laughing.

My sister and I live by different rules; we give different gifts, and even have different random facts we share (Margaret’s are here). Two sides of the same coin, or potato/po-tah-toe, and all that, we are not bookends. We are sisters: Different because we grew up in the same household, not in spite of that fact.

Does this make a memoir impossible? Does the sheer knowledge that someone else can readily disagree with your version diminish your tale, or make it less true?

Not a bit—and quite the opposite. None of us grows up utterly without the influence of others. The key in successfully writing about your life is to stay in the voice of how it occurred to you and how it looks from your point of view, staking out the territory of how you remember it and making no claims to this being the only possible or true version.

And then when everyone tells you that it didn’t happen that way, you can agree. It didn’t happen that way to them.

__________

Thanks to sister-friend Sloane Tanen for the chick art, top. An entire show of Sloane’s sisterly chicks appears in the TSP Galleries.

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ANOTHER FAKED MEMOIR. This time it’s Herman Rosenblat’s book, Angel at the Fence, a story with a story line that was simply too good to be true. Here’s the plot: A boy imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War II is kept from starving by apples thrown over the camp’s fence. The angel? A lovely young girl who years later reconnects with Rosenblat on a blind date in New York City. They marry and live happily almost-ever-after, until the groom gets caught palming off his faked memoir to a relentlessly unsuspecting public. Do I sound unsympathetic to all concerned? I am. But not for the reasons that you might expect.

It’s a perfectly good story–for fiction. It would have sold as fiction. It sold to the movies, after all. So, no, the story line is not my problem. And Oprah being duped again? She did call it the greatest love story ever to be aired on her show, but Oprah’s Book Club does such good service to America’s readers and writers that I just can’t fault her; tout enough books and these things are going to happen. And I’m not angry only because it’s just another writer trying to land a better book deal.

I’m mad because just like the three recent bad-ass-lying writers I can name off the top of my head—James Frey (A Million Little Pieces), J.T. Le Roy (Sarah) and Margaret B. Jones/Margaret Seltzer (Love and Consequences; the lie was exposed by her sister)—Rosenblat was wrong about life itself. In life, it’s not the big stuff that forms us, changes us, or teaches us anything real. It’s in the small moments that life is truly lived. And just like not having to sweat the small stuff, you also don’t have to make it up to make it interesting.

When small moments can yield such big lessons, why invent such big drama in what’s meant to be memoir?

Don’t believe me? Consider two sisters coming back together after a long, hard battle over a parent’s illness. Nothing rips apart families quite like a sick parent. Margaret and I did 15 unsteady years with our mother’s Alzheimer’s disease, and among the things I learned during that time was that only in the movies does some huge gift or near-death of one of the sisters reunite an estranged pair of exhausted caregivers. What really happens is that over yet another hushed shared meal, or one more otherwise silent drive to the airport, one sister laughs at the other’s joke, one reaches for a suitcase and gently touches the other’s forearm and in that, and in other tiny gestures, the knitting together begins again.

Let’s look back on the other memoir posts here. Does this theory prove true? In my very first memoir post, “Side Dishes”, Linda talks about her grandmother’s funeral. That’s a big event. Hmmm. But what small moment amid that event begins the reuniting between sisters? See if you can spot it.

S SIMILARLY, IN the memoir post I called “A List That Helps With Loss,” we have Joely’s astonishing tale of the death of her friend Mary. But it is told in the form of a list or three lists, really: What she took, what she heard, and what she said when she went to say good-bye to her best friend. The death was a huge experience, of course, but the things Joely took, heard and said are small, intimate characterizations of the love between the two women. There are no huge secrets, or uber bracelet packed in among these details. In the small stuff presented to us we see the large picture of how we live, love and lose. Later on in the comments on that same post we learn from Zephyr the value of a joke at the deathbed, and from Paul, the enormity of the unsaid.

Small moments, big lessons.

What are some of yours? Got some? Share them here.

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W HILE THE SISTER PROJECT has been up and running only a month, it seems we already know a great deal about one another. How is that possible? One way is through the direct information we share: that Margaret’s my genetic sister, that my sister-friend Paige of “Hey, Little Sister” can really cook. And while pure facts are great, if there is a Number 1 rule of writing (or any form of effective communication) it’s this: Show, don’t tell.

Reading between the lines, beyond the facts, we can develop a deeper sense of one another, from how we characterize ourselves in our posts and in our comments. With a sister, though, that can be a real challenge sometimes.

How can I characterize my sister and me in one small way? How can you characterize yours?

I teach memoir writing, and in good memoir writing, a fine rule to follow is not to tell someone’s height, weight or hair color unless it lends something to your story. If your grandmother’s dark brown eyes are the exact shade of the chocolate icing you’re spreading on the cupcake you make from her recipe, well fine, throw that ingredient into the piece and we’ll feel the love. But notice that it’s a small detail, and that we don’t need her whole face looming up at us to get the picture.

I remind my students (and myself) to characterize the person in the smallest ways possible to reveal who she really is—as well as who she is to you. What are her gestures, her habits?  Here’s the wrinkle, though: The closer the person is to you, the harder it is to characterize her in a gesture. How can I characterize my sister and me in one small way? How can you characterize yours?

Let’s try this exercise on the subject of New Year’s Eve. What do you do, and how does your sister (or sister-friend, or brother) celebrate?

I’ll go first:

Me: Practicing the ancient Scottish tradition of Hogmanay, I’ll be braced in the doorway, no matter whose house I’m at, no matter how cold, or how small my dress, welcoming in the New Year and booting out the old.

Margaret: At midnight, as the New Year rushes in? Oh, she’s long asleep.

Your turn.

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