SOMETIMES I CAN BE SUBTLE. And while no particular incident of that comes to mind right now, I maintain that I can be. Sometimes. I’m sure of it. Though never when teaching memoir writing, and so I know for certain that I was not a bit subtle in a recent class when I simply declared a total moratorium on the self-congratulatory. Let me explain.

Let’s say you’ve embarked on a piece that you think will interest women. The topic: how you’ve never been romantically swindled. No man has ever taken advantage of you in any way. It’s a claim you like to make, are comfortable making, and think others should know about.

Well, that’s not enough to make it a piece.

First off, self-congratulatory is very bad. Think about it. Who would really choose to listen to another monologue from the “And then I saids,” those bores who quote their own supposed retorts to a battered series of people they dominate every day? The “And then I saids” should have to wear buttons, so I can bolt for the canapés as they make their way toward me in a cocktail party. We learn nothing in these encounters, after all, so why listen?

Can you edit that piece on never being had by a cad and make it interesting to others? Maybe. Consider teaching your teenage niece to be gigolo-proof. Now that could be good.

Wanting to have some role in raising a sibling’s child is the very business of aunts, and as you retool the topic, the voice will change. Your original version would have been smarmy, and if self-congratulatory is bad, smarmy is dead-skunk-dreadful. Being the only one who’s right is the tough sell it should be. And as you search through that smarmy vomit draft, you must start feeling your way toward a voice of authority that is more meritocracy than fascist state. That, coupled with your status as an aunt, will make us want to read you, listen to you, or perhaps even buy your book.

My father, a fine sportswriter, used to say that you should try to write everything like a letter home, a suggestion that’s both graceful and correct. In a letter home you rarely tell those people who raised you how very great you are, or right you are, or unique. You tend to write about the ideas you are trying on, or the things you’ve tried and failed; how scared you are, or how lonely. You are the small dog when you write a letter home, telling how you’ve changed or what you’ve witnessed, and while you might wish they were here, they’re not, so get your facts right and put the bold, brash bragging aside, because these guys knew you when, and they can still kick your emotional ass if you get out of line.

So can readers, though they do so by not buying your books, not listening all the way through to your piece on the radio, and never again clicking on your blog.

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.

READY, SET, WRITE! That’s how most people think writing a memoir will go, whether it be in blog form, a series of essays or a full-length book. There once was a time when I was terribly polite about this work and what it requires. At cocktail parties when someone asked me what I do, and just above my string of pearls I’d smile and reply, “I’m a writer,” and nearly to a person, he’d say he was going to write when he retired. Nodding, I’d wish him the best with it and slink off to find the canapés, wondering what was wrong with me that I was going to devote my whole life to writing, when clearly people who were smarter than I could put it off until they got around to it.

Now, I’m not so polite. Now, when someone tells me that he is going to become a writer when he gets around to it, I reply, “And what do you do?” And sometimes he says, “Oh, I’m a brain surgeon,” and that’s my favorite reply because then I can say, “When I retire I’m going to become a brain surgeon,” with just a hint of a sneer above those pearls.

Writing is serious work and is not for the mere brain surgeons among us, but for those who resolve that 2010 is the year you finally write a memoir. And, here comes the single best time of  the year to start: The holidays, that great long stretch of time granting you myriad opportunities to see your family and take some notes. Oh! Did I say that?

I think I did.

What better time to collect some data than while baking and toasting and roasting by the fire, observing the rituals of family and finally getting some of it down and publishing it?

Here’s a two-word tip on how: Be hospitable.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Being hospitable in writing means many things, but going into this marathon of family observation let’s just choose one way to be hospitable to your memoir writing.

Let’s take notes. Literally.

Being hospitable means getting a stack of index cards and putting one in each pocket, in the back pocket of your jeans, and taking it out at the movies when you see someone make a great transition from one emotion to the next, making note of the spare gesture employed that conveyed the change; writing down that same crazy story Aunt Ellen tells every year about carving turkeys; noting that marvelous tale of the inherited aprons; jotting down that little endearing nervous gesture your sister employs just before she let’s the turkey be carried into the dining room. Write it down. Get a few notebooks, and write things down.

But here’s the rub: This does not require an expensive digital recorder, leather notebook, or Cartier pen. That’s shopping instead of writing. That’s showing off. That’s going into debt.

Get some index cards. Write down some stuff between now and New Year. And resolve that 2010 is the year you write that memoir. When you need help, check in with us. We’ve got some tips. Write it down at the holidays and see where the new year takes you.

THINK IN PROPINQUITIES. It’s a phrase that makes me sound more prim librarian than not, I know, but I love that word “propinquity,” and its reminder that you think of your angle shots when the topic you want to write up is Thanksgiving, for instance. Don’t give us a Polaroid of the day, but rather some side view that illustrates how you learned a new way to give thanks. It happened to me when I brought a New York City cab driver to Thanksgiving dinner.

I was single, living in Manhattan, and that morning it was a particularly unglamorous life. With a snapped ankle, a cast and crutches, I thought that no holiday cheer was worth cantilevering the flights from my brownstone apartment. And then the phone rang.

My hostess was insistent. Her son would come into Manhattan and fetch me. I couldn’t let him. And I couldn’t say no. Through the decade it took to lose my mother to Alzheimer’s, these were only people who each year invited us to holiday dinners. And now, it would be my first holiday alone.

No, I’d get there, I promised. I’d take a cab.

The only thing in my fridge I thought worth bringing was a six-pack of imported beer. Into a bag, over my shoulder it went and, balanced on my crutches, facing uptown traffic I felt like little more than a grimace in a skirt. Especially as cab after cab sped away without me after finding out I was going to Queens—not a short trip. If I’d had a lonelier hour in New York I don’t remember it.

Finally, slumped into a back seat, I wept over the Triboro bridge. At Shea Stadium we got snarled in the molasses of holiday traffic.

After a while I looked at the photo on the cabby license and realized the driver was probably about my age. We were going nowhere and the silence was awkward. I offered him a beer and we sat in the traffic by Flushing Bay for more than an hour, having our holiday drink, talking. An actor, without family, far away from home, he had volunteered to work the holiday so other cabbies could be off. When we finally got to Queens, my friends swarmed out the door, fearing, I guess for what had happened to me.

“You have to come in,” said my host to the cab driver.

When he got out of the cab I caught sight of the unfortunately placed hole in the backside of his old sweat pants and hobbled close behind him as camouflage.

Inside were the sounds and smells of the day: Football, ice in glasses, the cacophony of a family gathering its wits for the big production number. My hostess noticed the hole in his pants and offered the cab driver the most comfortable chair in the house and then a seat at the table and later, one on the couch to watch the Giants. What I noticed were all the old friends from my community who kept streaming in to say something to the nice cab driver who had brought me home for the holidays. And who had stayed for dinner.

That night on the ride back I sat in the front seat and Manhattan never looked so much like a candleabra-ed banquet laid out from the Bronx to the Battery. The meter was off. In fact, the fare for the trip out was canceled. He helped me out of the cab and up my stairs. Didn’t give him my phone number; he didn’t ask.

Two weeks later, I was still laid up. Around dinnertime my buzzer rang. It was one of New York’s finest cab drivers delivering a hot meal for me. Nothing more, but more to the point, nothing less.

So think in propinquities. To do so, use the calendar. It’s every blogger and essayist’s best right-hand man, allowing you the time to plan, write and submit magazine and radio pieces six-months or a year in advance of high emotional holy days, or to stockpile them for publishing on your blog.

Get yourself a backlog of ideas and resolve this time to write them, and then send them out in a timely manner (weeks in advance) to your local public radio station for that daily essay they run, the magazine (six months to a year in advance) you read regularly.

The high emotional holy days of the year are many, and many are widely celebrated—Christmas, Hanukkah, Thanksgiving. Some are deeply personal—an anniversary, a birthday. And some are universal, as well as deeply personal, such as the summer camp season and the beginning each year of school.

But if you’ve been reading along in my memoir tips you know better than to write a mere turkey and relish piece for Thanksgiving, unless you are simply conveying a recipe, though in my experience every recipe comes with a side-dish story. For Thanksgiving, think about gratitude or taking stock, and what they really mean; think of the background emotional stuff instead of Norman Rockwell’s steaming bird; think of the small ways in which we are taught to be grateful. Think about that universal idea of bringing something to the table.

Try it. And let us know how it goes.

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.

A SISTER-FRIEND FROM OUR extended network, writer and yoga instructor Joely Johnson Mork, sent us the following piece back in December, during which time all of us were otherwise engaged making other kinds of lists. But I keep thinking of Joely’s offering, and wanted to share it. One week after a loss she was certain she would never write about, the death of her best friend, I asked Joely, a former student in my memoir-writing class, if she thought she could simply bring in a list of thoughts related to the event. She actually she wrote a series of three lists, about her last visit with Mary. I offer them here, in another busy time of year, to again help us take stock of what we value.

Joely’s List That Helps With Loss

What I Brought
1. A copy of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “So Far.”
2. Three sticks of Buddhist incense that had been hand-delivered to me from Japan by a former lover.
3. A single change of clothes thrown without thinking into a canvas bag.
4. A week’s supply of Zoloft and Ativan.
5. My journal.
6. My marijuana pipe.
7. The turquoise necklace Mary brought back for me from Scottsdale.

What I Heard
1. Gale saying very solemnly, “Be prepared,” bowing her head to me as I walked toward the dining room where Mary was lying in her rented hospital bed.
2. The old-woman rasping of Mary’s breath.
3. Her husband’s surprised-sounding sobs.
4. The mechanical ocean sound of the oxygen tank.
5. Jeanne’s musical voice telling her daughter how honored she was to have been her mother and that it was OK to die now.
6. The moist crackle of fluid settling in Mary’s lungs.
7. The familiar, precious echo of Mary’s speaking voice breaking through her unconscious attempts to cough.
8. Thunder approaching with heavy boots and an empty sack slung over its back.
9. The release of rain on the leaves and earth outside the dining room windows.
10. The grinding of the hospital bed motor as we lowered the mattress after Mary had left us.

What I Said
1. On arriving, entering the kitchen to meet the crumpled faces of my friends standing there, “Oh, is she getting ready to spread her wings?”
2. “You have led an amazing life – you’ve done so much, we will all remember you.”
3. Whispered to Mary, when we were alone, “You are standing in front of a gate to a beautiful garden and the key is in your hand. Open the lock and let yourself walk inside. The sun is shining there – go, go, go.”

(For Mary “Mesa” Kittle, dear friend-sister.)

Of course, this reminds us of the gorgeous piece by TSP-new-sister Marilyn Pollack-Naron, and reminds us too, to read through the original comments sent to TSP and to Joely, as well as to ask you to send us your list, in the comments or by email to thesisterproject at gmail dot com.

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.

IT’S THE HOLIDAYS, the season to make lists. I had planned to write about that, as in what’s on my list/what’s on Margaret’s. But in The Sister Project’s first week online, so many of you emailed and commented about another topic that I’m moved to take it on here. The topic? Missing your sister at this time of year.

In just these few days, Priscilla wrote of reading to her sister as she lay dying; Melissa shared the story of her sister who was lost in an automobile crash. Lalita remembers her fourth sister as “a star in the heavens,” saying, “She remains a little girl while the three of us grow old hanging on to the edge of the earth, feeling enormously blessed.” And there have been others, each with a story of loss to share.

As I’ve said, I teach memoir. In each first class of a session, I listen to each student’s chosen personal essay topic. In every class, someone will choose to write about someone who left, about loss.

To get the topic going, I might ask the writer to simply make a list of what the person took with them when they went, because when people leave us, what they take tells us if they are going for good, going for show, or merely slinking off to someone else. Saltshakers are a good indication that he has not got someone else lined up. Taking only a sandwich tells us first that she’s hungry, and has little more than tonight in mind.

And we all know what he takes when he or she is leaving for good. Because it has happened to us, and it is in the list of what he took that the tale is told. That’s what makes the story truthful, as well as what makes it yours: What did he take of yours, what of his, and how do you define those, divide those, when at one time those lines were blurred by the smudge of love?

But people leave in different ways. In one first class, a woman sat stiffly, her arms crossed in front of her, dark bangs slammed right down to her brow. When it was her turn to reveal her topic, our exchange went something like this:

“I’m not even sure why I’m here.”

Uh-huh.

“My best friend just died.”

Oh. Oh dear.

“And I’m not writing about that. Nope. Got nothing to say. Too soon. Three weeks ago. Cancer.” She exhaled and unfolded her arms, and I exhaled, and we sat. All I could remember was the inutterable grief it was to lose my friend Susannah and what it is I did.

“Were you there when she died?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you live far away or nearby?

“Three hours away. I got the call.”

“What did you pack?”

“What?”

“What did you take with you?”

The next week she came in with a list. Actually it was three lists:

• What I brought.
• What I heard.
• What I said.

Under each were five mere sentences, 15 in all. And I hope she reads this post and sends the piece for you to read. It’s a wonder.

What about you? Have you lost a sister, blood or otherwise? While each hurt is unique, it carries within it its own identifiers that when shared, help us all to sort through grief, especially in this time of plenty.

Have a list? For some of us it would be what we drank or ate at the time, for others what we packed, perhaps what we prayed, or scribbled down, or maybe what we cook at the holidays to remember her by. I decorate my cookies with my friend Susannah’s panache; were she here, she’d be at my counter with me, covered in nine colors of royal icing.

Have you lost a sister, or a sister-friend, whether to distance, disagreement or even death? Write your list. It would be our privilege to see it.

_______________

Postscript: Artist Elsa Mora lost her older sister, though still living, to the dark maze of schizophrenia 10 years ago, a loss that inspires Elsa’s work even today. Read her story in the TSP Galleries.