Ep 116: Can You Write Your Story Before Its Become a Story?
In her recently released memoir, Hourglass, Dani Shapiro says she used to teach her students that writers need distance from the event or events they intend to explore in memoir.\nI was quite certain that we could not write directly from our feelings, but only the memory of our feelings. How else to find the necessary ironic distance, the cool remove? How else to shape a narrative but from the insight and wisdom of retrospect? (93)\nDistance Leads to Fading\nI've heard this same advice from many sources but struggled with it in practice. Certain experiences in my life have seemed like perfect fodder for memoir, but I waited to write. Time has passed. Years. At this point, critical details and insights have faded\u2014and, yes, even the feelings. That "cool remove\u201d she speaks of seems more like evaporation.\n\nShapiro says her thoughts on the timing are shifting, though. She now sees that "[e]ven retrospect is mutable. Perspective, a momentary figment of consciousness."\n\nTo me, her new approach feels like a much better way, enlivened by real-time action and energy and all the rich texture of now.\nTell the Story While Inside of It\nShe writes: "If retrospect is an illusion, then why not attempt to tell the story as I\u2019m inside of it? Which is to say: before the story has become a story?"\n\nI wonder how many stories have mutated as we wait.\n\nIt happened to me\u2014to a story I thought I might write. I guess I was waiting for perspective before writing it down. Well, and time. I didn\u2019t have time to write as I navigated the memoir-worthy events, but had I been savvier and recognized the power of snatching the story while it was fresh\u2014while the feelings surged with the most intensity, I would have done it. I wish I'd jotted more notes, saved more texts, recorded more observations with my smartphone\u2019s voice recorder.\nBlogging in Real Time\nThe way people used to blog seemed to follow this approach. Those who wrote from their lives seemed to blog almost in real time, attempting to tell their stories while they were in the midst of them.\nJournaling in Real Time\nThose committed to keeping a journal, like Ana\xefs Nin, a faithful\u2014some might say obsessive\u2014diarist, wrote, "It was while writing a Diary that I discovered how to capture the living moments.\u201d\nTelling a Story as Memoir in Real Time\nCapturing those living moments is the work of a diarist and perhaps some journalists, and Dani Shapiro\u2019s comment makes me wonder if it's also the work of a memoirist when we capture them in real time and write inside the story.\n\nDiaries and journals and this idea of a real-time memoir help us look at life even as we\u2019re living it. Again, Ana\xefs Nin said, \u201cWe write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.\u201d\n\nWe write to remember the moment, the feeling. We write to document the way it changed us. Is there a story here? Or just a series of snapshots? Was this a passing emotion or a transformative event?\nCapture the Living Moments\nTry it.\n\nOne way or another, whether or not it\u2019s a story of transformation, capture the living moments. Try to tell the story as you're inside of it.\n\nRecord the songs that play and the color of clothes on the day you receive life-altering information by email.\n\nTake note of the way the old 90-pound dog heaves himself up from his nap and moves through the house and down the hallways on creaky joints to greet the college kids when they walk in the door.\n\nListen for the woodpecker tapping the maple tree as you talk on the phone with your father.\n\nDon\u2019t decide yet if it matters; write inside the story that has yet to be a story.\n\nAfter all, if not now\u2026when?\nDon't Wait\nIf you wait to write until after the old dog dies, you might forget the way he cuts a corner and slides his side along the doorframe in his hurry to greet the girls.\n\nIf you wait, you\u2019ll forget that \u201cFire and Rain\u201d was piped through the McDonald\u2019s sound system, that your father asked if someone was at the door when he heard the tap-tap...