Zen and the art of library suggestions

Most of the creative nonfiction I’ve been reading lately has been borrowed from the library. Another plus, besides being a cheap way of reading a heap of books, is the recommendations the librarians – and the other people in the checkout queue – give.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been on a quest through lists of creative nonfiction, especially memoirs, lists that have come from the back of writing instruction books I’ve enjoyed. My first reason for borrowing books from the library was the cost, but as I’ve gone along, I’ve discovered that two of the books I’ve most enjoyed got a plug from people at the library.

The first of these was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, which inspired a series of articles, starting here. Another book that people were thrilled to see I’d borrowed was Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure.

Some of the books I’ve read have been dreadful. Many have been okay. But both the books that received rave reviews from the library have been excellent. So when in doubt about what to read, ask a librarian – or other punters.

Answering the unanswered

A few weeks ago, I shared how to learn from bad writing. Sara Wheeler managed to fill a book on Chile that left me, as a reader, with less knowledge about the country than I had before I started. In contrast to her primary level education, Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, gives a tertiary education.

Wheeler’s main fault was a lack of curiosity – in a journalist, deadly. Chatwin makes up for her lack as he tracks down detailed answers to every question he comes across. His book is an adventure, a quest, questions spiral out from a piece of skin his grandmother had in her dining-room – skin of a brontosaurus.

Chapter 33 opens with “Who were Wilson and Evans?”, and then Chatwin searches out answers until he, and the reader, are satisfied. Curiosity kills the cat, but it vivifies memoirs.

Start at the start

Uncertain of where to begin, many would-be memoirists don’t start at all.

Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia gives an example of the perfect point:

In my grandmother’s dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair…
“What’s that?’
“A piece of brontosaurus.”

It’s this piece of skin, seen as a child, that sparks his interest in Patagonia and sends him there years later to find answers to questions that spiral outward from the riddle of the brontosaurus.

Chatwin’s chronological start is only one technique in a writer’s repertoire. Given Patti Miller’s definition of memoir, we can come up with other places to start: theme (such as Nigel Slater’s Toast, burning toast as a symbol of a mother’s love), place (such as Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris, landing in Paris, the result of an impulsive decision), or topic (such as Kieran Kelly does in the forthcoming Aspiring, as he starts an ascent of New Zealand’s Mt Aspiring).

For my memoir, working title Coming Home, the opening scene will provide a litany of the reasons the six-year-old me hates my stepmother after only a few months of knowing her (actually it only took hours, but you’ll have to read it to see what I mean).

We all have to start somewhere and where we start usually needs to connect to where we finish, but that’s a subject for another article, another time.

Severe internal injuries

Some of these memoirs I’m reading to master my craft make me retch and vomit as their covers tell me how to respond.

Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs blurb states “Do not read this book in public. You will risk severe internal injuries from trying to suppress your laughter.”

Well, I read it, and mostly in public, on the tram. I neither guffawed or even chortled. The humor was banal and predictable.

I may have been predisposed against James. At the Adelaide Writers’ Week this year, one of the emcee’s shared how James had launched a book he hadn’t even read; all he did was give it a casual flick through before he went on the stage. He then proceeded to give great insight into… himself.

Now I have a big as ego as the next writer, but this was unprofessionalism displayed in public exhibition and would have robbed the poor writer whose book was being launched from the pleasure of such a big name.

There was one moment which lifted this book out of its mundane lot; a theme that has been mentioned a few times in this blog and will be mentioned many more times before 30 June: the Proustian Phenomenon.

When he mentions Proust, for a moment James channels the great writer, and for the first and only time in his book creates some evocative prose.

Of course, I may not be so hardlined against this book if only the cover hadn’t told me how snot-ejecting funny it would be.

STOP THE PRESS: As I finished this post, I had the displeasure to discover there’s a sequel: Falling Towards England – Unreliable Memoirs II. One can only hope somewhere between the first and the second, James found his promised sense of humor.

The road from Gove

If, before you sit down to write a memoir, you read as many as you can get your hands on, you’ll find they fall into three categories: those so excellent, you uncover new techniques; those so bad, you have a clear picture of what to avoid; and, those just above the level you’re at now, that give you a taste of your finished product.

For me, that book is Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain. The similarities between her book and the draft I already have, and my planned revisions, startled and encouraged me.

In some ways our books are very different. Hers is about leaving an Australian farm and finding her place in the world as a woman intellectual. Mine is about escaping the clutches of the abusive people in my life in various towns through the Northern Territory, and finding my place in the world as someone in control of my own destiny.

Conway’s prose uses strong verbs, and her writing style is similar to mine. Her book was an international success. She starts with an evocation of the setting, and finishes at an airport, flying off into the unknown; the start and finish points of my memoir.

Find such a book for your own writing. It will encourage you in a stronger way than words from other people, even other writers. No one walks paths that haven’t been trodden before.

Zen and the art of characters

Any element of memoir – including characters – must serve the story’s purpose. Some would baulk at the idea of “characters” in memoir – after all, they’re real people, aren’t they? – but the people in the memoir are not the people in reality. The best a writer can hope for is a facsimile of the person; recognizable, but serving the story’s purpose.

And what is this purpose? It differs for each story. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values where I discussed the application of Pirsig’s philosophy to the writing craft here, and supremacy of trust here, he tells us he’s chosen not to fully develop his characters. Why? Because the characters are unimportant to his story. He lectures readers on a new way of approaching rationality as he crosses the US on a motorbike – rhetoric rules!

Early drafts of mine have suffered from an army of partially developed seen-once characters; their stories only included because I remember them, and often, because of the nature of my book, think they have shock value.

Once I sit down to edit, characters will be culled unless they serve my story’s purpose. A story has four purposes, called throughlines, which I’ll write about later. Througlines are a concept of Dramatica Pro, a tool I’ve written about here.

Consider anything excess which doesn’t support the story. Cut it.

Zen and the art of trust

A writer makes some kind of promise to each reader at the start of a book. Trust abused is the fastest way for a writer to find obscurity (or notoriety – think James Frey, Helen Demidenko, JT LeRoy, Stephen Glass). Trust lost is almost impossible for a writer to restore. (UPDATE 30 May 2008: People seemed interested in LeRoy, so I’ve written more about him here.)

When I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (discussed earlier here), I worried Pirsig lacked the skill to bring me back from the place he was taking me. I mean that I have bipolar disorder, and the depth of thinking he applied, and the expansiveness of his ideas, brought out in me deep thought and expanded thinking. Thinking thoughts no one else does and expanding thinking are early signals of a manic episode. The only reason I continued with the book was because I’d heard over and over it was a classic.

Because of these recommendations, I trusted Pirsig to return me to normal; thinking stretched, but not snapped. And he did.

For writers, we need to consider what promise we make to readers at the start of our memoir. Can we deliver on that promise? To fail is to decimate trust.

Zen and the art of memoir writing

Philosophy underlies writing, as it does any thought-based activity. Last weekend, I secluded myself in a friend’s house and immersed myself in creative non-fiction and evocative writing, and delighted myself in a book that expanded my thinking: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values.

What starts off as a memoir of a trip through US backroads, changes tack and delivers a challenge to the basis of rationality. Along the way, it provides a framework, whether in a scientific or artistic endeavour, for creating quality. In another entry, I will go into other reasons this book had such an impact on me, but for now I want to focus on this framework.

Curled up in front of a fire on an autumn night, Zen lays out a way of viewing the underlying form of things. Given yesterday’s discourse on my procrastination on my memoir, Pirsig combined with Proust will help me succeed: Think like Proust while I write; think like Pirsig while I edit.

I see now that attempting to explain this in one blog entry, or even the several I intend won’t do Zen justice. If you’re like me, it may have been one of those books on your I-must-get-around-to-reading list. If this is the case, make it the next book you read.

And if you didn’t know of it before now, consider yourself fortunate to be aware of it.

Proustian phenomenon

One way you can know your work is ready for print, writing instructors advise, is when you can read another writer’s work and see ways to improve. I experienced this the other day (which I wrote about here). But this writing advice is insufficient.

Over the years, publishers and authors have told me my book is ready to publish; composers and authors have thrust their agents upon me. My memoir, however, has always fallen short of my target. The reason I’ve lagged my feet all these years (which I wrote about here) is because I lacked clarity about the end result.

My best friend, Paul, gave me the picture of the completed work I needed when he introduced me to Proust’s ideas, that my work, rather than being analytical, needed to be evocative.

Life writing instructor Patti Miller expands on this in The Memoir Book:

I believe it is important to write not from topics, but from individual memory. Memories are aroused and connect to one another not by orderly logical progression but, as we have seen, by a complex linking of senses and emotions across the brain…

What it means is that you only need one sensory aspect of the memory to be activated for all the rest to come flooding back. Some researchers call this the “Proustian phenomenon”. It is the key to the memory-based approach to writing memoir rather than the topic-based approach.

And just to make sure I got the message, as if my best friend and my writing instructor weren’t clear enough, God delivered me a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past via my ex’s hands.

I’m excited because this Proustian phenomenom may enable me to write my memoir on my terms.

Life writing defintions

Clarity is the foundation of success in any project. If you don’t know what you’re setting out to do, how do you judge whether you achieved your aim.

Life writing instructor, Patti Miller in The Memoir Book gives the following definitions of the different forms of life writing (which she defines as “non-fiction writing on subjects of personal experience and observation; it includes autobiography, biography, memoir, memoirs, personal essay, and travel and sojourn writing”:

• Autobiography: “an account of a whole life – from one’s origins to the present.”
• Biography: “seems clearly enough an account of someone else’s life, although it too can spread out at its edges to include elements of memoir.”
• Memoir: “an aspect of a life shaped by any number of parameters, including time, place, topic, or theme.”
• Memoirs: “about an aspect of a life… but memoirs have come to mean the reminiscences of the famous in relation to their public achievements.”
• Personal essay: “closely related to memoir in that it often includes the writer’s personal memories, but it is quite distinct in that memories are not included for their own sake, but at the service of an idea.”

Miller goes on to say that the skills used to write memoirs can be applied to any of these forms of creative nonfiction.