The Dark Knight instructs

Whenever life becomes too hard, I beat a cinematic escape. A few weeks ago: The Dark Knight. Knowing what helps you refocus and recharge can renew your commitment to life’s extraordinary demands.

What does the latest Batman movie have to do with writing memoir? As a child, I immersed myself in the worlds of certain characters and took on their traits. Now such escape offers a different level of perspective.

Toward the film’s end, the questions arise: Should Batman be the hero Gotham City deserves? Or should he be the hero the city needs?

Why not both? Back to my memoir, I need to be both the hero it deserves (doing it well), and the hero it needs (getting it done). I now write for three publications regularly, and delivering publication-worthy content has finally got my writing to the level my memoir needs. I’ve found my uber-standout voice. Now the heroic task is to express that voice on every edited page of my memoir.

Superman syndrome

AKA ‘Big boys don’t cry’ or ‘Real men pull themselves up by their bootstraps’. Real men don’t make excuses for why they fail to keep their commitments, to themselves and others, but they are honest about dealing with the reasons that keep them from being Supermen.

I’ve never had a tooth pulled. Never, that is, until last Wednesday, when I surrendered my bottom-right Wisdom tooth, and the molar in front of it, to the dental student who relished in his God-like role above me.

Stumbled into the wall on the way out and figured that after a few hours, when the numbness wore off, I’d be able to knuckle down to work. I’d handled getting my teeth removed like a real man.

But the numbness masked pain – as much pain as had made me want to get the teeth removed. The following week became a blur of eating choc-hazelnut sandwiches at odd hours so the the painkillers weren’t digested on an empty stomach, and a semi-conscious fog as I slept in the four pain-free hours before the painkillers wore off. Work got pushed to one side and I couldn’t concentrate on what people were saying.

Today, I awaken from the painkiller blur into a different world. My brother broke his back in three places. Another family member verges on psychosis. Someone else in the family is trying to get me to give up on him – like everyone else.

The week I’ve had dealing with my pain has taught me how to handle its highs and lows. Now, still in pain, I’m called to reach out to help others in their pain.

What is the difference between excuses and reasons? Excuses are lies you tell yourself to get yourself off the hook. Reasons are the admission that after trying all the options you could in the time you had, you still didn’t succeed.

Right now, I may not meet all my work commitments. I may make mistakes in my personal relationships. But I’m not Superman. And I’m a better man for it.

Managing writing demands

As a writing coach, one of the top concerns people bring to me is the lack of time to write. Although I’ve always been able to help people, it wasn’t until I started revising my memoir that I’ve come to appreciate how tough it can be to find the time for my most important work.

So these are my top tips to write the most in whatever time you can carve out for yourself:

• Banish the belief that you need big chunks of time to get anything worthwhile done. A few minutes here and there throughout the day will add up to the big chunks you’re after.
• Do something every day – bar one. Take at least one day off from your customary work each week. You’ll gain freshness and many of your writing dramas will solve themselves.
• Think through your day to foresee pockets of time you can use, and make sure you have your notepad, laptop, and any files you need. You can get a lot done in your commute. On public transport you can work in a notepad. In a car, dictate into a digital voice recorder.
• For speed’s sake, invest in dictation software. It takes a while to train it, but when it’s up to speed, your speed is up.

Another aspect needed is motivation, which comes from setting mini-milestones on a big project and achieving them. This, however, is another blog for another time.

Work expands to fill the time available

How long does it take to finish a writing project?

Whether you’re a writer or the last time you wrote was for school, you may be familiar with the following scenario:

You’re given three weeks to complete a writing assignment. When do you start it? The night before it’s due. Do you win a passing grade? Quite probably.

So how long did it take? All up, less than 12 hours. Would it have affected the quality of your work if the teacher had only given you two days to do it? Not at all.

Someone said, “Work expands to fill the time available.”

Now to connect this to memoir writing, work on a memoir with only a vague sense of the finish line – when it’s perfect – means that the work expands to fill the indefinite time. No matter how many improvements are made, you can always see more that could be done. New techniques to try, which end up with revisions to the book from start to finish.

An insight I gained recently was to treat book chapters as articles, rather than daunting 100,000 word behemoths. I’ve set a deadline to quit reading other people’s memoirs and creative nonfiction (30 June), and start the physical task of editing my manuscript. Once I begin that task, I give myself a deadline of completing one chapter a week.

And if I cram, I just may get it done.

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.

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.

Throw the gauntlet down

My best friend, Paul, challenged me to drop the distractions and finish my memoir. He’s seen me throw up excuse year after year – business ideas, community projects, and an assortment of incomplete writing projects – that demand time, energy, and money that deserves to be focused on one thing: finishing what I started 14 years ago.

Life writing instructor, Patti Miller, in The Memoir Book, looks at several reasons why budding memoirists struggle to finish their projects:

• Would anyone want to read what I’m writing about? Is it worth putting all this time and effort into it?
• What right do I have to present the less favourable side of others?
• Where do I start?
• How do I end the “one day I’ll do it” quandry?
• How do I restart when the project stalls?

Miller’s answers are to sidestep the problems or stare them down.

For me, I believe I’ve been called to tell my story and it’s my duty to carry this through to completion. Every opportunity or invitation that comes my way now gets evaluated against this question: Does it lead me closer to completing my memoir or further away?

How to treat characters – Part I: Extending grace

In the 21st century, it’s as easy to find fault as it’s ever been. What makes the difference now is there’s a market for memoirs that find the fault in everybody in the author’s life.

But is this the only way? And if it isn’t, what makes so many want to read and support the work of writers who do nothing but gripe and moan about the people in their shallow lives?

As I began work anew on my memoir, I was clear on this: It’s not a revenge book. Sure I was emotionally abused. Sure I was sexually abused. Sure I came from a broken home. And, I’m sure, readers could understand if I felt ticked off about what happened to me and the adults who let me down.

Most importantly, to tell my story, I do need to talk about things other people have done that aren’t particularly nice (and I’ll talk about taking a stand against wrongdoing in my next post). (Updated 5 April 2008 – “How to treat characters – Part II: Taking a stand” is here.)

So how do I get around this? Follow Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s lead in Holding Up the Sky. Throughout her memoir she says kind things of people, and if there’s anything bad to say, she often says nothing at all.

The only exception: When she’s taking a stand against injustice. Even then she keeps her thoughts short and minimises hurt to the person.

A very different approach to the spill-everything-about-everyone (emotional) gore memoirs.

Telling the story only you can tell

As I study memoirs to master my craft, I’m finding the most powerful are those where the authors tell the stories only they can tell.

Anyone could list Robert Mugabe’s atrocities to show he’s evil, but Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky offers fresh insight. Her parents came to visit her in South Africa via Zimbabwe. They weren’t able to get their Air Zimbabwe flight because of Mugabe’s practice of commandeering one of their jets because he feared a private plane would be shot down.

As this applies to my memoir: I can tell of a dad who seemed not to notice what was in front of his face, and the difficulties this has caused because of my love for him. I can tell of a step-mum who deals with her brother perpetrating sexual abuse by accusing me of doing the same thing. I can tell of a Grandma whose number one value is family as she balances believing in her grandson and believing in her son. I can tell of a favourite uncle who abused me for reasons I don’t understand and who I continue to see and interact with.

These are the things only I can say.

Teaching readers to cope

Why do readers choose memoirs tackling the hard topics? I believe the answer is to learn how to cope.

Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky tells her stories of working in South Africa through the end of apartheid. In the early hours of 2 February 1990, the same day Nelson Mandela was released, a savage slaughter was carried out in a community so close to Sandy she had to become involved:

I had learnt to flick a switch in situations like this. There would be time later for the shock to sink in. Right now, people needed us to act quickly and calmly and not add to their panic. On the inside, I didn’t know how I could bear more killing, more loss. Putting those thoughts aside…

In my memoir I could almost transplant that passage, the coping mechanism is so similar:

I had learnt to switch off in situations like this. There would be time later for me to wonder what I’d done wrong this time to invite the rape. Right now, Bruce needed me to be quiet; more, if I wasn’t silent, he promised he’d kill me. On the inside, I didn’t know how I could bear being used to sexually fulfill him sometimes and then be bullied the rest of the time. Putting those thoughts aside…

Yes, I know that’s out and out plagiarism, so I wouldn’t use it. But the similarity in coping with harsh realities is worth comment. And I do wish I’d written it myself.