PoleStar

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It’s so nice to have blogger friends; they’re a fountain of writing prompts. If all I ever did was respond to other people’s blog posts in my own blog, I’d never be stuck for material. Call me the lazy jackal to Betsy or Averil or MSB‘s insouciant and intrepid honey badger,* but that’s the writing life, baby.

Today was great pickings in blog world. Agent and former editor Betsy Lerner asks:

When you sit down to write, to start something new, have you made a host of decisions such as point of view, tense, style, etc. or do you start writing and see what happens, see how it comes out? After all you can always revise. Do you plan your story, outline it, make index cards, jot notes on napkins, or do you set out into the forest and see what you find, hope for crumbs. Is the creative process enhanced or compromised by planning.

How do you roll?

My answer: I have to plan, or I will get lost. I will end up on Facebook, calling it “research.” I need a polestar** to guide me. That doesn’t mean I can’t wander and take side roads to discover something new, but there has to be at least an attempt at structure, or else how will I even know that I’m wandering?

Of course, I’m a total newb at writing a book, but in a sense, I’ve been planning for it my whole life. Which means I’ve either been wasting my time instead of writing, or else I just wasn’t ready. I hope this much buildup leads to a big payoff, at least in terms of quality.

I recently got an illuminating glimpse of a different approach to memoir while re-reading Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories. In a chapter that appears to be a review of Czeslaw Milosz’s memoir (which I’m going to get in a hurry), Native Realm, she compares his views on memoir with the “probing,” “absence of reticence,” TMI-approach of American authors. For Milosz, memoir (and the “self” writing the memoir) is not rooted in psychology so much as in history. But it is the specificity of personal detail (whether it be memories recorded in a diary or the expenses for a dinner party in a home account book) which renders history real, and not merely an abstraction, the stage where ideologies play. I’m probably misrepresenting him, and will have to read the whole book to get a better grasp, but I’m not terribly off the mark, I don’t think.

Of course, making myself a figure within a huge historical context (for me it’s the first half of the twentieth century), I run the risk of getting too splayed out, of having too much to say, not all of it pertinent. But life seen as a product, and in the context, of history, is a richer, deeper loess in which to cultivate a story than the meager and solipsistic topsoil of (my) memory.*** And as one teacher enlightened me, we think we’re the seer, but in truth we are the seen. I think I’ve at times avoided writing partly because I couldn’t detach myself enough for that former self to be clearly seen; I was thinking that person is me, and she’s not. Needless to say, the act of writing will push that identity farther into the distance, and I might someday remember no more of her than I would a drunken one-night stand of my youth. As somebody else wrote, I don’t write to remember, I write to forget.

Betsy once declaimed the need for a “universal chord” in a memoir. If it’s a chord, what are the different notes? What sort of harmony is it meant to express? Is it a major chord, or minor? Of course, there’s more than one way to achieve universality, and I suspect that I may discover a few of them before I FTF. But for the time being, I think that what Milosz is talking about could be my longed-for polestar on the road to achieving it.

Happy new year!

*(Watch the video, especially take note of the section beginning at 1:45.)

**No, that’s not a stripper reference. That’s how Hare Krishnas write “pole star,” aka the North Star. Long story.

***Those with time to waste spare can discuss whether I’ve punctuated that sentence properly or not. I think it’s right, but the main thing is that it satisfies my Minimum Daily Requirement for commas.