Finally, put it aside. Put it out of your head at least a week. You want it to set up like jello. And when you pick it back up, ask yourself, What haven’t I said? How might someone else involved have seen it differently?
Charm is from the Latin carmen: to sing. By “charm,” I mean sing well enough to hold the reader in thrall. Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You’ll need both sides of yourself – the beautiful and the beastly – to hold a reader’s attention.
Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore.
I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.
Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It’s not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.
Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I’m in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelbarrows of gold.
Truth works a trip wire that permits the book to explode into being.
The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.
In those days, I still enjoyed a child’s desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe.
The American religion-so far as there is one anymore-seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he’ll never be found wrong.
The memoirist’s job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.
What would you write if you weren’t afraid?
Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you’re shaping the past’s meaning.
The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body’s tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome.
If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it. Zora Neale Hurston.
A university is a city of ideas, and we’re grateful you became citizens of our city.
Far as I can tell, a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it.
I threw away over 1,200 finished pages of my last memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind. If I had any balls at all, I’d make a brooch out of it.
Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. James Wood, How Fiction Works As.