Memoir: Let Your Reader Come Inside

Baby it's cold outside

Photo by Onur Bahçıvancılar on Unsplash

This is a long post, a meandering path working with some ancestral Irish, I suspect. (Please scroll down for the audio link. Or click on title to read on-site.)

First though: I’m so encouraged by the dozen subscribers who decided to “go paid” this past week. Thank you, each, from the corners of my heart!

Holidays must be on my mind—is always how it feels this time of year. Thanksgiving kicks this off. And the lyrics to that old holiday song baby, it’s cold outside float to mind. I mull through the conversation I had with an ex-writing student, now friend, who borrowed my copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. She returned it over a cup of coffee, and said that Didion’s name-dropping and elitism did little for her. I had to agree. Didion is a particularly privileged person, yes, who appears to have been completely unaware of this fact.

My friend also mentioned how she felt left out of the book, the story, the grief process. There should have been places she could feel herself slip into the telling of the words, she said. But there weren’t.

Holes—

“Not like your book,” she said then. “There were all sorts of holes in your book, spaces for me.” It’s always strange to hear a friend critique one’s work, even a writer-friend. It caught me off guard. My brain scrambled to think of “holes”—did they exist? How had they happened?

We want our stories to function in certain ways, for our readers to see and feel and hear. We want them not to feel excluded. And feedback on whether this works is good. Positive, negative, or “constructive,” as they call it.

The truth though is that I didn’t do this consciously. But it happened, and she’s not the first to say. And there are things that—due to time, due to moving on to the next project, moving on to life!—I’ve never stopped and analyzed this particular piece.

Then again, I might go slightly out of my mind if I begin to analyze everything— there’s that. We move on, and write more.

Or Hat

I’m writer and teacher. But when head down at desk, it’s with a writer’s hat. It’s hard to wear two hats; one falls off or distracts. I’ve also done my share of freelance editing, so there’s that hat, too. But when writing, editing hat is (or should be) hung up on the wall.

Editor hat steps in and says tidbits about structure and maybe “cut this,” “expand this,” and “what—exactly—are you trying to say here,” with emphasis on “trying.” Good questions. But I need to get the work out first.

Time for editor hat is usually when re-writing. Then it spends more time on my head than any other. It works, too, if I’m stuck. Teacher hat might come out then too, for some bit of analysis.

Workshop note! Teacher—and editor—hat is what you develop when you workshop with the works of others. And it’s not only about pinpointing what isn’t working; it’s about articulating what is working, too.

(I digress: Anyone up for that novel-writing workshop I’ve mentioned a couple times now?? Email me, please!)

That’s the piece I struggle with after the comments of my friend: How—exactly—did I leave holes for the reader?