99 New: Buried Stuff

So I’m reading this book – Fast-Draft Your Memoir in 45 Hours – because I watched an online class featuring the book’s author, Rachael Herron, and because I want to fast-track my writing.

A few passages hit home. Herron says “So let’s make this clear now: no one wants to hear about your perfect life. It’s boring.” She continues, ” We want to hear how people failed, how they tried, how they made mistakes, and how they survived in spite of their imperfections. That’s all we want. Show your reader the worst of you,and they’ll believe the best.”

Herron reminded me that the best memoirs are pretty raw stories. I’m thinking now of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild as an example, a rugged story of grief and hiking that bleeds  on practically every page. Herron’s alert that memoir needs to tackle the rough stuff made me think of how far my own writing would have to develop to be that authentically raw.

I’ve often thought I haven’t had enough trouble to write a good memoir but that probably isn’t true. There’s enough material but maybe not enough practiced honesty – like I’m bringing a kid’s plastic shovel to a chore requiring an excavator. I’ve had a couple of good essays got fairly far upstream before getting tossed and it was always, in my opinion, for having pulled a punch, ‘not going there,’ there being where it was messy and inexplicable, where I hurt people, left them by the side of the road, or was left. I wrote well but stopped just short of the fire.

So there’s a lot to think about and I’m only on page 16.