A distractable writer and author who is attempting to learn everything (and ends up writing about most of it).

I pulled out three from my memoir pile to introduce you to more specifically. These three took me completely out of my own world and introduced me to three very new worlds.

The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong is the story of a Catholic nun who left to be a historical and theological scholar in the 1960s when the Catholic church was undergoing some intense changes. A fascinating glimpse into the very cloaked life of the convent and how Armstrong created a life separate from it.

Lifesaving by Judith Barrington is the story of the author’s search for family and herself after the death of her parents on a cruise ship off the coast of Greece. The most shocking piece of this book is the author as a child with her parents on a boat off the coast of England. I won’t say anymore, but wow! This short, concise memoir is so beautifully written, I have hauled it around with me for days. Written by a master of memoir.

Dakota by Kathleen Norris is this week’s read and so good! The author moved back to her grandparent’s Dakota farm and talks about finding her humanness in the bleak and lonely small country towns that are the Dakotas. Just a gorgeous piece of writing and I am loving it!

If you’re interested in reading a pile of memoirs (at least 10 is my recommendation), click on one or two of these links and see what else comes up from Amazon as another option for purchase. That’s how I find a lot of books (also ask reading friends or writing friends for recs on what is good to read). You won’t regret it. What a journey! I’m a changed person for sure.

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Yeah, I’m a bit behind schedule, because of a month of traveling and then a month of being sick. Well, I’m back on schedule with today and tomorrow’s posts. Yippee!

The books I’ve been reading are all memoirs. And good ones to boot. I thought I’d give you a list with links so you could check them out and then I have some thoughts about the memoir book pile as a whole.

Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott
Blue Like Jazz by Don Miller
Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd
Called Out of Darkness by Anne Rice
Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany by Frances Mayes
Reaching for God by Eileen Mitson
When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd

Quite a pile. It was a very good exercise to immerse me into memoir. As a result, I have a working outline of a memoir-esque manuscript. And the pressure is on! Not on my writing, but on my ability to be authentic. I have to tell the truth. I have never actually stared at that so intensely before. I think as Christians we might be conditioned (at least I was) to speak in overly glowing terms about life rather than to be authentic. Being real is tough in our modern Christian culture. We’ve ghetto-ized ourselves into a corner. If we say it doesn’t work, the world can say Christianity is false, but if we continue with this claim that our form of Christianity works, we risk losing our own souls.

Whoa, that was deep. I loved reading these (some for the first time, some for the second time, some for the seventh time, hello, Annie Lamott!) and after I finished each book, I felt this intense satisfaction fill my heart. I see God working in lives in every single one of these books. My experience may be completely different and my understanding of life may be completely different, but I see growth in these lives. The power of a living God is so evident, from Don Miller’s experiences on the campus of Reed College with their “confession” booth, to Anne Rice’s starkly clear memories of her childhood Catholic parish, to Sue Monk Kidd’s yearning to find out how to be human.

Christians get lost just like anyone else. Our searching isn’t to doubt what we believe but to gently poke and prod to find out if we are human, if we still feel, if we still know. Jesus saves. But He doesn’t turn us into perfect saints. We’ll spend our lives seeking humanness, even as we look skyward.

I thoroughly enjoyed the immersion into these lives. I challenge everyone to gather a pile of memoirs (these are just a smattering of what’s out there) and just read one after the other. You’ll find it brings a clarity with which you look at your own life.

And that’s what it is all about.

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We writers have issues. The blank page or computer screen is like a mirror reflecting back to us every insecurity we can possibly feel, including the following:

1. Fatigue and laziness. Writing is often the last thing we have time for after a long day of work or parenting or school, thus we’re often tired when we begin to write. We often mistake this as laziness, or we just want to be lazy and watch television or go out with friends. Neither of those are wrong, but if you find that you are apprehensive about writing because you are tired or want to just be lazy, you’re facing a strong sense of insecurity.

2. Procrastination. This is just really easy to do with regard to our writing. We can procrastinate like no one else. Writing takes the kind of brain muscles that can shrink down practically faster than they get built up. So, procrastination is a major worry.

3. Apprehension about writing skill. We all wonder if our writing is up to par. I say the only way to find out is to just write. It’s much easier to fix writing that’s down on the page. I’m much worse about organizing my thoughts than my words on the page.

4. Apprehension about writing flow. We always worry we’ll run out of things to write or we’ll go off on a tangent and write about things that make no sense to anyone but ourselves. I’m there every single day.

5. Impatience. We’re cursed to live in such an instant society (Allison Winn Scotch writes today about going without a cell phone for a few days while she waited to receive her replacement iPhone.) It’s a lesson to learn to slow down and just write for the heck of writing, not for publication or for people to think we’re amazing.

6. Perfectionism. Ah, perfectionism. My personal Dr. Jekyll. I swear when I start sweating over writing perfectly, I turn into such an odd person.

7. Writing rules (including grammar). A lot of writers struggle with writing their amazing stories because they worry that they don’t know the rules of grammar. This is easily remedied by looking back over the work and editing it using a helpful grammar guide (I recommend Gregg’s Reference Manual; clear to understand and what we call in my industry “our best-kept secret guide.”) Other writers don’t know about plot or how to create characters. All this can be learned.

So, how does a writer deal with these worries?

It seems like a lot of worry. Why do we continue to attempt this practice? Why continue?

Because we love it. Because we can’t not continue to do it.

How do we deal with these worries?

We write. Every day at the same time, in the same place, on the same story or on different stories. We make it a habit and we do it in spite of all the worry and insecurities.

And then we win. Because publication is not the final goal most of the time. It’s a side show. It’s the fact that a writer wrote something that matters.

Now go. Write.

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Continuing in the vein of yesterday’s post, I think being willing to change in your life’s role is to grow.

Do we know how difficult it is to grow? It’s kind of an amazing feat. Have you ever noticed a blip of a plant grow up through the soil? I remember all those rapid exposure videos on Sesame Street showing us kids how a seed grows. They always fascinated me for some reason. I was not given much of a green thumb either. Luckily I married a guy with two green thumbs.

I’ve grown in the past month. I’m kinda proud of myself. I got handed insurmountable obstacles (at least they appeared to me that way) and I made it past them, around them, over them, and am still going. It’s good growth.

I like to think I can keep this up. But I’m going to need some help. I went to the library and hauled home a stack of books, all about growth into new areas that I need to learn more about. It’s good to grow.

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As I sort through memories of my May trip overseas, I find myself staring at pictures I took (usually wondering what I was thinking as I took it; so many blurry ones to choose from) and today this one caught my eye.

We were underground the old fort in Corfu-town and trying to figure out how to get back out when I put my head up and snapped this picture. I don’t think it was because it was a great shot or anything, but it was a WAY OUT ALIVE as we had just spotted a very large and scary looking spider scuttling across our path (and I had just slipped on a slippery step and caught myself at the last minute before cracking my head open) and I wanted to get back to light and out of the dungeon.

As I read memoir and work on writing memoir, these same feelings come to me. Especially when I’m inside various memories that I don’t care to dwell on too intimately. I just kinda slide right out of them, hastily scrawling some unoriginal universal truth over the top of what hurts. I want out and how!

Memoir is tough in that it forces me to think about where I was at the time of the incident and what my response was. Truthfully, I’m not a quick responder, well I wasn’t through most of my life anyway. I was a mediator, see. I was the middle between two sides. I always had that position in my family, in my church, among my closest friends. In the past few years, I’ve not had to be this mediator. I’m not the “leader” of a large group of people anymore (oldest sister, oldest girl in our church, oldest girl among my friends), as now I’m one of the group. No longer am I mediating or being the knowledgeable one; I was for probably twenty years.

My younger brother and sisters don’t need me to point the way anymore (I’m not sure they needed me as much as I thought they did all those years ago either) and that has been a learning experience in itself. I love being able to marvel at the brilliance of my sister who now teaches me about human resources and being an effective employee (I have a lot to learn!). I love hearing about how my other sister can spin magic in her Quickbooks accounts, keeping a business running and learning how to keep it running all at the same time! I didn’t teach either of them those things. I now learn from them.

So, memoirs show me a lot of stuff that I never sat down and thought about before. It’s a good thing! Five years ago I would have panicked at not being the mediator or the leader. Now, I shrug. Who cares? I don’t want that role any more anyway. It was good for a time, but now it’s so obsolete. I live in another state, and I’m in new roles: wife, employee, writer. In a few years, those roles will change again. That’s what life IS. Thank goodness, we don’t live static lives in which we don’t move an inch. Our lives move and boy do they ever!

What draws me to memoir is tracing in my own life how I’ve changed and how things have moved. And it reminds me that I’m drawn to stories of survival and light. I can’t read on and on about being underground; I need to know these people made it out . . . alive.

Off to work on some pieces today. Happy Tuesday!

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I love Greece! So, who wouldn’t, right? It’s a gorgeous country, chock full of history everywhere you look.

I sat in the shade (saving my whiteness from the 100-plus-degree weather) with the monkey, who was a really good traveler to take along. He preferred hiding in my purse actually.

This is souvlaki (minus the kabobs, which were already gone), one of the Greek dishes offered everywhere. The other dish, gyros, (pronounced euros) was always freshly made every day on the spit. They closed the restaurants early after breakfast in order to roast the meat (even on the ferry from Greece to Italy). Very cool food.

The only way to stay cool on a Greek island (unless you’re on a yacht going between the islands, Ryan!). We utilized this pool quite a lot that day.

View from my hotel room on Corfu, Greece. We had wonderful rooms (even got a nice upgrade!) and even though I had to share the bathroom with the boys, that was a very nice place to stay for a few days. I’d love to go back! Right, Michelle? Here we come!

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Dysfluency is the inability to write. Dorothea Brande’s book, Becoming a Writer, is now the standard (her solution for it was free writing, now used as the first step to getting unstuck or moving to fluency) on working through these issues. You can plan to write all you want, but actually doing it may be an entirely different issue.

Julia Cameron espouses free writing in her famous Artist’s Way series, so there is something to it.

Read Brande’s words:

Write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember it; the activities of the day before; a conversation, real or imaginary; an examination of conscience. Write any sort of reverie, rapidly and uncritically. The excellence or ultimate worth of what you write is of no importance yet . . . your primary purpose is not to bring forth deathless words, but to write any words at all which are not pure nonsense.

This produces what Brande termed the “full, abundant flow” otherwise called fluency. The key to understanding why fluency is so hard to attain comes from understanding two things about writing, termed by Robert Boice as 1. What makes writing so inherently difficult? and 2. What other hindrances do writers bring to writing?

1. For me, writing isn’t hard as long as I’m writing nonsense. I can toss out blog posts full of gossip or advice off the top of my head like there’s nothing inherently difficult about it. That’s the problem. I have strengthened certain writing muscles (probably the most obnoxious ones) and the smaller, more important writing muscles are still hiding. It’s the same as our body’s muscular systems. A workout dvd I’ve been using and have gotten friends and family hooked on is one from a dancer who tires out the bigger muscles in order to strengthen the smaller muscles (in arms, legs, torso) so that the strength is in toning, not in bulk. (I love this workout dvd; it does wonderful things to your arms.)

I think that has a lot to say about writing and it being difficult. It’s certain parts of writing that I find hard. I get lost in more serious pieces and I write so well just instantly that I don’t linger over the sentences and find the perfect word instead of a placeholder.

This is why I’m in a writing class. I want to slow down. I want to figure out the best possible choice for that sentence. Sure, most of my writing is paid, so I want it to go fast (I’m making money, folks!) but sometimes with a project, it’s better to just slow it down and really consider the choices you are making, much like turning rocks over in your hand after the ocean has brought them in on the tide. You pick and choose. You don’t just pick up every single rock you find.

2. The other piece of dysfluency is what sort of baggage we writers bring to the writing task. Most of what really works in our writing hurts–a lot! We can’t quite touch it because it hurts so badly or we hold it at arm’s length and refuse to come any closer. An electric charge exists around these pieces of our writing or psyche and we’d much rather just write nonsense or pieces about organizing or budgeting or going green than touch these pieces that are our solid gold. Writing is not something to hide in, although a lot of us professional writers do tend to hide in our corporate work. (My writing class is made up of several professionals and we all prefer our day job exhaustion to pouring out our deepest fears and worries.) But when we crash through and do it, we are intensely satisfied.

In my next post, I want to touch on worries that plague writers and keep them from moving closer to the deep writing that we all are searching so eagerly for. Until then, sending good vibes for your writing.

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I’ve seen calendars chock full in friends’ homes, in client offices, in my teachers’ agendas, and I wonder why we do it to ourselves?

We can’t go as fast as we can constantly. We need the down time. Why don’t we include this in our to-do list?

I am going to make a proclamation.

Everyone must schedule some down time every day. Other than sleep, other than meditating or praying or studying, and other than aimless television viewing.

“What? But that’s my down time!” I can hear the arguments.

Actually, you’re still doing something. But when do you just stop? When do you pour yourself a glass of lemonade and sit and watch clouds? When do you lay in the grass and allow yourself to be covered by ladybugs?

“Lovely idea, Trish. Can you get back to reality now?”

Sure. Here’s some reality: If you don’t stop, or refuse to slow down, your body and brain will do it for you.

How many reading this blog are tired, struggle with worry or fear, wrestle insecurities every minute, and wonder if they will ever be good enough?

Are we crazy? Why do we insist on flying through life without stopping to give ourselves the rest we crave and need?

I’ve talked a lot on this blog about how I need time to read stupid novels and watch reruns. I’m reconfiguring that as of yesterday. I sat outside on my back porch yesterday afternoon to watch the squirrels and birds and cats (and our resident Rocky Raccoon) interact yesterday. Oh the chaos. When I turned off the music, turned off the phone, turned off the writing conference and marketing conference mp3s I’ve been listening to endlessly, the animals were putting on a show. And it was hilarious.

I laughed so hard at the squirrel who had his hand inside the birdhouse, making sure he hadn’t missed the birds who flew the coop days ago. Then the birds who left sat on the railing cawing at him (their babies must be nearby) and suddenly a new cat (the one that has adopted our backyard) strolled around the corner of the house and startled the squirrel and the birds and it just made me laugh. All that drama.

Notice the bird and the cat and the squirrel don’t sit around and wonder if they’re going to be okay, if they’ve done enough, if they’re being mean or nice enough. And if they’re tired, they sleep.

I may have been sick for almost three weeks, but I’ve learned something. It is only us humans who add way too much to our days and thus come down with every cold, flu, and cough around. And it is only us who psyche ourselves out trying to keep up with the Keeping Up With the Joneses race that in reality doesn’t even exist.

Schedule some breathing room for yourself. Smell the flowers, stare at the clouds, take a nap in the sunshine. The world is a good place. You’re going to be just fine.

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I say this a dozen times and then don’t even really try to slow down. So my body decides to do it for me. I am well, and now dealing with a post-bronchitis cough and bronchial tube inflammation. It’s slightly ridiculous. I feel fine. My doctor is concerned about all the countries we went through in May. I did sneeze a lot through the Balkans and Greece. Hm. And now I have a corticosteroid inhaler (yes, like asthma, but not for asthma).

How to slow down?

That’s easy. (Not.)

1. A choice between good or better. Do I sit and read this book or this book? (The novel won out. Yep, back to some novels. Good ones too!) I have to remember what I’ve read that day already. How did I set my mood for the day? Frenetic or calm? If I set it up as calm, I can read the novel (which is what happened). However, if I started out my day as frenetic, I probably should take some time to be still, to stop.

2. Turning a blind eye to what I don’t need. J. Crew secret sale this week. I don’t need ONE THING, so I ignored it and updated my private LiveJournal blog for my Wedding Channel (now the LJ Crew) buddies. I only pop up once in a quarter, so it was time. I felt just as accomplished and everyone knows I’m still alive. Ha!

3. Take time to enjoy my surroundings. Todd’s been working on the backyard, much to the consternation of our backyard critters. The squirrels are upset and more so are the birds. And then we’ve inherited a cat. It has made itself quite comfortable in the backyard, drinking out of our fountain. Hm. But it’s fun to sit out there and watch the squirrels attempt to conquer the abandoned bird house and the bird screech at the cat who is too close to his wife. Ah, nature.

4. Refuse to stress about things I can’t control. Trying to figure out how to work better and smarter. It usually doesn’t work as well as I’d like, but for today, it’s enough. I think I’m winning.

Any other tips on slowing it down you can share?

The Inspired Room has a wonderful post on this very topic that I just love, plus she’s such a great decorator. I love her blog!

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