Today's prompt from StoryADay.org leader Julie Duffy was to take a story that could be a piece of one's memoir and turn it into a fictional story. The idea behind this prompt was that memoir is beginning to generate eye rolls among book publishers and agents. It's healthy to write memoir, the common line goes. But it's becoming more difficult to sell. So the answer: why not take real life and fictionalize it? With Kindles and ebooks, fiction is enjoying a much-welcomed rebound. Fiction can sell.
The prompt was one I could disregard, but the remark about eye rolls from publishers and agents got a bit under my skin, sort of like a comment from a successful memoir writer about morning pages, a practice I have maintained for 15 years, being a waste of time. I am capable of writing fiction, but I have come to realize that non-fiction is what I personally enjoy. Why make it up when the truth is so incredible? Just tell it like it is.
Over the past year, I have served as an instructor (or what my college sometimes refers to as "tutor") for several students developing major writings. I have used books on writing practices, examples of personal essay and book-length memoir, and texts on the art and craft of memoir writing to guide the students along. I also have shared personal strategies and my own experiences, as a way of helping them developing a practice that will work for themselves. These endeavors have been enormously fulfilling for me as an assistant professor who is seeking to define her own niche in an increasingly fragmented and dispersed higher educational environment. Taking a leaf from one of my colleagues who is of close to equal rank to me in seniority but considerably older and wiser in the world of lived experiences, I have found myself urging students to write not for the sake of publication but for the sake of the art, craft, and practice of writing itself. My own embrace of writing challenges in April (a poem a day) and in May (a story a day) and perhaps in June (a blog post a day) have been geared as well toward experimentation and innovation in craft.
But what about the world of the market? Is it worth writing just for the sake of writing? Or is that mere practice of writing a waste of time? Should one be marketing one's self as a writer? Should one be submitting work actively? How does one balance the demands of a day job against the passion to write?
And perhaps the clincher question is this: Is one a writer if one writes without regard for the market?
I ponder these questions daily, especially on days when dirty dishes pile up in the sink, workouts get short-changed, and the tasks of the day job end up taking a back seat to something that feels more artful and inspiring, like writing just for the hell of it.
I did have a day job once that involved writing all the time. I eventually left it because I hated the pressure to produce, and to be writing always with readers in mind. The job was that of a newspaper reporter, and I look back on those years now with a great deal of fondness and appreciation for what I experienced. But I also remember the things I did not like: Not being able to express a personal opinion, suspicion over the use of the pronoun "I", and the fact that it seemed like the job did not offer space for one to write just for fun.
"Take an hour a day," my mother would say. "Write for yourself."
"I don't want to write more," I would whine back. "Writing is work. When I come home, I want to relax."
Years and years later, I have appreciated the subsequent day jobs that I have been blessed to have -- copy editor, adjunct instructor, writer-in-residence, fitness coach, arts fund-raiser, and now faculty/mentor -- because they did and still do allow me the time and space to write just for fun. Without the pressure to produce writing for a paycheck, writing has become for me more personal, more artful, more creative and flexible. More free-flowing, more fun.
Yet, it is still work. Because, in part, one is not a writer if one is not writing to be read. Too many negatives in that sentence. Let me rephrase it in a positive way. One writes to be read. Readers comprise a market. So hence one writes for a market, though the explosion of blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, and do-it-yourself publishing is altering the meaning of market. Words that used to sell now sometimes must pay to be published. In short, from my perspective, writing for the hell of it is not a viable way to earn a living, in and of itself. If it is, I am not in on the secret.
But even as writing might fail to earn you a living, it might earn you a life. Telling your story contributes to the collective consciousness of a society, as poet-turned-memoir writer Judith Barrington put it. Contributing to the collective consciousness is an act of self-actualization, creative fulfillment, community building, political organizing, and ultimately social justice. It is a way of stepping outside the mundane realities of the day to consider the bigger pictures that frame those realities.
My best writing moment today occurred in the onion fields. I was not writing at all. I was knee deep in soil, pulling out tens of thousands of tiny weeds, trying to cleanse the soil of as many unneeded roots as I could so that our red and yellow storage onions, our Walla Walla sweets, our leeks, and our shallots would have more space in the ground beneath me to stretch out, expand, and grow. As I was using my nails and a small hand trowel to loosen the miniature grasses, succulents, and clovers, my mind was on my book manuscript and a conversation within it that occurs between my mother and me. What was the point of that story? I let my mind sift over that question as my fingers wove in between roots, stems, and soil. Why did it strike the chord that it did? What is its significance in the larger scheme of things?
An answer came. It spoke of what life to me was all about: a quest to understand why racism persists, why differences are tolerate but not embraced, how religious make people feel righteous. It struck me that lots of people have gone on this quest and documented their journeys on a grand, massive societal scale. Fewer have looked at how the quest affects them on an individualized level. Perhaps the quest is too frightening when considered in such a personal way. Perhaps the fear is what makes it unmarketable. Or perhaps it is not that the fear is unmarketable, but that the writer fears the consequences of entering such a market. Could perhaps this be the real reason that memoir doesn't sell? Is it perhaps the reason to write memoir, regardless?
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