Pontificating times three

Longtime reader and recent delurker Luisa emailed me with three questions, which I’ll summarize here:

1. If I write my story, it may be painful for people I care about, which makes me feel guilty. Should I go ahead and do it anyway? How do I deal with this, practically and emotionally?

Luisa, this is another big issue that comes up frequently with writing memoir. Should you write your story, even if it might be painful to others to read? I think you should. If you feel compelled to write your story, you will not be satisfied until you do so. And anybody who returns your love and caring will want you to have the catharsis and satisfaction of writing down what happened to you, and what you did about it. As you said in your email, your life story belongs to you. And the events happened as they did whether you write about them or not; there’s no taking them back or changing them now. You can pretend they didn’t happen, for the sake of other people, but they did happen, and you remember them, and now they want to come out of you. So it’s time they did.

There may even be ways to make it less painful for those you want to protect. One way is to shield them from what you’re writing by not sharing it with them. I usually recommend that writers don’t share their first drafts with anyone except people who are explicitly helping them write. This includes teachers, classes, mentors, and writing groups; this does not include family, friends, or anyone who may be mentioned in or affected by the material. First drafts are precious and fragile, as are the people who write them, so protect your first draft and yourself and your loved ones by not sharing it with them.

Once you’ve gotten through a first draft, you can then go back to the material and see if you want to edit out parts that might be especially upsetting to people you care about. There are many things I left out of Girlbomb, because I thought they’d be upsetting to others, or a violation of their privacy. Then there’s stuff that was upsetting that I left in. But you have to write it first for yourself, and then worry about others.

Other ways to protect people you care about: Leave them out of the story, to the extent you’re able to; change their names and identifying characteristics; call the thing fiction. The author Stephen Elliott also had this advice: “Make them physically beautiful in your story – if you do that, they’ll probably forgive anything else you wrote about them.”

But in all honesty, people may be hurt by what you write. It happens. And it sucks. It sucks for them, and it sucks for you. But please don’t let that stop you from writing down your story. It’s important that you do so, especially if there is pain, shame, guilt, and other negative emotion attached to it. Write it for yourself, and worry about others later. Just write.

2. As a speaker of both Spanish and English, in a country where many people speak French, finding my voice is a challenge. What language should I write in?

Your “voice” has little to do with what language you write in, and lots to do with word choice, sentence length, rhythm, and the level of formality or intimacy with which you address the reader. Books are often translated from one language to another, but the sense of the writer’s voice and the meaning of the writer’s words remain the same – when people translate Kerouac, they retain his sentence structure, his slang, and his poetic style, no matter what the language. Nobody’s making Kerouac sound like Nabokov, or vice versa. So I think you should write in whatever language is most comfortable for you, in the voice you’d use to talk to a trusted friend, and if it needs translation into another language for purposes of sharing it with others, you can either translate it yourself when the project is finished, or find native speakers of whichever language you’ve chosen to be your support group.

3. I feel guilty about writing when there’s stuff that needs to be done around the house. After all, I’m not a “real” writer with deadlines, so how do I justify the time I spend?

Luisa, do you ever watch TV? Read books? Take long baths? Do anything “unproductive”? Well, then you can certainly take the time to write, which is totally productive, even if you don’t have deadlines or publication credits. It produces a happier you, and that’s all the productivity you need. So get to it!

Comments

[satia]

Well, #1 sort of answers that question I asked you so you just killed two birds with one stone.

And again, thank you for NOT mentioning me in your first memoir. But you know, you never did talk about how drop dead gorgeous I am in the second one. You need to get working on that for the third memoir.

[Kirsten]

That was a really interesting notation about Kerouac and translations of his work. I've always been tortured by how one can translate poetry? I mean, how does one translate rhythm and rhyme? And, yet, one of my favorites -- whom I read in English -- wrote all his works in Spanish -- Pablo Neruda.

[Luisa]

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond. I guess the fear of losing stability in my relationships is stronger than my need to write. All the fragments and scenes are scattered in notebooks and little files here and there but when I try to recreate the whole thing I stop cold. I will have to find a way. As for the language, it's certainly true, translations are very well done and no author has lost his or her voice in the process. Muchas gracias!