Perfection Is Not

If you ask me, perfection and art don't go together. Maybe they do for some people, but the quest for perfection – i.e. compulsion – is an art killer. A writing killer. 

So many writers I have known (including myself at times) can't sit down to write because of the fear of not doing it well enough. It might disguise itself as “I have no time,” but I think if you look more closely fear of not writing well enough might be the actual reason. 

And if they do get as far as chair, paper, pen then whatever words make it through are erased or torn up. It happened just yesterday in the workshop. A young woman, after reading one of the most powerful paragraphs I had ever heard, announced that it was the only part of what she had written that morning that she had allowed to survive. The rest she had erased. 

Destroying your writing is a form of suicide. Not writing at all is a sort of pre-emptive suicide. It's not easy to insist on life, on writing. 

I resist my own impulse to self-destroy by publishing online as soon as I write. I like this art form of writing and publishing instantly. It came to me of its own accord. I didn't copy it from anyone. It works for me. I write this way. In the beginning I wanted to be Virginia Woolf, at my desk every morning – it has morphed into this: writing mostly in the Authentic Writing workshops, writing in pen because the subsequent typing is a chance to make a few light changes. And then posting it. There's no time to destroy.

I've got a good sharp brain. I could criticize my writing. I'd make a great English professor if I wanted to go in that direction. But I do not. 

So I encourage all art-writers – people who write to discover something about themselves, to walk on new turf, people whose life goal is not to just mimic what others have done and been praised for – I encourage you to stop thinking. Thinking and writing do not go together. 

For inspiration

I made a friend online about a year ago. I came across her blog, Art on the Run, and we have corresponded ever since. I share today's post, which I found, as a writer, hugely inspiring. Often I find my writing to be a close relation of Heather's art. I like her approach.

Heather's Art

Loren Eiseley quote

I find this perfectly attuned to my experience of writing memoir.

In all the questioning about what makes a writer, and especially perhaps the personal essayist, I have seen little reference to this fact; namely, that the brain has become a kind of unseen artist’s loft. There are pictures that hang askew, pictures with outlines barely chalked in, pictures torn, pictures the artist has striven unsuccessfully to erase, pictures that only emerge and glow in a certain light. They have all been teleported, stolen, as it were, out of time. They represent no longer the sequential flow of ordinary memory. They can be pulled about on easels, examined within the mind itself. The act is not one of total recall like that of the professional mnemonist. Rather it is the use of things extracted from their context in such a way that they have become the unique possession of a single life. The writer sees back to these transports alone, bare, perhaps few in number, but endowed with a symbolic life. He cannot obliterate them. He can only drag them about, magnify or reduce them as his artistic sense dictates, or juxtapose them in order to enhance a pattern. One thing he cannot do. He cannot destroy what will not be destroyed; he cannot determine in advance what will enter his mind.

Memoir, Art and What It's Good For

I hear it a lot in our memoir-writing groups. “This is better than therapy!”

Yes, it is. Which, to my mind, is not saying much. I think “therapy” is way overrated and I can't wait for it to be thrown on the historical pile of things-that-didn't-work.

But my response when people talk to me about the therapeutic wonders of writing real memoir is a response I got from Fred when I first brought it up with him many years ago when I was brand new to the Authentic Writing workshops. “Is this art, or is this therapy?” I asked him, suspiciously, looking, as always, for something to be wrong.

“Making art is therapeutic,” he answered calmly. Of course it is. How could it not be?

But a lot of people claim art therapy. They have theater groups and painting groups that claim to be therapeutic and I bet many of them help. But they are different from what we do in the Authentic Writing workshops and I want to see if I can distinguish how that is. I want to talk about the relationship between the type of writing that we do, its healing effects, and what art is. Because these are all big words and everyone uses them and means something a little different by them.

Take the word “memoir.” When people ask what type of writing I do and what type of writing the workshops focus on, that's the shortest answer: memoir. But I don't like that word much. I wish I could come up with something better because “memoir” covers all sorts of things that we are not.

At the extreme end of the scale there's memoir “as told to” -- you know, when the celebrity sits down with a writer, has a few long chats over drinks, etc., and the professional writer gets their story down on paper. That's called memoir. Let's get that off the table quickly. We all know this discussion isn't about that kind of memoir.

Then there's the broad swath of pedestrian memoirs in between the two extremes. And for the most part they are only boring because the people who write them aren't that interesting. You know, you can only write good memoir to the extent that you are plowed and irrigated as a person. If you haven't dared much, if you haven't looked inside much – no amount of “instruction” is going to make your writing – your expression of yourself – very complicated or unique. So the memoirs in this category all kind of sound like they were written by the same person even though the stories are different. One way to quickly identify them is that they depend on what they are about, rather than the voice of the writer telling the story. Let's get these off the table too – though where you draw the line is up to you.

So now I'm at the small group at the far end of the spectrum – those of us who are simply daring to write without thinking about it too much, writing as a means of discovering something about ourselves, writing without a model in mind – except maybe Van Gogh. Now we're talking about what I mean by art. Ahhh. I'm feeling better already.

I want to stand amongst the Van Gogh's of this world – those who are creating for its own sake, creating to forge new territory that – for the artist – is desperately needed to survive.

That's where healing lies. What is this word “healing” anyway? So prevalent it makes me a little carsick to hear it – like too much sugar. I prefer the word “strengthening.” Writing memoir – discovering and saying distinctly your version of the facts – not through the disguise of metaphor, but in unmistakable scenes and concrete details -- makes you strong. To choose the stories that are important, not have someone tell you what they are. To write without obligation to family, schoolteachers, grammarians, or bestseller lists. And in that list, family is by far the most powerful. The loyalty to family is at the root of all other loyalties that restrict a person, rather than permitting them to blossom.

As I write we've just come through the Christmas season. Almost everyone I know spoke of family obligations they had to abide by, and how exhausting those were. I saw adults – people with not that many years left in their lives -- still enslaved by family. I saw people not allowed by their so-called loving families to do as they wished, sometimes to even know what they wished.

Writing is a powerful tool that can loosen this knot of love, oppression, obligation that keeps people trapped and unable to blossom. To write your own stories in your own voice, to choose them and recreate them in a way that appears exquisitely accurate to you, is invigorating. It gives you independence. Frightening but life-giving.

I can't offer this as a system, as a one-two-three process. You write: you become liberated. It doesn't work like that. But if something here in what I have written inspires you to write that's all that's needed. Writing will take care of the rest.

Another Recommendation

A wonderful memoir, INKLINGS, by Jeffrey Koterba, just published this year.

A Very Good Read

If you have an interest in good memoir and finding out more about the invisible world of Afghanistan, I suggest this great book, East of New York, West of Kabul by Tamim Ansary. Ansary was born in Afghanistan with an Afghan father and an American mother. He left to live in the States when he was about 10. He is anchored in Afghanistan, understands it, can convey its mystery, and yet he does not come across as a "foreigner." He's an American. It is very good reading from both a literary point of view and an educational one.

A Worthy Quote by Mary Karr

And you have to make a distinction between literature and sound-byte memoirs. The sound-byte memoir is only worth reading in an airport. I want to create a whole world, like a novel.
-- Mary Karr. Author of the memoirs, The Liar's Club, Cherry and Lit.