Someone asked me: “When is there a time to remember?” I simply replied that if she feels that she does not have time, this is the effect of her choosing not to have time. I understand that deciding what you want to do with your life can seem like an overwhelming amount of pressure. Indeed, the meaning will change as it undergoes changes. My premise here is that you can write an interesting story about ordinary little moments in your life. Don’t try to include everything. Find a focus. Then pull out stories from your life and I think people will relate to what you’ve written.
What I have learned about writing I have learned by trial and error. It’s just old school. But you have to be brave enough to take the road less traveled. For whatever reason, we adamantly refuse to put pen to paper until we’ve finished the roadmap for that plan. What we think sounds plausible. We are just beginners. But none of this means it’s true. Remember the old phrase, “Money can’t buy me love”? You don’t need deep thought when you’re writing the first draft of your story. Sometimes thinking is the great enemy of perfection. You’re trying to write, aren’t you? The trick of the thing is to trust your imagination. The truth is that you will make discoveries when you write.
What, then, is the proper method of telling a story? Simply this: search your past for significant experiences. There are various forms that memoir writing can take: biography, autobiography, memoir, micro-memoir, snapshot, poetry, postmodernist multigenre, etc. In many ways, you can only truly learn about an experience when you write about it. This is the struggle to define yourself. Write these things down. You cannot dismiss what you do not consciously acknowledge. Do not write with bomb and circumstance. If you do this, your piece will be of no use to us. Write with emotion, passion and compassion!
You don’t have to have lived an “awesome” life to be a writer. You will tell us what you did out of your private passion for life itself. I recently realized the urgency of remembering the stories we haven’t written. Now is the time to remember. Your days and nights are yours to remember and fill notebooks with your stories. I’m sure you have something to say right now. Just close your eyes and breathe in the smell, you will really be there.
