Writing Better Than You Know How
 

          The Magic Dis-connect

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" quipped English novelist E. M. Forster instructively.

The canny logic of this question explains a key theme in writing down our personal story: what we carry around in our minds is rarely what ends up on paper. There is a magic dis-connect between idea and execution. Knowledge in the head is often radically transformed in its trip to paper.

How many times have we imagined that writing a specific piece was going to be a snap as we thought about it, only to find it was much harder and came out much different when we actually wrote it. Our notion of what we know is limiting. Writing better than we know—revealing more richness than we intended—is a common phenomenon in the workshop sessions. It happens most when we allow ourselves to open up and write warts-and-all recollections. It happens because we short-circuit our inner censor.

      Accessing "the Information"

What squeezes past the censor if we open up often amazes a memoir writer and marks growth and progress. The archeology of memoir writing is additive and cumulative: as our receptivity grows, we are admitted deeper into our memory files. Not surprisingly, the more you dig the deeper you go. This is buried treasure we dig out of the past; it can lead us in new, productive directions.

It’s what I call "the information"—the kind of insight, detail or discovery that can be life-enhancing, even life-changing, if we let it happen. At first, we may not even recognize that it has happened. Sometimes the message arrives coded, needing decryption. That code is usually what’s called a "subtext"—the hidden meaning "between the lines."

A London friend once told me about being knocked sprawling as a kid by a bomb blast during the Blitz in World War II.  He was running home carrying two precious bottles of milk, which broke as he fell. For years, all he could remember was a crushing vacuum sensation and his fear—until writing about the episode uncovered "bottled-up" feelings of failure and anger at being unfairly punished by a brutal father. All this was hidden under the lid of his fear—and a lifetime hatred of Germans (that disappeared shortly after his breakthrough).

We "bottle-up" many things in life. The "information" often is an indication of what’s in the bottle, hidden beneath our awareness. It can pop out when we least expect it, like a confounding genie.  Usually, the "genie" can't be pushed back in the bottle.

It’s not like finding the "great truth" or the ultimate "key." It’s more about small stuff, digging up what falls through the cracks when our lives break apart like tectonic plates and realign. Sometimes, it comes only in crumbs.  It lives where things cross or connect. It sits inside experiences that mark rites of passage from childhood to adolescence, for example, or in those events when we realize we are finally "adults."

For example, a friend could not account for her feelings of utter despair years after both her parents died within months of each other—until she realized that even as an adult she fought the feelings of being utterly "orphaned" so suddenly.

In itself, such "information"--such subtext--is value-neutral: neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong, neither helpful nor harmful. It’s simply what is, what evolves, what happens in that trip from your mind to paper or computer screen.  Its value is its instructive power as insight to explain or resolve a life's puzzles.

          Protective Mechanisms

You may notice you feel a need to edit your personal story’s truth, to look only on "the bright side" or paint the rose without thorns. That impulse is instructive in itself. It may reflect how you tend to deal with your "truth," how you "edit" your information--offering a glimpse of protective mechanisms we all use to defend or deny. Sometimes it feels wonderful, sometimes bad. Like life.

That same impulse can make finding out "who we really are" a relative reading.  Many things about ourselves we cannot perceive, simply because of  how we are "defended."  Often others can read our sub-texts, see our traits and qualities, better than we can, especially as they divine the details of a story--one reason the reactive chemistry of the workshops creates illuminating insights and observations.

The subtext carries messages that often resonate beyond the actual reading of a story; like after-shocks, they come clear only later. What seems like happenstance is purposeful; what creates head-scratching puzzlement contains a vital hidden message from the unconscious. It happens again and again in the workshops.

          Unseen Programs

And I believe this happens because we access—without intending to—submerged reservoirs of recall. One is the latent after-image of our dreams. The other is thinking that, like computer programs that run in the background unseen, we rarely perceive (remember those inner-critic voices!). Memoir taps into these reservoirs.

"We become what we think about," observed writer Earl Nightingale in The Strangest Secret. More important, to my mind, is the notion that we already are a product of our multi-tasking, background-running thinking. This is why memoir works to give us a more conscious picture of who we really are and how we actually operate: it brings background noise to the foreground; its details reveal hidden subtexts of our stories.

         Celebrate the Past

At first, these details, images, feelings are unintended. They happen most when you guard yourself least, when you let memory spool out unfettered. At the very least, the Memoir workshop will show you what it’s like to be more open and honest with yourself as you celebrate or acknowledge your past. You’ll wake to a new awareness: how habitually we cut ourselves off from the very "information" that can help us lead more balanced, better directed lives.

To access the joyful we have to contend with the less-than-joyous--the sometimes sad, painful streaks in our past that resist rubbing out. They are there for a reason. Getting next to them can neutralize their power, their tyranny. Often, we can exorcise misconception or misunderstanding simply by dropping our normal defenses and facing fears or anxieties.  We may be able to leave what bugged or shamed us behind.

Defenses, too, are there for a reason. Often, they’re the protective armor we built ourselves in childhood. These are old survival tools and they don’t disappear easily. It pays to respect their utility but also to question whether, as adults, we really need such tools now. Armor works both ways—it keeps out the good with the bad and locks in whatever light might be inclined to shine out from us. And it weighs us down needlessly.