Expanding NaNoWriMo: What About Writing Memoir?

NaNoWriMo is technically about writing fiction but I’m bending their already flexible rules a bit more and planning an immersion in memoir next month. Last year’s NaNo writing is now novel length and I’ve timed completing its third edit by the end of this month. Just as last year was my first serious novel attempt, this will be a first effort at writing book length memoir. Equally challenging. Twice as scary.

As an essayist, I’ve written scores of autobiographical shorts, seldom intimate, usually relating to isolated events and ideas from recent life, things I can write before the mind’s emotional snapshots dry and fly away. The task of marathon writing about my personal experiences from earliest memory and then carrying that on in the following months, however, is daunting.

I’ve heard a human’s favorite word is their own name. We hear complaints occasionally about those doing nothing but talking about themselves in conversation. You would think, in general, writing about ourselves would be a piece of cake. That we’d welcome the organized opportunity. I think I’d rather be set afire in the middle of a glass eating contest.

There comes a point when you’ve run out of convincing excuses and the fear subsides. My time is now.  

I think working from the “what if” of fiction was a helpful preparation. As I chased the slippery fiction of Black Mountain Light through the days I kept over-ending big mental rocks and uncovering my own non-fiction. I couldn’t help working in the occasional personal element, constantly weaving the road between personal truth and entertaining lies, of real and speculated history.

There were cathartic moments when I recovered memories I didn’t know could exist. I would be creating the experiential lives of characters out of thin air and suddenly find myself depending on the real as a tool for seeing. We do this a lot, of course, writing about things of which we have no real knowledge. That’s part of the challenge, to call into this realm a made up thing, a borrowed life, and make it real. Not just believable, but believed. Inevitably we must occasionally fall back on personal experience and empathy, the remembering and imagining.  

X is what I remember doing in a similar circumstance. This character is similar to her and she’d react by doing X. If I were in that place I would feel X and then do X. Perhaps our unwritten memoirs are where the answer hide.  

In that conversation with the barely real I would have flashes of the true, like vainly trying to speed read but only comprehending small amounts of the story, tantalizing fragments of a puzzle. Real and strangely evolved scenes from my life would come up for a gulp of air after spending my lifetime at the lightless bottom of the sea. That caused chain reactions of other memories. The snapshots were quickly becoming film.

So my memory has rebooted over the last year, energized further by past workshops with George Ella Lyon (Don’t You Remember?) and Karen McElmurray (Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey) and devouring every autobiographical phrase ever penned by Chris Offutt (The Same River Twice and No Heroes) and taking Jason Howard up on his instruction that we “must discover, understand, communicate, preserve.”    

Though I’m getting older and my memory isn’t what it used to be, at this mid-life point in life I’m actually remembering me more and more. The novel effort was intended for consumption from the beginning. I’m not so sure about the life story thing. I’m doing this for me. If, in the end, I can take the mundane and semi-exciting chapters of my life and sift them clear and beautiful upon the page, perhaps there’s potential for someone learning from them. In the end, however, it’s about re-meeting me.