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Creative Obsession
Everyone’s creative. In our own way, each one of us has a creative drive within us. For some, it manifests as painting, music or theatre. For others, the pursuit of science, city planning or auto mechanics. Even serial killers perfect their art, sometimes over years and dozens of iterations, each time trying to get it perfect. Who you callin’ obsessed? While the drive towards creativity is inherent in all of us, not everyone pursues it to the point of obsession. Those of us who do, often jump back and forth from one creative discipline to another, jacks of all trades, master of none, never really finishing things, and procrastinating…
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New Year’s Resolutions
Why do we want to start over and remake our lives every January 1st? Is it guilt for overindulging over the holidays? Is it disappointment that we haven’t achieved what we imagined to be our true potential? Or self-pity, shame, self-hatred, or doubt about our own self-worth? When did it start? Is it all the negative little voices in our heads that point out all our faults? Perhaps in the distant past, long before we were able to form a coherent thought, someone indicated that they didn’t approve of something we’d done – pooping in our diaper or making too much noise crying. Maybe as we grew…
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Preserving Our Legacy
With the recent availability of DNA kits used to research one’s ancestry, there’s been a resurgence of interest in finding out who our forebears were and where they came from. There are several companies that provide these kits with emphasis on different aspects of our history – some deal with the likelihood of our contracting particular medical conditions, while others focus on cultural migrations and the various parts of the world where our ancestors lived. This type of DNA research, while it doesn’t focus on specific individuals, has made researching our roots a good deal more accurate and provides a lot of information not previously available to us. The Old…
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Organizing Your Memoir
One of the students in my class this week was bemoaning the fact that she didn’t know how to incorporate into her memoir all the material she’d saved over the years. She had, as most of us do, boxes and boxes of old photos, letters, correspondence, keepsakes and masses of other trivia that she wanted to include, but she couldn’t make any kind of sense of it all. What was relevant and what wasn’t? What was valuable information and what had only sentimental value? I blush to admit, I tend to be a bit of a pack-rat. I can’t bear to let go of the things my parents and grandparents…
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Whose Story Are You Writing?
A common question that crops up when writing your memoir is: “What if my sister, my mother, my weird uncle, or whoever else I mention in my story, objects to something I’ve written?” Ask yourself two questions: 1. Is it my story to tell? 2. Is it relevant to my own life’s story that I do want to tell? If episodes of the story centre around someone else’s actions, the second question becomes the deciding factor. Problems arise when you include information that reveals things about other people – things they may not want others to know about. Perhaps your younger sister did something hilariously embarrassing as a six-year-old, but…
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All Memory Is False
Memory. You can’t write your memoir without it. It’s the one aspect that defines who you are. Most of us take it for granted – that is, until it starts to show gaps or fails us at critical moments. But what is it and how does it work? When we think of memory, we tend to see it as a series of video images or computer files – the clarity of our recollection being dependent on how important the specific event was and how good we believe our memory to be, but this is false reasoning. When we recall an incident, our brain rewires the neural connections each time we…
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Emotional Charge in Memoir
In every story, both fiction and non-fiction, all the best writing teachers tell us there has to be a main goal, an overarching question, a deep desire or an obsession. This powerful thread throughout the story keeps a reader engaged and committed to reaching the story’s end in order to find out what happens. It’s an accepted rule in creative writing. What About Memoir? What if you’re writing your life story in a series of isolated events – events which may have been important to you in some way but which don’t seem to adhere to a specific overall mystery to be revealed by the end of the book? What…
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Lost Memory
One of the problems of writing your memoirs as you get older (and most of us don’t think about doing so until we’re in a position to think about the generations that follow us) is memory. When we’re young, we’re capable of amazing feats of memory (at least, I think so — I’m not sure I can recall exactly!) We could memorize masses of information — for school, for our jobs, for recipes, for hobbies, for any number of activities in which we took part. As we age though, sometimes it feels as if our brains have become constipated, full of useless trivia we no longer have any interest in…
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Practice and Discipline
It seems to me that there has been an enormous subterranean shift in the overall values of society since the inception of the internet and particularly since our enthusiastic adoption of mobile devices. We no longer value hard work, discipline and practice as the road to self-improvement. In my youth, a major component of education was an emphasis on learning basic communication skills, in writing, in mathematics, and in the study of history, geography and basic natural sciences, so that we could better understand and interact with the world in which we lived. Good students expected to go on to university in order to further their education. Employers expected a…
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Creative Resistance
In any creative endeavour, it’s critical to pay attention to where you encounter Resistance. These are the places which will give you the most trouble, but when you finally “get it”, will give you the most value and insight. For a brilliant treatise on Resistance and how insidious it can be for creative people, I highly recommend Steven Pressfield’s books, “The War of Art”, “Turning Pro” and “Do the Work”, in which he examines the many ways Resistance can make itself felt. He anthropomorphizes Resistance in such a way as to give it intention and desire. That desire is the work of our unconscious, finding sneaky, near-undetectable ways to sabotage…
