::mslexia workshops::

The Blank Page #9
a writing workshop with Margaret Wilkinson

THEME: AUTOBIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

WRITING ABOUT one's own past always seems like a good thing. Childhood, in particular, evokes strong emotions, detailed memories, a vivid sense of place, great characters, unusual imagery.

For me, those years were extraordinary, terrible and beautiful. I remember the interiors from my New York City childhood, for instance, as lit by extremely high-wattage bulbs. All the lamps were positioned below eye level, or beside walls, so that they created film noir shadows. My father wore a hat like Robert Mitchum’s. My mother had a pair of stilettos in the dim recesses of her closet, where I tried them on. Against this backdrop the incomprehensible events of adult existence were played out.

In addition, my family had stories. These were often set in a place called ‘the old country’, which I envisioned as containing a hut, a well, and a herring. Sometimes the herring was on a plate; sometimes drying on a clothesline like a hand-towel. The well was always a fairy-tale well. The hut resembled a cottage in the Catskill Mountains where we spent summer.

However promising this might seem, using such material as the basis for a sustained piece of prose can be problematic. This is because personal memories and family anecdotes already seem like such good stories that we assume they don’t need editing or altering.

But this kind of material frequently lacks structure and focus. There are often too many characters, too much sub-plot and the wrong point of view. In short (like my Great Aunt Selma, who couldn’t get a man) they are just not well-shaped.

So how to turn your own life into literature? Below are a few exercises to help make what seems extraordinary to you into something that might also appeal to your reader. n

EXERCISES

#1
Focus on one thing at a time
Write a series of poems or short pieces of intense prose, each of which focuses on one particular object, food, person, smell or place from your childhood. The past is vast. This focus gives you a way in.

Choose one of these topics and write as passionately as you can. As you concentrate on your Auntie Mo’s slippers or the dog belonging to Mrs Wolfe next door you will almost certainly end up saying something significant about yourself and the people you lived with.

Read in sequence, such pieces can form a satisfying whole. See if you can discern a theme running through them: a business failure; the discovery of a talent; the loss of innocence; the gaining of wisdom. Re-draft the sequence to emphasise that underlying idea. (A wonderful example of this is an early Michele Robert’s story, ‘Une Glossaire’, in which she writes about her French childhood under headings such as ‘Beurre’, ‘Moisson’, ‘Grandpere’.)

#2
Explore a child’s point of view
Take advantage of the limited, almost surreal, point of view you had as a child. As a variation on the first exercise, write about particularly mysterious or significant objects from your youth. I’d choose my grandmother’s exploding pressure cooker, or the black leather finger pouch I discovered in the back of my parents’ chest of drawers.

#3
Use the ears of childhood
Write about something you did recently, but try to use the language of your youth, the slang, dialogue, dialect and syntax from where you grew up. This is one way of developing an authentic voice for your writing.

#4
Give an anecdote shape
For a more ambitious, sustained piece of writing, adapt an event into a short story by applying the following rules;

1 Summarise the story as you remember it
My uncle would never do the washing up. One day, after a large meal, he offered. To teach him a lesson, my father gradually brought out every dish in the house. He never even realised. He just kept washing.

Like me, you may have written from the point of view of yourself as a child. But a child’s is often the least interesting, because s/he usually understands so little of what is going on. And dramatic conflict is the very thing you need to keep a reader reading at length. So:

2 Choose a new point of view
Choose a new central character. Now you are no longer re-telling the anecdote; you are recreating it.
At a holiday dinner, a man who wants to humiliate his brother-in-law makes him wash every dish in the house.

3 Forget what really happened
Identify a single, strong motivation for your new main character, something s/he really wants out of the situation. Character and motivation turn anecdotes into stories. Now raise the stakes. Add drama and conflict.
At a holiday dinner, a man who wants to kill his wife’s brother (because he thinks the man has seen him with another woman) but can’t go through with it, makes his brother-in-law wash every dish in the house.

4 Change the setting
Distort the original memory yet further by altering the time, place or circumstances. Set the events in Africa, for example, or during a blizzard; during a nation-wide hunt for a serial killer. You can alter the ‘setting’ of the main character too, by making her/him very religious, or terrified of dogs, or of going blind or trying to give up smoking.

Now consider what is left of your original memory. Chances are, you will discover that what remains is the essence of what made that event memorable in the first place, with all the irrelevant clutter removed.