If you are a memoirist, what will you dare to write about? Will you write about your mother who is still alive? Will you write about your father’s suicide? Will you write about money, sex, religion — yours? Will you write about cancer and disfigurement, anxiety, the times when you thought you would die even though you were healthy, the irrational, ambiguous times?
It’s one thing to be vulnerable to a reader. It’s another to be too candid. The boundary is smeared and jagged. “Writing is therapeutic, but it is not therapy,” said my writing instructor, once. Meaning you will discover what you feel and know and understand as you write. You’ll feel better having articulated what’s inside and heretofore inchoate. But the result, the end product on the page, had better be readable, accessible to a reader. The reader doesn’t care about your therapeutic process, the reader wants an idea, a revelation, something to have been learned. The reader wants your perspective on yourself. The reader wants to trust you.
You want to take risks, else what have you learned? You also want to feel free to write whatever you believe is true. There are some subjects you’ll have a harder time being fully truthful about. Your spouse, a parent, how much money you make. You worry about what the spouse and parent and everyone else will say about what you said about them. You worry about being judged about how much or little money you make. So you pull back, hold some things back; details, feelings. The reader can sense this and poof! Trust evaporates.
Above all, you must find something to say that feels like a pebble of cool truth in your palm, something you can fully describe because you’re so familiar with its contours, being your small possession, that the reader sees it as vividly as you do. This is a thing of you that you know and can describe knowing. This is your idea.
How do you get yourself to a place of knowing risky things, having risky ideas, running with scissors, writing with scissors? Be ruthlessly honest. Avoid platitudes, incomplete realizations, coatings. Remind yourself that other people don’t feel as strongly about you and your thing as they do about themselves and their thing. So you have some latitude, some breathing room, to be fully in yourself and your story, because when you make yourself visible people look at you but they also look away and look back at themselves. You don’t have to feel critiqued, judged. Or go ahead and feel critiqued and judged. Just don’t let that stop you.
Orange Over Gray, ©2022 Meg Maker
Love this piece. And the title. Not only is this style of writing like running wth scissors. But often it's better to cut, cut, cut away!