Yesterday I went to an event and heard Marcus Lemonis speak. Marcus is the entrepreneur and investor who stars in the TV show The Profit.
Marcus never even took the stage in front of the 4,000 people gathered at the Sears Center, except during one short segment when he interacted with six women he’d called up. Instead, we heard his voice before we saw him.
So you want to write about your life, but let’s face it—you’re afraid to share personal stories that involve people you know. Your experiences are populated with your loved ones and this is what’s stopping you. You can’t share your story without including the good, the bad, and the ugly, and those can come in the form of friends and family.
How do you write the truth without alienating your entire social network?
Bring to mind someone you know who seems to have it all. You know the kind—the Eternal Optimist, the friend with the Midas Touch, the Big Man on Campus.
Someone like Kim, who was the lead singer at the church I attended. She was talented and vivacious, with a powerhouse voice and energy that lit up the stage. Week after week she performed with a smile on her face while I slouched half-asleep in the pew wondering how she did it.
Today I want to make a case for conflict. Nobody likes it, of course, except maybe drama queens, adrenaline junkies, or lawyers.
I personally try to avoid conflict as much as possible. Heck, the subtitle of my memoir is ‘How I Found Peace in Betrayal and Divorce.’ Sometimes, during not so peaceful times, I look at that and feel like an imposter. Or I might repeat the words I found peace, I found peace as if I can make it so.
Several weeks ago, on my way to my yoga class, I noticed an elderly man pulling weeds in his front yard. He was kneeling on a paper bag, working his way slowly through what looked to me like an impossible task.
Because the yard was nothing but weeds. And the house itself, in my ungenerous opinion, was a sort of weed, with sad, faded blue paint, a sagging front porch, and a sidewalk that was crumbling and cracked.
So now that I’m in my 50s, I’m proclaiming it the official “I don’t give a damn” decade.
I made this proclamation after dropping my teenage daughter off for three weeks of summer camp. Though she was handling this milestone in a calm, mature way, I found myself remembering the kinds of thoughts I had at her age when I went to camp…(read more)
In the sixties, there was a TV show called Dragnet with a detective named Joe Friday who insisted on gathering “just the facts.”
If you’re old enough to remember that show, you’ve been around long enough to have lived an interesting life. Even if you’re younger, you’ve most likely faced some challenge worth writing about.
So let’s say you want to write a memoir. Where do you start?
Since the publication of my memoir last fall, I’ve been reunited with my first love—fiction—and it feels so…..good. Mostly.
It also feels daunting and overwhelming and fills me with uncertainty and doubt.
But I believe ideas have their own timeline, and that, when we pay attention, we see tiny sprouts of magic when the time comes to begin the novel, or return to the memoir, or noodle over a poem.
I’m from Holland, Michigan, and when I was a kid, my grandma taught me a children’s rhyme in Dutch. She didn’t speak Dutch fluently, but her parents had and this little ditty was one of the things she remembered.
She wasn’t completely sure of the meaning, just that it was something about a cart before a horse.
It was a brand new, emerald green Schwinn 10-speed bike. I was thirteen years old, and I’d never owned something so beautiful. The paint sparkled magically in the sunlight and when I rode that bike through the neighborhood, I sparkled too. I rolled easily through a landscape peppered with unhappy parents, mean girls, first crushes, and bad skin with my hands up, nothing to hold on to and, in those moments at least, nothing holding me back.
👉 Enjoy dedicated writing space just steps from Lake Michigan
👉 Benefit from one-on-one developmental editing sessions