Being delinquent with my blog disappoints me. But, I find it hard to do more than one thing at a time these days. Struggling to keep up with daily work, editing my manuscript takes every bit of focus I can summon. With this Coronavirus isolation and non-socializing, I have all the time I could wish for. Yet, little is getting done at any one time.
My mind wanders off, sometimes in outrage over the latest Trump tweet or speech. Sometimes at the horror of the ER rooms in hospitals all over the world, inundated with Coronavirus patients arriving in large numbers and dying. Sometimes my mind conjures up the image of a man or woman on a ventilator, which terrorizes me, thinking that could be me or my husband. We both are high risk. I have adult asthma, already making it difficult to breathe in this humid heat. Or thinking of my family or friends in that position. As it is, I cry for those poor souls I see on the news. Or for the injustices that happen every day to people of color or the disadvantaged in some way.
And then, sometimes my mind worries about the future of our planet’s health or the mounting unrest all over the world. Will we ever have world peace?
Wait a minute…where was I going with this? See what I mean?
Now that I have finished all the editing on my manuscript, my editor suggests I “let it sit for a week. Then, read through the entire work, not stopping, and see how I feel about it? Am I happy with it? Or would I like to change, add or delete anything?” Really? The manuscript was over three hundred pages and now 167.
Meanwhile, I can reminisce back throughout the long process of writing my memoir essays. Could it be twelve years ago that I began? Yes. I’m afraid it was. Though I did take two years in between to write and publish a book, Bill Moss: Fabric Artist & Designer.
I started writing these stories when I entered a graduate program for my MFA in Creative Writing. I had related some of them over the years to my family and friends who always stated that they loved hearing them and why didn’t I write them down. I suppose this is the way most memoirists start. But in my case, I had been a speaker many times for business conferences and workshops, telling the story of my company—why and how it became successful. At the end of my talk during the “any questions” time, an attendee would ask why I didn’t I write my company story. So, I started with that at school only to have my writing instructor at the time say, “The reader wants to know who is this person that had no business education, training, or experience, using her intuitive senses and values running a manufacturing company?”
“Go back, Marilyn,” my writing coach said. “Put yourself in those shoes of the little girl, Marilyn Rae, living on a farm with grandparents, atop one of the Appalachian Mountains. Tell us what she experienced, what she learned, her trials, successes and failures.”
At first, I found this awkward. I didn’t like to write about myself. I tried putting my thoughts down in third person. But it wasn’t real. Finally, one day, as I was trying to write, I started remembering certain incidents that grabbed my attention. Milking a cow and the sting of the cow tail swishing against my cheeks on a cold winter morning, my tying her tail to her leg and her kicking out, breaking it. She had to be shot. A lesson that profoundly upset my emotions. I loved animals.
Another recollection, my father teaching me to shoot a gun at age six. The fear. The feeling of failure, finally overcome by success. The lessons from my father telling me “I can do it,” and not to give up.
Running away in the middle of night at age six and being picked up by an eighteen-wheeler truck driver.
Sitting for hours in a hot, overheated room, full of people, staring at my father’s face as he lay in a casket.
Climbing the highest tree. Taking risks upon dares by childhood friends. Hitchhiking to attend a Black church. Sent home from college for standing up for the rights of a fellow black student. Fingerprinted by the FBI for dissenting the Vietnam War. Driving a race car. Learning about the world of food and how to cook with true joy. These incidents started flooding my mind with vivid emotions. I nudged my way into Marilyn Rae’s mind at the earliest recollection.
I started writing these stories down and found myself getting lost in the memories and emotions, learning more about that little girl, “Poor lil’ MarilynRae” as my grandmother called me. It was an unusual experience for me, but also a rewarding one. I learned to like this little girl and discovered more about who I really am. I could follow her and try to find her in my later years. What I truly feel. Finding myself, instead of the woman I had become, mostly formed by other people that I had been trying to please. The many rewrites and editing were too numerous to count.
I read somewhere that Joan Dideon rewrote her books sometimes fifty times before they were published.
This has been a long and sometimes painful journey. I have had numerous writers, coaches, editors, and friends read various sections of the manuscript. As you can expect, I received many different viewpoints. “This is great.” “The reader wants to hear more of it.” “Take this out. Unnecessary for the arch of the book.” “Delete the childhood stories in Appalachia and stay with the later part of your life. More interesting to a reader who doesn’t know who you are.” “Why did you leave out the early stories in Appalachia?”
Confusion? Damn right. It has been frustrating and grueling to rewrite, edit, delete, add, etc. I have worked hard on this. And, and I mean a big AND, I have learned a tremendous amount about writing. I have obtained tools that I didn’t even know exist. Do I regret about the amount of time I have devoted to this project? Absolutely not.
At this age of eighty, I still feel that I have a lot more writing in me. I can’t dwell on years. I simply have to do it.
Why am I writing this? One, to reach out to other struggling writers. The longer it takes, the more you learn. Second, with the completion of my editing, I had to get these comments off my mind. I find it much easier writing about someone else, but I must admit this journey not only taught me a great deal about writing, but I’ve also gotten to know myself a lot better.
I encourage any of you writers, new or published authors, to share on my blog any of your experiences with writing memoir. The sharing of mutual problems or skills as well as the journey itself would be appreciated by me and I’m sure others.
Thank you.