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 tasks, editing my memoir took every bit of focus I could summon. With the Coronavirus isolation and non-socializing, I had all the time I could wish for. Yet, little was getting done at any one time.
When I thought I had finished all the editing on my manuscript, my editor suggested, “let it sit for a week. Then, read through the entire work, not stopping, and see how you feel about it.” Am I happy with it? Or would I like to change, add or delete anything? Really? The manuscript was over 300 pages and is now, after a lot of work, it was now i78. And I was getting bored with it since I had re-written and edited many times already.
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 Designer & Artist. 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 at school with that in mind only to have my writing instructor at the time say, “The reader wants to know who is this person that had no business education or training, 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, in the Depression.
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 and visualizing 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 me. I loved animals.
Another recollection, my father teaching me to shoot a gun at age six. The fear. The feeling of failure in his eyes, finally overcome by success. The lessons from my father telling me “I can do it,” and never 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 powdered face as he lay in a casket.
Climbing the highest tree. Taking risks upon dares by childhood friends. At age seven, 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 protesting 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 felt. 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 Didion 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 existed. Do I regret the amount of time I have devoted to this project? Absolutely not.
At this age of eighty-two, 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 others, I’m sure.