SMJuly 2010 Newsletter
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July 2010 Newsletter |
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HOME COURSES
MESSAGE BOARDS
BOOKS ETC. ADMIN Coached by Carol Celeste
© 2010 Carol Celeste Disclaimer
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Writing to Heal,Writing to GrowSM
CONTENTS
Hello readers of “The Writing Well” and a special welcome to new subscribers.
Summer finally brought to these parts June gloom—a morning marine layer that often sticks around until sunset. I don’t remember June gloom from my youth. My summer memories involve the joy of no school and sunny beaches.
For some of you summer brings a change of routine and scenery, for others there is no break in sight. We continue to build life stories no matter where we are or what we do. Be sure to keep track of your special moments to write about later, or write about right now. For serious writers, the memoir review in this issue covers a book that will help you turn your life into a story, a true story, for reader enjoyment and personal health and growth. The article shares ideas for publishing your gems.
After spending much time redesigning the newsletter format, I decided to keep it as is. More color and glitz means more expense for those who like to print it and most e-newsletters I find come in basic black. This probably applies more to email subscribers than Web viewers.
You’ll also find a writing prompt to motivate you to write your personal stories and markets to approach. More paying markets await at:
www.writingtoheal.com/pew/markets.html.
Until next time,
Do you have a plan for your life stories? Perhaps you write to HEAL old pains, to GROW by learning more about yourself, to REFLECT on past events of historical or personal significance, or for all those reasons. But what do you intend to do with your writings? Burn them to protect your reputation? Lock them up for discovery when you are gone and won’t have to face the wrath of those who feel slighted? Make your fortune with your best-selling greatest story ever lived? If you hope for the latter, you have many options, some more plausible than others.
Personal stories remain popular as evidenced by the raft of “reality shows”on TV. We are a society of voyeurs eager to learn what makes others tick. Even so, with the transitions occurring in the publishing world, you may find traditional sources less than anxious to handle your story, no matter how compelling.
Once upon a time, publishing meant having one of dozens of major publishing houses contract to edit, print, distribute and market your book. The editing and marketing part of that equation died long ago and now the print and distribute parts are generally available only to already acclaimed writers. Small presses are plentiful, but with limited resources can only take on a few titles each year. Thousands of magazines and newspapers once eagerly sought short works expressing slices of life that informed and entertained readers.
Personal essays still enjoy a strong market in the numerous anthologies dealing with tightly defined topics but many book publishers have quit business or merged leaving a only a few potential book publishers that can be called “major.” Magazines and newspapers shrink in numbers and pages almost daily. New periodicals proliferate but often don’t last long enough to get your work in print. Technology has changed the business model for what we call traditional publishers.
But don’t despair. The same technology that caused a decline in traditional reading habits, is just as available to you as to the big publishing houses. And it hasn’t reduced the amount of reading people do, in spite of chicken little moaning. It has merely changed the way most of us read most of the time. We still read, we’re still voyeurs. What this means for you as a personal essay or memoir writer is good news. Chances are, you are the most likely publisher for your work. That means you control the production and reap all the profits, monetary and emotional.
It also means you need a new set of skills. Technology offers so many publishing methods, it’s hard to keep up. And it’s even harder to know which methods best suit your particular needs or desires. Whether you publish the old fashioned way or DIY, don’t expect a fortune to emerge in dollars overnight. More likely the fortune you find will come from the joy of sharing. If a book is your goal, the easiest format for a DIY project is the e-book. You can make a PDF file to send via e-mail or use an online “free” resource, to code it for the many commercial readers and gain wider distribution. Or you may publish as a serial or as columns through a blog or Web site. You can even set up pay plans this way to sell books or complete articles after offering a sample. You can produce your own audio books as podcasts and share your true voice as well as your literary one, adding the sound as well as the description of your emotions. And those are just a few options.
With so many ways to share your stories, it helps to have a plan in place before you begin to write. Formats differ according to the publishing methods you plan to employ so you may need different versions if you want to travel more than one road to market. There really is no limit to how you present your work or to whom. Family only? The whole world? Select groups? Print, one of the many digital formats, audio, performance presentation? If you have a supply of complete stories originally intended for traditional publication, don’t consider them lost. You can adapt them to one of the new formats with a bit of creativity and do it much faster than it takes to start from word one.
You’ve put in many hours recalling and recording your life stories. You’ve relived events dozens of times while perfecting your word choice, tweaking your voice, creating scenes that touch readers, and translating your feelings into words. What a shame to let those pages decompose in a musty drawer. Think about the joy of sharing your life stories with readers. Of course, those traditional markets are yours to tempt, but they are not the only way to publish. So, what’s your plan?
Write about the first time you recall being punished. How did you feel about the punishment?
The point of the book is how to present your life with the same gusto as a fiction account. This method falls under the classification termed “New Autobiography,” an off shoot from the “new journalism” of the twentieth century, without being bound by a journalist’s adherence to fact. An entire chapter is devoted to the history of autobiography, starting with Egyptians around 3,000 B.C. bringing it to the present trend of story transcending the recitation of events. The urge to share ourselves and to peep into others’ lives seems part of human nature.
Your Life As Story delves deep into the process of discovering your inner self and turning it into a well-formed life story. Chapters of special interest to personal writers are those related specifically to you. These include “Finding Your Voice,” “Portraying Yourself: You Are Your Hero,” “How to Write What You Dare Not Say,” and “Truth in Autobiographic Writing.”
When writing fiction, you create a hero, or protagonist. In your life story you fill the hero role. It can be a challenge to deal with ourselves fairly, fearing we’ll be seen either as braggarts or whiny. Sometimes it’s hard to deal with ourselves at all, causing us to write more about others than about ourselves. Rainer reminds us that, “By definition the protagonist is the character who drives the story, whose desires, conflicts, and choices are the story.” That means revealing your thoughts and feelings about the things you’ve done and that have happened to you, making yourself the main attraction.
Rainer argues for emotional truth but adheres to the belief that “...New Autobiography...is now concerned with the larger truths of myth and story, which permit, and sometimes require, imaginative reshaping.” Hmmm. Writing in story formats using fictional techniques, yes. Accepting that our memories may not be factual, and letting readers know that, yes. But Rainer’s “imaginative reshaping” may easily be rationalized into justification for bending our truths beyond anyone’s recognition. I believe readers of memoir, personal essay, autobiography and other personal genres, expect and deserve the truth of our life as we recall it, not an invented version. But that is a small part of otherwise sage advice.
In the advanced courses at Writing to Heal, Writing to Grow we deal with many of the topics included in Your Life as Story, so this treatment appeals to me. However, it may well go beyond what beginning writers will want to tackle. Writing your story with honesty challenges even the accomplished writer but it yields great health and emotional benefits and this book will guide you well as you practice.
Share personal essay markets you know about. Email them to carol@writingtoheal.com and I'll add them to the website list. |
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