Exercises to Write Your Life — 5 Nonfiction Prompts
“One can’t mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit.” ~Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir
Writing about your life, whether short or long form, takes bravery. The writer must be willing to shed that protective outer layer, that metal diving suit, and expose some of the most intimate moments of their life. The best personal essays and memoirs grab the reader with their authentic voice, relatable experiences, and universal message. As I have moved deeper into crafting personal essays and working on my memoir, I have discovered and developed some exercises that help me stay in the chair and write my life.
Kick the Imposter off the Page
Mary Karr talks about the “false self” as the impediment to great personal writing that stays with you, and begs to be reread. Unlike fiction, we need a narrator we can believe and trust. This is not a made up world, and the teller of the tale must feel authentic, and probably self-reflective for us to cleave to their story. Karr asks, “How are you trying to appear? The author of a memoir manages to power past the initial defenses, digging past the false self to where the truer one waits to tell the more complicated story” (102). This is an important step in getting to the heart of personal writing. The best way to gain insight about yourself is ask somebody else, or a few somebody elses, if you are brave. Ask them what they consider your strengths and weaknesses, what they like and dislike about you? Ask them to be brutally honest. That is the hard part — you are allowing somebody else to hold up a mirror to all your soft, sometimes ugly parts. But unless you are a self-actualized person, you need this to confront that false self you might be putting forth in your writing. You are a character in personal writing. Remember our most beloved characters learn and grow by recognizing their flaws and mistakes.
Write the Ugly Stuff First
Picture the very worst, most uncomfortable scene you might have to write about your life. “You dread this scene as the rich dread tax time, as demons dread Jesus. It’s a haunter” (Karr 30). Before anything else, you must write this scene. You must sit in a room with your most disturbing memories for hours, working through them on the page. If you can do this you are ready to write about your life, either through personal essays or memoir. This is a biggie. If you can’t or won’t write the hard stuff, your work often comes off as too nostalgic or giddy. Whether short or longform, personal writing needs tension.
Embrace Meditation
Memory is a fickle beast and to gain any sense of the carnal on the page, you need to really tap it. The best exercise I have found for this is a guided meditation. Set aside some time in a quiet space, preferably dimly lit, and removed from possible distractions. An apt metaphor for life is a house with many rooms. You are going to close your eyes, and begin to think of those rooms as memories you want to access. Make sure you have a pen and paper handy for when you open your eyes.
Close your eyes. Enter the room of the memory you are seeking. Look around, notice all the details. What color are the walls? What furniture is there? Who is in the room? What do you hear? Is anybody talking? What tone are they using? How about smell? Anything potent or familiar? Walk around the room, touch what you see there. Where is everybody positioned? Is there tension? What is the source? Drink everything in for 5-10 minutes.
Open your eyes, grab pen and paper, write everything down. Punctuation does not matter. Syntax does not matter. Regurgitate what you experienced on the paper. This momentary mindfulness will help fill in the sensory details that help bring a personal essay or memoir to life. Bring your reader to those moments.
I did this when I struggled writing a scene from my childhood with my great grandmother, Nanny. Through meditation, I recaptured the smooth, hard surface of her butter-yellow formica table, the small divots in the chrome wrapped around the edges, the roughness of her pine rolling pin, and the heft of it in my child hands as I rolled out donut dough sailors before our tea parties. I come back to this practice often as I do more personal writing.
Write Some Letters
Whether an essay or longform memoir, you must imbue your characters with complexity. That parent you are bitter about, the brother you never forgave, the uncle who abused you — all need facets to their personality on the page. Write letters to your characters to flesh this out. I call them characters because even when you write about your family, they become characters to your readers, and as such, they need more than a flat depiction.
Write a letter to help you work through your feelings about them, about the situation you are crafting. Be honest about your role, be honest about your feelings. These letters never need to be sent. They are just tools to add dimension to your story. They also help chip away at that false self you might be constructing. I wrote a letter to my mother who I have not spoken to in 16 years to help myself get over the anger I felt and kept pouring into my writing. It did not help me forgive her, but I did understand my own culpability, and allowed myself a space to remember the good things about her I had shut away with all the terrible.
Poetry Immersion
Read, memorize, and review poetry. Poets are economists in language. They understand how to distill an image, an idea, a desire into just a few words. They can teach the essayist or memoirist how to bring that sensory detail to writing, how to complicate and uncomplicate it at the same time. Poetry also gives you ideas about structure. Sometimes braided or nonlinear is the right way to tell your story, and poetry has myriad structural offerings.
One of the most beneficial practices for growing your writing skills is read. Read great personal essays. There is a newsletter of the best personal essays of the week from Catapault, The Rumpus, Guernica, Granta, Narratively, and Literary Hub called Memoir Monday. I always find some rich inspiration. It is put together by Lilly Dancyger, a personal essay guru in my opinion. Read some craft books. I love Mary Karr, Vivian Gornick, Sven Birkerts, and Dinty Moore. Read some memoirs and essay collections. I just finished Toni Jensen’s, Carry. It was gorgeous. I also love Cheryl Strayed, Megan Stielstra, Kiese Laymon, and Leslie Jamison. The landscape is rife with ugly and wonderful personal writing — find the subject that resonates with you. In the meantime, below is some advice I have collected from some of my Creative Nonfiction heroes.
Mary Karr’s writing advice from The Art of Memoir:
Writing is painful.
Good work only comes through revision.
The best revisers have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standard of quality.
Dinty Moore’s writing advice from “The Power of Story: Finding the River in Creative Nonfiction”:
Find your Invisible Magnetic River, your primal story
Memoir asks questions; find your sustainable question
Tell a damn good story
Lilly Dancyger’s writing advice from “Generating Fresh Ideas for the Personal Essay”:
Think about your unique perspective.
Consider going small
Familiarize yourself with the existing conversation
