Writer’s Process Blog
By memoirista | August 19, 2007
An excellent example of a writer’s process blog is here, the blogspot blog of Karen Fisher-Alaniz. I have been following her development of her (and her father’s) connected memoir-letters composite, Breaking the Code-A Daughter’s Journey, for several months. She has posted on the Absolute Write forums on the thousand questions a first-time author faces, and I have seen her grow from the process. Her commitment to her work, which is now almost at the stage of submission to agents, has impressed me.
The pictures of her in writing mode are engaging, as well.
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Over the Rainbow - The Child and the Song
By memoirista | August 6, 2007
This YouTube video is an extraordinary performance of Over the Rainbow. The young girl Connie Talbot, sings the dream, and we cry. Perhaps Simon Cowell did, too. It is an excerpt from Britain’s Got Talent.
I am sharing it here because it follows on from my two theme discussions, serendipitously.
Serendipity is also involved in how I found it. I was going through a huge batch of Technorati Favorites I had accumulated from following on others’ attempts to improve their technorati rank by getting mutual favoriting. But many many did not carry out the “mutual” part. So I had all these Technorati favorites who had not favorited me back, to get rid of.
One of them, http://dillydesigns.com/, had the picture of Connie Talbot that you now see here, and the challenge, “Grab the Kleenex, you’re going to cry.” So I thought before I deleted her blog from my favorites list, I’d watch the video.
Very nice way to avoid writing.
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Solving a Problem 1
By memoirista | August 3, 2007
I have gone silent on both my Hadabrain blog - the actual writing of the memoir, and this blog, the process of writing the memoir.
Hadabrain refers to the song in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz - “If I Only Had A Brain (A Heart, the Noiv)” sung by The Scarecrow, The Tin Man, and The Cowardly Lion. The Scarecrow gets his brain when he is granted a diploma by the Wizard of Oz. That fits the general “triumph over obstacles” outline of my memoir. And that’s the end of the story (I think) for the Scarecrow.
I was puzzling, though, over Dorothy. What she wants to do, her goal, is to go home, and the conclusion of her story is that she gets back to Kansas - having hit her head and dreamed it all.
Well, the whirlwind that took me from Salt Lake City, Utah (even further out than Kansas) to the University of Pennsylvania Graduate Division of Arts and Sciences also took me away from “home” - actually another displacement of the idea of home. Home to me is diversity, home to me is East Coast, home to me is opportunity. Salt Lake lacked diversity, was in the Mountains instead of on the coase, and had a glass ceiling on opportunity. So perhaps I did click those ruby slippers, say to myself “there’s no place like home!” and wind up in Philadelphia, close to the East Coast, full of diversity, and with far more opportunity–home at last.
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Solving a Problem 2
By memoirista | August 3, 2007
The problem, again, is whether to link my memoir explicitly to the Wizard of Oz, as in the working title (If I Only) Had A Brain. You can see the simpler solution to the identification with the Scarecrow, who gets his diploma and thus his brain, from the Wizard, and the slightly more complex identification with Dorothy, who only wants to go home, who is carried away by the tornado/whirlwind when she gets hit on the head - suffers traumatic brain injury (TBI).
While percolating away at the problems I saw with this kind of thematic - such as not really wanting to go “home” to Salt Lake City - I came to a deeper insight. At the time I was a child, the women in my world who were working outside the home at jobs were teachers and nurses. I definitely did not want to be either, and I did not want to be what now has its own acronym, a SAHM - Stay-at-home-mom. I did want children, though. That’s another part of the story, not theme-connected, so let’s move on.
These were, I have come to realize, my deepest role models. I did not want to grow up to be my mother. She had a brain she never got to use. I had a brain I was determined to use beyond the home, determined to use in some way out in the world. I’m not sure that the story of the little mermaid has a great deal to do with having a brain, but Dorothy did, and however bewildered she got, so did Alice. Or at least they had adventures.
So when the car driven by Carla Martinez changed the world I perceived and felt, and changed my body, and changed my brain, and changed my eyesight, that car also pushed me back into the society of my childhood role models.
In the world in which I grew up, the female figures who had adventures and who did things were not real people, they were the constructed fictional figures of a genre one might call “whimsical adventure.” They were Dorothy, of The Wizard of Oz, and Alice, of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and “The Little Mermaid” of the story by Hans Christian Anderson (not Disney, who has parts of it very wrong).
There was a tremendous price to pay, in each of these stories. Dorothy’s leadership was achieved at the cost of declaring it all a dream due to traumatic brain injury (which is no dream). Alice simply fell asleep and dreamed it all, and the little mermaid endured tremendous physical pain to lose her mermaid’s tail and become human.
Thus the genre actually fails, as “whimsical” adventure, and approaches real life, a suitable setting after all for role models.
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Topics: General, theme | 4 Comments »
Contemplating My Navel II
By memoirista | July 9, 2007
This is turning into a series of “envy” postings, based on reading the super-creative blogs of others. This time the blog is AarghInk
at the post called “Just Show Us What You’re Really Like,” with photos.
My comment was
I would probably submit more, were I able to overcome my great fear of the author photo. You see, I know I’ll be a success–until they see the options for author photo and run screaming–from the editorial board meeting, or if not from there, from the book store.
Thank you for isolating and talking about that which we deny as we write.
It’s good to get those hidden fears out in public, isn’t it?
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“Writer’s BlockS” - Writing Software
By memoirista | July 9, 2007
The linear nature of a blog like www.hadabrain.net is linear. As you may know, I have started posting stuff for a memoir there.
Today I was looking at software for writers at this site, mostly wanting to check in for the descriptions of software to track submissions. I’m WAAY ahead of myself there, in so many ways. That is, I’m not really ready to track submissions.
Anyway, I stumbled upon a kind of software that sounds ideal for the non-linear nature of the way my memoir has been developing. For example, the entry “Marty” is about (mostly about) my mother. There is a reasonably logical place for it to go in the structure of memory, but in the story so far told on the blog, it doesn’t fit.
The software that would help solve all that, from the descriptions I’ve read, is WRITER’S BLOCKS 3.0. It takes a 3×5 card approach to organizing your writing. That is, blocks of text (such as “Marty”) are put in relationship to each other, in some order, with some color coding. Then I would be able to shuffle them around to my liking.
Even better, I can use it for my memoir, I can use it for a philological article I need to get ready for submission for publication, I can use it in the future for any project that needs to be changed from deductive reasoning to inductive discovery mode, and many more uses yet to be discovered.
I haven’t quite made the move to ordering it (from Absolute Write Store; I think I’d like to hear/read some user reviews. What I’ve read, of reviews on the web, say that the software is good if that’s how you work. That is, if you don’t need prompting on characters and plot.
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Blog Changes–Different Ads, More Blogroll
By memoirista | July 6, 2007
In the old ad arrangement, Amazon was supposed to be noting one’s wishes in serving up ads, so that the ads reflect books that wer in the genre memoir. This was not happening in the way I expected, or in the way that a reader (you!) could use. Hence the change.
I know that Amazon has an enormous variety of books that belong in the genre. I used the search term “personal memoir” the other day, and the first 100 listings were all in the genre of memoir, and only one of them was a book I had actually reviewed in The Reviews.
Now I have established a Store served up by Amazon. Memoirista Books is restricted to books (those hundreds of books) in the genre of memoir. There is an adjacent store on Amazon’s choices of books about writing memoir. That store page may be replaced by my personal choices.
Also, I have added an Amazon search box that you can use for other choices.
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Sharon Maas’s New Web Site is Sharon Maas.co.uk
By memoirista | July 2, 2007
The noted author Sharon Maas has briefly been without a web site. In order to get the new web site going, we want to spread the word: The new site is http://www.SharonMaas.co.uk/
Her web site title had ranked first on searches for ten years; we want to get the word out, that this wonderful author has her new site up and running.
For a more complete account of the issues that affect all writers on the web, see Cath Smith’s post on Sharon Maas.
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Contemplating My Navel I
By memoirista | June 29, 2007
Occasionally, something sparks more than usual introspection about how I do things (now). The following was originally added as a comment to another writer’s blog, and I liked it enough to steal my own work! Where does that fall on the plagiarism axis, I wonder.
Here it goes:
If I get a good solid nitpicking critique of anything I’ve written, yes, I learn what to look for in the next thing I write, or how to revise what I’ve written. It’s helpful, too, when I understand the critical distinctions between what I wrote, and the thoroughgoing critique I received. That feeling of not being very good at what I do, that you describe, is often there, but doesn’t bother me much anymore. I’ve separated the world into people who have an agenda that they want me to fit, and those who want the best for me–and the best from me. With the first group, I do my best to meet my own standards. With the second group, I hope, both of us grow.
The other blogger’s personal description included “never being very good at what I do.” The trouble is, I’ve found, once you get very good at what you do, no one will tell you that you are very good at what you do. There’s a long story that goes with this observation, but it’s best saved for that memoir that keeps waiting for wordcount!
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Covering Distance
By memoirista | June 26, 2007
I’ve been stuck on “There’s no place like home,” particularly as they reflect the words spoken by Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Certainly the beginning of WOZ is an easy metaphor for catastrophic shifts in one’s life. It’s only in fairy tales that one actually gets to go home; a fairy tale like WOZ offers no metaphor that suits the realization that one’s body will never be the same, one’s home will never be the same, and one may never be at home in the world again.
If you are completely puzzled by this entry, see my memoir-in-progress at (if I only) hadabrain.com
So it’s a difficult task, and a risky one, to pick up and use, thematically, a bunch of familiar tropes that don’t obviously apply, and would need a lot of work to be integrated into a memoir. Do I dare? Are there copyright issues with more than superficial and occasional allusions?
But then, there’s magic. I came back from my daughter’s the week before graduation, and got the shuttle home. The driver, for no apparent reason that I could see or know, got everyone loaded, and took his seat behind the wheel of the supersized van. He began to sing “We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz . . !”
Sometimes there are signs and answers, and do we ever know what to do with them?
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