Process Journal/April

4/5/08
I don’t know where the fuck I am in this memoir. I open up my draft of Chapter 5, and I don’t know what came before or what’s coming after. Because I’m intentionally not writing chronologically—I find chronological memoirs or bio’s tedious and boring–it’s hard to stay centered. How can I create a book as long as a novel without any structure? With a novel, I usually have some semblance of a plot, and even tho it always changes, it helps me know where I’ve been and where I’m going. Now I’m focusing on sisters, the relationships between Rhoda and Janice and between Linda and me, and I keep feeling a need to go back and check what I did in Chapter 2, when I wrote about Linda. I’m just totally lost.

I think I’m going to start re-reading The Liars Club soon; maybe by studying its structure I’ll learn something. I need some sort of anchor. Otherwise the further I go the more chaotic it’s going to get. As of now I’m happy with the first three chapters—but how they’ll fit into the memoir as a whole I don’t know.

Part of my confusion comes from not having anything printed out–the book is on computer only. Maybe I’ll just print the first and last pages of each chapter. I’m too low on ink to print everything….

….well, that didn’t work, in fact, it made me more confused, reading these disjointed pages.

Another problem: I was working on the memoir intermittently, because I want to be writing on my other blog sometimes, and also because the hassles in my life keep intruding. In order to make sure I kept up some kind of regularity, I decided to devote three consecutive days a week to the memoir, and leave the other four days for blogging. Well, as I’ve learned a million times, an absence of so many days means re-orientation every time I come back to it. If it takes me a day to get re-oriented, that leaves only two for actual productivity.

This is not working. I am not happy. If I’m not happy writing, I’m not going to write. Having given up, more or less, on getting published, my only reason for writing is pleasure, so if I don’t get pleasure from it I’m not going to do it.

Shit. Maybe I’ll feel differently tomorrow.

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Next Day: 4/6/08
When writing isn’t going well I do what every writer does—I procrastinate. This morning I spent three hours on the telephone. I shouldn’t feel bad about that—Aunt Janice and Christine have both been on my list to call for three weeks, and I finally did it. But I knew I was only doing it to avoid writing.

On the other hand, this is another thing that makes the writing life so hard: you never really have “nothing to do.” You never have enough spare time in your life to spend three hours on the phone. And these are not people with whom I engage in small talk. Christine especially is someone I need to talk to regularly, far more frequently than I do talk to her. She’s probably the only person I ever really want to talk to, the only person whose perspective I consider of value.

But back to my point about the writing life: I see how people hang out, how they spend time, and I also remember once upon a time being more relaxed that way myself. But for many years now, I’ve been unable to spend time casually, particularly in the morning, my writing time. I feel constantly pressured. There’s too much pressure, and it is imposed only from within.

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4/07/08
Revelation: I’m bogged down primarily because of the material I’ve been working on, the chapter focusing on sisters and the way all the relationships among females in the family are intertwined. Not only is that a pretty complicated subject for anyone to tackle, but my relationship with my sister is B-I-G, maybe even bigger than the one with my mother. Also…

Revelation #2: Unlike Rhoda, Linda is still alive. I only started this memoir after Rhoda died; I never could have done it when she was alive. And that wasn’t a conscious decision, but an organic process that just happened. Less than two years after her death I started wtiting about her; and…

Revelation #3: Because Stacy is alive, I haven’t been able to include very much about her and our relationship. I don’t know if I’ll be able to at all. If I can even write about that it’ll be difficult, and publishing it is probably out of the question. I’ve thought a lot about the issue of self-censorship so as not to hurt people, and I know where I stand on it: I don’t make public anything that I feel goes too far. I don’t want to damage my relationships any further, so it’s a purely selfish decision.

With these revelations I’ve re-organized things a bit. AND: today I’ll work on something easier—the chapter about the positive side of my mother’s personality. Another lesson I learned long ago: when you’re stuck, work on a different part of the book, even if the writing doesn’t go in any kind of order.