Do You Know Where Your Life Is Going? Or Even Your Story? And Do You Need To?
Join tonight's Write With Me Club and let's discuss this
I read this piece by
the other day which has really stayed with me. It is a beautiful piece about how ludicrous it is that we obsess about needing to know everything, having control, knowing where we are heading and hedging bets accordingly, when none of us can know or predict anything about the future. And while we’re doing all that whittling about knowing it all we’re missing living in the moment and just enjoying what is here, what is now without expectation of the future.Or at least those are the elements that stayed with me from her piece. You can read it here:
I feel that I have been treading water for a long time now, months or perhaps years, waiting for something to start, to get going, or go back to the way it was, and perhaps missing the fact that some things have maybe ended in the meantime, while I’ve been doing this waiting. Still, we push forward, in hope and expectation. Perhaps this is a familiar feeling for many at the moment, the MAGA & pro-Brexit crowds want to get back to a time that is lost, they are so busy staring in that rear view mirror they don’t see the pile up ahead of them. And the rest of us are so fearful of that pile up that we are hyper-focused on it, forgetting to enjoy what is here, what is now.
Oh, what a state we are in.
But let’s leave politics and return to more literary matters. I spent the weekend washing clothes and cooking and indulged myself yesterday afternoon in sitting down and reading a book I have been wanting to get round to for a while - Annie Ernaux’s Shame.
The first line is this: My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.
Now we know how important first lines are in books and what a first line, right? What happened? How did it happen? Was she hurt? Was he arrested? What did Annie herself witness?
She gives us all this upfront in the first couple of pages, she tells us where she was, what she saw, heard, felt. And if this is the scene that this whole slim volume (just 89 pages) is about then where do we go from here as a reader? What is going to propel us forward?
She doesn’t go over and over that scene throughout the book, just that one description up front, but what she spends the next 80 or so pages describing is minute detail of village life, village behaviour, the private Catholic school she attended, their rules and regulations, her parents’ shop and the customers who came and went, what she knew of their personal lives and what she kept from them about hers. It is a slim pressure cooker of a memoir, an exploration of these rules in a tight-knit community that culminated with an explosion, the one she described in the first line that by the end makes everything make sense without her ever having to go back to that scene.
I love Annie Ernaux, she is one of my favourite writers due to her intense eye, her exploration of subjects which are at the core of all of our lived experience, her ability to make the domestic universal. Her quest in this book was not to establish why her father had snapped that day, not really. It was to find meaning in something he had said about his daughter’s reaction to his violent outburst, why he had said to her that she would ‘breathe disaster’ on them. Why her? Why disaster? What did disaster mean to this family? Not death, but loss of reputation.
It is this that pushes this short book forward, this which makes us turn the page, this and the beautiful writing. But beautiful writing is not enough. I have been learning this over the last few weeks.
I currently have a book on submission with editors, I have told my paid subscribers this in the chat, and I wanted to share a little more of this with you tonight in my Write With Me Club. Friends who have read what I have written in my sample chapters have said it is some of the best writing I have ever produced. I agree with them. But it’s not enough, certainly not in this market. What we must do in non-fiction, as in fiction, is have a quest, we must have a clear mission, an idea of where we are heading and what question we need answering. Some comments from editors, while they loved my writing and my subject matter, have suggested this and I was able to make a few tweaks, and I wanted to share my experience of this with you and at the same time ask you this question about your own writing: Do you know where your story is going? Do you need to? Have you communicated this to your reader adequately?
We know that old Kurt Vonnegut quote that the character must want something on every page, even if it just a glass of water. But I wanted to explore this idea further.
But it occurred to me, going back to Leah’s piece at the top, that what we are asking from books and from our writing, is not necessarily what serves us in life. Do we need to know where we are going? Does that make the journey better? Is it forced, is it control? It is a fantasy and what do we miss along the way in our pursuit of this?
You might see that I’ve not figured it out yet, though I’d like to discuss this with you. So tonight, on zoom, round my dining table, 7pm GMT. Let’s have a look and see whether your story, whether that is a novel, or a memoir, or any other type of narrative non-fiction, is going somewhere. And even if you don’t have a work in progress, just join for the creative chat.
Here comes the paywall for the zoom details as it’s only my paid subscribers who can join my monthly meet up, but I’d love to see you there!