Writing Your Truth

light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For years people have said to me “You should write about your childhood!” And from their points of view, I understood why: raised by hippies in a culture of drugs, art, intellectualism and hedonism in Northern California, there’s a lot of rich ore to mine. But my childhood was not something I could write about directly; every entry point upset me, bored me, or filled me with anxiety.

That’s partly because the story of my childhood is not just mine. There are a lot of people involved, not the least of whom are my parents, with whom I still have contact and love a great deal. The other part was that I hadn’t worked enough of it out on my own; I didn’t want people to read my writing-as-therapy.

And yet, very recently, these stories have found their way out of the cracks of my barriers with something bordering on ease for the first time ever.

I tried to figure out, why now? And I came to a few important realizations that might help other writers to put down on paper those personal stories—whether in memoir or fictional form, or both:

  • Open to Understanding. Write about these stories with the intent to understand them, yourself, or the events better. When you write from a place of exploration, again, you don’t drive the sword of blame into anyone—you open an investigation.
  • Leave Blame Aside. When you take the stance of non-judgment, leaving blame out of the picture, you reveal the wider circumstances. This means you’ll come off less like a victim or martyr, and your “people” do not end up as villains.
  • Feelings never Fail. While the facts may vary from one person to the next, your emotional truth is never wrong. What you feel and believe is yours, and that is your jumping off place.
  • Fiction Speaks True. When in doubt, turn to fiction; change events, people and places up just a little. In that framework you have the power and license to shift and massage the truth and the events around a structure that tells a story. It doesn’t exactly let you off the hook, but it helps with the writing process.

On that note, my essay The Art of Lying & Stealing is a guest post over at Rachel Thompson (RachelintheOC)’s blog. She is known for writing dark, honest truths about her life, as exemplified in her bestselling book Broken Pieces.  I appreciated her making a safe space for me to do the same.

climb to glowing cabin

The Myth of Overnight Success (and why it’s bad for writers)

by Jordan E. Rosenfeld

You know it when you see it: that author everyone is talking about all of a sudden. One day, you’ve never heard of him or her, the next minute, J.K. Rowling or Jonathan Franzen or someone whose name is now almost household appears out of the void of obscurity (to you). And because of the explosive nature of success, it looks as though t this success happened instantaneously. This person tossed off a book, found an agent and bam, a month later: bestselling magic!

But…it’s a myth. Overnight success is an especially damaging myth to writers.

Many years back I had the pleasure of interviewing authors for my radio show Word by Word, and as a contributing editor at Writer’s Digest Magazine. For a writer who is also a groupie of writers, it was one of the highpoints of my writing life. I spoke with hundreds of writers (including some of my faves: Aimee Bender, Isabelle Allende, Tess Gerritsen, Chuck Pahlaniuk Louise Erdrich, TC Boyle, Yann Martel). What I learned both from speaking to them, and also in my own long slog toward publication of my three books, is that overnight success is an utter myth. Not only is it a myth, and I mean for writers specifically, it’s a dangerous one to any writer who truly wants to make a career (by which I don’t necessarily mean money), and here is why:

Practice: Writing is a craft, and though talent can take you far, the only true way to produce anything good is through practice. Lots of it. A painter of landscapes I met once said she had to paint “miles of canvas” for every finished painting, and I think it is the same for writers. We must write libraries of words. Even if you are a beacon of shining raw talent, you probably have a trick or two to learn, a habit to curb, or a new way of writing you’d like to try out. I think writers age like fine wines, personally, and the more you polish, the better. And there’s all this pressure in the digital age to get books up fast and then faster, which often does you a disservice. First drafts can be written in a rush, but subsequent drafts need a bit of time.

Polish (with help): All of the authors I interviewed had a writing partner, a writing critique group, or an editor they worked closely with. They did not rely upon their own eyes at all times to catch what wasn’t working. Because they sought feedback, these authors also did revisions of their work. Some of them did many, many revisions. And while the word often terrifies newer writers, I firmly believe that real writing—real craft and certainly polish—happens in the revision.

Persist. Every writer I interviewed was famous for a “breakout” book; while this was their first published book, it was actually the author’s third or ninth written novel. Which was all to say if your first book doesn’t make magic, I beseech you, by the mother of all holy things, keep writing!

The moral of the story is: Overnight success comes after walking a road over time of practice, and persistence. Nothing is ever wasted as a writer. You’ve walked another step toward another mile. Anything else is rushing, and you know what your mother taught you about haste making…

 

 

 

FORGEDinGRACE500

Forged in Grace .099c through Father’s Day

I’m celebrating my son’s 5th birthday all week by giving away my novel FORGED IN GRACE is just 0.99c to all kindle owners (kindle apps) too. Please spread the word!

Download FORGED IN GRACE for 0.99 cents here

 

the-writer-writing-3647594-640-428

Plot Intensive is Back. August 19-Oct.14, 2013

Busy writers don’t always have time to sit in a classroom to improve their fiction.

Jordan’s Writing Intensives are a unique, online blend of personal feedback, student interaction, and tailored lessons for the writer who is committed to the next level of craft.

These courses blend coaching and writing, as students receive direct feedback from Jordan as well as benefit from interaction with each other, video chat, and more.

*All students receive a free copy of the book of their choice upon registering for Jordan’s classes.! $30 discount for all returning students! (*one-week intensives excluded).

The Plot Intensive is back! 8 weeks. August 19-October 14, 2013.

Over-plotter, under-plotter? Struggles with plot are common among writers at all levels. This online intensive will change the way you approach plotting altogether, and thus your writing. A good plot is a journey of transformation for your character. Every memorable novel is both one of action and event, as well as emotional transformation. We tell and read stories to learn, explore, escape, and discover. This class will teach you how to write characters who transform, and refocus your story on compelling action, appropriate drama, and strong scenes.

You’ll learn (and apply to either a work in progress or a new project):

  • The basics of plotting: what it is, and what it’s not, as well as how you relate to it
  • A strong, successful plot structure that will not fail you, and how to work your story goals into it
  • Your characters’ fears, flaws, and motivations
  • How to keep a plot tense and memorable
  • The significance of the hero’s journey and how it can help you write a character readers won’t soon forget

You can participate to your own level in online discussion and the assignments are weekly and self-paced for busy, working people.

Register by July 15th, and receive the earlybird discount of $20 off.

REGISTER HERE

970802_10201210124795930_667947978_n

Dispatch from the Cheryl Strayed Writing, Truth & Community Event

After all these years of meeting, interviewing and even becoming friends with published authors, you’d think I would have lost my habit of getting starstruck. But nope! I’m a big dork when it comes to meeting a literary idol, or even just a literary person I admire. And of course, when a book becomes as big a hit as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, it’s easy to believe the person behind the writing is no longer on earth.

On the contrary, Cheryl Strayed was so much on earth she helped ground me back into some very basic things I’d not exactly forgotten about writing, but perhaps gotten cocky about thinking I already know them so well. So here are my few tiny insights gleaned from her lovely workshop, the talk she gave and the writing exercises she led us through.

  • Stories live in our bodies. Our own stories, and those of others. For many of us writers, the act of writing is a necessary pressure valve, to release these rambling stories onto the page.
  • What is the big question driving your writing that can become universal, beyond you? For Cheryl it was “How can I live without my mom” which turned into “How can I bear the unbearable?” I’d have to say mine is something like: “Why was I abandoned/neglected?” Which translates into: “How do we learn to take care of ourselves in the world?”
  • It’s perfectly okay to write a story terribly. Cheryl’s words were “It’s better to write a book that kind of sucks than none at all.” In this, she’s talking about first drafts, about getting those words out.
  • BUT: until you strive to make “art” out of the experience or story, it’s just a bunch of words or journal purge. She wasn’t talking about genre or snobbery either, she was saying that there are two things: 1) The messy, beautiful imperfect experience and the profound act of writing that down, and 2) Shaping and crafting that story to be able to speak to others in a meaningful way. If you don’t shape it, you can’t expect others to FEEL what you’re trying to elicit.
  • Revising is the way you make that beautiful shape and meaning.

That’s enough for today. I’m looking forward to reading her novel Torch and savoring her Tiny, Beautiful Things column as Dear Sugar.

Mighty Milo

Grace for Mighty Milo!

There’s nothing like a baby to rally people to a cause, and that’s a darn good thing. I’m here to tell you about “Mighty” Milo, the grand-nephew and grandson of two friends of mine who was born with a serious heart and tracheal condition on May 16. In his little more than two weeks of life he’s undergone open heart surgery among other things, and has been slowly weaning off the “ECMO” life support machine. His parents haven’t been able to hold him since he was 4 days old. BUT, he’s a fighter! And he’s got people fighting and praying and loving for him all over the place. He gets stronger every day.

Nonetheless, his parents have taken time off from their jobs to be with him, as have his grandparents and many other family members, as every precious minute they get with him is important. Babies respond to the sounds of their loved ones, and Milo needs them.

To support the Mighty Milo Fund, I’m donating $1/book for every copy of Forged in Grace, which is, coincidentally, a book about healing wounds, that any of you buy, paperback or e-copy. Between now and June 30th, I make that pledge.

So you can support Milo by spending a few bucks on a good book, or you can donate directly to his fund.

Many thanks for your support. Please share the word.

Jordan

colorful typewriter

Fiction based on Fact: Parallel Universes

I have never liked writing about my own life for an audience. For thirty years I’ve kept journals where I barf out the details of my own personal dramas, whine and cry and turn to myself for answers. I journal in the same way that I exercise—because it helps me feel better, but not because I really like it. But I write fiction because I have a need to make stories—to provide a grid of meaning—to truths and experiences that do not have a clear meaning as they happen. I’ve written the occasional memoir piece, but those always have a way of feeling untrue—or rather, factually inaccurate. And since I believe that every memory filters experience differently anyway, at the end of the day it is easier to just write fiction, where I always have the license to make things up.

So I haven’t quite known what to do with the fact that what I’m writing now—which has come out of me in a gush, 40,000 words in two weeks so far—is very much based on my life. That is to say, it tells a version of the story of my life. A parallel universe, if you will. Nobody in the story is exactly the person they are based upon. My narrator is not precisely me, and what happens to her did not literally happen to me. And yet I know everything she feels, and I can feel in my very cells the complex conflicts of all the people around her.

Memoir writers  often worry that the people they write about will not like what they write. That they will hurt, offend, annoy, or worse, damage a relationship. And yet, the only way to tell this story truly, was to model my characters after real people. When I say “model” I mean I borrowed key elements—sometimes a manner of speech, or a way of life, or features, or passions or being in the right place at the right time in my actual life to fit the story’s needs.

No one in my family has to be embarrassed that I am revealing family secrets or pointing fingers. If anything, this story begs for me to bring a compassionate eye to every character, to explore these complex characters without judgment, but curiosity. I’ve come a long way from being the blaming child who bottled up anger over what happened to her. I understand now, decades away from those years, that everyone’s intentions were good, that they did their best. But what’s more, I realize that for all its chaos, the people I grew up with left me with a rich artistic and intellectual legacy that I’m not sure I would have had in a different family.

So, while I still don’t like writing about my life, I love writing a novel that pays tribute to borrows from the raw experience of my life and the people in it.

 

 

PrettyInPinkBigPic

80s Flashback: Mining the Past for Writers

To my surprise, the most commented on thread on my Facebook page this week was on what boys wore in the 80s. Specifically wealthy Caucasian boys, which I needed for my WIP, though asking the question opened the wardrobe doors to my own sartorial fascination, mostly with brands my family couldn’t afford: Guess and Esprit and Izod and United Colors of Benneton.

The novel I’m working on takes place in 1984, and though I lived it, I don’t remember a lot of the details (I was only 10). But with some prompting, it all came flowing back in: Izod and polo shirts with flipped collars; acidwash; Vans and day-glo colors. Lace tights and gloves, jelly bracelets, high-tops. Boys with bleached bangs and oh my, the music.

I’ve spent the weekend listening to an 80s pop station to put me back in the mood, amazed at how my body thrills to those synthesized beats and echoing male vocals, or the extra chirpy/syrupy female vocals. It’s strange how potent the trappings of the 80s is to my memory.

The irony is that the 80s were not an actual happy time in my life. I shuffled back and forth between my divorced, working parents, a latchkey kid babysat by afternoon TV. There was addiction at every turn, a lot of adults hanging on to life and livelihood by their fingernails (I’ll save the gory details for the book).

And yet the entire gestalt of that time—its gaudy fashions, its pop culture, its angsty John Hughes movies that made Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson into idols—is something I feel incredibly nostalgic about, and which has been powerfully helpful in drawing the setting for this project.

It just goes to show that even when it’s hard, it can be useful to one’s writing.

What period of time has you captive, whether you lived it, or wished you did?

Okay, Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun just came on, and I’m going to do a circuit around my house and prove her right.

fairfax

The Gift in the Darkness

It all started with the spark of this article that resurrected—literally—a character from my past. He was one of those mythic wanderers who blew in and out of my life as a child, one of many colorful people who influenced me then and even now in the landscape of my writing.

I often say jokingly that I was raised by hippies, but I’ve realized lately that I was actually raised by artists—both the frustrated and the productive kind—as well as intellectuals who prized the arts, reading, and philosophical discussion.

A lot of this talent and intensity got hijacked by the drug culture of the 70s, and derailed these painters and musicians and writers for many years. Some of my most beloved “extended family” never recovered and never went on to create.

But I grew up in this intensely artistic, wildly creative (and I mean wild as in uncensored, rebellious) group of adults. I was an only child in a cast of young adults (At nearly 39 I now realize these were barely more than kids in their 20s) who were giving their parents’ post-war ideals and values the bird. Their boundaries were diffuse, and I believe that they saw themselves as pursuing higher consciousness and elevated art, activism and world change. And some of them kept at it and succeeded, though not many.

Though my upbringing was full of uncertainty and even outright terror at times, I’m coming to see the gift tucked inside the darkness. For the last four days material I’ve long chewed on has come pouring out of me. Nearly 100 pages, a flow so profuse it has taken over my waking and dreaming life, etched in the imagery of the lush, wealthy, wacky community of Marin County, California, where I grew up. After years of slogging at writing with occasional euphoria, exercising it with the same struggle I endure to get my actual muscles in shape, I know how rare and tenuous such an outpouring is. I can’t remember that last time I wrote so much in a single day since I was a child.

I’ve spent years trying to find entry into the material of my past that isn’t judgmental of these key players; only since becoming a mother myself 5 years ago, have I come to understand how hard life can be under the best of circumstances, with all my sober faculties about me. I believe they knew not what they did at the time. More than that, I’ve started to prize the infusion of creativity I inherited from them, without the addiction to boot.

For it is that child, steeped in literature and free expression, hedonism, drugs, exuberance, terror, awe and confusion who is speaking in my pages, telling a story at last, that doesn’t mean to point fingers of blame, but rather to say: I was there, it was wild, and it shaped me. And what’s more, now that I have lived away from my origins for over a decade, as I write it into being in the pages of this raw baby novel, I realize that for all my annoyance and frustration, I will always love where I come from for making me who I am.

blue chaos

Failure and Chaos–Coping Strategies for Writers

Failure is one of the most common feelings among writers. There are so many opportunities for failure, from rejection, to a work in progress that doesn’t come together.

Every time I see a status update from a hardworking writer that says something like, “How did I ever think I knew how to write,” or “My novel hates me” I always think: you’re right on track.

And that track is NOT failure.

I’ll tell you why.

Creation is an act of chaos. I’m sorry to pull out the birth metaphor but if you’ve ever seen one, human or animal, you know they are messy, wild affairs full of moaning and fluids and pain and frustration. Frankly, writing is no different. The act of creation requires starts and stops, going forward and back. Writing material that you will not use. AND, let’s not forget something else–anything new is full of thrilling, marvelous wonder. If children popped out of the womb speaking French and doing math tables, no matter your spiritual point of view, you have to ask: what’s the point, right? We create because it is full of wonder and awe even though it hurts a lot, or at the very least often causes grown adults to wander around in public muttering to themselves and eating themselves into donut comas (no? just me?).

Writing is a process of discovery. 

You discover things about yourself, about your ideas and feelings. You enter into perspectives you may have always wondered about, and deepen your exploration of those you’ve known intimately all your life. You try on lofty propositions. You escape, you revel, you get weird (no? just me?).

Let me repeat: Creation is an act of chaos. And actually I don’t really mean “chaos” but rather raw the wild, bursting, daunting energies that the universe is made of. Wild stuff. Atomic stuff. Fundamental stuff. (No, I have no better word than “stuff” today).

If you are experiencing any one of the million feelings of failure and frustration in the process of writing a book, I’m sorry to break it to you that you are not failing. You are herding your own big bang into being; you are riding quantum possibilities.

You only fail if you stop.

 

 

About Jordan


Author of FORGED IN GRACE, Jordan E. Rosenfeld learned early on that people prefer a storyteller to a know-it-all. She channeled any Hermione-esque tendencies into a career as a writing coach, editor and freelance journalist and saves the Tall Tales for her novels. She lives in Northern California with her superhero-obsessed son, Psychologist husband and their tuxedo cat, Elvert.

Buy Great Books!