Your Story

by Joanne Fedler

  Firstly, Zed is not an asshole.

  Secondly, I was unambiguous about what I wanted. I put my needs right out there. Clarity has a magnetic quality, whether we want to be mothers, pole dancers, musicians, or writers. If we’re fuzzy, we must work to get unfuzzed. The belief that we have “the rest of our lives in front of us” is a conceit of unmindfulness. It’s existentially negligent. We ought to act with some urgency around the things that matter to us.

  When we’re not clear, we make vague decisions. Vague decisions lead to depression and unhappy life choices that leave us feeling like victims because they seem not to have been made by us as much as they have just happened to us. McDonald’s is full of such folk. Because if they stopped and asked themselves what they want out of life, they’d know they don’t want diabetes, heart disease, and high cholesterol.

  We are the only ones who can answer the question What gives my life meaning? Not our parents, not our politicians, not our mates, not our girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse. Nothing is more important than knowing what we want in life.

  Finally, I wasn’t afraid of Zed’s answer. If he’d run away, at least I’d have known he wasn’t the right guy. The world is full of men to choose from. So if he’d done a runner, I’d have been hurt and sad for a while, but it wouldn’t have been the end of my world. What would have been a big deal is if I’d never made my intentions clear, hung around for a few years, and tactfully brought up the kid question only to find out that he didn’t want kids just when my ovaries were thinking of going into retirement.

  Conviction elicits an equal conviction—meeting ours with either a YES or a NO. When we are clear, and bold, an alchemy is unleashed and we can change our reality.

  When we trust ourselves, we know what to do.

  53

  Trust the innerness

  In everything we do—whether it’s writing a book, getting married, having children, immigrating, getting divorced, going through a serious health crisis—we can (and should) prepare ourselves as best we can. But there’s a part that only happens once we’re right in the middle of it all—there’s a knowing, a resiliency, a fierce, soulful flame that ignites when we’re riding the storm that we can never access in the lead-up because it only kicks in once we’re there. And it’s THIS deep innerness that we have to learn to trust. The wings we need will grow as we’re falling.

  Every process has its own mystical quality. We cannot control or predict it. We just need to be aware of it. Writing a book is a process, a slow intimacy that develops over time with language and our voice. Sometimes we get stuck and we don’t know how to move a particular scene or moment forward. So we might throw out a question like a bone into the bushes and ask our subconscious mind, like a puppy, to retrieve the answer for us.

  After I’d submitted my manuscript for Love in the Time of Contempt to my publisher, I was asked to write a final chapter that could somehow “hold” the message of the book. I spent weeks trying desperately to think up a brilliant ending and kept coming up with nothing. But I’ve written enough to know to trust the process. It doesn’t work to deadline or demand. It’s a bit like a teenager in that way.

  During this time, I was distracted with a new kitten in our home. We bought Archie from the Cat Protection Society. We’d specifically requested a laid-back kitten to accommodate Tanaka, our queenly dame who’d been around for 15 years and detested other feline company. But as soon as Archie jumped out of his box in our apartment, he dropped the cruiser act and transformed into an alpha-male crazy cat. He tore up and down our hallways, jumped in the trash bins and the fridge, and once even tried to get into the oven. He knocked food off the table, broke dishes, and frankly, he was driving me nuts.

  Archie scratched, bit, and drew blood. “He’s the worst cat,” my teenage son declared. “I hate him.”

  “He’ll grow out of it. And you can’t hate him, he’s just a kitten,” I said.

  “What’s the point of him? He won’t sit in my lap.”

  “You love him, no matter what he does. You keep hoping he’ll come sit with you, and one day when you least expect it, he will. And then all your love will have been worth it, just for that moment.”

  And suddenly, I knew I’d found the ending to my book on how to love teenagers. I ended it with this paragraph:

  A week after my conversation with my son, I’m walking through the apartment, switching off the lights, and I find him curled up in front of the TV, his long lanky body a gangly sculpture of limbs, his face soft in sleep, his huge feet sticking out from under the zebra-striped TV blanket. I wonder whether I should wake him and send him to bed, but then I notice the white nose and single stretched-out paw peeking out from under the blanket. I turn and let him be.

  The right image, the right moment, the right sentence will come to you in time.

  Our story is something that happens between our intention and the process of writing. We don’t control it entirely. We have to trust that the mulling, the random exploration, the quavering, and the crises will lead us to the end. We have to hold on to the reins of our story and surrender at the same time (yep, that’s a paradox).

  Trust the innerness.

  54

  Trust creation

  Anne Enright, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2007, writes in Making Babies, “A baby is, first and foremost, an act of the imagination.” Procreation is a psychological pirouette into what is possible, a projection into the unknown. We all create from an invisible abundance; though oblivious to it, baby girls are born with hundreds of eggs inside their bodies, as well as the perfect gestation environment for a human life. We may not be aware of it, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s true. Then, 20 or 30 years later, when we see two little pink lines on a pregnancy test, we have a moment of radical self-disbelief. Me? Pregnant? How did I do that?

  To write, we have to learn to trust ourselves and what it is we are doing.

  This business of creation is grander than us in the most ordinary of ways. Each of us is, unconsciously, involuntarily even, a repository of an infinite potential for creation.

  Likewise, we need to trust that all the elements of our story are inside us, even if we can’t see them.

  One way to do this is to understand why it is that we lack self-belief. The answer’s the same for all of us: because we’re not sure that our story matters.

  55

  Trust your story

  If you’re human and you’re breathing, you have a story. From a distance, your life reveals patterns, crises, moments of heroism, and dark nights of the soul. You may have a sense of your storied life already, because it’s likely that you’ve taken to journaling at some point to record those moments:

  “That bastard Felix . . .”

  “I wish I’d never met her . . .”

  “Did I really say that?”

  “My boss is a narcissistic sexist . . .”

  Journaling is a sign that your story lives. It has a faint heartbeat. But it’s a mistake to type up our journals and slap on a book cover.

  Trust me when I say that no one should read what we write in our journals. Writing we do late at night or before sparrow call where we splurge on self-indulgence, sloppy emotion, and half-processed thoughts is a private affair. We think it’s more fascinating than it is.

  But don’t diss the drivel. That initial uncensored slobbering onto the page is a dump we have to make before we can sort through the rubble and pick out what we want to share with an audience.

  What we write in our journals is not our story. But our story nestles somewhere in there. As we figure out what our story is, we need to remember that not everything we think or write about is interesting to other people. However, once we process the chaos and examine the tangled threads, we will find the captivation our story holds for others. We must not doubt that the ordinariness is fertile and valuable.

  Don’t lose the strength of your belief that your story matters. It matters to you. Your job is to make it
matter to others.

  How do you do this?

  First, you must think in “story,” not in facts.

  Second, you must get clear on who you are writing for.

  Imagine your book in a reader’s hands. Ask, What’s in it for someone who doesn’t give a toss about me and my life? Always write for someone. The energy of that trajectory is grounding and directive.

  Trust that your story is the way to your reader as well as the obstacle to your reader. Don’t let the facts of your story get in the way of reaching that person’s eyeballs and aorta. The facts of your life are only there to illuminate for the reader a truth that transcends them. In later chapters, I will share writing techniques that make space for a reader inside your story.

  Hilary Mantel, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012, said this about memoir:

  It’s hard for beginners to accept that unmediated truth often sounds unlikely and unconvincing. If other people are to care about your life, art must intervene. The writer has to negotiate with her memories, and with her reader, and find a way, without interrupting the flow, to caution that this cannot be a true record: this is a version, seen from a single viewpoint. But she has to make it as true as she can. Writing a memoir is a process of facing yourself, so you must do it when you are ready.

  We trust our story when we are ready to write or tell it.

  So what does it mean to be “ready”?

  We are ready when we have some degree of self-awareness (however you choose to get there—meditation, therapy, dance classes, laughter-yoga, tantric visualization, the Hakomi Method . . . you pick). When you’ve suffered enough and have been broken and rebuilt many times. It’s a blend of maturity and empathy and self-compassion and a lot less ego.

  Knowing ourselves is critical, but it’s not enough. We’ve got to learn how to transform self-insight into shared insight. We must apprentice ourselves conscientiously to the craft of writing to develop clarity on questions like:

  Why do I want to write this story?

  Who is this story for?

  What is this story about?

  How will I tell this story?

  What is my plan of action?

  What decisions do I need to make?

  What do I still need to learn?

  Be humble. And have conviction.

  Trusting your story happens when you work the hell out of that impossible contradiction.

  56

  Trust the universe to follow your clear instructions

  Many years ago I was trying to finish the draft of a novel I’d been working on for years. My concentration and enthusiasm for it had been interrupted by two pregnancies, births, newborns, toddlers, and work that was bringing in some much-needed diaper money.

  But this time I was Serious. It was Now or Never. I wanted To Finish. But Finishing is a very different business from Beginning. It has a particularly exacting energy and requires different emotional and writing muscles. Whereas beginnings can tolerate the chaos of inspiration and the various explosions of insight that propel all of us to write in the first place, finishing is about tidying up afterwards. It’s the clearing away of the dirty plates and the scrubbing down of the floors. It is the neatening of loose ends and the dusting of surfaces.

  The problem is, I am a horrible, simply ghastly housekeeper. I battle to focus and I lose interest in tidying up when I am halfway through a drawer or cupboard and surrounded by things I can’t work out whether to store, file, or throw out. Finishing requires us to put on those rubber boots and wade into the swamp of our creativity armed with a big black garbage bag. It asks of us ruthless decision making. The cutting away of extraneous bits, the folding down of corners, and the smoothing down of edges. Finishing is the art of narrative origami, with a couple of bloody swipes with a samurai sword.

  If Beginning is the interior designer, Finishing is the housekeeper. Beginning is for artists, Finishing is for accountants. To be a successful writer, you have to be able to do both. Writing is a discipline as much as it is a flamboyance.

  Though my book had become feral and grown from a few pages on a screen to about seven files, with I-can’t-remember-how-many-versions-or-which-one-I-last-worked-on, and three boxes of research, I knew that I had to dive in and work it out. Tax accountants do it all the time; they work their way through papers, one by one, and make some order out of it all.

  What I lacked was the confidence that this part (the really hard part) was worth it. That far from it being a futile hobby, like trainspotting or bird-watching, there was a point to it all, an über-rationale. That maybe what I had written was worth the effort and someone might actually want to read it.

  Most writers suffer from this crushing lack of self-confidence. Ironically, it often kicks in at a point when we are just about to achieve something, to make a breakthrough, turn a corner, or manifest a transformation. We often don’t recognize the guerrilla tactics of our own self-sabotaging psyches.

  So in the spirit of mentoring my uncertain self, I made a small card with the words “I AM A WRITER.” I laminated it. And on the back of the card, I wrote, “Don’t forget the book and the magic it carries. You can do it.”

  I tacked this card up on my computer screen with adhesive. Each day when I sat down to write, those words looked down on me.

  An affirmation is an assertion, a verbal visualization, a pronouncement about a state of affairs. When we assert in the present tense something we wish for in the future, so the theory goes, we create our reality. The power of the declaration makes it so.

  I don’t know enough about the sacred hidden geometries of intention and how they interact with destiny to say if this really is so. Did that card have any power? I know it got my head right. An affirmation is conviction in motion. It’s the way we hold ourselves accountable to the longing inside us.

  I no longer cringe when I say, “I am a writer.” Though I had been writing for a while, the affirmation made it true in my heart

  Give the universe clear instructions. Tell it: I am a writer. Then get back to work.

  57

  Trust the invisible forces

  Whenever I start a book, I set my intention for it. I ask: What do I want to bring into the world with this book? Who do I want it to reach? What outcomes would I love to see happen because of it? What other books is it like? I’m feeling for its shape.

  Then I collect all the books that have in some deep way inspired or helped contour the longing that’s brought me to write the book and I keep them close by as totems to help me bring my book into the world. I choose some books for their style, their humor, or their feel. I choose others because of the clarity of their message, or the beauty of their prose. I come armed with some intention of what I want to create.

  I then do some dreamwriting using the prompt “The book I long to write is . . .” Some preliminary writing (sometimes called “prewriting”) to frame our intention sets up an invisible but powerful force field around our work that helps contain it. As writers we must reach for specific goals, whether it’s to start a blog, get an article published in a particular publication, or write the first draft of a book manuscript. Our dreams and longings start to gain power as soon as they become clear.

  I sometimes think of a book as a dream I am trying to have on the page—it feels that mercurial at times. So I speak to it, I invoke it, I call to it, I ask it questions. I form a relationship with the invisible forces and trust that they are working together with things visible in a quiet miraculous alchemy to bring about something wholly new.

  I also believe in pledging my writing to someone, writing toward a person (dead or alive, real or imaginary). You might dedicate your writing to your late mother, a best friend who lives in another country, the Wizard of Oz, the Dude in The Big Lebowski, the spirit of Nelson Mandela, the memory of Daniel Pearl, the heart of Kuan Yin, the teachings of Christ or the Buddha. In the Talmud there’s a beautiful saying: “Every blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers,
‘Grow, grow.’” Every story needs its angel to guard it and whisper words of precious encouragement. Put a picture of your angel above your desk and let it watch over you as you write.

  58

  Not so tightly

  To get what we want, we need to know what we want. We need to set goals and an intention and move toward them with clarity and purpose, always revisiting the question, “Why am I writing this?”

  Our goals give us a direction. Where things get weird is when our intention grows tentacles and becomes attachment. Attachment corrupts conviction. The conviction and commitment we need is to the process of writing, not the outcome. People come to writing wanting to be published. But that intention might become a stumbling block. Your intention needs to be that you’re going to write the best goddamned book / article / short story / poem that you can. Pursuing getting published by Penguin Random House like it’s the source of all your life’s purpose and future happiness is a recipe for deep unhappiness.

  And frankly, it corrupts creation.

  Frame your intention. Cast your vision. Invoke the invisible forces.

  But don’t bet on it. Don’t go into debt on it. Don’t hold on too tightly.

  Just write.

  59

  Tell no one

  When we start writing, we get excited and want to share our happy news like a newly pregnant mother-to-be. We want to blab to everyone, “Hey, I’m writing a book.” It’s hard to keep a secret as big and beautiful as this.

  But we must. If we care about what we’re doing, we have to learn to keep secrets.

  A writer I mentor sent me a tearful e-mail because her husband (her number one fan and supporter, with whom she was sharing all her writing) had innocently asked her, “So how exactly is this thing going to become a book?”