Writing from Life

More than ten years ago, Sunil Freeman, Assistant Director of the Writer’s Center, called and asked if I would like to teach “Writing from Life.” “What is it?” I wanted to know.

“Personal narrative, stories about one’s life,” he said. “True stories.”
(Here I am recreating dialogue, an accepted technique in personal narrative writing.)

As a fiction writer, I find “true” a scary word. Although fiction is lying to tell the truth, fictionalizing life makes it easier to get to that truth. Or so it seems to me. Yet through leading workshops in “Writing from Life,” I have learned the beauty in stories from one’s daily life. Experience is a tangle of the relevant, the mundane, and the random. In “Writing from Life” we work at hewing stories from the crude material of experience, picking through the chaff to find the wheat.

Each class of “Writing from Life” has been a journey with the participants. Much like The Canterbury Tales, we pilgrims gather around the campfire and tell stories from our lives. This class is more personal and requires confidentiality since we are writing about family, friends, and others, like bosses, people who have not asked to be characters in our writing. But our subject matter is wide, the whole of our experience, our secrets, our childhoods, our fears, and more.

I have a personal preference for travel writing and own many books on travel, especially DK Eyewitness Travel Guides. I have a shelf of these from Vienna, Paris, London, Cracow, Warsaw, etc. But nothing beats a trustworthy narrator telling me what it was like to be a stranger in a strange land. Through my latest “Writing from Life” class, I went to Japan and Africa. I saw Paraguay at the time of their revolution through the eyes of a young patriot.

I felt smothered in a narrative about claustrophobia and shivery on a bus ride in winter through a snowstorm. I marveled at the memories of being a woman reporter on the Hill when women seldom had such jobs. Back-to-back father stories provided a stark contrast. Life is not neat nor does the personal narrative always resolve neatly, but it is often funny.

We laughed at memories of 1960s culture; at stumbling into jobs in teaching and banking; at a wussy boss who had to use euphemisms to lay off an employee; at the odd phenomenon of tattoos and the hilarious slang that goes along with this tattoo culture. What fun we had! I miss you all.