Writing Tips From a Famous Author — I Put on My Best Socks to Get Them

Zooming With a Famous Author — Sheltering at Home Week 45

I put on my prettiest earrings and my coolest running socks for the occasion. The earrings would be visible on Zoom, of course, but not the socks.

Why the socks? This was a special occasion and I wanted to look my best. I wanted to feel my best. Kind of like back in my dating days when I’d put on my prettiest bra for a first date even though I wasn’t planning to strip down to my bra any time soon.

As of last weekend, like most everybody I knew, I’d been cooped up at home for 44, going on 45, weeks. My social life consisted mostly of my husband,  the occasional Skype with the kids, and the UPS guy.

Meeting New People

But today I would be meeting some people. Real people. With the help of a video chat service, I’d be sitting down at my laptop and going out into the world. I would be joining an online workshop with eight other writers and our leader, a Famous Author.

The Famous Author, I’m pretty sure, will applaud my restraint in not dropping her famous name here. That would turn this into story about her, not me. Memoir, she insisted over the three days we spent with her, is the story of the writer, not the famous people she went to school with or had affairs with or took a writing class with.

The other thing our Famous Author wanted to teach us was something called the container essay — a handy device for memoir and personal essay writers that involves telling a big, meaningful story within the limits of a small, container story.

How Do Those Socks Fit In?

Which means that, because I started out this particular personal essay talking about socks, I’m going to have to end it with socks. Not sure how that’s going to happen. Stand by. I’ll think of something.

Long-time readers of this blog might be wondering — Barbara is a writer with years of experience: A stint as a junior editor at Good Housekeeping magazine. Decades on major metropolitan newspapers. A published book. Not to mention the 582 blog posts she’s put up on this website since 2009.

Why in the world would she sign up for a writing class?

Because I’m stuck, that’s why. I need a kick in the pants.

I’m very happy with my 2015 book, Wrestling with God, and the wonderful first-person stories I gathered for it. The witch. The progressive Muslim. The fundamentalist Christian. The Buddhist monk who spent two years bowing his way up the California coast. The atheist.

And I’m happy with the progress of my second book, a kind of Erma Bombeck-meets-Betty Friedan romp through the hectic, woman-trying-to-have-it-all years when my kids were small and Jon and I were both holding down jobs.

A Book Ten Years in the Works

It’s my third book that’s got me flummoxed. The one I’ve been thinking about since my mother died — ten years ago.

I have been imagining, all these years, a kind of multi-generational epic memoir: the story of my difficult mother, my mercurial grandmother, my enterprising great-grandmother, my firece-looking great-great-grandmother, and my mysterious three-times great-grandmother, the one said to be “half Indian.”

I wanted to find out — why was my grandmother so mercurial? Why was my mother so difficult? Why was I so depressed for so much of my life? What happened to us, we generations of mothers and daughters? What trauma befell my maternal line somehow, somewhere?

My question for the Famous Author was, how in the world do I get started on this big project?

Forget Michilimackinac, Forget Red Wing

When it came time to talk about my manuscript, the Famous Author got right to the point. Forget those ancestors, she advised — the ones I’d planned to investigate on Ancestry.com, the ones who would have me traveling to places like Michilimackinac, Michigan, and Red Wing, Minnesota.

In memoir, she said, you can only write about what you have experienced directly. Writing about someone you’ve never met — that’s a different genre.

She also wanted me to stop thinking in terms of a book. Write essays, she said. Write lean — container — essays. Write them one at a time, each one complete in itself.

Keep It Simple, the Famous Author Said

What? You mean I don’t have to write that big, long, mega book with all those complicated, hard-to-pin-down stories of the generations of women who came before me?

You mean I can just write one essay at a time, one after another, and see where they take me? Maybe to Michilimackinac, maybe not?

Less than an hour with the Famous Author and I was off the hook. I could set aside that weighty mega project that had become so oppressive. I could do what I enjoyed most — write essays like this one.

It was worth the price of admission.

It was worth putting on my best socks for.

Postscript: OK. I wrapped that one up nicely. A tidy container essay with a bow at the end. I’ve gotten good at that. But the Famous Author had a third piece of advice for me that I almost forgot to  mention here. Write deeper, she said. Go to where it hurts.

Oh, dear. Maybe I’m not off the hook after all.

(The Famous Author’s secret identity? Tune in tomorrow. All shall be revealed.)

Earlier attempts at writing about my mother at “A Manners Challenged Kid.”   Also at “My Mother’s Last Words to Me Before She Died.”