Take ten minutes a day through the month of November to undertake some memoir-inspired writing.

November 2nd

If you are a regular visitor to this website, it is more than likely that you already know about Natalie Goldberg’s lovely book that prompts us, no exhorts us, to write memoir. You may already know one of her earlier books – Writing Down the Bones, perhaps – and this one is full of that same enthusiasm and zest. Our minds, Goldberg says, work in a zigzag way. We don’t remember in an orderly chronological fashion; one remembered detail leads to another and before we know it, what began as a thought of Cheerios leads us, hop, skip and a jump to ‘the first time we stood before a mountain and understood kindness’. How many times, when writing in a workshop, has at least one person said, ‘Well, I hadn’t expected to write that. I’d forgotten all about that green cardigan…’ or whatever has emerged in the writing.

Memoir is not about the grand life story. It is about making sense of all the small things -which sometimes turn out to be much bigger things – now, at this moment.

Old Friend from far Away is a book of short sections, some no more than six words long. Each one is a provocation to write, and to write boldly and without fear. It is the book that I turn to most frequently when I need inspiration for my own writing or for a workshop. It speaks directly to the reader with warmth and encouragement. Natalie Goldberg writes:

Writing is … not a diet to become skinny, but a relaxation into the fat of our lives. Often without realising it, we are on a quest, a search for meaning. What does our on this earth add up to?

And with that in mind, here’s one of those short prompts. Potatoes. Write everything you know about mashed potatoes.

Or what about Say: Often in the middle of a timed writing practice you feel muddled, you are not really saying anything. Try this: don’t even wait to finish your sentence, right in the middle put a dash, then write, “What I really want to say is,” drop to a deeper level, and keep going.

November 1st

In Hinterland, a print and digital magazine devoted to new creative non-fiction, Jarred McGinnis and explores the unreliable and fluid nature of our memories:

Memories are not a recording of fact, but the story you tell yourself about the last time you remembered that memory, which is being remembered by a different you in time, space and experience.

How close we are, as writers of literary non-fiction, to writers of fiction. He suggests:

Writing a memory that we couldn’t possibly have: something that you have been told, that happened before you were born, that exists for you only in a photograph or in someone else’s story.