Viable argument - Jule Ward Writes

August 8, 2022August 6, 2022

Am I Writing a Best Seller?

low light photography of books — Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

a thought-provoking question

In her most recent email to fellow writers, my friend, and colleague, Erin Donely, challenged her readers with the question,” Is being a ‘best seller’ the best idea?”

“Every book reaches a critical juncture in its development,” Erin states, “when you must decide: Do I want this book to reach the masses, or does it serve a more specific audience? It’s hard to know at first.” (Erin Donley, erindonley@erindonley.com. July 29, 2022.)

Erin emphasizes that authoring a book about your life can be – terrifying, traumatic, and cathartic. But if you aren’t clear about what you are doing, the whole project will turn into a major burden.

You must be clear about two major aspects of your memoir. What is its purpose? Who is its ideal audience? The answers to those two questions will give a memoir its direction and its organizing principles. Without them, you have nowhere to begin because you don’t know where you are going.

have a higher purpose

To ensure that your book serves its highest purpose and reaches its most ideal audience, Erin suggests, you need to ask yourself why should this book be written. Who will benefit from reading these words? And most importantly, what do I need to get this work done?

Answering these questions correctly, she promises, will “set you free.”

So, I challenged myself to answer Erin’s questions, to fill in her blanks.

Starting with the question, “Who needs to see these words beside me?” I formulated the following.

“More than anyone, I want all the people who supported me as I cared for Kristin and Johnny, my two extraordinary children, to read it as soon as it’s available to them. Every one of them needs to know what their strength and caring meant to me and to my children, how they sustained me and kept me going when I thought I’d never make it, and how much I will always thank God for bringing them into my life.”

These helpers and supporters were family members, friends, neighbors, teachers, care workers, and other parents of persons with disabilities. Like angels, there always was “someone,” just the right “someone” for the moment. I know they won’t all find themselves directly referenced in the memoir, but I hope they pick up the vibes of gratitude that the book will carry.

all parents need to know

In speaking directly to those who upheld me throughout my children’s lives, I hope to speak indirectly to all parents. Raising a child, any child, from infancy to adulthood, is a challenging task and they don’t have to go it alone. We all need support. Hopefully, parents hear me say, “Open yourselves to help whenever it’s available.” I didn’t do that as often as I should have.

When I envision speaking directly to this audience, Erin feels confident that I’ll set my book free – “from having to do the heavy lifting that commercially viable books require.” I can draft our story without seeking expert advice about my children’s medical conditions and without comparing my book to others on the same topic.

the toughest question

That leaves me with Erin’s last and very central question, “What do I need to get it done?”

At this point, the whole story is there – all twenty-seven chapters of it! You’re right. You don’t want to read twenty-seven chapters and I don’t blame you. I am working hard to hone it down to ten succinct chapters, following the advice of one of my other mentors, writer, Ellen Blum Barish (http://www.ellenblumbarish.com/). She suggested last fall that I pick a number and stick with it. “Your instinct for an important number can be a true guide,” she assured me. She also said, “Find the stories that make Kristin and Johnny ‘Pop off the page.’” I’m trying to do that. Johnny adored everything Seuss and would have loved her advice.

Another respected mentor Marian Roach Smith (https://marionroach.com/)has helped me seek “the turn for home” like a good racer. I’m doing my best to keep pace. The memoir is not a never-ending story. It’s coming closer every day to being a finished project.

Thank you, for hanging in there with me.

person using typewriter — Photo by Min An on Pexels.com

January 26, 2022January 26, 2022

The Vomit Draft

the end is just beginning

Last month, both on this blog and on my Facebook page, I bragged (and there’s no way to put a kinder word there) about having completed a draft of my memoir. I felt darn right proud of that “accomplishment” because I had attempted to complete a memoir four other times and never got to “The End.”

Then I read Marian Roach Smith’s The Memoir Project in which she firmly states, “self-congratulatory is very bad.” She would add that this is especially true than when one is talking about a “vomit draft.”

My husband gagged when I used that term. “That’s a terrible thing to call your demanding work,” he told me. But I really get what Marian is saying when she writes, “It’s called the vomit draft because it will both sink and be pretty much everything you’ve got in you.” (p. 86)

digging deep

Writing a memoir, I’ve discovered is like mining for diamonds. Before any actual mining even takes place, prospectors need to locate the diamond sources first. If I choose to write a memoir, I hope will be worth reading, my first step is exploring my life experience to determine whether there may be sharable value there. Do I have something to offer readers that will enhance their lives?

man in orange polo shirt and blue denim jeans sitting on brown wooden round stone in near on on on — Photo by Sheku Koroma on Pexels.com

Anything and everything are mine to explore. But just as diamond seekers often follow second sources that never lead to “pipes,” or deposits where the diamonds will prove true and profitable, not everything I dig up from my life belongs in a memoir. I need to locate a primary source.

When prospectors are certain they have found diamonds, shanks are inserted into the ground at the ore-bearing “pipes” and vast amounts of soil are extracted. I knew I wanted to write about parenting my children, especially my two children with an extraordinary neurological disorder. That, however, covered forty-five years of my life. As I dug into my memories I retrieved copious numbers of incidents, funny, sad, delightful, challenging, discouraging – piles of memories.

the wheat from the shaft

Diamond miners typically do not examine the raw rock and soil on-site. Instead, conveyor trucks transport the composite to special plants which process the ore and extract the rough diamonds. This is where I stand in the memoir-writing process. My “vomit draft” is the huge pile of rock and soil from which I need to extract the “rough” diamonds. What pieces of the narrative I’ve captured on the page can I dole out in the final story? What have I learned that I can share in a meaningful way? Which of the “rough” diamonds, I sort out of this pile now, will work to build an argument for me, one built upon what I now know about the human condition because I lived this life? Which of these scenes best illustrate what I learned?

shallow focus of letter paper — Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

In diamond mining, there is no assurance of fortune. Three hundred tons of ore might be sieved just to produce a single carat of gem quality rough diamonds. I may have written 100,000 words. It would be fortunate if a third of them are still standing when I finish my work.

not there yet

Even after extraction, the rough gems are a long way from the jewelry store. In heavily secured facilities, workers sort rough stones into various gem-quality categories and industrial-specific grades. To get from here (staring at my “vomit draft”) to there (the finished manuscript) is mind-boggling arduous work. Each paragraph even of the “rough diamonds” needs to be reevaluated. Is it necessary? Does it help the argument? Did I make the same point elsewhere? Am I falling asleep? If I am, so would my reader would be. Does this sentence help to show that I moved forward? If not, either it shouldn’t be there or it needs to explain the stagnation. Not until I’ve evaluated the “gem-quality” of each scene can I feel free to move toward the next draft.

brightly shining

In the ultimate step of its violent transformation from rough stone to exquisite gem, the roughs are sold, cut, polished, and commercialized. As I work toward a final draft, I’ll be doing four or more cuts. Are my sentences overly long? Break them up. Have I used a phrase where a single apt word would work much better? Did I just skim over that sentence? Get rid of it. To shine as brightly as an engagement diamond, this memoir needs to be perfectly cut and polished. It’s a long and violent transformation process for “gem,” but you wouldn’t give your beloved a diamond straight out of the ground. And I don’t dare offer you my vomit draft.

“Parents would be much better off if, like defense attorneys, we knew the answer to the question before we asked it. Except we never do, which makes a very nice place to write from.” Marian Roach Smith, The Memoir Project.

a child playing with her mother — Photo by Barbara Olsen on Pexels.com

November 30, 2021November 30, 2021

The Notion of “Fixes” and “Cures”

What is normal?

In her intense, impassioned, compelling memoir, Sitting Pretty, Rebekah Taussig, who has used a wheelchair for mobility since early childhood, tackles among other hard issues concerning disability, the notion of “fixes” and “cures.” She asks why we are so obsessed with fixing ourselves. She suggests, we ought to let ourselves be, take pride in our identity, be the self who is rather than struggle always to be a “better” version of who we are.

We can discover, she notes, that when we accept and dive deep into the unique challenges that every one of us lives with, we will also find in that same place joy and abundance. The rich conversation and dialogue that can follow taking this approach can lead us to a whole new way of seeing and understanding not just ourselves but the world.

looking for a “fix”

Tausig’s questions bit sharply into my memories. Had I wanted to “fix” Kristy and Johnny? Those children, my oldest and my youngest had lived their whole lives with physical and developmental challenges that required consistent care and supervision. Neither developed past the toddler stage although they both lived into middle age. Both had had hundreds of epileptic seizures. Wouldn’t it be natural for me to have wanted a different life for them? Who, in their right mind, would wish to give birth to a child with so many “problems?”

Yet, in Hausig’s perspective, Kristy and Johnny do not have to be seen as problematic. Those of us, who “pathologize and fix some bodies and accommodate others,” (pp. 74-79) present the true problem.

a really brave new world

I find myself swept up by Hausig’s vision, a world that was not full of roadblocks and bends, a world so full of wells and shady places that all find a place there. In that world, no one would construct a building that could not be easily navigated in a wheelchair. All schools would tailor their programs to the learning styles of the students who filled their classrooms, not some idealized “average” student. What she demands that we understand is that “average” just does not exist in the real world. Average is a theoretical mathematical mean as ethereal as the shape of a cloud.

medical magic?

At the same time, I must be honest and admit that I did wish that I could wave a magic wand and make Kristy and Johnny’s seizures go away. Was not that what we were after with all the different changes of anticonvulsant medications that the doctors prescribed, and we tried over the years. And that does not even count the time we kept poor three-year-old Johnny on an impossible ketogenic diet. He could not understand its purpose. I found myself wavering from its strictures and then blaming myself for his seizures. If I had been able to keep to the letter of the diet, would he have become seizure-free? Was getting rid of epilepsy worth losing my sanity? No, I cannot deny that I fell in line with the search for “fixes” and “cures.”

people are not math problems

Not all of that was wrong-headed. Seizures can be dangerous. They come on so suddenly that injury often follows. Usually, cuts and bruises are the worse that can happen, but once Kristy broke her collar bone. But behind the struggle to conquer the seizures was the hope that if we could stop the seizures then their brains could function more “normally.” Maybe then they could lead “normal” lives. Once again, I applied mathematical notions because that is what a “norm” is, to a human child.

parents love to dream

Let us face it, as expectant parents await the arrival of their new child, they most often dream of the future they will provide for the beloved little one. Most parents when asked what they most want for their children will say they want them to be happy. We have, however, measures for happiness and they do not include disability. They do include intelligence, achievement, love, beauty, and goodness. Most of all, even though we do not want to rush it, we do want our children to “grow up.” When that does not happen, the world feels out of kilter.

who are the grown-ups?

Yet, people with developmental disabilities do “grow-up.” They just do it differently. As parents, we must shift our meanings not “fix” our children. As a society, we can note as well that some children who have no apparent “disability” don’t seem to “grow-up” in the common sense of the word. They do not become financially independent. They never find a life’s work. They never partner successfully. Do we stop loving them? No. But we do often try to “fix” them. It often means the very happiness we wished for them becomes that less possible.

rethinking our culture

This brings me back to Tausig and the importance of her book. She is calling on us to rethink “some of the most deeply ingrained beliefs we carry as a culture.”

Can we do it? It is asking a lot. I, for one, am going to try. In my memoir, I will not hide how hard it sometimes was to meet my children’s needs. I will, however, point out that many of the challenges came from the roadblocks our culture placed in my way. I had to push those aside to enjoy the privilege of living with the unique, wonderful people who were my children – all of them.

“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” -Francis of Assisi