The Stories I’m Still Learning to Write
LIFE WRITING@ WORDHOUSERESOUND
Writing later in life can bring a strange mix of memories, hesitation, and uncertainty. We may have plenty to say but still wonder whether our life stories matter, whether we are confident enough to write them, and what form they should take. Perhaps we don’t have to be ready before we begin. We can discover the story, and even the kind of writer we are, as we go.
When Your Memories Start Asking to Be Written
This is the time of my life when looking back feels normal. Whenever I talk about my past with someone who seems genuinely interested, I spill much more than I intend to. Memories that at first seem like nothing much become something in the telling. One detail leads to another, and afterward the other person may comment that, truly, I had a dramatic life.
I say this with some caution because I try very hard not to overdo the narration, not to project another me, or to posture an alter ego. I try to remember the objective details of a moment. And as often happens when the other person is a friend who knows I write, I immediately hear the inevitable: “You should write about it.”
Then I stall. But I’ve written about it. It’s a blog, not a real story or a book. I have too many files of beginnings. I’m a bleeder when I write; it takes too long to finish a piece. Why can other writers immediately say what they want to say on paper? I need to process so much and end up processing still. And now, maybe I’ve gotten too old.
For many of us writing later in life, this is where the real difficulty begins. The memories are there. The stories are there. What is missing is the confidence to believe that they are worth putting into words.
Writing Without Measuring Yourself Against Other Writers
Comparison is deadly. I should not always say, I could never write like that. I should say more like, This is what I want to write about.
Not every writer begins with the same skill, talent, experience, or confidence. Some have had a lifetime of literary kinships; some seem to have found their way into language early. I may not be picking up a pen for the first time at sixty-four because I’ve been writing for years, yet I still cringe when I hear myself referred to as an author.
There is always another writer who writes more elegantly, finishes more quickly, or seems to know exactly where a piece is going. The main hurdle here is confidence. A writing mentor calls this ego strength. Confidence in writing isn’t automatic, although we may claim competence in our careers, have raised successful children, managed a household, taught many young people, run a business, served a community, or planted a tree. Yet sitting down to write can still make us feel strangely vulnerable, as if we are beginning a life again.
This is where ego enters the picture. Writing needs enough ego strength to tolerate naivety and imperfection. For some of us, that strength needs to be propped up at the beginning.
It means embracing with gladness the prodding that says, “There is something worth exploring there.” It may mean joining a writing group, letting others inside the draft, and learning to stay grounded while the work is still unfinished. It may mean allowing a mentor or friend to see possibilities in the writing before we do. Beginning is also discipline: staying with the page long enough for something to emerge..
Finding the Right Form for Your Story
Beginning also means asking what kind of writing you want to do. This means getting past the need to stamp ourselves as this particular kind of storyteller. We can struggle when we try to force a memory into a form simply because we have decided that this is the kind of writer we are.
A long life contains other possibilities for progressing in language. A memory may want to become a memoir, a family story, an essay, a poem, or something that does not fit neatly into any of these.
I don’t have to get fixated on a genre, but neither is genre a random choice. It is a decision about what I want the writing to do. How much of life we have learned by doing will never be fully appropriated in language. Perhaps that is why writing will always be, in some awkward ways, a beginning. You write, you process, you discover something else, and you write again. You keep writing and never quite finish, even perhaps after that coveted book is out.
What Living Longer Gives a Writer
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott reminds writers that the first draft only has to exist. So all my excuses are, as the cliché presses on, moot and academic.
For most older people like me who are told, “You should write about it,” beginning is a steep climb. After a lifetime of doing the same things and different things, taking care of parents and siblings, saving for a home, surviving bad decisions, and hoarding unusual memories, we may still be ignorant of the actual seed experience that will begin our narrative.
We know what we already know about life. What we don’t know is whether saying something about our lives matters. We are fully aware of our ordinariness, so it is difficult to find a language that will make it feel worth telling. Yet we are yearning somehow to preserve it.
Writing begins with recognizing that one particular memory keeps returning, or that a seemingly ordinary experience becomes more interesting each time it is told. That may be the seed.
So, if a senior who has always wanted to write begins only now, the temptation is to say, I should have started years ago. But having lived longer can be an anchor for beginning. It is not about mastering another writing technique. Just write it, like Nike says, and let the draft exist. Anne Lamott reminds us that a first draft can be messy, awkward, and imperfect.
The goal is not to prove that I can write a book. It is to give my life a frame, like a picture in an album. The frame does not contain everything. It simply keeps one moment from disappearing. What I am really trying to do when I write is not to make my life more dramatic than it was, but to give some of its ordinary moments a place to remain.
