Goggles with attitude

In her “three-part rant” on the PEN Center USA blog, Shanna Mahin makes a series of sharp and timely points about the art and craft of writing memoir. Like many readers, myself included, Shanna is tired of memoir being considered the “red-headed stepchild of the literary world”. She writes:

Good memoir adheres to the same guidelines as good fiction. It needs plot, story, well-developed characters, a solid through-line, all of it. And a memoirist has to do it with one hand tied behind her back. She can’t conflate a time period (although, allegedly, Vivian Gornick might argue that point) or create a dramatic scenario to illustrate the angst of the human condition (ditto, James Frey, et. al.) She has to do it with the raw materials at hand. It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living. I didn’t say that, V.S. Pritchett said it. And he was oh-so-right. Obviously, I’m not talking about Tori Spelling’s newest contribution, I’m talking about all the amazing books that have earned their place on the shelves of literature, work by writers like Nick Flynn, Tobias Wolff, Mark Doty, Lauren Slater, Abigail Thomas, Dani Shapiro, Mary Gordon, Patricia Hampl, Kathryn Harrison, Stephen Elliott … . I defy you to read any of their books and then tell me that fiction is somehow more relevant as art, or that any of these writers should learn the lost art of shutting up.

Get out of your protagonist’s way
Mahin makes a point about memoir that is often overlooked: that there is a difference between you and your narrator in a work of memoir, even though you are most likely writing in the first-person about an aspect of your life experience. Mahin puts it this way:

You owe it to yourself to get out of your own way about your protagonist. I realize it’s touchy. Technically, your protagonist is, well, you. But it isn’t. It’s a construct of you, rendered specifically for the page. If your peers are telling you that your protagonist is pretentious and bitchy, well, ouch. But the truth is that it’s your craft (ew, I said craft) that’s painting the picture. You get to figure out the story you want to tell and—and this is where the real work comes in—how to tell it on the page. That’s the journey.

I think this advice holds for all the characters who populate a memoir. Whether you’re in a classroom receiving feedback on your work, or relying on the opinion of a trusted reader, you must be able to look with steely eyes at the characters you are creating on the page. You are choosing what to include and what to leave out. You are deciding which words describe them.

Recently I had a client who, draft after draft, refused to give the character of his mother any redeeming qualities. She was no angel, but neither is a monster ever 100% monstrous. As a result, I felt at a distance, because the writer is drawing a caricature rather than a character. The writer will not get far with the manuscript because he insists on writing the story solely from his point of view, emphasising his victimhood. Good writing reflects empathy and understanding for all your characters, no matter what genre you write.

Oh, and the eyewear pictured above? These are “f*ck you goggles”, which Mahin suggests are essential for anyone writing memoir, in order to stare down the nay-sayers of the genre.

Mother, child, traditional printed book

Publisher Mia Freedman has just announced on her Mamamia website that her company will be publishing e-books in 2012. Managing Editor of Mamamia Publishing will be Rebecca Sparrow, columnist, author, and until recently, Mamamia’s deputy editor.

The Mamamia platform is a textbook launching pad for an e-book publishing venture. Over the past several years, Mia Freedman has leveraged the internet, her traditional media experience and her personal credibility on women’s issues to create a large and devoted following in newspapers, on television and across the web.

According to the announcement, it appears that most of these e-books will be authored or co-authored by either Freedman or Sparrow. Freedman explains:

We’re both passionate about writing and communicating but as authors – as consumers – we’re a bit disillusioned with the traditional publishing model.

We want to be able to reach a lot of people easily and directly. We want to be able to drill down deeper into some of the fantastic topics we discuss here on the site. And with an audience of 500,000 people (mostly women) every single month, Mamamia is in the perfect position to do that.

As usual, she’s spot-on. Most authors dream of such a platform while they tweet, blog, write freelance articles, and usually hold down another job to pay the bills. Mamamia is its own self-contained target audience, a marketer’s dream. The “traditional publishing model” is only necessary if you need to get printed books into bricks-and-mortar bookstores.

It will be interesting to see how Mamamia will choose to promote or give editorial space to traditionally published books  that appeal to their audience. There must be an editorial policy in the works. Until that’s clear, a few publicity managers will be scratching their heads over how to reach the Mamamia audience beyond a potential e-book wall of Mamamia’s own making.

But you can’t deny it’s a brilliant business move.

Here’s a quick round-up of writers’ resources I recently pointed to on Twitter that have proven popular retweets:

My How to find grants for writers contains links to both US and Australian foundations and funding bodies and was my most popular tweet of last week, followed by the brilliant

Poets & Writers resource Top Ten Topics for Writers which has a bounty of practical advice covering topics ranging from copyright and getting an agent, to publishing and promoting your book, as well as exhaustive lists of writers conferences, creative writing contests, MFA programs and literary journals.

A detailed list of 2012 events from the membership organization Writers’ Conferences and Centers.

If you have a more global outlook, consider res artis, the worldwide network of artist residencies, representing more than 400 centers and organisations in over 70 countries. You can search by country, duration of residency, discipline (111 in Literature alone), whether or not artists’ expenses are paid, and whether or not companions are allowed.

Follow me on Twitter by clicking here.

One last tip: if you’re a writer and a regular user of Twitter, you should be following publishing guru Jane Friedman’s list Best Tweets for Writers. It saves me a lot of time and I’m sure I’m not alone. Thanks Jane!

Applying for a grant as a writer is easy in one sense – after all, you can write a decent sentence – but very difficult in lots of other ways. There will always be more applicants for any grant than there are grants available. Your chances of success are often (not always) better if you have a significant publication or publishing history. And how do you find out what grants are available, which ones can you apply for, and when are the applications due?

I’ve decided this year to publish links on literature-related grants in the US and Australia as an information-filter for writers who have yet to dip their toes in philanthropic waters.  After all, I’ve worked in and around book publishing and the philanthropic sector for quite a while now, so it makes sense to share my knowledge to help writers.

So here’s a few links and relevant blogs on this topic to get started:

USA
Mira’s List – a comprehensive listing of grant opportunities for creative types across the spectrum, not only writers. As Mira says, “I lead you to the water, you do the rest.”

Julia Sukys offers a valuable overview in this post of the different types of grants available to writers in the US and Canada, making the point that you shouldn’t ignore grants for small amounts because “grants beget grants”.

The Foundation Center is one of the world’s leading information sources about grants. It has a fabulous online directory that is free to access if you happen to live in New York and can visit the Center’s headquarters on 5th Avenue. Visiting via the internet, individuals can pay a small fee (around $10) for one month’s searching of the comprehensive Foundation Grants to Individuals Online Directory.

AUSTRALIA
The Australia Council for the Arts is the Australian Government’s arts funding body. It awards grants in 20 literary categories. Its website is a fabulous place to lose an hour  getting acquainted with what’s available. Here is the literature grants search page.

Philanthropy Australia is the Australian equivalent of the US Foundation Center. While it states that private grants to individuals are very limited in Australia, it nevertheless provides this excellent list of places to look for a small pot of gold.

If you have any questions about grants, funding, philanthropy, the whole shebang, please ask me in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

View from the summit of Mt Manuscript

If you’re looking for constructive feedback on your work in progress to take it to the next level, I’ve got some time available in February. I regularly read and write editorial reports on writers’ draft manuscripts for clients as distant from each other as Abu Dhabi, New York and Sydney. As a published memoirist and essayist, my expertise is memoir, but I was a fiction and nonfiction editor when I worked in-house as Picador Editor at Pan Macmillan Australia in a previous life.

Email me at info at virginialloyd.com. Then we’ll talk or email or Skype to establish where you’re up to with your project, I’ll fill you in on the rest of the details, and we’ll go from there.

I’d love to hear from you even if you’re not ready for a manuscript critique. Many people have questions about editing and revisions, which I’m happy to answer if you ask me in the comments below.

What might it be like to write “for the unknown good of our enemies”? This is one of an inspiring and reassuring list of writers’ resolutions for 2012 from the blog of Brevity magazine:

Published by Virginia under Memoir,Writing

I must be missing New York’s cold January weather. How else to explain the two ice packs I’ve clutched to either end of me this past week in a hot and humid Australian climate? Visiting a dear friend in Brisbane, I fell over my own foot while hanging out some washing. The resulting bruise looked like something that might have inspired Picasso’s blue period. And today my head literally collided with a door while N. and I tried to coax a huge spider out of another friend’s ground-floor apartment. These two injuries round out a trio that started a few short weeks ago with my first lower-back injury – the ironic result, according to my dad’s physiotherapist, of returning to regular exercise after a break. And here I was thinking that not exercising was the problem.

They, whoever they are, say that such things happen in threes. Which should mean that my physical travails are now at an end. To celebrate, here’s an exquisite piece of music by one of my heroes, Australian pianist/composer Mike Nock. This track, After Satie, is from his latest CD. More information at Mike Nock’s website.

Tonight I learned that Australian filmmaker Sarah Watt died earlier this month. Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake – it was more than three weeks ago. She leaves behind a body of award-winning work, a loving husband, and two teenage children. This moving article in The Age features a photograph I will reproduce below until such time as I’m asked to remove it. (Photo credit: Simon Schluter.)

Sarah Watt with her husband William McInnes

When I first saw this picture of husband and wife, I stopped breathing. Just for a moment. It is an almost perfect replica of a photograph a friend took of John and me within a few weeks of his death, which is now seven years ago. Sarah’s grin, her relaxed pose, the genuine friendliness emanating from her face. The skeleton waiting in its wings. And there’s her husband beside her, similarly v-necked and relaxed, wearing a hat to keep the melanoma away. That knockabout character we know from his TV roles and books is not in this photograph. In its place is a man dreading the inevitable, hoping he might have a faint grasp of what her absence will be like, and now facing the awful knowledge that nothing prepares you for such a loss, no matter how long your beloved has been defending herself from her diagnosis.

As someone who watched her husband succumb to the same type of secondary bone cancer that just stole Sarah Watt, I can only offer William McInnes my deepest condolences, and my empathy. I remember the disbelief, the howling, the physical weakness, the anger. I remember not wanting to go on for one more minute. Somehow I went on.

I can’t imagine what grief is like for William McInness or for either of his children. I can only know what it was like for me. John and I had no children – “it’d be too sad not to be able to pick them up,” he always said when we discussed it – and in the years since I’ve often wondered whether it’s better or worse to be widowed with children, or without. The answer is that there is no better. There is no worse. The loss of your spouse destroys you and it also destroys “you”, that sense of yourself that, however impaired or ridden with doubts or insecurities, helps you to steer a course through daily life. When you’re lucky enough to be in a loving relationship, there are two pairs of hands guiding that rudder, to an extent that neither of you ever suspected.

Learning to steer again took me many years. Everyone grieves in different ways. I hope that despite this family’s public loss, they can find the privacy they need. One helpful thing John repeatedly said to me in the weeks before he died was that he wanted me to be happy. It took years for me to hear him. As I said, sometimes I am a slow learner.

(For anyone struggling with the loss of a spouse who is looking for something to read that might help: I wrote this book and, more recently, this essay on subjects relating to what I’ve written about here. I include the links because I know from the emails I receive from complete strangers that my book has helped people.)

I’m excited that my first guest post on the terrific Brevity blog is now online. It’s a riff on a satirical attack on memoir-writing in the new play Seminar by Theresa Rebeck, which I recently saw in preview. The remarkable Alan Rickman (who I have adored ever since Truly Madly Deeply) plays Leonard, a formidable writing instructor. Although the play celebrates a firmly Romantic view of the writer, it’s worth the price of admission for the wonderful acting and sharp dialogue.

Part of the play’s action turns on a memoir by a former boy soldier turned cross-dressing writer. My post at Brevity asks: Can some memoirs be considered a form of literary transvestism?

The Economist‘s books blog reviews James Wolcott’s memoir of 1970s New York as the latest in a long line of first-person accounts of living in the city.

There are certain precautions memoirists can take to inoculate themselves against the genre’s hazards. … Memoirists are safe so long as they appear to be eulogising someone or something other than just themselves. Of all the strategies employed to avoid narcissism, rhapsodising about a place is perhaps the most popular.

It identifies the “New York memoir” as its own sub-genre, complete with recurring motifs — the memory of low rent, the secret favourite places, the proximity of heroes (the review quotes E.B. White’s phrase the “nearness of giants”), the nostalgia of being young in the city, and the disillusionment that inevitably follows:

If vanity is the main peril of a traditional autobiography, then lamentation is the inevitable risk of the New York memoir.

I suspect this kind of lamentation might also be part of the survival armour one puts on, bit by bit, over decades living in the city. I’ve been struck by how many older New York friends of mine insist that the city is not what it once was — in their case, “once” means the 1970s. Yet they all continue to live here. (For my own part, I wish I could return to 1920s New York, to the time of Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table.)

Perhaps this kind of blind spot is a necessary tool of survival, a kind of projection that focuses on the external, visible evidence of all the changes around you, rather than on what has changed about you since you arrived, heart in mouth, all those years ago. But to write well it’s essential to become aware of such blind spots. The review concludes:

Mr Wolcott has omitted the slow, tender and quite necessary suspicion that perhaps what made the era so great wasn’t New York so much as the brimming person he was when he first arrived there. The New York memoir, after all, is little more than an excuse—for the writer and reader alike—to celebrate all-consuming exuberance and ambition. The city can certainly engender such feelings, but so can being twenty-two.