Your Life as Story:
Writing Narrative Non Fiction

Lisa Dale Norton

". . . believe with self-focused conviction that your insights and experiences are worth sharing . . "
—NORTON

Recently I’ve had a lot of writing clients come to me with the same issue. It drives me now to speak about the need for selfishness in a memoirist.

Okay, we all know the charges leveled against memoirists: ego-centric writers with a tendency to whine. Right? Well, maybe some of us, and certainly all of us at some point, in some private journal entry (hopefully, because that’s where the whining belongs), but I speak here of something all together different: the need to selfishly keep your own counsel, to believe with self-focused conviction that your insights and experiences are worth sharing, and then to go about collecting them on paper and keeping them sacred by keeping them private through all the rough early drafts.

What this means is that after honoring yourself by believing you are doing important work, you must go one step further and stop showing your work to random readers before it is time. Yes, be selfish with your work. Keep it all to yourself.

I know every writer yearns for feedback, and I know that in your heart you want—and perhaps expect—the people you share your writing with to applaud you, to shower praise upon you. This might happen, but more likely you will not hear what you want to hear. Over and over I work with writers who have taken their young babe of a story out into the world too soon and come back burned, doubting their talent, ideas, and right to speak.

Selfishness as a memoirist means trusting that you are the best judge of your work until you have perfected the content, style, and details of manuscript preparation. And if you don’t think you are the best judge, then you need to educate yourself further in each of these areas. Only when you have made the writing as solid as possible in each of these areas should you show it to a wise, empathetic, and trusted writer who is further along the path than you are. A person of this caliber should understand the kind of feedback that would be most helpful for your growth process.

Do not show your material to bosom buddies, family members, less experienced writers, or non-writers and expect to get what you want or need.

(continued next month June 1, 2010)