Seeing Again

Making the story a little truer every time.

I once wrote a hundred drafts of a book. Most days, I don’t think about that project. Some days, I remember to hate it. Once in a while, I pull it out of the drawer and work on it.

The intellectual part of me would like to argue that writing a memoir (a true story about your life) is a purely technical exercise. My serious, academic side believes I will command more of your respect by telling you that writing a story is like solving a finite equation: you study until you acquire the skills to ensure you’ll get it right—and then you get it right, every time.

Boy, have I studied. Boy, have I worked.

For this, I want accuracy. Mastery. Credibility.

Some jobs offer just that. When my husband completed graduate (professional) school, he strode out the door of the institution with a veritable certificate of authenticity, a brand of officialness that would never expire.

I would like you to believe that I have acquired the ideal combination of degrees to qualify me to tell the best stories. I would like you to imagine that, at this stage of my education, a day of work is placing the right letters into the right places, like pieces into a puzzle. All pieces accounted for at the end of a project, I stand back and behold the (complete, coherent, predictable, beautiful!) image I have made.

But it isn’t true. The process of writing a memoir is less like solving an equation or assembling a puzzle—and more like building a plane while flying it.

The process goes something like this:

• Write a true story about something that happened to you.

• Realize that the story isn’t very good.

• Realize why the story isn’t very good: because it isn’t very true. You got it all wrong—the words, the order of the words, the idea behind them. Your motivations, your characters’ motivations. Mostly, what it meant. Whether it meant anything at all.

• Try to fix the things you got wrong by rearranging the words, moving the commas, replacing one scene or image or analogy with another.

• Fail to make it better.

• Make it worse.

• Understand for the first time that you cannot tell perfectly any story, even one that you thought belonged to you, even (especially?) one that happened to you. As awareness of your incompetency grows in direct proportion to the amount of time you’ve spent working, consider quitting the manuscript, the writing, the whole thing.

• Allow time to pass (as it will, with or without your permission). As time passes, notice your perspective changes. Realize you saw your story one way, and now you see it another. Thank life for doing the work of relentlessly correcting your perceptual inaccuracies.

• Observe how this realization unlocks another possibility: the possibility that this wrong way of seeing could go on forever.

• Understand: You will never tell this story purely true. You will never tell even one purely true story.

• Decide to tell it anyway.

• Try again.

• Try again.

• Try again.

The process of writing a true story, if you’re doing it right, will wring you out. (When people come to me with bright eyes, an open heart, and a fresh memoir idea, it takes everything I’ve got not to say, “You sure about this? Any other job you might want to do instead? Because this is going to CRUSH YOUR SOUL.” And then, with a smile, “But like, in a good way!”)

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Some folks assume writing true stories is easier than writing fiction.

Nonfiction, though, requires a fidelity to reality. The contract between a nonfiction writer and her reader is harsher, the expectation in some ways higher. The reader wants to know that this really happened in the way the writer says it happened. But how can the writer ever really know she’s telling the story correctly? IS there a correct way to tell a story?

A frustrated lady double-fisting blue ink pens; image courtesy of artificial intelligence.

For my nonfiction students, a common sticking point when writing memoir is dialogue. “But if it was 20 years ago, how do I know my mother said it exactly that way?” My students ask this as though dialogue is the only mistake we can make when telling a true story, as though loyalty to words spoken aloud trumps all the ways we misunderstand our own lives, our own stories. They may be (wittingly or unwittingly) wrong about everything, yet they worry it’s the false dialogue that will reveal them as frauds.

But dialogue is not the only thing we’re bound to misremember. It’s not the only part of our stories we’re persistently interpreting (and misinterpreting).

We can get better at telling stories. (I wouldn’t teach writing if I didn’t believe this.) Quite literally, we can learn to put our commas in the right places and develop more believable characters and figure out where our modifiers ought and ought not go. But even so, the thing we make will always fall short of perfect truth. In his four-part poem “Four Quartets,” T. S. Eliot writes,

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted—
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. 

Perhaps this is what I should tell the bright-eyed memoir beginner: “You’re in for a real treat. Like Eliot says, every attempt is a different kind of failure!” I suspect it will do little to boost enrollment.

Wisdom, it seems, is always just behind us, nipping at our heels, eager to undo what we thought we knew and how we wanted to say it.

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Years ago, I cringed whenever I saw other writers title their memoir-writing courses things like “Tell Your Story: Memoir As Spiritual Journey.” This kind of language, I believed, watered down the seriousness of the craft. “Writing as a spiritual journey” was fine for grandmothers with journals, but it would not hold up inside any academic institution. Like, this is not yoga.

Being taken seriously is, clearly, a hang-up of mine. But thanks to people like Whoopi Goldberg who “write” memoirs with entire chapters devoted to farting (yes for real), the genre of memoir is always fighting a battle of legitimacy inside academic creative writing programs. So the last thing I was interested in was discourse that suggested writing memoir was an avenue for woo-woo spiritual transformation instead of a valid intellectual pursuit.

But then I wrote a memoir, and goshdang if I didn’t get spiritually transformed every-which-way.

Learning and practicing a discipline is serious business, as many of you can attest, but it isn’t only “intellectual.” It is a process of ever-deepening knowing that, ultimately, prepares us to reach the end of our knowing. And what do we find at the end of our knowing?

We trust we will not find the cliff’s edge. We trust there is something solid there, as disorienting and spiritual [eye roll] as that journey [eye roll] may be.

Maybe practicing something for 10,000 hours makes us “experts” (or maybe not), but only from the vantage point of expertise can we look ahead toward further uncovered ground.

Most disciplines are like this, even the ones we consider empirical or finite. Career mathematicians will tell you they, too, are writing a story without an ending. Scientists have no idea what comprises the vast majority of the universe or even what lives at the bottom of the ocean. The Pentagon can’t explain most reported UFO sightings. We might even be wrong about gravity.

The only way for a mathematician to get to the stage of unknowing is to pass through many, many stages of knowing. A great mathematician must (bravely, I think) learn all the way to the end to realize his knowledge has run out, that he has squeezed all the toothpaste out of the tube.

Then what?

Well. In writing, we have a particularly great word (of course we do) for the inherent loose-endedness of learning and discovering. We call it revision.

High school and college students believe revision is like taking a feather duster to a bookshelf—light work heeded by only the most scrupulous observers. Only a skilled teacher can convince them it ought to be more like hauling sofas and coffee tables down hallways and up stairs. And only a truly great teacher can steady their hands as students poise a crane outside the house of their manuscript and send a wrecking ball crashing through the kitchen.

Here’s why revision is such a great word: buried inside it is the key that will unlock its proper execution. Re / vision = again / see.

Write the story, see it again.

See it again.

See it again.

Every great writer I’ve ever spoken to tells me the same thing: you will not know when the thing you have written is done. You will never stand back and behold the (complete, coherent, predictable, beautiful!) image you have made. It will always feel a little less than done, a little short of true. Still, every so often, you pull it out of the drawer and work on it. This act (this belief) must, I think, be akin to hope.

Is writing a memoir so different from living well? We are trying to understand the story of the implausibly beautiful, incoherent, messy and messed-up, hope-and-hate-drenched universe. Just when we think we get it right, we live longer and thus begin to see it another way.

And that’s the best-case scenario.

Richard Rohr, my favorite friendly Franciscan friar, says this:

It is probably necessary to eliminate most doubt when you are young; doing so is a good survival technique. But such worldviews are not true—and they are not wisdom. Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and ‘unknowing,’ and in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree. I have never figured out why unknowing becomes another kind of knowing, but it surely seems to be. It takes a lot of learning to finally ‘learn ignorance’ (docta ignorantia).

Art doesn’t care about accuracy, credibility, mastery.

And so with motherhood, and so with marriage, and so with faith. Mostly, those things seem to care about turning us upside-down.

Mostly, those things seem to care about forcing us to see it again, see it again, see it again.

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So writing a story is a spiritual journey after all, I suppose, because it requires a heap of trust, humility, and endurance. Getting the story “right” on the first, second, or thousandth pass would be like an astronomer claiming to know everything and slamming shut the cover of his telescope, leaving undiscovered the infinite remaining mysteries of the universe. Like if we’d stopped at the discovery of a round earth, never making our way to the moon.¹

What is it about finishability we find so compelling?

What is it about mastery?

Probably, we just like control. Probably, it just sucks to feel like we’ll be pushing the boulder of discovery endlessly up a mountain.

Credit: Chaz Hutton

Completion is a worthy, if largely illusory, goal.

Maybe the question is not why we find mastery compelling but why we are so terrified, disoriented, and frankly judgmental of its opposite: the humility of learned ignorance coupled with the stubborn idiocy of trying again.

Paradoxically, it seems to me there’s a lot we could fix by admitting we can’t. Maybe not knowing isn’t the curse we think it is.

It’s been said that a writer, even if she writes ten or twenty books, is really only writing the same book over and over again. This is one reason I love writers: they have revision in their bones.

They are always trying to make the story a little truer.

1. Do you know how many things we learn about the universe every day?