Kia ora,
Warm welcome to you if you’re new here, and good to see you if you’ve been on this journey with me for a while.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, it’s ok for the first draft of your story to be messy and imperfect. In fact, it’s kind of hard to avoid it.
I was talking to our memoir Facebook group a few nights ago about writing respectfully about other people, and the subject of beautiful imperfection came up. In order to allow the story within you to emerge, the inner critic often needs some reigning in, or switching off altogether.
What’s needed during the first draft are ideas and ramblings and notes and imperfect sentences. Sure you might feel the need to work at it as you go, I know I do, but make sure the ‘housework’ doesn’t get in the way of that first basic write up. I know from experience that if I do let my inner critic take control, I’ll lose faith in my story.
Once you’ve written it, there will be plenty of time to go back a second and third time to work on it, to reorder chunks of your story, rewrite sentences, replace words, check spelling and grammar, maybe take out repetition. And then eventually you’ll lose perspective and you’ll need to invite someone else to look over it.
I think that’s the joy of the first draft, that it can be a messy adventure of allowing ideas to tumble out of us, and fall wherever they land, until we return to them and further develop them.
I’m writing a book for a client right now, pulling the information from diaries and interviews. If you were to read it, you’d see it’s full of short facts that lead nowhere, and information with no context, but give me some time to get it down in its raw form, and then go back and organise and fine tune it, and there will be a readable story.
So write on dear reader, write on.
Charlotte x
PS it can be fun to write your memoir, family history or life story as part of a larger group and there’s no better time than the cosiness of winter to begin. Join my online course Write Your Memoir before August 1st to become part of the Winter 2024 memoir group. You’ll get to start alongside others in our lovely Facebook group, to enjoy some inspiring guest speakers who have written books (more on that to come), a good chat with me to help you along, and a 10% discount. Click here to join up.
Charlotte Squire 