After a good hour of typing away at my blog entry for this week, I clicked “Save” only to have it vanish into cyber-nothingness before my eyes.  After the initial fury subsided, I was left with a queasy “maybe-somebody’s-trying-to-tell-me-something” feeling.  While my blog-thoughts weren’t exactly original, they were what I’ve been pondering this week, but with my confidence shaken by the fateful “Invalid Entry” (the computer’s words, not mine), I’ll share only an abbreviated version of my original post.

I’ve been thinking this week about how people write their most personal memories, and whether it was even a good idea.  You know the kind of memories I’m talking about – the grab you in the gut and change the way you view the world kind.  We’ve all read essays and stories that were autobiographical, but I find that authors that rely heavily on their painful experiences (especially if it’s one specific experience, like, say, the death of a parent), often fall short of the emotion they are trying to draw from their readers, or they are successful at it once, and then simply try to repeat the formula over and over.  Since these authors are frequently accomplished and established writers that are falling short of the mark, what chance do I have of recounting my most difficult memories in a successful and meaningful way?

As I began to think about this more deeply, I decided that I wanted to know what other writers thought, and I employed a highly scientific method to gather this information…I posted a question on my Facebook status.  My responders (fiction writers) all admitted to “writing around” these central, shaping events in their lives, mining the emotions, but avoiding the specific “real events” of their memories.  I suppose that if you make your character into yourself, the pain is just too real, the revelation of your exact feelings too big a risk.  You’re left, then, with a character whose emotions fall short and fail to engage the reader; or too many emotions are dumped on the page, and the reader is overwhelmed.

So, how can you “write around” a tough, autobiographical topic?  If you’re writing fiction, it could be as simple as telling “your” story from the perspective of a different character, or changing the outcome.  Of course, my use of “simple” refers to the ease of changing strategies, not the ease of implementing them.  Either way, digging through a painful topic is going to be difficult. 

And if you’re a non-fiction person (especially a memoirist), I imagine you have a whole separate set of issues when facing these life-changing memories that we could discuss as well, but, unfortunately, none of you responded to my Facebook status.