“Modern…writing consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug –“ George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language.”
Again and again we hear injunctions about how we should think, live, and by implication, write. Rather than gluing together long strips of words as Orwell charges modern writers with, today’s cultural clichés string together pre-thought thoughts that come bundled with their own strips of words like “be in the present” and “write from the heart.” There is nothing inherently wrong with these suggestions except that they’ve lost their authenticity and meaning through overuse. What do these expressions really mean? More importantly, what do they mean to you and your work?
1. Stay in the moment
I don’t mind staying in the moment, but I like to choose which moment to stay in – past, present, or future.
I think of staying in the moment – no matter what moment we’re talking about – as expanding time, making it fuller and richer through reflection and recollection, such as recollecting where I put my glasses at the very moment I set them down, or recalling exactly what I was doing this time last year. In writing a memoir, we bring the reader into whatever moment we’re describing.
As a little girl, I wanted to remember everything in the story I was telling myself, especially my own emerging consciousness. Crouching behind a tree, clutching a pine cone, I vowed never to forget it. Of all the hundreds of pine cones in the world, this was the one that would live forever. I would make it live forever by remembering.
“I will never forget you,” I vowed, cupping the pine cone in my hands. And I will never forget what it’s like to be me right now.”
2. Write what you know
How, exactly, do you define “what you know”? Does it include what you might find out or what you don’t know you know? A writer is an explorer of continents, known and unknown. Through writing your memoir, you may find the familiar landscape of the past changing as you work, revealing new depths and untraveled terrain.
I’m writing a memoir-travelogue about the three years my family and I lived in Florence. I’m not sure exactly what Italy meant to me and why it was so important, but by writing the book, I’ll find out.
3. Think positively
DON’T THINK OF A MONSTER!
The minute someone tells me to think positively, I immediately conjure up a giant negative image. You can’t force yourself to think positively. You can, however, use negative thoughts productively in your writing, or give them some pasture and 
let them run around until they’re worn out. That clears the way for a natural buoyancy and resilience that will reflect in your work.
4. Write from the heart
An author friend told me she gets tired of hearing “Write what’s in your heart and don’t go by the marketplace,” especially when she writes her heart out and then her editor says that her book isn’t commercial enough.
The truth is that you can do both. A piece of writing begins in the heart, but you can choose to take the market into account as you develop it. 
Women are good at multi-tasking (to use another popular cliché.) You could write ten different books about the same period in your life by changing the focus of your story. If you know that the market is saturated with one type of memoir, you can shift the emphasis to make yours more marketable.
5. Don’t dwell on the past
“Our best times together are when we speak of the past,” Vivian Gornick writes about her mother in her memoir, Fierce Attachments. “It is only the present she hates; as soon as the present becomes the past, she immediately begins loving it.”
I chuckled when I read that. I suspect that, like me, most memoirists luxuriate in dwelling on the past – in a productive way of course (though occasional hand-wringing is permissible.)
***
Recently, I told a friend about how sad I felt that my husband is retiring at the same time as our daughter prepares to leave for college next year. My friend suggested that I separate the two issues in my mind. I thought about that for a while, and then I realized I couldn’t, and in fact didn’t want to separate them. My husband’s job held out the possibility of returning to Florence to live. Now that door would be closing at the same time that our daughter prepares to head to Florence for her freshman year. The two themes – my husband retiring and Annelise leaving for college – are thematically connected. After contemplating this, I realized that Annelise’s going to Florence on her own is the perfect ending to my book. It resolves the story beautifully which helps me come to terms with the collision of two momentous events in my life. As writers we find our own meanings and our own connections. That’s why we write.
How do you see it? Do you find that your truths are different from those modern culture espouses? How is your unique point of view reflected in your writing?
