How to Write a Book

Today’s guest blogger is another Book Writing World member, whom I first met in an online memoir class I taught about twelve years ago through Gotham Writers Workshop. She joined the BWW and has been working on an interconnected series of stories (or will it be a novel? or a memoir? Read on . . .). One thing I love about Melanie is the way her “brain” and her “storyteller” work so well together. In some of us (like yours truly), these important aspects of the writer can work at odds with each other, but for Melanie, they harmonize beautifully. Here she gives us an honest look at the writing process.

How to Write a Book

By Melanie Lee

In August 2010, I began to write a memoir. In one sense, I’ve been working on this memoir all my life. In another, it’s been about a year since I started taking handwritten notes with the purpose of putting them into type and making a book out of them. Writing nearly every day to meet my minimum goal, I find I’m inundated with ideas/memories/perceptions that want to see the light of day. It’s a bit daunting, even on the most banal level of “how do I organize things?”

I figured out a system: I still like to handwrite and I like to type so I carry around slips of paper in one of the Moleskine pocket notebooks for handwritten new ideas and when I’m near the computer, I type the new ideas in there. The program I’m using is Scrivener which has been a great help in locating various strands of writing. After a year of this,  I feel like I’m ready to start thinking about the form of this book.

I don’t have it figured out yet but know something is coming. I’ve typed a lot of my notes and printed them out. I am in the midst of reading them; my deadline for finishing this read-through keeps getting pushed back by life and new ideas needing air, but c’est la vie, and anyway, things are progressing and I’m interested in my project. I’ve been handwriting most of the new notes and need to transfer them into Scrivener soon – my Moleskine file is getting heavy again the weight will have me stooping like the little old lady I hope I don’t become before I know it. I would love to be done with all the new typing and the reading within the next month. Boy, that would be nice. Once I’m done with this stage, I’ll make decisions on what to work on and what form it will take, though I’m getting some ideas.

I’ve already read through about 40 pages of the typed notes, which is 40%. I got much done on the way back from a trip to New Mexico. It was very difficult reading on the plane. I was getting all emotional at one point (a very potent section) and there I was with my daughter on one side of me and my husband on another (husband alone would have been okay) and in a plane to boot. Colds offer you great ideas for camouflage!

One reason I was getting emotional was panic: how was I going to make anything of this? Now, between the work I did on the plane and the work I did the next day, I am okay with some that remain very short stories and that other things are constellating into something longer. For the short, short pieces, I’ll rely on Janet Frame to make it ok. One of the lovely things I discovered with Judith (a BWW member whom I was able to visit on my New Mexico trip) is that we both love Janet Frame. Or, I might go another way and construct the memoir out of short pieces each of which will reflect the moments it was written, each piece changing the piece before, like the novel told in first chapters, I, The Divine by Rabih Alameddine.

Another thing I’ve been wrestling with is the point of view,  and I’ve become sure I want to write this in the third person. When I was a kid, I could not read books in the first person. That was because I hardly believed I was there. Now I can read them, but now I feel like since I live with myself all the time, it’s nice to get away from the first person singular, see this “I” as someone I don’t know. In a way, it feels more truthful to go to the third person.

So, shape (structure) and voice, and new notes. That’s what’s next for me.

Melanie Lee live in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, dog and hamster. She is at work on a book of autobiographical fiction. She blogs at http://onegreendolphinstreet.com/