At unexpected points
in life, everyone gets way laid by the colossal force of recollection.
Memory is a pinball
in a machine -- it messily ricochets around between image, idea, fragments of
scenes, stories you've heard.
With such intense
memories… we often record the emotion alone, all detail blurred into unreadable
smear.
Voice isn't just a
manner of talking. It's an operative
mindset and way of perceiving that naturally stems from feeling oneself alive
inside the past. That's why self-awareness
is so key.
We don't see events
objectively; we perceive them through ourselves.
The trick to
fashioning a deeper, truer voice involves understanding how you might
misperceive as you go along; thus looking at things more than one way. The goal of a voice is to speak not with
objective authority but with subjective curiosity.
Most of us don’t
read the landscape so much as we beam it from our eyeballs.
Carnality may
determine whether a memoir's any good, but interiority -- that Kingdom the
camera never captures -- makes a book rereadable.
Whenever a writer
gets reflective about how she feels or complains or celebrates or plots or
judges, she moves inside herself to where things matter and mean.
We each nurture a
private terror that some core aspect, something of either our selves or our
story must be hidden or disowned.
