Writing from your own life experience can lead you down an unexpected rabbit hole. When you start out you might think it’s something like journalism. But just as fiction writers say that characters often take on a life of their own, your own story can come alive like that.
When you author your own tales, you realize how much power there is in choosing what to write about. You choose what to put in and what to leave out. You are the master writer of your own story.
If you start looking at your life with that same master writer mindset, you realize that you are also the master of your own story in your life, today. Maybe with less control. You don’t have a delete key. But you might feel empowered to make new or different choices.
And then! Some of that new way you are seeing life might end up back in your writing. It becomes an art-life echo. A dance of creation.
Writing memoir is a stroll through the temple of memory
Writing from your past is not a tour of the museum of the dead. Memory is living. It is pulsing with life. It echoes forward into your lived experience today.
Some halls in the temple of memory are frescoes that make your heart flutter. Some parts might feel like horror flicks, with trauma and blood. But even these more difficult memories are pulsing in some way.
The writer sees these memories anew. Hidden meanings appear. The writer now says, “ah, look at that!” when previously, there was no real perspective. Something is being undone in you. Something is being remade.
What can you do but hang on for the ride!