1. Be an ambitious emerging writer who wants to try something new. Take a workshop about writing about writing, a new-to-you subject you’re interested in exploring as you learn about the craft of writing. Take notes on the basic elements of the “craft essay” as it’s called in the trade:
I. Define the problem you want to solve (how to write dialogue, build a scene, establish structure, access memories, approach revision, etc.) and
II. hook it onto a story.
III. Show how you tried to solve the problem and failed. Then,
IV. show how you did solve it using a writing technique readers can also employ, and
V. offer a takeaway.
Continue writing your memoir about your grief experience, which you learned falls under the category of “disenfranchised grief,” or grief for a loss not usually considered socially acceptable. In your case, it’s your grief for a man forty-eight years your senior you had a relationship with in college. Try lots of things to get the words out. Take lots and lots of classes. Learn as much as you can.
2. Spend time reading essays on grief writing to get an idea of what’s out there already. Notice that many grief essays focus on the cathartic and therapeutic benefits of grief writing. Notice they often emphasize the validation the writer can receive for their courage, the satisfaction writers can feel at helping others, the opportunity to help someone feel seen or heard. Recall how the first time you shared your grief writing with someone who didn’t judge you it kind of changed your life. Wonder if you have something worth sharing with others struggling with their own difficult grief experience. Realize that you’d like to find out, to challenge yourself to write something you haven’t attempted before. Recall that much of what you’ve already seen doesn’t actually hone in too much on writing advice beyond writing-as-balm, writing-as-therapy.
3. Write an essay about writing about your own grief experience, hoping that disenfranchised grief as a subject will distinguish your essay. Write about how writing made you feel better, enabled you to connect with others in similar situations, made you feel less alone, etc. Do so knowing that you haven’t really thought too deeply about process because it just seemed obvious—just sit down and get on with it, right? Get rejected because you didn’t offer craft advice. Wonder who you even are to give advice. What do you even know anyway
4. Think about how you might answer that question—what do you even know? Go through all those class notes. Recall an exercise you’ve done many times, Summer Brennan’s Five Things.
a. Start with a clean page.
b. Number it 1-5.
c. Write one truth. Follow it up with a paragraph. Or a line. Or a word. Or a whole page.
d. Then write another truth, another follow up. Continue until you’ve done five. If you need to write six things, or four things, maybe you call it a Few Things. The point is to spend time on your topic. Five Things About Finding Joy in Grief. Five Things About Chocolate Cake. Five Things About Five Things. Five Things About Sweatshirts. Five Things About Envy. (These are all real lists you’ll make someday.)
e. Keep a separate notebook for your Five Things and create a table of contents at the back for easy reference.
5. Start a new list. Title it, Five Craft Things I Tried. Number it 1-5.
- After #1, write “I’ve played around with voice using the stack of memoirs on my desk. I tried to write like Annie Ernaux or Eirinie Carson to see how I sounded, to hear what those voices had to say.”
- After #2, write “I tried different verb tenses. I wrote in present and past in different places. I tried future now and then,” etc.
- After #3, “I swapped out ‘I’ for ‘she’ to see how it opened me up” You picked this up from a memoir workshop. “I thought about my younger self as a different person and wrote about her that way. I noticed it allowed me to be vulnerable and even though I ended up changing it all back to ‘I’, I liked the material I generated when I held myself at a distance to myself in that way.”
- #4: “I took out my grief playlist and used it like prompts. I wrote responses to the lyrics that made me cry. Taylor Swift was my grief counselor; maybe she could be my writing coach too.”
- #5: “I wrote a letter to my younger self and told her how it all looked to me today. I articulated how my perspective has shifted.”
Look over your list. Pick the couple of items with the most resonance, those that feel the most original or useful. Write more about what happened on the page when you tried them. Go back to the workshop outline and write a new essay. Realize that whether or not the new version gets picked up, you know a lot more about writing than you thought you did after all.
Marie Cloutier (she/her) writes about girlhood and womanhood and complicated loves and losses. She has work in the forthcoming craft book and anthology Letting Grief Speak and a variety of literary magazines. She is working on a memoir about disenfranchised grief.