Zinnser and What He Did For Me

The most intriguing thing I read in our Zinnser text (though I thoroughly enjoyed the assigned sections), was his suggestions about writing a memoir. I really liked the suggestion of sitting down everyday and writing a few pages about a memory and building it into a memoir.  It's something I will work on after graduation.  If it doesn't end up a complete piece, then at least I'll have had a whole lot of practice.

Zinnser gave me permission this week.  Permission to let go of the intense stories I so desperately want to tell about my life, and to start with something not-so-heavy but not-so-light either.  The reading helped me to look at my life, at the little situations that happen in it, and see what major things have sprouted from them. With this essay, I started writing about a few different topics before I settled into my final idea.  The first idea was about the last day my father was alive.  This proved too much for a thousand words, and just felt too heavy for what I wanted to do.  The second idea was about my daughter being swapped with another baby at the hospital after her birth.  The problem was with that that I'd written a blog post about it a year ago, and everything just seemed far too factual, and like I had very little opportunity to make it very creative.  It certainly had immediate and long-term implications for my life, and is a piece that I'd like to work on again, but just isn't something I felt that I could finish in two weeks.

I finally ended up with doing exactly what Zinnser suggested.  I picked a random memory out of my mind and went with it.  The memory was plucking a beautiful wooden sick call cross out of the abyss that was the basement in my childhood home when I was sixteen.  As I wrote the piece, I realized that the cross/crucifix had played a part and especially mirrored my spiritual journey.  That memory has stuck in my head forever, and through this piece, I now understand why.  I hope that after this is work-shopped (to death if need be!) that it will be a decent finished piece that I can store inside that crucifix for my daughter to read one day, as someday I hope it will be hers.

This is exactly what Zinnser's father did for him, and I'm looking forward to using his suggestions to do it for my daughter.