At a discussion I led at our local library on memoir writing yesterday , I offered a series of writing prompts relevant to memoirs. My purpose in doing so was twofold. For those in a writing mood or who want to try to get some writing started, these are fun and interesting topical cues. At the same time, I think these prompts demonstrate the kinds of life details that can so easily be lost to the passage of time if no one bothers to write them down. Here are a few of the memoir prompts I suggested. If you are interested in creating some narrative nonfiction today, either as part of a memoir or just to exercise your writing muscles, given them a try!

1.     Do you know where your parents got engaged? Have they shared a particular story about the event?

2.     What were the favorite foods in your family when you were growing up? What constituted a holiday treat? What was considered everyday fare?

3.     What were your earliest experiences with loss and death, and how did the adults in your life help you (or not) to understand those losses?

4.     What has been the most extreme weather event you’ve experienced?

5.     Is (or was) there a particular issue on which you disagree with your parents? How has it been addressed? Was it ever resolved?

 

Yesterday I emailed myself a rejection letter.

That's kind of weird, I know. But in a curious way, it solved a problem for me.

I applied a couple of weeks ago for a grant that I very much want to be awarded. My chances of receiving it are…decent. Not bad; not great; just okay.

And ever since, two conflicting messages have been playing in my head. One message promotes the importance of self-affirmation. “Believe you can!” it says. “Reach for what you want!”

Well, I do believe I can, or I wouldn’t have applied for the grant, and I did reach for what I wanted when I submitted the application. But that doesn’t assure that I’ll receive it.

And the other message is familiar to every child who has ever entered a contest and been told by a wise and well-meaning parent, “Don’t get your hopes up. Be prepared for a disappointment. Maybe you’d be happily surprised, but at least you’ll be emotionally prepared if not.”

I couldn’t decide which of these two tacks to take, and instead started bouncing randomly between the two. At some moments, I found myself saying, “Put the power of positive thinking into play. Direct the forces of the universe to assuring that you get this grant. Galvanize the positive energy within yourself to make this happen.”

And at other moments, I told myself, “Just don’t think about it. If it happens, great, but it probably won’t, so just put it out of your mind, and also prepare for disappointment.”

Neither belief was quite working for me. So I decided that along with directing positive energy into the universe to propel that grant toward me while also lowering my hopes accordingly and bracing myself against disappointment, I would write myself a preemptive rejection, just to see what it felt like.

“Dear Nancy, thank you for your interest in our program. Unfortunately, we have selected another applicant,” I wrote. Then I emailed it to myself.

All day it sat at the top of my in-box, the first words my eyes fell on whenever I looked at my computer screen. And on some level, I began to forget that I had written it myself. I found myself growing accustomed to seeing those words – “Unfortunately, we have selected another applicant” – and I began to feel increasingly comfortable with them.

“Oh well,” I told myself. “It was bound to happen. They selected another applicant. Now on to that article I need to write.” Having those words appear throughout my day made them somehow an ordinary piece of my life, and they lost their hypothetical sting.

Hypothetical is the key word, of course. I haven’t received a real rejection letter yet, nor an acceptance. It might be a week or more before I know either way.

I’m not sure how long I’ll keep that email at the top of my in-box. Maybe tomorrow my belief in positive thinking will prevail and I’ll email myself some encouraging and affirmative words instead, or maybe I’ll succeed in forgetting about the whole thing until a decision is made.

But it made me wonder if I should start writing myself fake letters about other disappointments as well. Maybe I should email myself a pretend court summons, or a letter from my insurance company rejecting a claim. I could email myself a notice that one of the kids had been suspended from school. I could send myself a text from a neighbor saying that our house was on fire.

Okay, that might be a little extreme and surely wouldn’t have the desired effect of making me immune to anxiety and disappointment. I can delete the imitation rejection letter when I get tired of seeing it. Maybe by then I will have received the real thing. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll get an award letter instead.

Either way, I like to think I’ll be well prepared.

 

Initially, it sounded like a good idea. Challenging, yes, but in an interesting and stimulating way. One of the students from the writing class I taught last year for our local adult education program wanted to know if I would organize a private workshop devoted to memoir writing.

I told him I’d do it if we could gather a group of at least five participants. We both put the word out. He found two more people and I found three, all of whom were miraculously free on the same set of five consecutive Monday evenings. We agreed to start in mid-January.

Preparing for the first meeting, I was mildly anxious. I didn’t know any of the participants well and wasn’t certain of their level of commitment to their writing. I hoped they would all get along. I hoped none of them would begrudge the drive through the dense woods of Carlisle to get to my house, which is a little bit complicated at the best of times and can be downright vexing on a dark winter’s night. Mostly, I hoped they wouldn’t regret signing up for the class.

But the first meeting went beautifully. Everyone enjoyed getting to know one another, talking about their writing projects, setting goals for their work. I ended that two-hour session convinced that I’d made a good decision in agreeing to do this.

And then the following Sunday evening it started to snow. Snow fell all day on Monday. School was cancelled, and we all agreed by email that we’d have to cancel class as well. “See you next week,” I wrote to them, already anxious about breaking the momentum that had started to build on the first night.

The next Monday it snowed all day again. School was cancelled again. Once again, the emails started circulating in the late afternoon. I admitted that anyone who managed to make the drive to my house might not be able to get back out at the end of the night. We cancelled class again. “Definitely see you next week,” I concluded in my email. “Statistically, we can’t possibly have three Monday snowstorms in a row.”

But we did. The third Monday, which should have been our fourth class, it was snowing hard once again. Another set of school cancellations. Another set of emails. Another agreement that no one should be out driving.

That was when my anxiety set in. In early January, when we’d planned the class, we hadn’t seen snow since Thanksgiving. It somehow never occurred to me that we should include a contingency plan for snow cancellations and reserve an extra Monday or two at the end of the six-week stretch for make-up classes.

And it turned out people weren’t available on the Mondays that followed the storms. There were vacations, business trips, long-scheduled meetings, Presidents’ Day. We soon discovered the only series of Mondays on which even some of the class members could reconvene didn’t begin for another three weeks.

So after that one initial successful gathering, it was six weeks before we saw each other again. And that gave me plenty of time to reignite my anxiety about leading the group. It reminded me of how I used to feel as a kid when I stayed home sick from school: the more days I missed, the harder it became to go back.

My husband kept telling me that if I felt so apprehensive about leading this group, I never should have agreed to do it, and I realized it was the kind of thing he never would have done. He’ll agree to things he doesn’t really want to do if there’s a compelling reason to do it, like attend a funeral or go to a professional conference, but if the stakes were low and he felt as dubious about the outcome of a particular event as I felt about the class, he just wouldn’t commit to it in the first place. And he doesn’t understand why I seem to get myself into these situations fairly often, agreeing to do things that then provoke ongoing ambivalence.

As it turned out, the class was a joy. Although there was never another class after the first one that all five participants were able to attend, everyone made it to at least two more classes, and no one complained that they didn’t get their money’s worth. Or that I hadn’t done my part to make the class a worthwhile experience, Or even that they didn’t have a good time. In fact, by the last couple of classes, there were hugs all around as people put their coats on to leave.

The six weeks ended up extending over three months, which was not the plan. And I spent a fair amount of time during those three months worrying about whether it would all work out or not. And Rick is right; I could have avoided the whole situation by just not agreeing to do the class in the first place.

But it was so unquestionably worth it, in the end. All of the participants produced beautiful writing; all of us made new friends; all of us discovered new ideas.

Oh, and I learned something else as well. Never, ever schedule anything in New England in January without counting in the possibility of snow cancellations. Something I probably should have known already. Just as I should have known to trust the situation and not let my anxieties get the best of me. So it was a learning experience, as any good class should be.

 

 

It’s only a small coincidence that just as I was thinking about inspirational quotes on the subject of success, my friend Sue posted this one from Dale Carnegie: “Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” 

After all, inspirational quotes about success abound: they appear throughout Facebook, on the walls of the kids’ classrooms, drifting through my in-box in the form of a daily email that I don’t remember subscribing to. The phrase itself, in fact, seems almost redundant. An inspirational quote about success? Well of course. How could you have an inspirational quote about failure?

Except that’s just what I needed last week: an inspirational quote about failure. The only quote about failure that I could think about as I sat at my computer that day was “Failure is not an option.” And yet for me, failure was most definitely an option. In fact, as the hours rolled by and I was trying for the third time to complete the writing assignment I’d been given earlier in the day, I became convinced it was the only option.

A friend who works as a marketing consultant had asked if I’d be willing to try writing some copy for her. When she described the project – a fairly technical description of a business-to-business solution in the high-tech arena – I admitted it was beyond my usual realm of subject matter, but she was encouraging. She seemed to think I might discover new abilities – and maybe even new interests, a chance to broaden my scope as a professional writer.

Alas, she was wrong. Having committed to the project, knee-deep in documentation, information, and instructions, I acknowledged to myself that I simply had no idea how to do this. I didn’t even understand the subject matter very well, let alone having any idea how to communicate it based on the requirements of the project.

This wasn’t an entirely new experience for me. Four years or so ago, when I was working hard to expand my freelance portfolio, I took on every writing job I was offered. As a result, I distinctly remember one afternoon in which the clients for whom I was on deadline were a municipal planner, an internet security company, and a varicose vein clinic. Each client insisted that a writer of my abilities could surely just apply the same techniques with which I write about artists, musicians, food, travel, families, and community to their particular product and it would be fine.

And in each of those cases, I was able to finesse it, pretty much. I found ways to explain varicose vein treatment and sidewalk reconstruction and computer firewalls in a cogent enough way to make the client happy. But this time I just didn’t think I could do it.

Failure, in fact, is an option, I told myself. I have failed at this assignment, and now it’s time to stop wrecking myself over it and let the client know.

So I emailed her apologetically, admitting it just wasn’t my skill set and I wasn’t doing her any favors by spending increasing amounts of time on a project for which she was sure to be dissatisfied with the results. Then I went out for a walk, afraid to check my email for what was sure to be an angry or disappointed response.

But that’s not what happened. When I returned from my walk, I found a reply from the client that said “Thanks for trying to help, and for being honest when it became clear that this is not working.”

The experience made me think about the concept of core competencies. It’s good to be well-rounded and show aptitude in many different areas, but it’s also okay to know what you do best and to leave the other endeavors to other people.

So yes, as a parent and friend and occasional teacher and coach, I will continue to be encouraging, to try to inspire people to succeed. And I’ll continue to strive for success in my own pursuits as well, of course. But at the same time, I’ll remember what I learned from this particular unfinished assignment: sometimes failure is indeed an option. Not only that, but sometimes it is an entirely valid option.