We all have these key moments, when we have to do what it is staring us in the face, or go stir crazy.
Like the time I decided, ‘Right, I have to write my memoir. I have to do this, or I’ll die. And, it might kill me in the process – from embarrassment, anxiety, exhaustion, sadness – but God dammit, I’d rather die trying, than die of boredom and depression and regret. If writing this – and going through hell – is what it takes, then fine! I’ll take that chance.
Life always gives us challenges. And the longer we ignore them, block them out, dodge them or make excuses, the harder will be the next tests we face. Similar challenges form a pattern that may be very familiar, and will tend to revisit and repeat, until we get the message that, yes, we do have to deal with this head on. The longer we prevaricate, the greater the challenge grows, just to test our resolve. We have to take our courage in both hands and clamber aboard. The longer we leave it….
But such challenges are offered for a reason: perhaps to allow us to recognise and rework a defeatist pattern, to teach self worth; even, sometimes, to resolve issues have haunted us forever, such as a pattern of failure or settling for painful compromises, never allowing our true colours to shine bright.
In my next non-fiction book, Making Miracles, which is set for release in 2018, I share my dream diary, in the writing and re-reading of which, I recognised repeating patterns that have persisted over lifetimes. These I had to take on board if I wanted to make progress in this life. Luckily, I did, in the nick of time.
So let’s follow our dreams, people! The world needs folks with courage and faith to do what they know they have to. Let’s live like today is our best day.
Rest assured, it is very useful to write a book – to write anything – even if we don’t get round to finishing it. We learn a lot in the process, and we figure out stuff which perhaps isn’t suitable for anyone else to read anyway, so that’s all good. In any case, as any writer will tell you, ‘finishing’ has a rather subjective aspect to it: is a book we are writing ever ‘finished’?
But writing memoir can feel peculiarly, individually self-obsessed, so it feels almost easier than in most creative endeavours, to say, ‘What am I doing this for? I should give up now, before I get carried away … before I end up being swallowed up in this idiotic undertaking. What do I know, anyway?’
It is so easy then, to shut the book and never go back to it. It lies around on the shelf, while we feel uncomfortable and slightly ashamed. I know all about that.
Self belief is fundamental for doing anything as intangible as writing.
There are those who will, when you tell them snippets from your life, nod encouragingly and say, ‘Hey, you have had a really interesting life, I’d love to read about it!’ But by and large, writing memoir is a private undertaking, best understood alone and fashioned in private into something that may, eventually, end up being something more.
It takes years, though. Unlike all the rags to riches stories favoured of Hollywood and Bollywood of starlets immediately getting that sign-up, or winning a national talent contest, ‘instant success’ for authors is usually the result of about ten years of hard graft. So, be prepared to work hard for nothing, for a long time.
Doesn’t sound promising, does it? But when the chips are down, we rarely write memoir because of the tangible, commercial rewards. We write because challenges have to be met sometime, so we might as well meet them while we can, head on.
I have written a memoir. The process was long, surprisingly painful and full of the steepest learning curves imaginable.
But through a period of about seven years, I did realise that, though writing memoir is not necessarily straightforward, there are things to bear in mind. We might start by deciding, first, what we do not need, when embarking on writing our memoir.
We do not need:-
Any qualification in literature, creative writing or equivalent.
A law degree or formal adult education to fend off critics or lawsuits.
To conduct embarrassing interviews with friends and family.
For now, here is a glimpse of what you might find helpful to write memoir
A work ethic or method to get you started
A willingness to make time
An desire to continue, bordering on the obsessive
Willingness to listen
Patience to undertake literally hundreds of rewrites
The willingness to change your understanding when casual conversations with family reveal that you may have got something wrong
A willingness to come clean and be honest
Playful optimism and the ability to laugh when it all gets too much and you feel like throwing in the towel.
This is a light-hearted list, incomplete and perhaps even a bit contentious. We each have our own list of what we need. What’s missing? Ah yes, of course.
The desire to write our story
Something to write about.
If we start writing, and realise that our work is, well, boring, we can do several things we can do with
We can
throw out what we have written and start again. Given that, after a million re-writes, nothing in your original MS will remain, this is a perfectly feasible option.
Go out and live an interesting life, and then come back and write about it. We might be twenty years too early.
I’ve never seriously considered writing for teens, though my daughter has asked me often, if I would consider it. So it comes as a bit of a revelation to me – not for the first time, I realise – that young adults, teens from all over the world enjoy reading my memoir, Trapped. In exploring my life as it was, I never set out to consciously write a book for young adults, though my prose style tries to avoid over-sophistication. (Even as I write that, I worry: my daughter asked me recently if I swallowed a dictionary…do I still use three long words, where one short one would do?)
Last year, I was delighted to hear of a class of seventh graders, twelve year olds in the USA, who were set Trapped as a reading text by their class teacher. And recently, Sam Keane sent me a review, which I have included as a recent blog post.
I have always assumed that Trapped, being about a depressed, angry and sexually frustrated woman who only wants to be happy – to be allowed to be herself – would place it firmly in the ‘adult’ category. So how do I feel, knowing that youngsters read about my sexual frustration?
It may be that teachers, using the text as a study tool for young adults, delicately sensor the text; or more probably, since I was at school, there has been a revolution in attitudes around sexual experience. My daughter, I know, benefits from a full and candid exploration of attitude to sex at school, which contrasts markedly with the tiptoeing and cringeworthy explorations that we endured in late primary education in the late 1970s, and which left us with more questions than answers.
Perhaps my attitudes are well out of date, and what I consider cringeworthy and embarrassing is merely part of life, these days. It could just be that young adults are less phased, that they listen, decide and make up their own minds more readily about what they experience. If that is so, then I am pleased, and I applaud the sophistication of young people. They, so much more than my generation, tell the truth and expect to hear it, so are unlikely to be phased by a few truthful, passing references to the sexual experiences of one woman who, if she’d had her way, would have loved to find more ways of enjoying love.
You are cordially invited to the official launch of my new book Happiness Matters.
To coincide with the extended release date, next Monday 19th June, you are cordially invited to a book launch for Happiness Matters. We are having an evening get-together at Thistle Foundation’s Edinburgh offices from 6 – 8pm. There will be drinks and snacks, conversation and books! You are all most welcome to come along.
Writing a book about happiness is not everyone’s flute of bubbly, nor even their cup of tea. What, after all, can another book contribute to the extensive self-help literature that already exists around this and a plethora of related subjects, all inviting us to get a better, more meaningful, a happier life?
I have had the experience of being depressed for the best part of twenty years – which is a big chunk of time I wish I could have lived through more joyfully. But more importantly, I no longer get chronically depressed. Sad, sometimes, anxious occasionally, but not depressed as I used to, for days and weeks at a time.
Despite having faced more challenges than I wanted to – and we all have challenges to deal with – I have found a way out of depression that does not involve long and complex analysis. Happiness Matters has taken ten years to reach publication; in this time I have had lots of time to test out different theories, to see what works and what don’t. I don’t have any magic formula; but perhaps I can reassure anyone who is unhappy, that there are things we can do to help ourselves feel more powerful, in control and pleased with life.
So if you would like to know more – or if you are sceptical and would like to challenge me on what I write about – you are welcome to join us for an evening’s contemplation of the lighter side of life.
This morning I received a review of Trapped by Sam Keane.
I’ll let Sam speak for himself.
‘My name is Sam I’m a young adult battling Cerebral Palsy.
For my final project for English class we had an assignment to write about a non-fiction book. I wanted to do my assignment based on something real, something I could directly relate to in a strong way.
I chose to write about life with Cerebral Palsy and some of the choices and consequences involved. The choices and consequences weren’t just about life Cerebral Palsy but that was the main focus.
I began to read Trapped: My Life with Cerebral Palsy by Fran Macilvey and as I’m reading it about 5, maybe 10 pages in, I felt a sense that this is what I wanted. I knew right away that Fran’s book was… the one. I’d already found a number of things that she’d described where I’m saying in my mind “been through that,” “felt that way” or “that’s me too.” Some of the similarities to what Fran described in the book and my own life were on the opening page, when she talks about falling and the “familiar, rough embrace scraping skin off my knuckles or palms, which are now embedded with gravel adding spots of blood to the muddy mess on my cuffs.” This was and is something I constantly went and go through since I could walk, a feat which I didn’t accomplish until the age of 5.
On page 85 Fran writes, “The world of physically active tends to be uncompromising.” Yup I agree completely. Time and time again when I’m being physically active whether in phys ed class at school, or with friends, I always feel like being active feels like a grind, trying to keep up with them. It’s not easy, even though the people I’m with, classmates and/or friends are unfailingly compromising to the fact that I have a disability. Always my friends, classmates, make the games and sports we play accessible and fun for me as much as they can. Even with that being said I still need to put in twice, three, even four times the amount of energy they do, no matter how hard they try to make it better for me. That’s just the way it goes and I’m 100% ok with that because I love sports and the challenge it brings to play.
Page 87 “Am I going to ‘get better?’ No I’m not. My condition is inoperable, permanent, and I am not ‘broken’ in such a way that a tube of glue or a pile of nails will fix anything.” That is something I sometimes feel when asked if I will ever “get better.” It was an absolutely amazing book with lots of relatable feelings, events and experiences that not just me but others with Cerebral Palsy can directly relate to.
I want to personally thank Fran Macilvey for writing this book and for sharing what her life was like with Cerebral Palsy and not just that, but her life in general. Fran, thank you, your book has given me something I can relate directly to in a strong way. Very inspirational read as well.’
Thank you so much, Sam, for sharing your thoughts here. I’m glad when what I write can show we are all working together to make life better, step by step.
Reading Joanna Trollope’s The Soldier’s Wife I come across this passage early on, which had me leaping out of bed
‘….Dan had said that deployment on active service made you long for extremes, either the supreme domesticity of home when you were away from it or the violence of action and danger when you were back. You couldn’t halt the pendulum, he said, you couldn’t stop it crashing from side to side, often out of control. Even if it sometimes hit her – or the children – as it swung….’
Something about this passage resonates with me.
I habitually spend time waiting around – still waiting – for others to come back, for life to tell me what to do, for the push that I need to venture forth. And I have always blamed that particular passivity – shyness, failure, fear – on disability.
But perhaps it has more to do with an abiding sense that my life, the patterns of it and the way the weave and weft wraps itself around me, has been defined by what other people need and decide: the parent who works abroad; the partner who cannot make up their mind whether to leave or stay; the children who have to fit in with patterns set up by others – the need for continuity which boils down to a choice of boarding school, where patterns are set in stone…. but which haemorrhages a domesticity that my husband, for example, can take more for granted.
I suspect that one of hubby’s templates says to him, ‘Parents are here and will always be here, so you may venture – go!’ but my templates tend to suggest to me that I should wait and see what happens, what others decide, because their choices will define what I can do.
But none of us can live our lives like that, not really, not always. We have to jump, and hope that we have a good landing. We have to dive in and see what happens, experiment and hope for the best. Otherwise, what happens to the quality of our lives?
When I was a beneficiary of its expertise, Remploy was still owned by the Department of Work and Pensions. Following extensive factory closures, it is now in private hands, owned by Maximus and an employee trust. Since the reorganisation, what has happened to its disabled employees? They have not just gone away, and there will be hopeful for suitable openings, as anxious as the next person that their last job will not become a distant memory.
I was in and out of work as a solicitor over a period of twelve years. At one time – how embarrassing to admit this – so poor was my bargaining position that I desperately needed help to regularise my pay and paperwork. My well-intentioned boss was a single practitioner too busy to deal with it. Remploy agreed to accept me onto their books and was able to set my pay to rights, provide me with pay slips, sort out my national insurance contributions and offer a pension, as well as day-to-day advice and support. During periodic visits, my Remploy supervisor saw me working and asked why I didn’t find myself a proper job: funding limits meant that I was at the top of my pay bracket and likely to stay there. He obviously felt I deserved better.
Taking his words to heart, I did find another job quite easily. Because my new pay increased substantially, Remploy could not continue to support me and I bid them a fond farewell as I prepared to take my chances on the open market. But pay was only one part of their remit. They provided understanding, a position of bargaining strength and expertise, all of which I lost when we parted company.
Aware of my limitations, I took another post advertised as part-time, thirty hours a week. But as always, the devil is in the detail. To do the job, I was expected to accept unrealistic deadlines set by other people, and was forced to work after hours. The pay was great, but nothing was added for overtime, which stretched uncomfortably until I was easily putting in forty hours a week. For an able-bodied colleague that might be a nuisance. For someone with a disability, the effect is more insidious. After six months, I had to rest, but when I asked for a day off each week – planning to fit thirty hours into four days – twice my request was refused without any discussion. Exhausted and faced with targets I struggled to meet, I had to leave. These days I work from home, aware that when I put in a forty hour week, at least I can do so from the comfort of my armchair and take frequent breaks. How many employers can afford to be so relaxed?
For those of us who might wish to work independently in the job market, the truth about Remploy is that their continuing support has been vital for longer-term success, though this is not always obvious at the outset. Remploy helped me to stay in work because they understood my practical dilemma, which no other employer would take account of in the normal course of business: I needed to be able to pace myself. Remploy were able to find a formula that worked. In so doing, they enabled me to take a longer-term view. Once their support was removed, I soon found myself unable to manage in an environment unapologetically geared to an able-bodied workforce.
According to the Sayce review which recommended the closure of Remploy factories, funds available to make finding a job easier are better targeted at disabled employees directly. In the same way that disabled consumers have the right to visit shops unimpeded, employment seems increasingly to be treated as a matter of access. The disability alliance website notes that “Access to Work helps disabled people and employers with adjustments to premises, transport costs and other in-work support” all of which certainly help. But what happens once an employee with impairments has a foot in the door?
Overwhelmingly, employers consider one aspect of work: their financial costs and gains. While disability discrimination legislation has made great strides forward, there remain many aspects in which the market driven-economy can skip neatly around its obligations to disabled employees. In hidden and insidious ways, a disabled employee often remains at a disadvantage, no matter how many hours are devoted to employee relations or however many policies exist to allow flexible working. Unfavourable comparisons around productivity, punctuality, sociability, public image and teamwork remain.
A friend of mine who is disabled and writes plays about disability wrote to me, “(we) should be judged according to others in your circumstances”. But how many disabled people can keep their place securely in mainstream employment? It is a difficult conundrum. In the Remploy factories, impairment has always been the norm, which was at least useful when it came to making meaningful comparisons.
So long as each former employee of a Remploy factory has found work and access to the same levels of continuing support, the changes in workplace structure and ethos may not impact too badly. But somehow, I doubt that the necessary levels of support will remain available over the long term.
Remploy has efficiently and quietly gone about its business over many years. If it had been making a lot of noise and grabbing the headlines, its contribution to the lives of disabled adults might not have been so easily refashioned to suit an ideology which assumes, on scant evidence, that for a disabled person the difficulties of finding and keeping a job are easily sorted with a bit of remodelling. The architects of the changes will not be waiting around to pick up the pieces if their optimism turns out to be misplaced. Yet, as news reports of the time indicate, barely one third of the employees made redundant during the privatisation processes have found re-employment. Old-style supported employment has its place in the scheme of things, after all.
I hear that Labour are planning to re-nationalise. Will they re-nationalise Remploy?
It is good to listen to our audience, and taking advice is always useful, whether that is from a single reader or a roomful of expectant hopefuls. As I may have mentioned, writing is a solitary and often isolating preoccupation, so it is essential to maintain contact with people in the real world outside. Without that grounding, our work, and our whole world, can come adrift.
But…. we mustn’t listen so hard to our audience – unless we are a paid writer of text for a company brochure or publicity machine – that we become bendy like spaghetti.
For a first-time fiction author, the temptation is to listen and incorporate all changes, ideas, thoughts and suggestions, in the hope that doing so will make our work more appealing and marketable. But our energy creates our work, and if we listen too closely to what others might suggest – do we run the risk that we give up writing all together?
Who are we writing for? Ourselves, first of all. The first stage of any creative project must be free of self-consciousness. It must be free to fly and fart in the face of critics and friends alike, blissfully shielded from concerns about marketability, reader appeal or plot holes. That kind of energy is what makes writing a joy, a privilege and a rare pleasure, and while in the midst of creative frenzy, we have to feel free to say, ‘Go away, I’m not finished yet.’
That initial process is taking me far longer than I thought it would. With my rational mind, I calculated a year is enough time to get a book down and dusted. But, creatively, especially as I work best with several projects on the go at once, I’m finding that two years is about my minimum. The longer time-frame, paradoxically, allows me to work more freely, not worried about time scales and deadlines. And in all that time, we are really writing for ourselves, first – because that – selfish? – motivation keeps the voice alive, allows it to anchor and refine, before other people get a look in.
The processes of indie publishing may seem complicated, but like every task in life, they can be broken down into sections which we tackle one at a time, in sequence when it suits.
First, we decide that going indie might be a good idea, then we start to enquire, find resources and read about it. Then we read some more, then we venture to work out what the jargon means… and we keep reading.
Then we look at what to do – finish writing, edit, send out to external editor, re-edit some more, and some more…. There are always glitches and typos to fix…. then decide to get it formatted and how to do that, write up pitches and cover material, consider metatadata and pricing then decide about book cover design….
The step up to indie publishing is huge, yes, but if we break it into small steps, each becomes achievable in good time, with a bit of focus and patience. There is practical stuff to deal with too, such as deciding about distribution channels, opening new accounts with Amazon, IngramSpark and Neilsen to buy ISBNs and register our books. Not to mention tax, reciprocal arrangements for withholding, ITINs, and the rest. Having been through some of this already with my existing publisher helps a great deal.
I have started a body of notes which I add to as time goes on. These are updated every day, and they help me to navigate the processes without all the details getting lost. Notes save my brain from the twin hazards of forgetfulness and interruptions, neither of which is predictable. With a steep learning curve and limited time, taking notes saves having to remember all the details.
This is an exciting learning curve, a bit what I imagine ski-ing must be like. Lots of highs and adrenalin rushes.
September 1, 2017
The longer we leave it
Fran Macilvey 'Trapped: My Life with Cerebral Palsy', cerebral palsy, Fran Macilvey, Happiness Matters, Memoir, Path To Publication, The Rights & Wrongs of Writing 2 Comments
The longer we leave it…
We all have these key moments, when we have to do what it is staring us in the face, or go stir crazy.
Like the time I decided, ‘Right, I have to write my memoir. I have to do this, or I’ll die. And, it might kill me in the process – from embarrassment, anxiety, exhaustion, sadness – but God dammit, I’d rather die trying, than die of boredom and depression and regret. If writing this – and going through hell – is what it takes, then fine! I’ll take that chance.
Life always gives us challenges. And the longer we ignore them, block them out, dodge them or make excuses, the harder will be the next tests we face. Similar challenges form a pattern that may be very familiar, and will tend to revisit and repeat, until we get the message that, yes, we do have to deal with this head on. The longer we prevaricate, the greater the challenge grows, just to test our resolve. We have to take our courage in both hands and clamber aboard. The longer we leave it….
But such challenges are offered for a reason: perhaps to allow us to recognise and rework a defeatist pattern, to teach self worth; even, sometimes, to resolve issues have haunted us forever, such as a pattern of failure or settling for painful compromises, never allowing our true colours to shine bright.
In my next non-fiction book, Making Miracles, which is set for release in 2018, I share my dream diary, in the writing and re-reading of which, I recognised repeating patterns that have persisted over lifetimes. These I had to take on board if I wanted to make progress in this life. Luckily, I did, in the nick of time.
So let’s follow our dreams, people! The world needs folks with courage and faith to do what they know they have to. Let’s live like today is our best day.
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