Some of us, maybe many of us, have a rich background of writing of the sort that was formalized and descriptive and conclusive as part of our work. For me,it included constant written physician consults, medicolegal reports for personal injury claims to lawyers or courts Writing understandable and comprehensive reports was an important part of many jobs. To believe educated persons who say they can't write, is a stretch. It's all writing! Look at your own background. What you observed and retained and want to record. Maybe you have a diary or a journal, already available, itching for print. My grandmother's great grandmother, Susan Sibbald, at seventy wrote of her first 29 years of her life, a life which lasted from 1783 to 1866. It was only intended for her family but published in 1926 by her great grandson. It is a living document. Its reality astonishingly cemented by a young woman whose diaries through the period of Trafalgar, Napoleon, Wellington, Nelson, sea and land battles rated no mention in her world.
Wikipedia and the multiple dictionaries consider memoirs either address only a targeted period, or address a targeted subject, treated within a biography. The first 29 years of Susan's life, or the relationship of the Garden to Jim would therefore qualify as a memoir. However, I believe there is more. A simple sentence structure breaks into the acronym SVO: subject,verb,object. Example is Jim eats Cereal. It could be turned around as, Cereal fuels Jim. Then the subject is cereal and the object is Jim. It could be the Garden fuels Jim. And here the Garden is the Subject and dominant and Jim the Object. Listen to your Garden is a blog structure of garden and environment crucial to the written response or implied response of Jim to it. This particular memoir structure parallels that SVO as a memoir in that it elevates the subject environment over the biography. This blog structure is often portrayed as “What I saw” and therefore “What I think”.
Passion for the Subject and Knowledge of the Subject are important. When Abraham Verghese, a surgeon, wrote Cutting for Stone his strong characters were still the servants of Medicine. When Elizabeth Gilbert wrote The Signature of all Things her strong characters changed but the march of plants, evolution,and the commonality of all living things remained as the hallmark of the novel. When Sir Thomas Browne graduated in Medicine in 1654 in his book the Religion of the Doctor he noted that nature was the universal and publick [sic] manuscript, as revealing of God as the Bible was. When George Orwell, journalist, essayist, novelist wrote, he wrote in what he called plain English and derided those who dressed up their sentences, or were in his view opaque. He stressed ideas and clarity were best achieved in plain English, possibly arising from his background as a journalist. The Wikipedia account of the remarkable JKRowlings life and times is outstanding in defining the role of muse and spontaneity in the generation of writing and its creative diversity.
Our library asked various writers to put in a short paragraph explaining the habitual manner we employed to write. The little pieces were put up around the library for a month.They were interesting and diverse. My contribution was on the muse (Read Pg 140 in my book A Braided Cord). I struggled to define the muse and its reality. I found it best to describe the muse with examples to put it into context. In accordance with its appearance from time to time from somewhere, unchained, I called it a Random Harvest I was never able to write more than a page at a time though I tried. However, the muse always ended at the right time. If I had to work at saying more, I didn't. I ended up writing blogs since they suited that short short story that got to the point quickly. I can't say why, though it may be that I am impatient and surgical. I started in 2009, writing blogs, in my case on a blogspot platform first off, later a website for writing, disseminating and inviting criticism and finally using a self publishing company that provided editorial work, design and production.Though they have marketing protocols available to advise, it's up to you to do all the spade- work. Where you treasure and protect your voice there will always be an authenticity to it that speaks of you through whatever you write. When you lay your voice on the page, and your verities emerge, you have already told your tale
Read aloud your written word. After all, that is your voice. In A Braided Cord (pg 145) the blog "Wordsmiths" acknowledges the voice. It starts by saying, " Received clusters of designated symbols we call words can either be seen or heard. The second cranial nerve, the optic nerve, will mediate the seen word to the occipital cortex. The heard word will be mediated by the auditory branch of the eighth cranial nerve to the cortical temporal lobe. These different entry points and transfers to the imprinting areas inevitably lead to different perception despite the excellence of the subsequent processing and integrative activity of the brain." I wrote this blog several years before I had a brainstem stroke. The brainstem is responsible for speech (noise) and it became lost and then garbled for several weeks before it returned in larger measure. Of course, the brainstem is the most anatomically primitive part of our brain. The tradition of the oral and heard word is the "early and primitive" in our evolution that emits passion and permits survival. We could hear and speak before we could read or write. Read aloud your written word.
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