You’ve got everything you need to bake that pie. See how this goes? And let’s just pretend that, like me, you have a shtetl-mentality, meaning you somehow grew up always fearing running out, and your shelves are wildly overstocked. But there is that can of pumpkin, that all-purpose flour, the salt, the baking powder, baking soda. No matter what you do to them, they cannot go on the Thanksgiving table. So see those Easter Peeps there on the shelf? You know, those neon-colored sugared marshmallow bunnies stuck together like an Any Warhol acid-dream painting? Yeah, those. What feast is coming up? For what specific meal do you need to perform an inventory of your pantry? Oh yeah: here comes Thanksgiving. You’re not, at least if you want anyone to read your work. You see what you’ve got and, if you are a beginning memoir writer, you think you are supposed to use all of it in one big book. Standing in front of that pantry you take stock. Some, like that organic, twelve-dollar-a pound crystalized ginger, are highly specific to one use or another others, like all-purpose flour, are positively multi-use that za’atar, yeah, well, I’m not sure what that’s for either but I own it too. Varied as they are, they have one thing in common: They are waiting to be cooked up. See them? They are all there on the shelf paper, some better organized than others, some bursting through their wrappings, or filled to the brim in their glass containers. The way I see it, your life stories all sit in your pantry closet. Perhaps we’ve reviewed the same opening pages together five or six times now. This came to me while speaking to one of my memoir coaching clients who was wrestling, really struggling, with getting on with a book. Here it is: Your life is a pantry, but to write about it you must choose one feast at a time for which to cook. Just today it was something new about how to write a first draft. And why not? Every day I learn another thing or two about this great art of writing what you know. SINCE PUBLICATION OF THE MEMOIR PROJECT, my irreverent little book on how to write memoir, there has not been one day that I have not wanted to tweak it, adding a small thought or a phrase to what I published in its pages.
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