How did I get here?

Strategies for perseverance in writing and in life.

I’ve been working on my memoir for five years. The project developed organically from the journaling I started once I learned my husband had terminal cancer, a form of therapy that saved me from losing myself in the thoughts and emotions I carried inside.

Reliving the past can be an excruciating exercise. At the same time, distance, maturity and time add clarity and sobriety to our understanding of the forces that made us who we are.

Distance, maturity and time have help me see the reasons behind my outbursts, the root of the anguish I used to feel when confronted with the unexpected, the hurt that preceded the scars and also the love that pulsed underneath it all.

Many times I considered dropping the memoir project altogether; everyday life as a widowed single mother gives me enough to process already. A number of times in these five years, I pushed the writing aside, leaving the file to simmer in the cloud while giving myself space to figure out just the right amount of recalibration required to keep it going.

I finished my first draft about two years ago. I thought I would have finished my fourth — and possibly final — draft during a trip to Cuba in May, and then last month, when I spent a week at a surf camp in Costa Rica. I forgive myself for not doing either.

As I write this, I have fifteen left to the end of my manuscript. I am so close. Perseverance got me here. The ability to carve out time to write while working more than one job got me here. Belief in the value of a story built around the deconstruction of reductive labels used to define me (and restrict me) got me here. The fortitude and peace I’ve found in embracing myself got me here.

Here are some other things that have helped me:

• Always have a notebook and pen in hand: Writing is a task, a job, a commitment, a responsibility. I discovered, however, that my heart and mind weren’t always ready to write at the time I set aside for it on my calendar — which, by the way, is very important to maintain writing as a daily practice, however small the daily window might be. Ideas have come to me while waiting to transfer my driver’s license to New York at the DMV, watching Gilmore Girls with my girl, hiking in the summer heat in Phoenix (call me crazy, but I love hiking in the summer heat in Phoenix!), riding the bus in NYC (call me crazy, but I love riding the bus in NYC!) and other unexpected moments. Because I got into the habit of carrying a notebook and pen, I’ve been able to write down the thoughts in my head, the transition challenges I resolved, the scenes that showed what I had to tell. I then used these to fuel my next writing session.

• Focus on the impact: I realized I had my approach to memoir writing all wrong when my literary agent described the importance of separating people’s intentions from the impact that even their best-intentioned actions had on me. Learning that helped me recognize and articulate the impacts in my story and to frame them for what they are: the blocks that have made me who I am — a work in progress, for sure.

• Tie each scene to the point you’re trying to make: This was a strategy I learned from Jessica DuLong, a fellow writer who helped me organize my jumbled ideas when I decided to package the journal entries into a book. (I’ve added so much since, Jessica. You’ll be proud.) Every scene has to serve the narrative. Thinking about my writing this way helped me eliminate moments I felt were cute or interesting, but that were not important to the story I’ve set out to tell. This exercise isn’t about choosing what to hide. It’s about choosing what to expose in order to stay true to your purpose.

• Lean into change: I’ve long given up on working to get things back to what they used to be. My goal is to learn and grow from every experience so as to spot (and hopefully avoid) the traps that set me back, identify the opportunities and have the courage and clearheadedness required to take risks. These are helpful lessons for writing as they are for life. I found a lot of validation and some tips in this excellent New York Times Opinion essay by Brad Stulberg, adapted from his forthcoming book Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing — Including You. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

  Here’s to getting to the end of my memoir’s working draft by the weekend’s end. More on that in the next newsletter. For now, I leave you with a picture of the gorgeous sunset outside Witch’s Rock Surf Camp in Tamarindo, Costa Rica.

  

  With love and purpose, always.

  Fernanda.