It’s been a busy couple of weeks. The thing about being published in March, is that a lot of the build up happens say six months before publication – you have the publicity meeting; you write some pitches; the proof copies go out – and because this all happened on the other side of the hump of the turn of the year, it can feel like a long time ago when you are waiting to hear back. At our publicity meeting, my publicist Leanne said: it will all go quiet and feel like nothing is happening at all, but things are happening, only they are happening behind the scenes. Of course, we had all those amazing quotes come in from early readers – and then, and then… But, over the past couple of weeks, we’ve begun to hear from the journalists and book reviewers.. and… Things now are starting to happen! You can learn more about this on my News page.

Then I had the start of the university teaching term, and I was finishing off my London Lit Lab teaching – a proposal writing course.

But what relevance does this have to this blog post? I hear you cry with frustration. I want to learn about Reflection…. Well, I am actually reflecting on what happened over the past month or so, and also this new thing that I am experiencing, which is being published by an excellent publisher and feeling utterly held by their editorial and publicity team. I am practicing what I tell my students to do – to reflect on life. To stop and think about what happened yesterday, the day before, in your writing as well as your everyday. What you ponder; what you observe. Those of you who have studied at university level, particularly postgraduate, will be well versed with the need to get into a kind of reflective practice with your work. I always encourage my students to keep a diary, to jot down ideas, of course, but also notes about their process. What they have learned from their peers as well as in the classroom; and how they could build on their skills and improve their writing moving forward. It will make it easier for them when they come to write their critical commentary, which accompanies their creative project, but, also, in narrative nonfiction, particularly, we need to hone that reflective voice – we need to begin to understand that our observation and our opinion matters.

This is actually not as easy as it sounds. At the end of my last private course – How to Write a Memoir Proposal – I held a memoir surgery on Zoom, and one of my students asked me about my own process in writing SINS OF MY FATHER. How many years it took me to write it. I won’t bore you with my entire answer, but a key detail that I shared with the students was thatI ended up writing three entire drafts, before I had the one that sold. The first was a series of essays. These essays were being published in Granta, Aeon, The Real Story, and I had the idea that perhaps I could just collect them all together and make a book out of them. But it proved to be too difficult as there were too many gaps in the narrative, and repeat of theme and scene. So I trashed that idea and realised I need to engage with the timeline of events, and create a spine that had a forward-drive momentum. I didn’t want to make it solely chronological, but could see that it needed to have some chronology in order to be clearly understood. I extracted from the essays and told the story as it happened, from start to finish. Only in this version I had lost that critical edge of the essays. In my final draft, I managed to mush the two together – keep the forward momentum, but re-introduce the more in-depth interrogative element of the essays, which is the memoir I now have – and was the memoir I really wanted to write. But it took me quite a long time to get to that place!

What I also learned was that I needed to step up into the narrative. I needed to own it, to speak my voice. I think I’d been avoiding this before. But when I did, I realised it was the unifying ingredient that I needed. It brought the whole thing together.  It was me telling the story not the story telling itself. In memoir this is particularly important, and it’s the narrator that the reader aligns themselves with, and hopefully sympathises with, so that narrator really needs to have a clear presence on the page. It took me that long to have the confidence to do this. Once I understood that I needed to step up, everything else suddenly felt quite easy.

Here is a memoir opener, to try to demonstrate a clear reflective voice: This is from Ariel Levy’s memoir, Rules Do Not Apply.

‘Do you ever talk to yourself? I do it all the time. We do it, I should say, because that’s how it sounds in my head. When I’m following a map, for instance: We’re going to turn right on Vicolo del Leopardo, go past the bar with the mosaic tiles, and then we know where we are. It’s an old habit: We’re going to look the teacher in the eye and tell her it’s not fair. My competent self is doing the talking; my bewildered self is being addressed. We’re going to go over to the phone now and call for help with one hand and hold the baby with the other.

For the first time I can remember, I cannot locate my competent self – one more missing person. In the last few months, I have lost my son, my spouse, and my house. Every morning I wake up and for a few seconds I’m disorientated, confused as to why I feel grief seeping into my body, and then I remember what has become of my life.’

Levy shows a good understanding of herself in this passage. She shows self awareness, which is another quality that the memoirist needs to demonstrate in his or her writing. An ability to see themselves as characters on the page, and reflect on what their behaviour – however quirky – means.