It Takes a Village to Write a Memoir
by Grant Faulkner
Confession: I was once a solitary writer.
As someone who has been known to have non-joiner tendencies, it’s ironic that I find myself more and more enthralled, enchanted, and inspired by the power of community as I grow older as a writer.
A community is a mysterious thing. My creative community keeps growing and changing shapes and flowing in new directions, surprising me, taking me to new places in such nourishing ways. It’s the definition of magic: constant transformation.
I’ve been thinking about this because making art can be so much about the self, but being part of a community puts you in service to others. You can’t just take from them. If you don’t give, you really won’t be a part of things. You won’t experience the magic bolt of connection or that upswell of support that is often delivered randomly—but at the most crucial moment.
The myth of the solitary hero
Most writers tend to be solitary creatures. We sit in the penumbra of the light at our desks, anguishing over the inertia of a plot, crumbling up pieces of paper, biting our fingernails, and hoping that the next cup of coffee will deliver more inspiration than jitters.
Our culture celebrates the notion of a solitary heroic ideal, gritty self-starters who meet challenges and overcome adversity, whether it’s the sports star who leads their team to victory or the scientist who cures a deadly disease.
Solitude no doubt plays an important element in writing, but if you trace the history of literature—and perhaps especially memoirs—you realize how it takes a veritable village to write a book.
Cheryl Strayed views writing as a paradoxical act: it is “radically private,” yet its ultimate purpose is to foster a “great sense of connection and community.” While she emphasizes that writing requires hours of being “profoundly alone,” she argues that community is vital for sustaining a writer’s discipline and sense of purpose because of how it provides validation, accountability, and a safety net of shared experience
Similarly, Lidia Yuknavitch founded Corporeal Writing in Portland because, “I was interested in writing in community, which is different than ‘group work’ or a ‘writing group.’”
“What I am interested in is a collaboration realm where writing in community shivers the edge of self and social. What if we wrote and made art together in a room without a conclusion?
“What if we gathered our collective creative energy and took turns carrying it for and with each other? What kind of de-institutionalized body current could we create if we just gathered as people who love writing, or who can’t keep a lid on their own creativity, people who lead with heart and guts? How might our poetics and storytelling change?”
Riffing as creative process
Frissons of creativity tend to happen with others. Finding like-minded creative friends is important for those seminal imaginative sparks to catch fire.
“None of us is as smart as all of us,” the saying goes. An initial idea grows through the interchange of ideas, with one idea sparking another idea—and then the light bulb of inspiration glows.
Think of a jazz group, where individual musicians riff on a melodic theme. They don’t necessarily know where the song is going. The group has the ideas, not the individual musicians, but unexpected insights emerge, and a beautiful new song flows from the group.
When you work with others, you’re naturally combining an assortment of different concepts, elaborating and modifying each others’ thoughts. Your writing community can be a goad, a check, a sounding board, and a source of inspiration, support, and even love.
There’s a reason it’s difficult to beat the home team in sports: they have an extra teammate, the crowd.
In a community, you tend to benefit from fellow authors’ writing and publishing journeys in unexpected ways. I can’t think of any door that opened for me that wasn’t somehow opened by another. An introduction to an agent. A writing residency. A teaching job.
I spent a couple of decades of my early writing life going it alone, more or less, in large part because I was honoring two of my worst traits: insecurity and arrogance. Insecurity and arrogance are a toxic combo because together they didn’t allow me to ask for help. They didn’t allow me to join others.
It’s in that simple asking for help, that simple trust of opening up to another, where creativity gets a literal injection of fuel.
Every memoir is defined by the community of writers it belongs to. A memoir isn’t written solely by its author; it’s also a work of the people surrounding and supporting the author.
