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Writing the Personal



Notes from the Emerging Writers' Festival, 2013

Sure, we all have something to say, but why would people want to read it? This Town Hall session discussed blogs, memoir and biography. Specifically, how to make writing about oneself interesting to others. Why do we want to read your travel stories, your disasters in love, your encounters with cancer, your intimate meanderings? Along with the crucial question: how does one avoid pissing off friends and family so much that they will no longer speak to you?

The panel certainly had great credentials for writing the personal: Fiona Wright, author of a collection of poems, Knuckled; Walter Mason, travel writer, Destination Saigon; Anna Poletti, author of Intimate Ephemera-Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture and Luke Ryan, comedy writer and author of soon to be published You’re Only as Sick as you Feel.

The session was hosted by blogger, Lily Mae Martin. She blogs at Berlin Domestic, where she pokes around exploring issues concerning the body, art, motherhood and the domestic. 



Panel members for Writing the Personal
(L-R) Lily Mae Martin, Fiona Wright, Walter Mason, Anna Poletti & Luke Davies



Rather than a run down of each panellist, here are the most compelling issues explored:

The panelists made a case for owning and writing your own life.

Fiona Wright sees ‘Writing as an act of self determination.’ She says ‘nobody else can tell you what your story is if you tell it yourself.’ As Walter says ‘I like to confess things so other people don’t find them out!’ Luke did not want to be ‘framed by cancer world. I want to get as much out of this tumour as it’s getting out of me!'  he said. Anna said that ‘Winning and maintaining the trust of reader is the first and main challenge for writer.’ To do that, a writer has to ‘establish the stakes, that is, the courage it takes to write, and put this in the writing itself.’

Shared spaces pull the reader in, so write about events surrounding your experience, for example festivals, celebrities or momentous events. Others stories are part of the conversation you are entering into, says Lily Mae. As Anna mentioned, this idea of sharing is also one of the appeals of the zine, By inserting an original photo as a cover, or sealing the zine in an envelope, the reader must unwrap the text and receive the writer’s gift.

Let yourself look stupid and vulnerable, and ‘avoid snark.’ ‘If you have the choice between making someone else look stupid, or yourself, always choose yourself,’ advises Walter. Explore the spiritual, he says, even if this is risky.

Danger zones: characters that walk the fine line between fiction and reality. Fiona’s sister did not speak to her for 8 months after reading one of Fiona’s poems which she felt sailed too close. As Fiona says: ‘Writing the personal is such a risky business, because I like writing that is dangerous, that puts something at stake.’ Having said that, Fiona admitted that she now shows her stories to all the people involved before publishing them. 

In writing the personal, we need to take risks and be brave. This session couldn't solve the dilemma of how one can write honestly without pissing people off. Sometimes, the truth, or our version of it, is not going to be received well. To finish on a quote from Jeanette Winterson: ‘The saddest thing is that I wrote a story that I could live with.’ As she embarks on her memoir, her own (and owned) personal story, she asks the reader: ‘trust me now.’

© Anna Sublet 2013
First posted at http://www.emergingwritersfestival.org.au/blog/
Written as part of Post Graduate study at Victoria University: 
"The VU Blog Squad is an official team of reporters who cover the Emerging Writers’ Festival, every year, on our blog. They are writers and students from Victoria University. "


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