To wit: Say I happen to be walking along with something (or other things) "happening" in my life macroscopically -- but there's a pile of shit on the sidewalk that stops me. Enter microcosm. I bend down to get closer. I take my time here. I describe how the shit smells, and how I feel when I smell it. I speak of what the shit reminds me from my past, and revel with some new understanding and perspective on that old shit. I expound, using an extended metaphor of something comparable that reveals what this pile of shit "means" on a deeper level. I describe what color it is, the consistency, the little pieces in it (like grass, fur, spinach - yes, it could be human), and what those things remind me of, and what they mean. I think of the shit I'm going to take later (and when I do take that shit, I think of this shit and how it changed my life). And before I know it, I have a whole page or two (or even three) just on this pile of shit on the ground, really just a tiny blip in a moment of an experience in the day of a life.
That's how I felt while reading The Liar's Club earlier, waiting at Great Clips to get my hair cut (so a "No-shit" moment became a "shit" moment, lol) (and see, I could go off on why I was getting my hair cut - shitty last hair cut - and what my hair has been like since I got that last hair cut - shitty - and I could go on to tell you what my hair's like now - less shitty; borderline fabulous). (But back to Liar's Club...I've been told I have a parenthesis problem.) The first "day" of the memoir lasts pages and pages and pages. I've been trying to read it for two days now, and that "first day" still isn't over (granted, my attention to reading gets diverted when something triggers my itchy writing fingers). What I get from it, as afore-mentioned and afore-exemplified, are these: Details. Details. Details.
It just went to show me, I don't have to write my whole story from childhood to now in one blog post (to put it hyperbolically) (and that's why I'm enjoying focusing on relationships, because it puts my life into little shoeboxes with people's names on them). I do need to pay attention to every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every page, and make sure I'm not trying to fit any square pegs into a round "whole" (and see, I also have a problem with little mini metaphors running all over the place...like I'm a cat-herder...but that's a simile...). When I do write the "real" memoir after this 25-man blog project, it doesn't have to tell my "whole" life story, either. Hell, Mary wrote two sequels to The Liar's Club...with probably still more to be revealed. (So I could write my whole life story with my first memoir, but then what? I suck at creative fiction.)
Okay, one more cat, to sum up:
Each post is a grain of salt on the tip of an iceberg floating in the Ocean of Memoir.
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