Sedaris
NaNoWriMo starts on Sunday, and I'm trying to gear myself up. I want to take this seriously. I want to put writing first and not let it slide to a lower priority like I have been pretty much all 2015 so far.
Sarah and I went to see David Sedaris last night. It was the second time I've gone to one of his readings – he's hilarious and self-deprecating and completely unconcerned (it seems) with what anyone thinks of him, which gives him a freedom and rawness in his writing I envy. I think to write things that matter you have to let yourself be a little raw and impolite and politically incorrect and unapologetic. I know he probably still cares how he comes across to people, but he's not let that stop him from writing what he wants without watering himself down. I get way too concerned with what people think of what I write, which means to avoid any chance of being criticized or not liked I just never show anyone what I write. That works, except it's kinda not the point. I'm going to have to figure out how to just say "fuck it, this is what's in my brain, and if it upsets you, maybe it's just not for you."
So there are a lot of little moments that make up this essay, but they're all tied together in some way. They all serve to paint a picture of what it's like to be a part of his family and what his relationship was like with his sister. And you get a sense of how complicated his relationship with her was and how his feelings are complicated now that she's gone.
Sarah and I went to see David Sedaris last night. It was the second time I've gone to one of his readings – he's hilarious and self-deprecating and completely unconcerned (it seems) with what anyone thinks of him, which gives him a freedom and rawness in his writing I envy. I think to write things that matter you have to let yourself be a little raw and impolite and politically incorrect and unapologetic. I know he probably still cares how he comes across to people, but he's not let that stop him from writing what he wants without watering himself down. I get way too concerned with what people think of what I write, which means to avoid any chance of being criticized or not liked I just never show anyone what I write. That works, except it's kinda not the point. I'm going to have to figure out how to just say "fuck it, this is what's in my brain, and if it upsets you, maybe it's just not for you."
Anyway, I was sitting there in that big auditorium listening to him read and thinking about how he structures his essays. He jumps around chronologically and thematically, but somehow it doesn't feel disjointed. He ends and you think, "yes, that was a good story." Really it was 5 or 6 stories, maybe more.
For example, here's an essay he wrote about the death of his sister. I heard him read this one the first time I saw him a couple years ago. The overall topic is the his sister's suicide, but he jumps around quite a bit, throwing in details that seem irrelevant at first but all add up to something. He's got one overall idea – that losing his sibling is a huge shift in how he sees his family, even though their relationship was complicated. He's also got one overarching story – going on a family beach vacation right after his sister dies. But there are other moments thrown in – some tied to family vacations as a child, some tied to his relationship with his sister, some meant to represent something about his feelings about his sister's death. I went through the essay and just tried to make a list of all the scenes / ideas. You don't really have to read this, it was mostly just an exercise for myself:
- At the Dallas airport, hearing the news that his sister has killed herself
- Growing up in a big family
- Being overwhelmed by friends who have more than two kids
- Meeting a father who still refers to a daughter who died 18 years ago before she was born as one of his children
- His sister putting it in her will that her family couldn't have her body
- What his sister had left in her room
- Going on a family vacation at the beach after she died
- Trips to the beach when he was a kid
- A description of the current day beach house
- Someone's comment on his sister's obituary in the newspaper
- How they didn't really know her / their complicated relationship with her
- Sharing stories about his sister with his siblings
- His relationship with his sister and how they didn't talk
- Inscriptions in his sister's 9th grade yearbook
- Writing letters to her when she was at a disciplinary institution
- Spinning class with his dad
- His dad going through one of Tiffany's boxes
- His brother playing a trick on him at the grocery
- His brother's voice being mistaken for a woman
- His brother's relationship with his daughter
- His brother being a different dad than his own father
- How as a kid they always talked about buying a beach house
- Buying a beach house
- His dad wanting to name it Tiffany
- What the new house looks like
- Leaving the beach house
- Stopping at a farmer's market on the way home
- Having a conversation with his father about why she did it
- Seeing a stand selling reptiles, saying he wanted to buy them all and kill them
- As a kid feeling depressed when vacation was over, still feeling it
- At the airport, remembering how his realtor exclaimed about his family having 5 people in it, and him agreeing even though there used to be 6.
It'd be easy to dismiss this as just Sedaris following his stream of consciousness and writing about things as they come to him, but it's probably more meticulous than that. It feels freeing and daunting at the same time.
One thing I need to get better at is pulling content out of what happens around me. Sedaris talks about people he meets at book signings, people he meets in the airport, things he sees on the road – everything is potential content. I feel like the first step is to get the content out, then I can worry about structure.
The more I try to write, the more complicated it all seems.