Meet me in the Middle

Reflections on 33,000 words

Photo by Allie Reefer on Unsplash

As a teenager I used to lull myself to sleep with fantasies of a literary life. In my purple painted childhood bedroom, lying in my white four poster bed, I’d stare at the ceiling and imagine myself in other places:

Being invited on glamorous vacations with other writers, where we spent time writing but mostly just feeling special, part of the club.

Giving keynote speeches at colleges and universities, followed by parties in the English department building, complete with free-flowing wine and copious cheeses.

Discussing creativity over lunch with Mark Strand or Tim O’Brien (I mostly idolized white male writers back then, but I won’t blame myself — in the 1990s that was the literary canon).

Giving an acceptance speech at the Oscars after winning best adapted screenplay.

Being told I was genius, earth-shattering, that I’d written a great American work of art. Being told that I had changed the world.

Now back to reality: here’s a little glimpse into my writing process since I began writing my memoir in 2022. It took me a whole year to prepare to write this memoir. In 2022 I took notes. I thought about the memoir a lot. I took a class in which I barely created any new material, but just the act of being back in class with other writers after many years away stirred something in me, sent a message to my body that I was about to get to work on something important.

In 2023 I began sharing an office with a friend at a local co-working space. It’s generous to call it an office: it’s about the size of a closet, and contains only a desk, a chair, a lamp and a rug. I have access to the office on Mondays and Thursdays, which means that for the past year Mondays and Thursdays are my writing days. On those days I dedicate at least an hour to my memoir manuscript.

So on Mondays and Thursdays I wake up with the knowledge that I’m going to write. On days when I’m particularly organized I pack a lunch — usually leftovers — in my tote bag after I eat breakfast and my husband makes me a cup of lightly sweetened milky decaf tea that he pours into a well-worn blue thermos. I have an old double walled cup that I fill with icewater, and that also goes with me because they don’t have ice at the co-working space and there’s something about ice that makes the water extra refreshing.

I pack my laptop in my backpack, along with a piece of chocolate if I can find one, and I load the backpack and the thermos and the cup full of icy water into the car. I drive the short ten minutes to my co working space, park, walk to my office, open the door, set out my laptop and thermos and water and get to work.

There’s something about feeling that office door shut behind me that cranks my brain on — suddenly, I’m back in the manuscript once again. I open up the Word document — Scrivener is daunting, so I’m not ready to use it yet — and start writing. I write new words. I erase some of them. I build whole new paragraphs, and sometimes I’ll re-arrange them. In between, I take sips of my water and my tea. I get up to stretch. I sometimes wave to the other people in the office, but usually nobody bothers me. I break for lunch.

I write for an hour, but usually longer if I can squeeze it in and the words are flowing. It is an absolute luxury — two full mornings to write, every week. And it is also a lot of solitary work, a far cry from the literary parties and galas and conferences that I imagined in my head as a teenager. Forget changing the world; I’m barely in the world these days! Just me and a computer, week after week, showing up consistently and doing the work.

My office. The decor is courtesy of my office mate, who has great taste.

First I wrote 100 words in that little office, then I wrote 1,000 words. Soon I had written 5,000 words. Then … 15,000. I watched the word count climb and climb. Soon I’d written 20,000 words. It seemed unbelievable to me. Bird by bird, as Anne Lamott so famously says in her craft book of the same name. Slowly, I was building something.

And this month I hit a milestone with my memoir manuscript: I’ve written 33,000 words. Most memoirs average at about 60,000 words, so I’ve hit the halfway mark. I have half of a manuscript. Half.

***

About a year into this process I saw a tweet that haunted me:

It said: Your writing might not change the world but it will change you and that’s enough.

No! — was my first thought. That’s not enough! I have to change the world. It’s what I’ve been dreaming about all this time, what has sustained me through pages and pages of this work that I — an extrovert, for god sake, — have done alone every single week for the past year.

If I don’t change the world, what are all those hours worth? That’s the whole reason I have been sitting alone in that office, tangling with old memories that are sometimes hard to revisit, blowing off friends and setting down boundaries and just generally being the opposite of who I’ve been for many years: someone who didn’t take her own work that seriously.

I screenshotted the tweet, even though it haunted me. I wanted to remember it, wanted to see if it was true. It was something I wanted to believe but it seemed like something that people would say to make themselves feel better when their original big goals didn’t come to fruition.

Now, over a year later, looking over the 33,000 words that I’ve painstakingly crafted alone in a makeshift office, I have another thought: Why was I valuing everyone else above myself? Did I matter so little? Did I matter less than the whole world?

***

When I started this memoir process I had a million ideas for what the book would look like when it was finished. I wanted it to be accessible but also literary. I wanted it to say a certain thing about the world, about what it means to be human. I wanted it to be done by a certain time; in fact, I was already too late to be a “young” writer. I wanted it to be acquired by a certain publishing company, with a certain agent.

I had a million ideas for how this book might change the world: I wanted it to show people that ableism¹ was real, I wanted it to right some wrongs, I wanted it to become a part of the canon of writing about disability.

And these impulses are beautiful, and I will always keep them close to my heart because a part of why marginalized people write is to take back power where they have had very little; to light the path for others who have had similar experiences.

But here’s what I’m left with now: all of this thinking, and still I had not given any thought to what I might look like when the book was finished. Ooof. Can you believe it?

But I am not the same person even halfway through this manuscript, and I still have miles to go.

I didn’t start writing this memoir for personal growth reasons. That seemed like the opposite of literary. When I first sat down to write my memoir it was the recognition I wanted. It was the fantasy. It was for the opportunity to change the world.

You’re free to roll your eyes when I tell you that I’ve gotten so much more. Nobody has asked for this memoir, and so I might not ever know if it changes the world. But, already, it has changed me.

I have found delight and confidence in learning to put my experience down on paper so that others can understand it. I have found satisfaction in seeing the work grow. I have found compassion for my younger self, and a better understanding of some choices I’ve made in the past that didn’t make sense to me at the time. I have found that I am not who I thought I was: I am someone who takes her work seriously. I am someone who can delay gratification. I am someone who can work hard at something that doesn’t pay in dollar bills. I am someone who doesn’t need the things I thought I needed. I am someone who belongs, no matter what.

It’s true what they say — the work we make, remakes us.

And I guess I still want to change the world a little bit. Because I can’t stop thinking about the kind of world we might create if everybody knew that they were worthy of taking Monday and Thursday mornings to put their life down on paper — just for themselves.

---

Odds & Ends

• EXCITING NEWS! I am thrilled to report that Under the Gum Tree literary magazine is publishing an essay of mine in their upcoming Summer 2024 issue. Stay tuned!

• Did you catch Part 1 in my upcoming three-part series on creative writing workshops? Tune in next month for Part 2.

• When I first launched this Substack I didn’t know much about it — what the community might look like, or what types of things I might be writing about. I tread cautiously into this new space. As a result I had limited comments to paid subscribers. However, after being in this space for almost a year I am feeling much more comfortable, and I’m also even more aware that one of the reasons I am here is to find and nurture community. So the comments are now open to everyone.

---

I joined Substack because I am excited for the opportunity to bring together a community of other writers and readers who enjoy learning and thinking about writing creative nonfiction and memoir. If you’re excited about creating community too, or you learned something or enjoyed this post, consider giving it a like, letting me know your thoughts in the comments, or sharing it with the writers and artists in your life. Your support is so appreciated.

You are reading the intangibles, by writer and creative writing instructor Allison Kirkland. This publication is geared toward writers of memoir and creative nonfiction and the people who love them.

Want more? You can find me on Instagram or visit my website. Thanks for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

1. “Ableism is the discrimination of and social prejudice against people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior. At its heart, ableism is rooted in the assumption that disabled people require ‘fixing’ and defines people by their disability.” Read more: https://www.accessliving.org/newsroom/blog/ableism-101/