Isabel Allende begins all her books on January 8th. She says that she writes the first sentence and then the story begins to unfold. One particular January 8th at the crack of dawn, her agent, Carmen Balcells, called her from Spain and told her to write a memoir. Allende replied that her family didn’t like to see itself exposed.
“’Don’t worry about anything,” said Balcells. “Send me a two or three hundred page letter and I’ll take care of the rest. If it comes down to choosing between telling a story and offending relatives, any professional writer chooses the former.”
Allende went on to write the memoir but she struggled with having protagonists that were her “own living family, filled with opinions and conflicts…the plot is not an exercise of imagination but an attempt to present the truth.”
As you begin writing your book or your essays, you might want to keep this thought in mind: No one will read what you’re writing until you allow them to. So you are free to write the truth, or whatever you believe to be the truth. You can write dreadful, shocking things, you can write badly and sloppily, you can whine and mewl if you want. Because: you can always rewrite, change things, or simply tear it up.
Writing is rewriting. But first you need to have something on the page to rewrite.
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“And so I began to write about things I thought I would never tell another soul as long as I lived…” – May-Lee Chai Hapa Girl
(The above is an excerpt from my book-in-progress, A Year of Writing Dangerously.)
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