Jim Minick can write any genre. I mean anything. Poetry. Fiction. Nonfiction. Memoir. And he writes every bit of it well. I was excited, then, to see him leading a pre-workshop workshop at Hindman this year called, “From Prompt to Pitch.” The concept was to take a writing project from its beginning phase to what you would pitch to an agent. Jim had lots of exercises picked out to help the class hone in on accomplishing each stage of the project. The first few all started the same way, though, interestingly enough: This is a ____________ (story, poem, book, novel, essay, memoir, etc.) about __________. Jim, of course, had words of wisdom for us along the way, too. “We’re writing for discovery. We’re writing against cliché.” He also reminded us, “Reading is as important as writing.”
At one point, I wrote that my memoir was about — and summarized its plot. For the purpose of this class and the week at Hindman, my project of focus was “the Duran Duran Memoir,” which has largely been made up of the trip to the UK/Europe in 2013. Denton has told me it needed to have more Duran Duran in it for years now and I have resisted that advice. The more we worked on the exercises Jim gave us, though, the more I realized, Denton is right. (When has Denton ever NOT been right when it comes to my work, though?!? The man is a genius and knows his stuff.) So, every time I wrote this is a memoir about — and chose a new area on which to focus the aboutness, I realized more fully, this manuscript (which is between 70K-75K words), which I thought I was almost ready to pitch to an agent, still needs a lot of work. Then I did a run-through of it with the aboutness being the theme of the work.
Then I got serious about the aboutness. I called it what it was. “It’s a memoir about pop culture in the 80s.” That’s pretty close. Because it includes music, fashion, some movie stuff, MTV, magazines, all sorts of pop culture. This was me brainstorming, but it felt more on the money than saying it was a travelogue, like I had been calling it before.
Then Jim invoked Robert Frost: “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” And this writer was undergoing some massive surprises in this discovery process that was certainly going to make her cry! The whole inner structure of my memoir had always been this trip to the UK/Europe. How was I going to keep some part(s) of that and add in more Duran Duran, which I could clearly see now, were needed to make the book work as a fandom memoir? Which parts would I need to cut? These were truly my darlings that would be killed off because I loved every part of that trip so much! Even the ones that didn’t have so much to do with Duran Duran. And the whole trip was because of Duran Duran. How could I be expected to parcel out parts of it to be hacked away? (I could already envision Nice being stripped from the manuscript and my heart broke. I wasn’t sure I could recover. Okay, maybe I was being a tad melodramatic. But Nice? Come on. Nice!)
Jim asked us to define the driving question of the book. “What are you trying to discover as a writer?” For me, I started asking questions that didn’t deal entirely with the trip. I asked, “What is it like to be part of a fandom? What happens when you follow your obsession for 40+ years? What happens when you meet your idols? What happens when you outlive your fantasies? What happens when fate conspires and you take a 28-day trip that centers around the objects of your desire from your teenage dreams? How in the world do I come up with an all-encompassing question for this???”
For homework that night, to share with the class on Sunday morning, our final day together, I worked on the jacket copy. I was pleased with how it turned out. I’m usually not good at that sort of thing at all, but I felt good about what it said and how it read. It was suggested that I narrow down the line about “relationships she built before and during her fandom experiences.” I was also cautioned to be careful with using lyrics, which I’ve always known will be a touchy area with this kind of book. One of my classmates said they could already see the documentary. I laughed. But overall, everyone seemed really interested in my project and encouraging. I do think it has a lot of potential. I think it has a certain appeal, whether you’re a die-hard Duranie or not. (Jim Minick, by the way, is not. “Duran Duran? I hate Duran Duran!” I told him I love him, anyway.)
Some other great quotes from the class:
“Your [work] knows more about itself than you do.” — Blake Kinnett
“Often, anger is a blanket on top of another emotion.” — Pulaski McLeod
“Preservation is never neutral.” — Andy Keaton
Recent Comments