Tayari's Blog: The Glimmer Method

Posted by TayariJones on August 8, 2007 07:11 AM
Filed under Writing

The Vail Daily News posts an article today about Pam Houston. I am a big fan of hers-- "Waltzing The Cat" is one of the best short stories ever; I teach it every term. I have had the pleasure of meeting Pam on two occaisions: one was at the Tomales Bay Writing Conference last year and the other was at a bizarre job interview. (She was great, everyone else was sorta nuts.)

Anyway, back to the article. Pam talks about ber process. I've long known that her work is heavily autobiographical, she often speaks of it. The situation is such that the lawyers at her publishing company ask to give a little disclaimer before she speaks, lest her ex-boyfriends decide to sue. (She never disclaims and they have yet to litigate.)

She explains her process of writing as looking for "Glimmers." She searches her memory for the shiny places in an experience and writes from there. In the article, she talks about some of the "glimmers" from her recent trip to Tibet. I thought that was pretty interesting as I am shifting my technique in my fiction classes a little, encouraging students to draw on their own memories. (I used to discourage the mining-the-past approach for fear of getting students hung up by "but that's how it happened!")

OK. Back to the article. This is the sentence that stopped me cold:

Indeed, some of Houston's contemporaries have called her the ultimate cannibal since essentially, she writes her experiences and hardly ever makes anything up. Sometimes she's writing just 10 days behind her life, she said.(bold added by me)

Ten days?!?!? She can write about something that happened just last week?? Whoa.

I have tried to write about memories when they are fresh, but it always ends up being too, well.. raw? This is particularly true for strong emotional content. Many times I had sat down at the computer in tears, trying to convince myself that I can convert whatever disappointment into Great Art. The best revenge is writing well!Well, I cut that out because I could write pages and pages of autobiographical melodrama and end up even more depressed for being such a hack.

Now, when I am upset, I go just for icecream. The best revenge is dulce de leche.

via galleycat

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