The Canadian writer Jean Little wrote: “Memoir is not the whole head of hair, but one or two strands of the hair.”
When I started writing The Honey Locust Tree, I thought it would be easy. Pick a few strands of my own hair and proceed. How naive.
First, there was the problem of complexity. Which strands of hair told the most interesting story? I started writing about a school and a prison, but a wise reader told me that a school wasn’t as interesting as a prison.
“Everyone has been in a school,” she said, “but few have been in a prison. Focus on that.”
“So I have to delete fifty percent of the memoir?”
“Leave in a couple of chapters about the school, but delete most of the school material. Put them in a folder called Out Takes.”
The Out Takes folder sits in my computer, but I don’t think it will ever see the light of day.
Second, there was the problem of being sententious. The theatre critic Terry Teachout wrote: “Artists of all kinds have a weakness for Big Statements.”
I suffer from that problem. In several early Honey Locust chapters, I expounded on the Quaker philosophy, silent meetings for worship, and middle school education. In every case, the chapters sounded like lectures.
Third, there was the problem of finishing. Writing a short article is one thing, but a longer work constitutes a different order of challenge. I have started several plays and novels, only to discover that I didn’t have a workable plot or engaging characters. Rather than finish them, I abandoned them. I completed numerous drafts of Honey Locust and thought each one was a finished manuscript before I realized that I had much more work to do.
Every so often, writing feels like cooking: It’s hard to know when something is done.
I hope the strands of hair that I’ve chosen to focus on in the beginning make you want to find out what happened in the end.