There’s more than one way to
write our lives, different formats for exploring where we’ve been, where we are
now, and where we’re headed. Or would like to be.
Novelists, dramatists, and poets
might use bits of their own lives when writing fiction, plays and poems. Those
writing memoir and personal essays are writing their actual lives, looking for
meaning and significance therein, hoping what they discover will resonate with
their readers’ lives.
In each instance, there is an
intended audience in mind—usually the general reader. People writing family
stories to pass along to future generations are also writing for an audience,
albeit a more restricted one: people in their family, whether still living or
yet to be born.
Then there are the vast number
of people who keep personal journals, who write about their lives only for
themselves. They have no plans or desire to publish, no need to edit as they
write. They may be writing to record and reflect on their personal stories; as
a way to manage stress or difficult transitions; and to make sense to
themselves of what they are thinking and feeling.
And, yes, they are creating
something in the process, though it isn’t a poem, a play or a short story. What
journal writers are creating (and revising) are their lives.
Yet both kinds of writing—public
and private—share a lot of the same elements. I was reminded of this when
reading playwright Mike Birbiglia’s piece about his new solo play, “The New
One,” in a recent edition of the Sunday New
York Times.
Here’s how he begins:
I recently wrote my fourth solo play, a comedy about how
no one should ever have children, and how, after my wife and I had a child, I
learned that I was right! Anyway,
“The New One” is going to Broadway and the
biggest question I’m asked since I announced the run is “How did that happen?”
I’m not sure. But if I take a step back and try to answer
the question, I’d say, “There was no single step.”
It was a series of steps over years…..So what are those steps? For me, it began
with my first solo play, “Sleepwalk With Me,”
15 years ago.
As I read through each step, it
seemed that two of them especially could apply to private writing.
Here’s Birbiglia’s #1 Step:
1. WRITE IN A JOURNAL. Document your life. The good
stuff. The bad stuff. But mostly the bad stuff. What’s wrong with you is more
interesting than what’s right. I’ve always felt like we go to solo theater to
be told secrets. When I was developing “The New One” I was writing in my
journal all of these secret feelings I had about being a new dad. Feeling like
everything I did was a mistake. One day I wrote, “My wife and daughter love
each other so much … and I’m there too.” In the margin I wrote, “This could be
something!”
Writing as a way to think about
or think through our experience is why we ever put pen to paper. Or as
memoirist Patricia Hampl once wrote: we don’t write what we know, we write to
find out what we know.
I’d revise this slightly to read
that in journal writing we do start by writing what we know. But we don’t stay
there. The goal is to keep writing and, in the process, discover or uncover thoughts,
feelings, fears and desires that maybe aren’t consciously apparent.
So Birbiglia was writing all his
secret feelings, and then had an “ah-ha.” As a playwright, he knew he could use
that discovery in his work. For a journal writer, that very same discovery—that
very real feeling—could be of great value in his or her personal and/or professional life.
And here’s the 4th:
4. PRACTICE. Over the course of two years I’ve performed
“The New One” in 60 cities in three countries and I’m still making changes. The
show will run for 12 weeks at the Cort Theater and I will have my binder
backstage after every performance, making notes on what could work better. The
script is a living, breathing item that changes constantly and the audience has
everything to do with that. By the way, an “audience” can be any number of
people. It can be a living room of friends, an open mic at a coffee house, or the
speech at a bar mitzvah. These are not joke examples. These are memories. Now
what do you do with the feedback?
And not only is a script a
“living, breathing item that changes constantly,” but so are we, influenced in
large part by our “audience” of family, friends, co-workers, and others who
intentionally or not give us feedback, some of which we find valuable.
Even the negative stuff.
Besides, we’re not afraid to write the negative; we know that writing about it
will lead us to some positive way of dealing with it. That’s what journal
writing can do: give us agency over our own lives.
To read more from Mike Birbiglia:
