Writing Lessons: How to Get Started Writing a Book, With Jennifer Richardson
HOW TO GET STARTED WRITING A BOOK does not always involve cleaning your refrigerator, shopping online, or an urgent organization of your shoes. That’s just me. For more practical help on how to begin writing a book, you’ll want to hear from Jennifer Richardson, whose new memoir, Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage, is the 2013 Indie Reader Discovery Award winner for travel writing. How proud am I to have her here? I’m thrilled, as thrilled as I am to introduce you here to She Writes Press, one of my favorite new presses. And as much as this is an intelligent, charming and beautifully-written book, it is also a beautiful one. The perfect combo, yes? A fine writer with a great book maker. Lovely. So how to start that book you want to write? Listen to Jennifer.
Writing Lessons: How to Begin
By Jennifer Richardson
Working under the theory that imitation is the highest form of flattery, I turned to the classics of the idyll genre for inspiration when I set out to write Americashire, my memoir about life in the English Cotswolds. I took inspiration from Peter Mayle and Bill Bryson, but it was Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun that gave me a starting point. In particular, it was this detail from the first page of her book: “Through my thin white linen dress, spiky horsehairs pierce me every time I shift, which is often in the hundred-degree waiting room.” Something about the preciseness of that description stuck with me; I could feel the stifling heat, those horsehairs needling the backs of my own thighs.
In this passage, Mayes is describing a visit to a legal office where she will conduct the transaction to buy her now famous Tuscan home, Bramasole. Like Mayes, my story also began with the purchase of a house. And so that’s how I wrote my way into my memoir: I, too, would begin at the beginning. In an early draft, I even referenced the velour stubble of a train seat pricking the back of my knees as I rode the 18:20 out of London-Paddington to spend my very first night in our new Cotswold home after we closed on the deal.
It was many months later when I realized that the beginning of my memoir shouldn’t be the chronological start of my time in the Cotswolds. I was at a writing retreat where, one evening, I was asked to select a passage to read aloud to the group. Instinctively I turned to the opening paragraph of chapter seven, which takes place several months after my husband and I had bought our home in the Cotswolds. The passage grounds the reader in both the landscape of the area, treating it almost as if it’s a character in the story, and lays out the central dilemma of the plot, whether or not I should try to have a child. Why, then, was I making the reader wait until chapter seven for all this? The next day I moved some things around, and the opening of chapter seven became the first paragraphs of my book.
Despite the fact that I changed my opening, imitating what another author I admired had done was useful. It got me started, and once everything was down on paper, rearranging it was a less overwhelming task. It was the difference between putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and creating one from scratch. I also like to think I employed the lesson from Mayes about using small details to bring the reader into your world, but I’ll let you be the judge of that. Below is the opening excerpt from the first chapter of Americashire.
Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage, an excerpt
Spring in the Cotswolds happens very slowly and all at once. In exchange for a few cheerful daffodils, the British collectively suspend their disbelief and start to talk of it in March. But spring doesn’t really happen until mid-April on a particular day, when the landscape is dun brown in the morning but by evening you find that green has tipped the balance. Soon lush shag piles of minty-green grass and weeds and shoots and blooms line the country lanes, rising into pea-soup hedgerows, then the brown latticework of trees still bare except for pinch-faced buds. Over the next two weeks, these unwind into a canopy of chartreuse lace, set off by a sprinkling of bluebells on the woodland floor. These are not blue, lavender, lilac, or violet. They are plain purple, the one you get in the Crayola eight-pack.
Rapeseed happens next. Nothing changes the landscape of the Cotswolds more drastically or quickly than the en masse bloom of this flower. It is the color of Ronald McDonald’s jumpsuit or the cheap mustard you get in a plastic packet with your corndog at the beach, a color that should not occur in nature, yet it does. It appears in swathes that render the hills a crude patchwork of yellow and green and drives half the population crazy with its hay-fever-provoking scent. Despite all this, I love it. I love everything about this brash landscape of unrepentant lime greens and artificial-food-coloring yellows, which is why I start to feel anxious about its demise almost as soon as I notice it’s happening. Soon May blossom whites and peachy cones of horse-chestnut blooms will be sneaking onto the perimeter, silently upstaging their raucous counterparts with understated elegance. The Cotswolds of Matisse will slip into the diffused light of the Cotswolds of Monet.
Amidst the ephemeral pleasures of spring in the countryside, there was something else to be anxious about. It was wrapped up in a rectangular pink foil strip with twenty-eight pills sealed inside. There were six of those strips to be exact, one for each month of the renewed birth control prescription I had just picked up from the village pharmacy. For the past few months, my husband, D, and I had studiously avoided speaking any further about the “big talk” we had given to my parents over Christmas in which we had announced I was going to try to get pregnant. To be fair, there was plenty to be distracted by in our new country life. But the truth was my ambivalence toward motherhood had not shifted, despite large quantities of fresh air.
The pink foil-wrapped revelation of my ambivalence shook my husband. A long-held tenet of our relationship was that I was the decisive one, the one who could be counted on to just get on with it. I presided over the world of black and white, the left-brained, the rational. D held court in the domain of the emotional, the intuitive, the creative. He cries in movies; I bring the tissues. He rearranges the furniture; I pay the mortgage on time. In short, my prescription refill was an act of war: I was invading his territory, and he was pissed.
Author’s bio
JENNIFER RICHARDSON is the author of Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage, the 2013 Indie Reader Discovery Award winner for travel writing. The book chronicles her decision to give up city life for the bucolic pleasures of the British countryside. You can find Jennifer Richardson online at the book’s website, follow her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter, read more of her on Good Reads, and share with her on Pinterest.
AND THE WINNER IS…
I hope you enjoy Writing Lessons. Featuring well-published writers of our favorite genre, each installment of the series will take on one short topic that addresses how to write memoir, and will include a great big book giveaway.
It’s my way of saying thanks for coming by.
The contest for this book is now closed. Please see the next installment of Writing Lessons.
The winner of the book is Kim. Congratulations, Kim! I’ll be in touch to send your book.
Reading works that resonate with my senses/words definitely help me write. It’s like, oh I would love to write like that. It’s so true that we need to start and pour out the good stuff. I find that rearranging is an art…while chronology is easier and less confusing to the reading, I can imagine the fun reshaping the work once the ideas are down. Would love to read this travelogue. Thank you for this lesson!
Jennifer – Using Ronald MacDonald’s jumpsuit to describe the brazen yellow of the Cotswalds and an 8 pack of Crayolas to describe just the right purple was such a great way to connect American readers with an English landscape. I could visualize it instantly.
Marion – At the risk of repeating myself, I have found so much of value in this Writing Lesson series. I also appreciate that you’re highlighting the presses as well as the authors. Many thanks for providing such an important service.
Sue, your comments about rearranging versus chronology ring true. Judith, you made me laugh regarding the McDonalds example. I can see how it reads as me making a conscious attempt at connecting with American readers, but, in truth, it reveals more about me and the fact that I was raised eating McDonalds for dinner a couple times per week. Thanks to you both for creating a dialogue around this!
I love this excerpt! I studied abroad in England during college, and writing like this always evokes so many memories of sights, smells and sounds. And simply the memory of how it felt to begin in a new place, and how that new place ultimately became “normal.” When you are a resident instead of a tourist, you find out that there is a village pharmacy, and so many other elements of a place that turn it into a home.
I really appreciated Jennifer’s lovely, overarching yet specific descriptions of the Cotswolds, and then how she zooms in on her personal struggles within that setting. It also adds to the suspense: why are they in the Cotswolds? What will her decision be? Beginning with the overall scenery and then sinking deeper into the conflict and thoughts of the characters seems like it really works as a mechanism to draw the reader in. I look forward to reading more!
I read the Memoir Project blog and find myself thinking about the content for days. I not only enjoy the blog but value it. I’m slowly finding my voice in writing and find I take more time daily writing. Jennifer Richardson’s insights to getting started was timely. Thank you both.
You are so very welcome, Delores. I am delighted that it is valued. Please come back soon.
Like Delores I too think about the content of the writing lessons for days and they are increasingly helping me move forward. I return to them as well.
I loved everything you wrote Jennifer, and the strongest point I took away was, “It got me started, and once everything was down on paper, rearranging it was a less overwhelming task.”
Thank you both.
Claire, you raise such a good point about how things seem so different when you move to a new place and then, over time, become normal. I did an interview recently where I encouraged expats to write blogs for just that reason — the most important thing is to write it down while you are still capable of noticing whatever “it” is. At some point as you assimilate, you start to lose that ability to see things with fresh eyes. This applies not just to living somewhere new, but to starting anything new — a job, a hobby, becoming a parent, for example. It’s the fabled “beginner’s mind” of zen.
Delores and Katherine, you remind me of a quote I love that is often attributed to Goethe: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Here’s to beginnings!
I keep hearing about this book, and I put it on my list of “must reads” a few months back. I’m a fan of marriage, England, and America, so yes please!
My husband and I travel to England at least once and hopefully twice to England every year and you describe the rapeseed perfectly. The first time I saw it growing like a gigantic carpet laid on a hillside I was overcome. I still can’t seem to capture the way it looks in real life with my camera. I think what you said in the comment about details is right. I find writing in the present is so much easier because the details are fresh on my mind. It’s when I go back a decade or more that I struggle with that. Perhaps you can weigh in on writing details from the past.
I love the discussion of rearrangement, from beginning-at-the-beginning to starting n-media-res. The ancients certainly taught us how to do that, but it seems (at the beginning at least) so much easier to start a linear telling. Thanks for the reminder to ground the story in details, and to start in a non-linear position!
I have got to read this book! The rich description of the countryside, then the shift to the underlying personal details hooked me in a big way. You are on my must read list. The comment about rearranging being less overwhelming once everything was down on paper really hit home to me. I have been overwhelmed and had even packed away my story thinking it was just too big a job for me to tackle right now. Maybe I can use that as a kick in the backside to get me going. Thank you for sharing.
And thanks Marion for a wonderful series full of such variety and great advice.
I often struggle with the beginning, how something should open. Will the reader have enough information? I always thought the first line had to be a zinger. I learned from this, for a book at least, you have a little time to tease the reader. It wasn’t until the last sentence of the fourth paragraph that she hooked me. And I’m hooked. I want to read more.