What to Write, What to Write?

It's Monday. You know what that means.

Well, yeah. The start of a week. Getting off to school. Books, lunches, shoes, homework. Teaching yoga. Getting back into the work files for the week. Tidying. Weekend laundry.

But besides all of that.

That's right.

It's Monday-Online-Writing-Class-Assignment-Due-by-Midnight-Deadline-Day. Otherwise known as the one day per week when I am guaranteed to be writing something that is not descriptive of either a mission or a program funding request. And I write it on Monday as opposed to Tuesday or Friday or Sunday because, duh, Monday is obviously the LAST day of the full week that I have the assignment. I just pat myself on the back that I do my writing around 5 pm instead of waiting til 10 pm or so. (Which for the record is when I usually was writing my fiction assignments for the first few classes I took this way.) So I have shown tremendous growth and I have moved my work spurt up by a whole five hours.

So (it's come to this!!) here I sit, thinking that indeed, it would be a very good idea to write something and send it on over. Indeed it would. My problem, again, is that the assignment is so very open. Pick a memory and write two paragraphs of description to set the stage for it and ground it in a place. Then write up to three pages of what happened. Easy-peasy, huh?

Pick a memory, any memory. I'll fan them before you for your selection. This is where my newness to this whole Memoir business just knocks me off my feet. The sheer ENORMITY of sifting back through my life and choosing, of deciding which memory merits three pages while I leave the rest to languish is just daunting. Sort of freezes me up.

I do think I have my memory actually. I have one from about eight years ago. It will certainly work. It's about my daughter and the setting is Palm Springs. And it's about my life too.

But geez. Not that I ever looked down on Memoir as a genre, or thought it was simple. But this needing to choose and shape so much material into some sort of coherent narrative, well, it has given me a new-found respect for those who work in this area.