In this blog’s pre­de­ces­sor, I men­tioned draft­ing lots of entries but never got about post­ing them.

I also brought up the issue of the style of writ­ing that my web out­let of expres­sion should take. I couldn’t express myself freely before. But I think I’ve got­ten onto some­thing, I think something’s changed inside me. I can write now.

I recently read an arti­cle in Reader’s Digest about writ­ing mem­oirs. It men­tions that mem­oirs are inter­est­ing snip­pets from one’s life, whereas an auto­bi­og­ra­phy is the story of an entire life. Per­haps I’ll write snip­pets, I do hope they are inter­est­ing! Haha.

I include a word-for-word excerpt of an inter­view of Jean­nette Walls, a writer of a book of mem­oirs : “So many of us think that cer­tain things only hap­pened to us and some­how they make us less of a per­son. I’m con­stantly urg­ing peo­ple, espe­cially older folks, to write about their lives. It gives you new per­spec­tive. It was hugely eye-opening for me and very carthar­tic. Even if the book hadn’t sold a sin­gle copy, it would still have been worth it.”

I think I’m one of the older ones among my read­ers –_-. And yes, writ­ing has been really carthartic.

Another excerpt from Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize win­ning author: “…99.9% of peo­ple lead bor­ing lives. But every sin­gle one of them is try­ing to make some sense out of his or her exis­tence, to find some mean­ing in the world, and therein lies the value and oppor­tu­nity of  a mem­oir. It’s ther­a­peu­tic for the writer, and it even­tu­ally helps his or her descen­dants under­stand them­selves bet­ter”.

You’ll have to read the pre­ced­ing text from the arti­cle to under­stand why he men­tioned that 99.9% of peo­ple lead bor­ing lives; not that they are really boring.

Con­tin­u­ing from McCourt’s opine:

1. “Mem­oir is about hand­ing over your life to some­one and say­ing, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn some­thing from it“
   
2. “It’s hon­estly shar­ing what you think, feel, and have gone through. If you can do it effec­tively, then some­body gets the wis­dom and ben­e­fit of your expe­ri­ence with­out hav­ing to live it”
3. “Writ­ing about your life is also about com­ing to a fresh under­stand­ing of it at an age when you prob­a­bly think you know your­self pretty well. Nov­el­ist Stephen King has said, “I write to find out what I think”.

I think the prob­lem of my pre­vi­ous entries were their cryp­ti­cism. I talked too much in rid­dles; as was the case in all blogs past. I think that I’m doing a dis­ser­vice to my read­ers, as the arti­cle men­tions. The pur­pose of this blog thus, is to firstly: edify read­ers, 2ndly: to shed some light on this won­der­ful conun­drum that is me (oops I did it again :p).  I will strive not to write as a detached observer as before, else my story will be one that read like it was “wrapped in cel­lo­phane”.

I apol­o­gize for the exten­sive pla­gia­rism. And mem­oirs of an invis­i­ble man are no more.