Lesson: 14

How Learning to Swim Applies to Memoir Writing

Here’s a little story about how I learned to swim. This will apply to memoir writing. Stay with me.

As a youngster and then as an adolescent, I did not learn to swim. After a long while of flailing and swallowing water, I just decided that swimming was too hard, and I quit trying.

From then on, I sat on the beach watching other boys and girls swimming and I pretended that I didn’t want to swim. Oh yes, I might just go into the water to splash a bit, but then I’d decide “Well, that’s enough!” and go back to the shore.

Then one day, when I was 25, I acknowledged that not being able to swim was a real deficit in my life. I realized I did not want to spend my life as a person who did not know how to swim.

Deciding to learn to swim

I decided to be a swimmer—and not just any sort of swimmer but a good swimmer. I bought a membership at a recreation center where there was a pool.

I committed to going every day. At first, I just splashed and gave myself a goal of reaching the other end of the pool. After a while, through force of propulsion and flailing and swallowing water, I managed to get from one end to the other of the pool. This was a success of some sort, but not what I was going for. And…

It wasn’t fun yet.

I didn’t know how to hold my head so that I could breathe easily nor how to position my arms for speed and ease nor how to kick my feet – while it would seem to be an easy task to do these things, it isn’t. It has to be done with some skills and some synchronicity and I wasn’t managing that because…

I didn’t know how.

It occurred to me that, while I could learn these various techniques on my own over the period of the next years, I could also ask the lifeguards for help and speed up my learning process.

Could I learn quickly?

Working with people in the know

I remember the lifeguards clearly. They were young people around my age or younger. One was Mary and the other was Ed. They were super friendly—and they knew how to swim well.

Already being a person trained in teaching, I understood that I needed to progress in steps in order to learn how to swim well. Every day, I approached either Ed and Mary—of course, they worked on different days—and asked them if they would be willing to watch me swim and suggest one thing – only one thing – that would most improve my swimming.

They both agreed to coach me. On days when I was in the pool, one of them would watch me and point out one thing that I could do right then to improve.

An early exercise was to stretch my arms more both in front of me and in back of me when I was stroking—so that is what I did. Better stroking really improved my speed—even more so when I added proper breathing techniques.

Every day, I would ask one of them, “What’s the next thing I should be mastering?”

Some days, Mary or Ed would tell me, “You still need some work on your legs” or if we were now working on breathing, they would point out that I was not yet breathing in the air pocket they had so patiently demonstrated to me.

I would do whatever they suggested. I could see I was learning a lot. I was becoming a better and better swimmer—me who used to flail and swallow water!

With commitment and practice, it really didn’t take that long for me to learn to swim more efficiently and expertly. Then my coaches pointed out some more advanced techniques for better swimming.

Knowing what I needed to know about swimming, I began not only to swim out of determination but to swim out of pleasure.

Mastery!

Within just shy of three months of starting out flailing across the pool, I was swimming two miles a day!

I was impressed!

At the beginning of my apprenticeship, two miles had seemed an unattainable goal. I felt like I was just fooling myself. How could I ever swim two miles!

But I did it with the help of my coaches.

The “icing on the cake” came many times in the following years when people asked me if I competed as a swimmer in my age group!

How this ties in with memoir writing

Many memoir writers flail and gasp and power themselves through their writing process. They don’t quite know what they are doing but they are determined and they are going to learn – somehow, slowly, hopefully well.

But what if, just as with me at the pool, you could secure the help of someone—a writing coach—who would point out where you most need to work at the moment, of someone who could show you the tips and techniques to better writing?

Could you greatly shorten the learning curve and find much more pleasure in your writing?

The person you need to help you are people like Ed and Mary who are skillful—but skillful in writing a lengthy memoir.

If your sister-in-law who teaches at the high school and is real good at English is also a writer, then she may be an appropriate choice to help you write your memoir. But her time may be limited and she may need to tell you more often than you would like, “I want to help you but I have so many school papers to correct this week and next, that I’ll have to beg off for a while.”

Or worse: perhaps your sister-in-law who teaches at the high school and is real good in English is not a writer. Perhaps she knows a lot about periods, commas and introductory sentences, but she really doesn’t know how a story comes together – at least, a story of 200 to 300 pages. She’s never written anything like that. She will be able to help you with the proofreading when your manuscript is complete—check the spelling and the pronoun antecedents—but she is not the one who can assist you to shape and pace your story. She simply doesn’t know how to do that. She is not a writer—she is an English teacher.

My complimentary offer

If you’re not writing as well or as quickly as you would like, if you’re afraid that your story may not be as deep or as interesting as you want it to be, if you want to write the best memoir you are capable of but don’t quite know how to do that, I have a complimentary session waiting for you!

I have a half-hour set aside for you to discuss your writing needs and how The Memoir Network team of professional coaches can help you to master writing—just as Ed and Mary helped me to master swimming.

There is no obligation to come on as a client, but in such a session, I hope to make it clear that a mentor can make it possible to become a better writer faster.

During this session, I will not critique your manuscript, nor will I impart any nuggets of writing mastery for you to walk away with. That would be like Ed or Mary showing me a diagram of a great stroke.

Nope, you would need to jump into the pool to master swimming—and we need to immerse ourselves in your memoir to shape it into the account you want to leave as a legacy.

What I will do in this session is clarify the editing and/or coaching process so that you can appreciate the value it would have for you.

This offer would sound good to me if I were in your shoes and…

I hope you’ll take me up on my offer.

To set an appointment, give me a ring at 207-353-5454 or email me.

In conclusion…