Manguso — Writing a Book

The most recent Poets and Writers contains an article on Sarah Manguso and her new memoir. I’m a bit memoired out. However, this sound like a real-life, true, and understated memoir, so I may have to read it.

Can I step out of this blog post for a minute to say that Sarah Manguso has some gorgeous dresses? Check this out —>http://www.sarahmanguso.com/about.html And then take a look at the latest P&W for more groovy shots of her.

The whole reason I’m writing this post is to talk about the writing process. Manguso says that she wrote her memoir in a series of vignettes while at an artist’s colony. She made rules for herself that included not worrying about what order she wrote the vignettes in and writing 1000 words per day. In one month, she had the book.

Lest that sound oversimplified and make you feel bad you’ve taken 10 years to write your own book, keep in mind everyone has a different process. Also, the article mentions she’d had these ideas in mind for seven years, so ideas had been percolating for a long time.

I really, really like this idea of writing vignettes. Without calling it that, that’s what I’d already started to do with a prose book idea I have. I decided there were not enough books on a topic I want to know more about, so I’m writing one.

Vignettes are manageable. When balancing a FT job, mothering, wife-ing and all my other -ings, vignettes seem downright easy.

I had not been making the writing a regularly scheduled event. My life is rather unpredictable with a schedule that changes a little bit each day, and I’m not sure schedules work well for me anyway. I’ll give it a go though.

What do you think about creating a book by writing vignettes? What are your thoughts?