When I was in college, I had the privilege of studying creative writing. My program required me to take a little bit of everything, so I did. I studied fiction, poetry, scriptwriting, and creative nonfiction.

I learned a lot from each class, but I was surprised by how much I was drawn to creative nonfiction. It felt like a natural extension of how I thought.

We were visited by Karen Brennan, the author of Being with Rachel: A Personal Story of Memory and Survival. In it, she tells the story of caring for her adult daughter after an accident. That experience stuck with me, but I never followed through on writing my own memoirs.

Over the years, I have thought and even outlined several books, but I’ve never finished any of them. That is until now. I have been working on the manuscript for a new book. It is part poetry and part memoir.

The premise is simple. Shortly after I turned 40, my wife gave birth to our fifth child. Since then I have been writing poems about my experience as a father and as a man who is dealing with … well, getting older. Some poems are funny and some are serious, but altogether it paints a portrait of a moment of my life. I’m calling it: A Father at Forty: Poems and Stories from the Year I Grew Up.

To prepare myself to write the memoir portions of the book, I have been reading Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington. I have absolutely loved how thought provoking this book has been.

In one passage, she writes, “Whether you are a beginning writer setting out to learn about the memoir or an experienced writer turning from poetry or fiction to this new form, it is important to remember that it takes time to learn” (37).

She goes on to refer to this as an apprenticeship. I had never thought of it this way.

I have done a lot of writing over the years. I have written hundreds of pages of academic research for my college degrees. I have written several screenplays as well. I wrote a textbook. But none of that is the same as writing a memoir. I’ve come to realize that even thought I have spent countless hours learning to write, I am still an apprentice memoir writer.

I have a lot to learn.

In approaching this memoir, I decided to think of myself as a character that needs to have a character arc. That’s a strange thing to think about when you are still living the story, but it has helped me to gain perspective.

Recently, I was listening to Episode 289 of the Self Publishing School podcast with Chandler Bolt. In that episode, he interviewed Brooke seam, the author of the memoir, May Cause Side Effects. In it, she describes the year after she was taken off of depression medication and the horrible side effects she experienced. She explained that even though she new what the story was, she didn’t find her voice until she tried a writing experiment where she wrote in the first-person present tense. Once she did that everything fell into place for her.

I had a similar experience.

When I started to write the stories between the poems, I also found myself describing the scenes in the first person. Maybe it’s because that’s how screenplays are written, but doing that helped me to make the scenes real. I was putting the reader into my shoes rather than just telling them what happened.

This is one of the many lessons I’ve learned as I have only begun to learn the craft of memoir writing. Sometimes you need to look at the story from a new point of view—such as first-person present tense.

If I approach this book thinking that I already know how to do everything, I won’t be humble enough to learn. I won’t be humble enough to listen to good advise. The book will almost certainly suffer for it.

As you travel through you writer journey, be humble enough to learn. Think of the process as an apprenticeship where you should be learning. Approach it with expectations for what you will learn and go find the books, the teachers, the mentors that you need to learn the lessons that will help you down your path.

I certainly don’t have all the answers, but at least I know what I don’t know and what I want to learn. I hope this helped you as well.

I’ll see you next week.

—Jacob