Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Believe it or not, several of my readers did in fact take me up on my Winter Memoir Challenge and have been working hard to contribute their own stories to the burgeoning literature within our niche community of odd fellows. One such scribe has noticed a rather powerful consequence of writing….

A profound sense of introspection over his journey.

This is not altogether unexpected, as I had the same thing. As did Bodi. And no doubt everyone else who has committed themselves to writing a memoir. The process seems to work like peeling an onion layer by layer.

Layer One – The personal debrief
As you lie in bed, a feeling of smug self-satisfaction on your face, the girl you just banged trots off to the shower. Your mind turns towards replaying events in order to determine how you pulled it off. What were the key moments? How did you handle the key risks? This debrief is mostly tactical, with a large helping of self-congratulation.

Layer Two – Telling your mates
The +1 text was fired off immediately. Now it’s the next afternoon and you’ve met your friends / wings. There’s a story to tell. So you walk them through it with a focus on drama and tension. Perhaps they ask questions to clarify key points. You’ll probably end up telling the story several times and at each telling the fat is trimmed and the spice is added. It’s transformed from a debrief to an anecdote.

Layer Three – Bragging Blogging about it
Now you wish to tell the world, or at least that small community of avid blog readers strung out across the globe. You’ll probably retell the tale with a journalistic focus and getting the precise sequence of events correct and interpreting them according to prevailing daygame theory [1]. Those of you increasing in confidence may adopt a tone of teaching the dear reader so he may yet benefit from what you’ve learned from the process. The incident has now moved from debrief, to anecdote, to lay report.

Layer Four – Writing it up in the Memoir
You have assembled a number of such events into a narrative and interspersed it with the other things you were doing on your journey. It has been contextualised within the wider narrative of your Player’s Journey. Now you are drawing parallels to other similar incidents, or grouping them together according to phases in your journey, and seeking to re-evaluate an event – that may have happened over a year ago – with the benefit of hindsight. Quite likely you’ve reached a different conclusion over the key moments and key risks that you’d initially identified. The debrief became an anecdote, became a lay report, became a considered reflection.

It is at this final stage that we writers zoom the camera out from the trees and take in the forest as a whole. The passage of time and the repetition of sets has granted us perspective. We see our earlier selves in a different light. Speaking from my own personal experience, I find that soon after banging a girl I tend to overestimate my own agency in bringing the events to pass, and then writing in the memoir I underestimate my same agency. Probably it’s because the novelty and sense of achievement has been dulled by the passage of time.

“Reading back and expanding upon what I wrote at the time, just after the lays, I’m finding sentences which are expanding to long moments of introspection. With hindsight I’m able to see why particular things meant so much to me personally” says a scribe.

Exactly!

The writing of the book to publish is a blind. A distraction. A false flag.

The real value of the book to you the writer is as a homework project in deep introspection. Consider the blog posts the term papers and the memoir your final thesis. The memoir process requires you to order your journey chronologically, re-tell it, and make sense out of it for the reader. The primary reader is you, the writer.

You are making sense of your journey.

The writing process is one of looking into the core of events and interpreting. You are understanding and fleshing out the key character – you – and finding out how that character is motivated and how he reacts to events. It is self-directed inner game therapy [2] and thus this introspective phase of the writing process should be wholly embraced. There will be many ‘eureka’ moments during your writing as you approach an old event from a slightly different angle. You’ll see flaws you didn’t realise you had, but also good qualities you didn’t realise you possessed. You’ll be impressed by your tenacity in some moments and embarrassed by your weakness in others.

Writing your memoir is a great tool to guide you through deep inner game change because it forces you to stick to the facts, the whole of the facts, and then make sense of them. By having the intended final “reader” in your mind as the person you need to explain yourself to, you are subjected to mental discipline in a way you could otherwise evade if you allow uncomfortable thoughts to simply dissipate in your consciousness.

Lastly, you’ll probably be surprised at how much progress you’ve made. Re-telling those old stories from the beginning of your journey, you’ll be mentally positioning yourself back into your old frame of reference and likely be shocked. Did I really think like that? What a chode I was!

The primary beneficiary of your memoir is not us, the daygame community [3], but it is you the writer, who will emerge with a greater self understanding.

If you are excited at the prospect of reading memoirs, you should probably start with the best: Balls Deep, A Deplorable Cad, and Adventure Sex. And then you should mortgage your house and buy Daygame Infinite. And probably Daygame Overkill too. In fact, fuck it, you’re serious about this so sign up for personal coaching too. [4]

[1] By which I mean Daygame Mastery
[2] Assuming you are writing the book sincerely, rather than as a grandiose ego-trip.
[3] Though we do benefit greatly from the resource you place before us.
[4] Or just deposit money directly into my bank account, I’d quite like that.