Category Archives: Memoir writing theory

by | April 25, 2013 · 5:20 am

The List You Need to Write a Memoir

I started working on my memoir an embarrassingly long time ago. When I started I thought I knew what a memoir was–after all, I’d read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It’s the story of Maya Angelou’s childhood.  OK, I could do that.  I didn’t have a similar experience–not even close–but I had my own events to write about.

What I didn’t realize when I started was that a memoir isn’t just telling what happened to me in chronological order.  The story is all in how you slice it, according to Tristine Rainer (I’ve written about her great advice several times).

In order to write a memoir I had to figure these things out:

  1. Exactly what story I wanted to tell.  After all, I have had a full life and could probably mine several books out of it.  To focus on one particular story, I took the advice of an instructor and wrote a one sentence description of my story.  It wasn’t a Faulknerian sentence either.  Just one concise sentence that sums up what my book is about.
  2. What scenes belong in the book and which ones don’t.  I wrote quite a few scenes that don’t belong in the book.  But what the heck, they make good fodder to write blog posts from ;).  Or I can save them for a second book.  Writing the scenes was valuable, though, because they primed the pump of memory.  The more I wrote, the more I remembered.
  3. How to structure the story.  The problem with real life is it isn’t well-paced.  It comes in long stretches–childhood, adolescence, young adult life, etc.  There are threads which reach back and forth across your life, further complicating the process of ordering the book.  I found structure to be the most difficult part of writing my memoir so far.
  4. What to do with advice that doesn’t fit.  I’ve gotten a lot of it.  My first memoir instructor said something like NO FLASHBACKS EVER.  That drove me nuts. It took me four years to read Bernard Cooper’s The Bill From My Father and get his tacit endorsement of flashbacks to move forward with my structure.  That instructor also told me to write my book in the present tense.  While I have a couple of sections which are in present tense for effect, I discovered that it’s too difficult to tell a book-length story of any complexity in the present tense.  So I eventually chucked both pieces of advice.
  5. What to do about backstory.  I’m still figuring this out.  I’ve been weaving past and present together, and this is helping, but there is a lot of information that is getting shoved aside that has to be conveyed to the reader.  And yet by moving between scene and summary in rhythm, there still isn’t much room to cover summary, especially when even very tangible concrete descriptive (whatever you want to call it) summary takes up a lot of room, albeit not nearly as much room as scene.
  • What do or did you need to figure out for your own writing?

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by | April 22, 2013 · 5:30 am

Cross-post: “The Importance of Story”

Today I wrote this post for the adoption blog called Don’t We Look Alike? that I write with my daughter, but it also seemed to connect with this blog as it concerns the notion of story.

“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.” ― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

Everybody and everything has a story.  According to Terry Pratchett, we are all shaped by stories.  This quote might mean that reading a variety of stories helps develop us into who we are.  But, in fact, we are shaped even more by the stories which are unique to our selves.

We create stories out of our complex lives.  To understand ourselves and others around us, we tell ourselves stories that make some sense out of it all.

As Patrick Rothfuss puts it:

“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”

Most of us come to our consciousness with family stories told to us by relatives.  Even in families which are reticent to talk about the past, there is a pattern which is story in hearing that one has the same stubborn streak as one’s father and that he has hammer toes because his mother couldn’t afford to buy him new shoes when his feet grew.  These elements become part of the story of the child.

Some people have stories which are missing big gaps.  Imagine having amnesia in your fourth grade year.  You can remember the rest of your life, but there is a hole where an entire year should be.  Many adoptees have a hole larger than this.  If an adoptee was not part of an open adoption, it’s probable that she was not given much information about who her birth parents were, what their stories were, and what their lives were like when she was not yet born.

The person who was adopted might not know anything about her own birth or what her life was like as an infant.  When there is information shared, it can be sparse and not tied into a narrative.  It might not even be accurate.  It could be lies.

I was not adopted, and I have been told plenty of family stories.  I grew up with family stories and photos.  Many of the dots were connected for me.  Recently I’ve done some genealogical research, and it astonishes me how some of the stories I was told turned out not to be accurate.  However, the most fundamental information has been true, unlike that for some adoptees.

My children were adopted as babies in international adoptions.  We received some pages of information from the agency.  Mainly, we learned about their medical exam results while living in the orphanage (son) or with the foster family (daughter). We learned their weight and health when they were brought to Holt. But there is also information on the charts listing the ages and education levels of their birth parents, and what areas they came from.  When we read these pages with our case worker, she filled in information, providing us with story fragments.

I took all the information we had been given—both written and oral, guesses and facts—and wrote up stories for both children, providing them with a story which pre-dates their lives in our family.

It seemed important that they have their own stories.

“[T]here’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.” ― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

Think of this: “behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin” [my italics].

So while it seems important that the kids have their own stories, these stories had to begin with the stories of their birth mothers.

Next time you wonder why many adoptees search for their birth families and wish to to learn information about these families, remember that you are who you are because you have your own story.  They are only searching for part of their story, a story that is important to their very identity.

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by | April 6, 2013 · 6:25 am

Look Outward, Writer

Here’s a lovely reminder that writers need to turn outward, not just inward.  In writing about “the other,” one writes the self.

“We think that to find ourselves we need turn inward, examining the intricacies of origin, the shaping forces of personality.  But ‘I’ is just as much to be found in the world; looking outward, we experience the one who does the seeing.  Say what you see and you experience yourself through your style of seeing and saying.”

That quote is by Mark Doty in Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

Still Life with a Glass and Oysters
Jan Davidsz de Heem (Dutch, Utrecht 1606–1683/84 Antwerp)

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by | March 28, 2013 · 5:20 am

Memoir Gaps: Filling in the Blanks

I have always carried a lot of clear and strong memories with me, especially from my childhood.

But when you go to write a book-length memoir you need more than those memories–you have to remember what happens between those vivid images, to recreate the glue between them, in a way.  Sometimes searching backwards for the hazier recollections and the forgotten events seems as if I’m trying to get into a boarded-up old building.

E. St. JamesSan Jose, CA

E. St. James
San Jose, CA

William Zinsser, in Writing About Your Life, says that the way to write a memoir is to start with those vivid memories, writing up one each day.  Then he makes a giant leap to the assumption that by writing those recollections the writer will discover her own writing style, as well as what is important and what is less important–in fact, that the writer will discover what her story truly is!

Hmm, that’s great, but then he dumps us off at the curb, without any directions on where to go from there.

That’s the place where I began to flounder and, although I’ve worked very hard at finding my structure, my story-and my direction–still have difficulties.

After many efforts and revisions, I have the beginning chapters of my book and a rough idea of the rest of the structure.  But as the story moves on, I need to work on the glue between the vivid memories.  This is true more of characterization than anything else.  Particularly since in my childhood memories I was . . . a kid.  I didn’t see the adult characters in my life as the round and dynamic* characters people they are.  And I didn’t see myself as a round and dynamic character either–not clearly.

That’s why I am using other methods to try to fill in some of the blanks.  One of these methods has been studying psychological aspects of the characters, such as the HSP and Myers-Briggs analysis I wrote about.

Writing Prompt

Another method is to write an imaginary scene which shows a reason why someone did something.  For example, when I was in 7th grade I was sat on and beaten by a fellow classmate.  I was imprisoned underneath her because she outweighed me by more than 100 pounds.  I have no idea why she would do something like this, and I remember feeling the unfairness (actually, I felt squished, too).

To get insight into her personality and motivations, I wrote a scene which results in the beating.  The scene is fiction, and I can’t use it for the book (and don’t want to share it ;)), but in writing it I learned more about the girl and myself as characters.  It’s when I do research in this way that I frequently have little epiphanies, where I learn or remember things that I didn’t know I knew.

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* round characters are seen as fully-dimensional human beings, whereas flat characters tend to be one-sided

* dynamic characters change as real humans change in life, whereas static characters remain the same

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by | March 14, 2013 · 5:20 am

That Character I Ought to Know Best,

Or Investigations into Developing My Own Characterization, Part I

A few years ago little quizzes kept popping up on my Facebook home page.  They all guaranteed self-discovery.

What Jane Austen character are you?  Emma?  Elizabeth?

Which Sondheim musical are you most like?  A Little Night Music?  Company?

For some reason I really had to find out if I was an Elizabeth, as I suspected, and if I was Into the Woods because I certainly couldn’t be Sweeney Todd.  I felt the quiz results might lead to some greater self- knowledge.  If not a deeper understanding (okay, so that’s a little tongue-in-cheek), at least I could step back from myself and look at the whole picture and therefore see myself with more perspective.

For while I have developed comfort with myself over the years, and I understand my own feelings and thoughts, I can’t really see myself as that complete package others do.  And if I don’t see myself that way, I can’t expect readers to see a fully dimensional character as my book’s protagonist either.

The irony is that I also have to develop that deeper understanding of myself to see my reactions in their entirety (both positives and negatives) and to recognize the hidden subtexts of my actions.  Without becoming bogged down in regrets for the past, I have to understand where I contributed to situations, even when the truth makes me look much less than perfect.

For this latter investigation, excavating memories, writing, and re-writing–and all done with an open mind–are the best tools.  When I think I can’t pull out one more memory, that’s just what I have to do and that memory will open up new truths about the past and, therefore, the present.

Tristine Rainer, in her handbook of memoir writing Your Life as Story, devotes a chapter to “Portraying Yourself: You Are Your Hero.”  She urges writers to see themselves as dramatic heroes with flawed personalities.

Ask yourself what your character weaknesses were at the time of a particular event you are writing about.  How did your flaw or flaws affect what transpired?  And writers can’t neglect their heroic traits, so you should identify those as well.

She also recognizes the need for the inside and outside views of the main character:

“In order to get a sense of yourself as the protagonist of a story, you need to see yourself from the outside as others might, as well as from the inside.”

Rainer suggests that writers discover what others want to know about them.  “‘What is it that people always ask you?'”  The answers to that question can lead to some great stories which will engage others.

Knowing that I have to learn more about myself from the outside and from the inside has clarified for me the task at hand.  As I learn more about myself, my scenes are becoming richer–more layered and shaded with meaning.  My character is becoming more likable as she becomes more flawed and takes more responsibility for herself.

It’s all relative.  I’m sure I still have far to go, but my writing improves with practice and research, and that keeps me moving forward.

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So . . . what is it that people always ask you?

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by | March 4, 2013 · 5:20 am

Memoir and the Cast of Characters

On Saturday I posted my plan to work on characterization for my memoir Scrap during the month of March.  One fellow blogger, Mike from Fugitive Fragments  wrote an interesting comment:

“It occurs to me that in writing the character for self in a memoir one risks sacrificing truth and honesty. Surely it is more authentic to use your own voice?”

I wrote back a rushed answer:

“Mike, thanks for a great comment! I actually think it’s just the opposite. People don’t often present a really truthful portrayal of themselves when they begin to write memoir. It’s only when you really know yourself well enough that you can be honest. And if you’re writing a story which occurs over a long period of time, you have to know different versions of yourself, depending on your age. I have been working on this book for four years and am still digging into things, especially myself!”

It seems like a good idea to explain a little bit about how I see the genre of memoir and the role of characterization in memoir.

Memoir is a crafted story about one part of the writer’s life.  If you write creative nonfiction, you probably know that it’s not like autobiography which is meant to be a chronicle of the writer’s life from birth or family origins to the present moment, generally told in chronological order.

The story can be focused on a certain thread or element of a major portion of the writer’s life or it can be about something which occurred over a short period of time, such as a trip to Singapore, or a dramatic event, such as a personal story about 911.

The writer tells her story through the viewpoint of the narrator who is a portion of the writer herself.  The complexity of a human being cannot be re-created on the page, and in order to keep the focus on the story being told, only those elements of each person which are important to this story are incorporated into the character.

For example, my book is about my relationship with my father, how it has affected me, and some elements of his life and his mother’s life which are intertwined with my own story.  The fact that I have a doll collection and can place my hands behind my back in prayer position (reverse namaste) probably will not come up in this story because they have little to do with it.

Iowa_archaeology_edgewaterMike is right that in memoir it is important to be truthful and honest, writing in an authentic voice.  My ideas of how one does that probably differ from Mike’s.  By just “writing in my own voice” (quotes are mine) and seeing where that will lead me is not crafting a story that is true to my experience.  I first have to be my own archeologist, excavating or digging deeply in order to understand myself, my reactions, and to see the connections of my life clearly.

When I began working in the genre of memoir (my genre had been poetry) four years ago, I didn’t really understand the difference between the events of the story (what happened to me in the past) and the practiced, reflective mind of the present day narrator (me in the here and now).  Both these aspects of the story are important to memoir.

Through work on this project my understanding of myself has increased.  My understanding of my father and grandmother has increased, as well.  The result is that I am processing the destruction of the past (point A) and allowing the appreciation for the blessings to permeate the damaged tissues of our relationship (point B).  My story shows how I got from point A to point B.

The creation of the narrator’s character–the sifting through and selecting what personality traits and experiences to include–is similar to the creation  of the rest of the cast–the other major characters.  In addition to the narrator, also known as the protagonist, there can be allies and adversaries.

This is the cast of characters for my book:

Narrator—an introverted, inquisitive girl who loves books and comes to believe she hates her father.

Daddy/Dad—an emotional, enterprising man who grew up in a household headed by his single mother.  Unfortunately, he is controlled by anger larger than himself.  This major character seems to be an adversary (another adversary is the Secret).  Can he also be an ally?  Only time will tell.

Mommy/Mom—a fragile, incurious woman who marries and has children too young, she struggles to become her own person.  She is a major character.

Grandma—a stern and hard-working single mother who has bravely and rigidly raised her children through the Great Depression and into the 1950s.  She is not herself an ally or antagonist, but she does represent a non-human antagonist as she is the keeper of the Secret which the protagonist needs to discover.

Husband–a major character who is a helper and confidante for the narrator in her struggles.  This character is a strong ally, but is not a fully dimensional character as he is in the book for his role in this story, not as the complete person he is in real life.

There are a few minor characters, such as brother, son, daughter, and friends.  Many will be dimensional characters, but not as complexly presented as the major characters.

If you write about your own life, what does your cast of characters look like?  Can you identify the adversary and allies of your story?

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by | February 2, 2013 · 4:49 pm

What’s Happening in February: Prep and Research for My Book Project

Thanks to Faith Adiele, I’ve been reading Robin Hemley‘s A Field Guide for Immersion Writing: Memoir, Journalism, and Travel.  In this book, Hemley suggests writing a blog as a way to research a writing project.

It sounds like great advice, but as you know I already have a blog (well, more than one).  He also warns in a June 2012 interview:

It’s quite easy for writers to spread themselves too thin: writing a blog, tweeting, Facebook updates, all that. Most writers need good long stretches to simply be alone with their work and their thoughts.

So I decided that rather than spread myself more thinly, I would use this blog for the month of February as my laboratory.  I’ll work on some of my prep and research for my book Scrap.  For this project, I am studying my history and experiences, particularly as they involve my father and our relationship (which looks like both drama masks) and arranging these memories into a new and enriching vision.

I hope you won’t mind coming along and visiting during this nostalgic trips to the fifties, sixties, and seventies.

from Wikipedia

from Wikipedia

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by | January 31, 2013 · 5:20 am

Deviation and Beauty

The red maple up past the McKinley Elementary School playground on Emerson Street, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, is etched on the backdrop of my mind like a permanent screen saver.  A symmetrical outline, the tree turned crimson every October for exactly one month.

As a kindergartener looking up the street from my Grandma’s side yard, the tree represented perfection to me.  The first time I noticed it was probably when I was pushed in my stroller up the street and someone, my mother or grandmother, gave me a red leaf from the ground.

Later, Grandma ironed one under wax paper for me to keep.

When my mother worked at Checker Motors and I entered McKinley school in the morning kindergarten, I stayed with my grandparents during the days.  I used to gather leaves from under the tree by myself.  Each leaf, shaped like a small hand, matched my own as I picked it up and placed it in my palm.

When I looked up into the leaves, the light sparkled, dappling my view of the world around me.

Red trees stir me with their deviation from the norm, their place in the firmament of “all things counter, original, spare, strange” (Pied Beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins)  Like the passion of tender new peony shoots against a backdrop of green bushes, the red tree blazes against greenery, blue sky, or dreary human-drawn landscape.

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On a related note, I am wondering if I am obsessed with trees.  I’ve written about the palo verde, the elm, the plum, and more.  If I didn’t have this paper trail of evidence leading me to the source of my obsession, I couldn’t have told you that this is one of my writing topics.  I recognize my obsession with writing about family and my childhood, but I didn’t see the trees until I looked back.

In her seminal book Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg suggests:

Writers end up writing about their obsessions.  Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be leased.

She insists that obsessions have power.  “Harness that power,” she urges.

What are your writing obsessions?  If you look back at what you have written, can you identify an obsession you didn’t realize you had?

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by | January 22, 2013 · 5:20 am

Can I Be More Than a Stonecutter?

In the early sixties, when my father hauled trash, he would bring me gifts which were cast-offs from other people.  One time he brought me a large carton of textbooks from the 1940s, which an elementary school had thrown away.  They were primarily English and social studies texts, and in these books I discovered a wide variety of stories which my brain played like a never-ending movie projector in my head.

One of my favorites was the Japanese folk tale, “The Stonecutter.”  In this story, the protagonist is a laborer who cuts rock out of the mountainside.  The man doesn’t realize it, but a spirit lives inside the mountain.  This spirit has the power to grant wishes.  The man wishes to become a rich man so he doesn’t have to labor so hard, and he becomes one.  Later, he sees that the prince has power over the rich man and wishes to become a prince.  You know what happens.  He becomes a prince, of course.

In his quest for something more, he hadn’t realized that even a prince has his limitations until he discovers that the sun has more power.  He wishes to become the sun.  As he continues his quest, he becomes a cloud and then a rock, which is the rock of the mountain.  The most powerful of all.

As a rock, he suddenly feels pain and discovers that a man is chipping away at him.  He wishes once again for power over his own life and becomes a man–a stonecutter cutting away at the mountain.  He’s right back where he started before he wished his life away.

Outside my bedroom window

I’ve never forgotten this story, although sometimes I move too far from the lesson itself.  The power is mine to live my own authentic life, even if I am the stonecutter, chipping away at the mountain in front of me.

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Writing, though, is not always like life.  As a writer, I believe that it’s possible to do more than live my own life.

Mindful of my work, by some miraculous force, I can be the stonecutter and the mountain at the same time.

Have you ever had that feeling when you were involved in the process of writing?

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by | January 16, 2013 · 7:10 am

Today’s reblog is the 3rd piece I posted. Please make it a beautiful day!

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