who the scapegoat is or was;
who acted or acts as the silent heart;
who is or was criticized in your family;
what was honored in your family;
proverbial wisdoms handed down in your family, culture, or tribe;
what experiences of your family or culture these proverbs reveal;
the rituals that connect you to your family, religion, group, or tribe;
the festivals you celebrate as part of your identity;
the food associated with these rituals, including its preparation and how it is eaten;
any initiation rituals you have undergone;
any rites of passage that are considered important, and why;
the three most defining aspects of your identity and why you chose these three;
the historical messages you inherited about your identity;
loyalty and secrecy (part of the unspoken “tribal” messages we receive is that we stick together, we don’t talk about what happens in our group to outsiders, we stand by each other) and the secrets you wish you could spill about your family or group; or
the greater truth you believe would emerge if these secrets were debunked.
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What I believe . . .
Let’s go back to why we’re writing our story.
At its core, it’s because we want to share what we believe about life, whether it’s that we are here to make a difference; love is the only wealth worth accumulating; forgiveness is the only way to heal; or our suffering either has (or does not have) a larger purpose.
So what do you believe? What are the overarching values, ethics, and principles of your life?
All story is, in some way, a homage to these beliefs. If we don’t have a firm grip on our values, we’re going to battle with understanding why we’re writing and why anyone would want to read our story. So our task, as we write, is to get clarity on these core principles. What we stand for. What our life is in service to. We need to come armed with clarity about our own emotional truths and the ways in which we are courageous and creative. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, our story is a tale about faith, inspiration, and devotion (or its alternatives), and writing it is about honoring the work of our lives.
Once we’re clear, we don’t want to bash the reader over the head by didactically declaring our philosophies on life, sex, and death. Why not? Because nobody needs a lecture. Rather, we implicitly express these deep beliefs by the way in which we frame and share our experiences.
How we write about our lives reveals whether we believe life is random or karmic. Benevolent or malicious. A gift or a curse.
What happens if we don’t know what we think or believe about anything?
Ah, just start writing. Freewriting. As we write, we begin to sense the shape and form of our deepest values, though they might feel inaccessible to our conscious minds.
Another way we can access the invisible, mysterious aspects of ourselves is through dreams. Hélène Cixous writes, “Dreams remind us that there is a treasure locked away somewhere and writing is the means to try and approach the treasure. And as we know, the treasure is in the searching, not the finding. . . . To reach [this risky country where the treasure resides] you have to go through the back door of thought.”
Another gateway into this realm is through our relationship with the elements—earth, wind, water, and fire. As we begin to explore our stories, we can engage with the earthiness of being grounded, the flightiness of wind, the fluidity of emotion, and the passion of fire. A connection with nature (the environment, the animals) brings up issues of trust, respect, responsibility, and personal honor.
You can write about:
a moment of awakening (the birth of a child or some other spiritual experience);
what you believe in (God, nature, Spirit, Gaia, or nothing at all—what beliefs and values inform your life, and how you hold what is mysterious and unknowable);
what matters to you;
what you would die for;
what you’d be willing to sacrifice to protect your deepest truth;
the time when you felt closest to God, nature, or Spirit;
an important dream that meant something to you;
a time when you acted on instinct;
a time when there was a strange synchronicity of events or coincidence that changed your life;
your relationship with silence;
a time of crisis when you turned to the invisible forces for help;
your relationship with prayer;
why you think some people suffer more than others;
a time when you’d lost all hope and how you recovered;
what holds you up when life seems most discouraging and hopeless;
10 things that give your life meaning;
experiences that have affirmed your sense of why you’re here on this earth;
experiences that have shaken or disturbed your sense of meaning;
your relationship to miracles, such as the most miraculous event or experience you’ve witnessed or encountered;
what you are no longer certain of;
what remains unresolved in your life;
what you must bury;
what you know you must let go of;
where the flow in your life is;
where the source of personal illumination and heat is; or
where the yin and yang energies (male and female) reside in you.
PART IV
Techniques
Art is fire plus algebra.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Now that we’ve covered some of the topics you could use as triggers for writing your story (your “what”), we need some technique. This is the “how” part of the book. It’s the algebra to your fire. Technique isn’t sexy, but it makes your writing sexy.
Never skimp on form. It’s lazy. It’s disrespectful to your reader. And it’s an injustice to your story.
In the chapters that follow, I will share with you what I consider to be the essential techniques you need to write your story so others will want to read it.
And just a reminder for the how-to-write-a-book junkies: I’ve created my own names for some traditional writing concepts to rearrange and air out well-worn ideas. When a concept becomes a cliché, we may forget that perhaps we didn’t fully understand it to begin with. This doesn’t mean we’re stupid. It’s up to our teachers to unpack material in all kinds of new ways until we get it. So that’s what I’ve done.
I find the best way to dive into technique is to read a chapter, and then experiment. Don’t let the technique overwhelm you. Allow it to do its job, which is simply to offer structure and make sense of the deep, encoded mysteries of story. It’s to make the implicit explicit.
It’s to tame and give shape to your fire.
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Target (or, one size never fits all)
Whenever I give a talk, I ask the organizers for a detailed breakdown of who’s in the audience. I want to know if it’s women only, or men too. Young or old or a mix? I want prior notice of dignitaries, rabbis, imams, young mothers, teenagers, and children. This is mainly so I don’t say “fuck” and offend anyone by talking about menstruation or vibrators. But also, knowing who I’m speaking to changes how I deliver my message. I tailor what I say and how I say things so that what I say has the best chance of landing with my listeners.
The same goes for writing our story.
Who are we writing for?
Earlier I said that you are writing for you. That doesn’t change. You must always be writing for you first.
But you are also writing for someone else. Aim your writing at your reader.
So who is your reader?
The answer is never “everyone.”
Ever been to a store and tried on a garment with the audacious label “One size fits all”? I am not far off six foot and have thunder thighs. My sister-in-law is five foot two and has a tiny waist. There is no garment on the planet that
we could both fit into. I now boycott anything that says “One size fits all,” because:
it’s clearly a lie;
the manufacturer obviously thinks I’m stupid;
it generally means something I am not—little and skinny.
So who are you writing for? The who always flows from the why—why are you writing your story? Is it to record your history? Then perhaps it’s for your family, your children and grandchildren. If you are writing your story to inspire other people and you believe your story could benefit a wider audience, identify who that audience might be, whether it’s young mothers, other sufferers of depression, or other cancer survivors. Try not to, in Kurt Vonnegut’s words, “open a window and make love to the world.” This, he claimed, will only give your story pneumonia.
Do not write until you know who you’re writing for and why they would be interested in your book. That’s like sewing a dress before you’ve taken the measurements of the person who’s going to wear it. Your book has a target. Let’s call her Mary, because that makes her real. How old is Mary? Where does she live? Is she single, married, gay, straight, childless, or maternally overburdened? Where does Mary like to shop? What sort of problems does Mary have? What does she worry about? What TV shows are her favorites? What keeps Mary up at night? Is she menopausal? Who does she vote for?
Always speak to the person in front of you. Always speak to your Mary.
Because Mary is not a fool. She (like you and me) knows one size never fits all.
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Time line—things that transpired (TTT)
Sometimes the easiest way to dive into our story is by making a time line of important moments and events in the order in which they happened. The benefit of this is that it can serve as an outline of our story. Outlining is a prewriting process where we categorize and organize our ideas before we begin to flesh them out.
Use a table like this:
Date Age World events Big moment in my life Comments: memories, associations
August 1967 5 Six-Day War in Israel
Communist China announces explosion of its first hydrogen bomb
Dad dies Cemetery, all those flowers in the house, Mum allergic
She gets Grandma to throw them in the garbage
January 1968 6 Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinated
Apollo 8 orbits the moon and takes first images of Earth from space
We move to the country We finally get a dog
I have to share a room with Sally
Mum starts work as a nurse
She’s never home
January 1974 12 Richard Nixon resigns
Movies: Chinatown, The Godfather: Part II, Day for Night, Blazing Saddles, The Towering Inferno
Get my period Playing tennis, the stain on my tennis skirt
Katie gives me her sweater to wrap around my waist
April 1975 13 Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge take over Cambodia. Saigon is surrendered. End of Vietnam War (April 30) Mum remarries Hate the wedding, Joe tries to make me dance with him. I cry in the closet
In addition to the personal, include what was happening in the world around you at the big moments in your life. Look at world events as well as local events. You may notice interesting things. For example, if your mother suffered a heart attack in 1945, which was when World War II ended, speculate about the impact of these big themes on smaller events in your life. The world is a canvas and we can interpret how the bigger picture bled into our personal lives. These connections offer poetic backdrops for us to draw on. Look at the movies and books and pop culture that dominated each year. They may trigger new memories for you. Infoplease.com is a great site to help you gather this information quickly.
By creating a time line, we satisfy a few elements of storytelling:
our time line situates our story in a time and place, so we have a setting. Setting is the historical, political, or physical landscape of our book. It helps the reader have a sense of place, both in time and in the space of where our story is set. A historical framework will enrich our story and give it a flavor. We can describe the weather, the architecture, the mood, the streets, what was on TV, the sounds and smells of the time. Sometimes the setting can absorb some of our theme. If our theme is loneliness, we may find elements of our setting that illuminate a sense of isolation (a single potted plant, a house at the end of a street where no one ever passed by).
we create the basic elements of plot (which I will cover in more depth later). The plot of our story is: A led to B, which in turn led to C.
We are not bound to follow the sequence of our time line—it simply lays the tracks for our story. It does not dictate the way we choose to tell it. We will no doubt find a far more interesting way of structuring revelation. We’ll move around our time line when we come to curating it for a reader. That’s where the craft of storytelling comes in—when we decide how to structure or tell our story.
In memoir, it may seem as if we don’t have a lot of work to do to construct our plot. It’s already somewhat formed because our life happened as it happened. But remember, a plot is not just A happened, then B happened. It’s B happened because of A. In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster writes,
A plot is . . . a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. . . . Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say “and then . . . ?” If it is in a plot we ask, “why?”
Our job is to find what is interesting about the Things That Transpired and make causal connections between events we may not, until now, have realized were related.
We’re looking for the “whys” as well as the “whats.”
Just remember: your story needs a plot to really live and work for the reader.
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The teller of the tale
Just like in every story, ours must have a fascinating character. In memoir, tag, we’re it. Instead of making characters up as we do in fiction, we have to nail ourselves down in memoir. There are unique challenges when we write our own story because we’re juggling three roles:
the narrator or the teller of the tale;
the protagonist or main character; and
the interpreter who is trying to make sense of the story.
Still, all the rules of writing character apply. So we must come across as:
complex and interesting, so our “Mary” will want to know more about us; and
flawed and sympathetic, so our “Mary” will care about us when, frankly, she has laundry to attend to, not to mention Game of Thrones to watch.
But how do we pull off writing about ourselves as a compelling character? We know ourselves so intimately, how do we look back at ourselves and articulate what a reader needs to know about us?
Some suggestions:
Take yourself on a blind date: What questions would you ask yourself if you were a stranger to yourself? What have you done that’s remarkable or unusual? What are your passions? Weird habits? Be curious about who you are so you can discern your motives, idiosyncrasies, and personality tics. When you write about yourself, you must bring this writer’s eye to your own life.
I recently worked with a writer who couldn’t articulate why he might be interesting to a reader. On examination, I pointed out that he had a history of impulsive, rash behavior that invariably resulted in him making exactly the right choices—they’d led him to become so successful that he was able to retire at the age of 43. Where he saw “That’s just me,” I saw powerful intuition and remarkable courage to act on it.
Likewise, another writer I mentored failed to mention to me that she was the first female Pipe Major of Hamilton Caledonian in New Zealand. She had a long history of playing the bagpipes, but didn’t think this was “interesting enough” to share. When we began to unpack why she began to play and what the pipes represented, she realized this was core to her story.
Familiarity, in this situa
tion, breeds blindness. We are inured to our own intriguing qualities.
Be objective: When we write about ourselves, we must observe our lives as if we were not in them. What do others see when they look at us? When we write about ourselves, we’re both inside and outside our story at the same time, a witness as well as captive to the moments we are writing about. Step outside yourself. Look in.
Forget what you know: We can’t help knowing how things turned out in our lives since we lived through them—we know that he eventually proposed, and that we accepted. We know that our mother died a year after her cancer diagnosis and that our first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. When writers write fiction, they must create suspense, tension, and unknowability: Did she buy that one-way ticket? Did he die in the boating accident? Was she unfaithful? It’s this suspense that we need to mimic in writing memoir. So we must try to forget what we know. We must unknow “how things turned out” and write as if we too are wondering what happened next.
Interview yourself: In fiction, we may do character interviews to get to know our characters. Likewise, in memoir we can interview ourselves as if we were a character in a book.
How do we act as both interviewer and interviewee?
When I was little, I used to play teacher-teacher. I used to set tests for my students, but as I had no students, I had to fill in all the answers and be all the students as well as the teacher. Step in and step out. Same here.
Write about yourself in the third person: By simply changing the pronoun from “me” to “he” or “she,” we can sometimes access this “characterization of the self,” because the third-person voice can break the thread of over-identification with the narrator: “She who loves to dance in the rain.” “She who is a rancid bitch until she’s had her first sip of coffee in the morning.” “She who won’t take out the rubbish on a Tuesday because, goddamnit, it’s his job.”
Identify your desire: A character becomes compelling because of what she or he wants, even, as Vonnegut said, “if it’s just a glass of water.” So we must identify what we want, whether it’s a postage stamp, a date with the hot guy, or to exact revenge against our stepfather. It’s this desire pushed up against a series of shitty obstacles we face that creates conflict. So perhaps we start off wanting acceptance, safety, to get over our grief, to forgive our parents, to make peace with our body or our history, to forgive ourselves, to understand why things happened the way they did.
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