Your Story

by Joanne Fedler

  But often there lurks a deeper desire that is only revealed as the story unfolds. In When Hungry, Eat, I start off wanting to lose weight. As the plot progresses, it becomes clear that what I really want is to fit in, to belong, to find a home in my new country. Play around with explicit desire and see if there’s a shadow longing hiding underneath.

  The narrative moves forward (and readers keep turning pages) because of thwarted desire. So we must identify what we want (or think we want) and then thwart the shit out of that desire.

  What’s at stake? What happens if we don’t get what we want? How compelling is our desire? The author Stanley Elkin said, “I would never write about someone who was not at the end of his rope.” The more captivating our reason for wanting something, the more readers will be engaged by our story. So we must figure out what we want; why we want it; how badly we want it; what we’re prepared to do to get it, and what we’re willing to risk.

  Point of view: In memoir, we’re telling our story from our point of view. Readers know what we are thinking and feeling.

  But there may be times when we need to shift into someone else’s point of view, for example, when we want to convey facts we couldn’t have known or when the story is about different perspectives. I’m going to briefly cover the options here.

  First person: E.g., “‘I was born into a family of neurotics and hypochondriacs.”

  When to use a first-person narrator: When the story is mainly about the narrator’s emotional journey. The reader knows it’s all told from that person’s perspective.

  Advantages of using the first person: It is intimate. Readers feel close to the narrator. They empathize and feel what the narrator is feeling.

  Disadvantages of using the first person: The narrator can only tell what she knows and cannot fill in gaps about what others are thinking or what happened when she wasn’t there. We need to be wary of not shifting into other people’s points of view. We can make observations about other people’s emotional states based on what they say or do, but we cannot get inside their heads.

  Second person: E.g., “You wake up one morning and realize you are in the wrong marriage.”

  When to use the second person: We may want to intermittently move from the first person into the second person, as I do throughout this book. I also employed this in certain chapters in Love in the Time of Contempt to protect my children and avoid talking about them directly.

  Advantages of using the second person: This is a device that brings our reader in and asks her to stand in our shoes. It’s a good trick to remember when we want our reader to lean in to the experience and feel it more directly, or we want to engage our reader in understanding that “this is a universal experience, and you know what I mean.”

  Disadvantages of using the second person: It’s tough to keep it up for an entire book—it can feel forced and tedious. We can only use it now and then.

  Third person: E.g., “She was born into a family of neurotics and hypochondriacs.”

  When to use the third person: When our memoir moves between many characters and time frames in which different things happen to different important characters. It’s a version of the omniscient narrator who knows what is happening with every character and the history that precedes each character.

  Advantages of using the third person: We can shift between different characters’ points of view. We’re able to show what every character is thinking and feeling. It is less intimate and more objective. There is no need for flashbacks through a character’s memory because this narrator can simply relate what happened. It is flexible—we can shift easily from one time or character to another.

  Disadvantages of using the third person: It is less intimate and so has a distancing effect. Our readers might find it difficult to connect emotionally with our character or characters. But if our story is more event- or plot-driven than emotion-driven, this won’t matter.

  The unreliable narrator: A narrative device where we want the reader to question the credibility of the narrator and wonder how much of what he or she says is true. In memoir, we can use this cleverly.

  If we were writing, say, about our mental illness, addiction, delusions, or compulsive lying, we might alert our reader to the fact that we cannot be trusted to tell the truth. We want the reader to question our integrity. This narrative device helps us create within the text layers of truth, shadow, complexity, and doubt.

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  Transformation

  A story is always about transformation. A character arc from point A to point B with obstacles overcome in the middle. If nothing changes between the first page and the last, there’s no story. A beginning, middle, and end. Or a hook, buildup, and climax. Samuel Beckett got away with it. But he was making a point, wasn’t he? About the futility of it all. We are not Beckett.

  Think of your life in terms of a story arc. Were you once arrogant and self-centered but became openhearted and selfless because of some terrible accident or loss? Did you shift from grief to acceptance because you took a change of direction? Were you brokenhearted, divorced, and angry and found your way to being happily single and full of self-love?

  In a story (which we all now understand memoir is), something happens—the inciting event—that bumps our story into motion. It is often something pretty horrible, something that backs us into a corner: a diagnosis of cancer, the death of a friend, the discovery of an affair, the loss of a career.

  This kick-starts the transformation arc. We have to do something, like make a decision, act on a piece of information, end a relationship, and this reveals who we are to the reader—a complex, flawed, but lovable human being. Think active. Don’t let yourself be inert.

  One of the big mistakes we often make (in memoir in particular) is allowing our main characters to be passive. I made this mistake in my first novel, The Dreamcloth, where my protagonist, Mia, did nothing; lots of awful things happened to her. The problem is that characters who do nothing make us feel nothing. And we need our readers to feel for us.

  When we write memoir, we sometimes forget that we are active players in our story. In real life, we may feel like we were victims of circumstance. But we’re now in the world of story, where protagonists do stuff. So find a place in your life where you did something—stupid, brave, unforgivable. Even forgetting to call your mother back is doing something, as opposed to just ruminating.

  And make sure something changes from your first page to your last. Don’t make your readers wait for Godot.

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  Turning points

  A life untroubled is a dull life.

  Our tests and trials are important moments on our time line. What makes our story fascinating is that we did not have a smooth and easy ride, that we faced conflict and obstacles. We didn’t get what we wanted. So:

  What trouble have you been in?

  What have been the great trials of your life?

  When did life not run smoothly?

  Identify these turning points so you can map out your life as it twisted and turned. We are who we are because of what did not go right for us. That’s where we grew and became strong. In those moments we found out who we really were. We discovered what we’d tolerate and what we wouldn’t. We made our moves. We took action. We survived.

  We may need some of the curiosity and objectivity I spoke about earlier to identify our turning points. Even though we may have experienced our parents’ messy divorce, had an abortion when we were 17, and helped raise a younger brother with Down syndrome, we may not see these as trials or tests because “that’s just what happened.” We may also have survived unscriptable heartaches, traumas, and abuse that we have not yet been able to name as such.

  When thinking of your own life as a story, aim to identify at least three “beats” where things turned. They don’t need to have been big, major moments like a death or a loss. They may be insignificant factually, but massive emotionally. Like the first time you sang on stage and got a standing ovation. Or a
teacher told you she saw something in you. Or you prayed for something and got it, and so from that moment on, you believed in God.

  A turning point must involve some action. Don’t allow your memoir to become an internal contemplation—readers may be somewhat interested in how our emotional world developed, but they don’t want to get caught up in our heads. Your story must be a balance between action and reflection (what happened and what meaning you derived from what happened). So even if you decided you were going to leave your marriage (a thought), the turning point might be “He broke the dinner plate in rage.” Then show yourself calling the lawyer and filing for divorce.

  Identify some of the most important turning points in your life, then reflect on why they were so important. You’ll find that they were moments of transformation or crisis. These are the golden nuggets of your story. As writer Steven James reminds us, “You do not have a story until something goes wrong.”

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  Them

  Now let’s deal with Them. The other characters in your story. Who are they? Make a list.

  Each one needs to get the same fastidious treatment you’d give to characters in fiction and that you’ve given to yourself as the teller of the tale. Each one needs to be complex, flawed, fascinating, carefully observed, and habit-ridden and have motivations, fears, desires, and longings. We build story through character and we build character through detail.

  But what if you don’t know why your mother stayed with your abusive father all those years? Or why your father never told you he had a twin brother who died at birth? That’s where your writer’s sensibility kicks in. You can always write it this way: “It seemed as if . . .” or “I wonder whether . . .” or “I can only imagine that . . .”

  We often cannot know why people in our lives behaved the way they did—perhaps they didn’t know either—but we must observe them richly and compassionately, the way we would any character, and then investigate their contradictions. Do character interviews for each of them. Look at them from all different perspectives. Don’t flatten them, give them depth.

  Do not lapse into cliché or turn the people in your memoir into stereotypes. Allow them to be multifaceted and to reveal themselves as the story unfolds.

  Figure out if you need to do some research about the people you’re writing about. Don’t let the research consume you, though—write first, figure out what gaps exist in your knowledge, and then go research the gaps.

  Bring them to life through what they say and do

  Characters give themselves away by the things they do and say, not by what they think. Thoughts (yours or your characters) are not action and do not move your story forward. Focus on action and dialogue. This is also good practice for showing, not telling.

  Dialogue is a super-effective storytelling tool. It crafts characters, sets the pace, and shapes your story, so we should engage it with these goals in mind. It’s not a good idea to use characters who lecture the reader as a way of exposition (summarizing chunks of backstory to help fill in the gaps).

  Dialogue is powerful because it reveals relationships between people—the underlying tensions, currents, dynamics, and emotions. If one of your characters is a racist, bigot, or psychopath, the best way to show this is through what she or he says:

  “Say that again, you moronic faggot.”

  “Oh darling, don’t make such a fuss about things. It’s terribly unattractive.”

  “I hate it when you walk into a room, and, like, how people stare, you know, and you feel, like, all naked and shit.”

  Our characters give themselves away when they speak. John, my neighbor, once said, “I go to that dentist. He’s a Jew, but he’s all right.” Do I need to explain who he is? Nah, he did that all by himself.

  We can reveal so much about our characters through speech—their social status, insecurities, and fears. Our reader should be able to “hear” their voices and feel like they’re eavesdropping on a real conversation. Instead of telling the reader, “I had a difficult relationship with my mother,” create a scene between the two of you and show us through the words said, interruptions, pauses, rhythms, and silences of real language what the relationship was like.

  Some things to keep in mind about writing effective dialogue:

  Dialogue should move the story or plot forward. It should never be a space-filler.

  When a character asks a question, it shows what the character is feeling or thinking and allows for revelations.

  Don’t state the obvious. It’s not necessary for the characters to comment on events, e.g., “There was a loud bang. ‘What was that loud bang?’ he asked.”

  The best way to learn to write dialogue is to listen to the way people speak.

  Eavesdrop. Feel the way a conversation works. It is a kind of poetry.

  What we know and how we’ll show

  While every character needs to be richly conceived, we don’t need to show the reader everything. What we show is the tip of the iceberg. What we know lies beneath the surface and remains concealed. Once we know everything we need to know about our characters, we need to make decisions about how and what we’ll show our readers.

  A good trick is to make two columns like this:

  What I know How I’ll show it

  He was broke and unemployed. He wrote a check for $1.25 to buy a can of soda.

  She was lonely and found it hard to connect with people. She spent all her time in the garden tending to her flowers.

  He was an eternal optimist. When his blind date didn’t show up, he sent her roses, saying, “I’m sure I got the time and date wrong.”

  He had diabetes. He examined the ingredients on all products.

  Have fun exploring your characters in this way.

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  Theme

  Your life has themes. Every life does. Your work as a writer is to find those themes.

  Themes are patterns that keep coming up time and time again. We can only find themes when we look at our lives objectively, when we step outside of the drama and the everyday and reflect on our life as a continuous experience. You might discover that your father leaving your mum when you were four and your marriage breaking down share a theme of abandonment or betrayal. Looking closely, you might see that there are similar themes in your friendships and work.

  Perhaps you were the golden child in your family. You won awards. You were an overachiever. You always got the guy. You had it easy. You always ended up looking after others.

  To find your themes, examine the important moments in your life and ask, What was playing out here?

  This explains why my book When Hungry, Eat was able to touch so many people when it was ostensibly about a middle-aged woman trying to lose weight and come to terms with having left her homeland. My drama with tight clothes and flab wasn’t what the story was “about.” Those were the details. What it was really about was hunger. Not just physical hunger, but all hunger—the hunger of the spirit. And everyone knows what emptiness feels like and what it’s like to long for fullness. Readers who loved my book may have been coming to terms with a divorce, or with the empty nest, or with other huge life changes that made them feel exiled from the lives they once knew. Do you see how it works? The details of your story are “how” you are illustrating the themes that underlie it.

  The theme is the “why” of your story. It’s the foundation on which you build the rooms. The theme is the roots of your story tree. It’s the place from which your story grows.

  A story is not about ideas. It’s about how we turn ideas into feelings. We want our readers to feel the impact of our story not in their heads but in their hearts. Theme is the magic key to unlocking that big, thumping muscle in its cage of ribs.

  No matter what your story is about—what happened to you and how—it’s also about something broader than the particular, deeper than the detail. All stories explore the themes that we as humans long to understand—love, death, loss, grief, injustice, beauty, horror, tragedy, inno
cence, suffering. Sometimes when we start writing, we don’t yet have a grip on our themes, but as we write, we discover that the concrete details of say, our battle with AIDS, or coming to terms with our mother’s terminal illness, are about courage, faith, loss, and grief. These are our themes and they are what make our particular story universal.

  What if you don’t know what your themes are when you start? That’s perfectly okay—our themes may only show up once we’ve written a fair bit. Our themes are revealed by the obsessions or passions of our characters (which are really a form of our own obsessions or passions).

  Once you’ve identified your themes, you can start to have fun looking for ways to reinforce them. You might notice a sub-character or an object that comes to represent the theme. In this way, you can enrich the text by exploring your theme in different ways. You can show your themes through symbolism, questions posed, setting, dialogue between characters, or characters who embody different aspects of the theme.

  Theme is what helps us create the emotional connection we want with our reader: we want to evoke terror, humor, fear, intrigue, horror, delight, lust, fascination . . . something . . . anything. Theme helps us make the bridge between the personal and the universal. It’s how we tap into the larger universal unconscious. The particular is only of interest to a reader if it touches emotions he or she is able to feel.