This is particularly important in memoir. For memoir to be of interest to others, it must be in service to some bigger idea or theme. Find the theme or themes that run through your story—love overcomes fear, or redemption through suffering, or faith leads to freedom, or courage in the face of injustice. Everything that happens to you in life is linked to a theme.
There are literally hundreds of themes to choose from. Here is a selection:
Alienation
Ambition
Beauty
Betrayal
Chaos and order
Circle of life
Coming of age
Courage
Cruelty
Deception
Disillusionment
Displacement
Escape
Everlasting love
Evils of racism
Faith
Family
Fate
Good versus evil
Greed
Grief
Growing up
Hope
Hubris
Identity
Injustice
Isolation (physical, spiritual, emotional)
Jealousy
Justice
Loss of innocence
Love
Love and sacrifice
Motherhood
Prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, etc.)
Religion
Redemption
Reunion
Sex
Spirituality
Suffering
Surrender
Survival
Trust
Truth
War
Youth and beauty
Spoiled for choice, right?
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Taper
Writing memoir is about choosing the right moments, and about making powerful storytelling decisions that move the narrative forward.
The difference between autobiography and memoir is the difference between a wide-angle lens and a close-up.
Autobiography is the story of our lives from birth to the present day. It has length and breadth. Memoir is a story from our lives—it’s selective, thematic, focused, and has depth. In memoir, most of the life (the canvas on which the story takes place) is implicit and disregarded.
So choose some windows from your life that reveal the part of your journey you want to explore and illuminate. Be selective. Make artistic (not narcissistic) decisions. If your story is about raising a disabled child, the fact that your father died when you were seven (which is obviously relevant to your life) may or may not be relevant to the story you’re telling.
As you pick the important life-shaping moments from your life, you will begin to see themes and patterns, an almost invisible lattice of connective tissue between them. Now hold on to that thread and weave your straw into gold.
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Telling
Our theme is our “what” (what our story is about). Here comes the how.
How will we tell our story? How will we shape the narrative? What will we include? Hide? Reveal? What order will we impose on the events? This is where our housekeeping skills come in handy. Our ability to organize and play architecturally. How we curate the experience for the reader. As Carol Shields writes in Small Ceremonies, “It’s the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It’s throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it.”
Our time line (or plot) is the order of events as they happened. But the structure is how we tell what happened (what emphasis, time, and pacing we give to each thing that happened). When we write, we make choices about what to reveal and conceal, and it is this dance of disclosure and secrecy that creates the emotional journey for the reader. How we link sequences gives meaning to those moments, because all good writing builds depth as different scenes reflect off one another.
Structural decisions are big ones, and they have to be made with confidence. For example, you have to choose:
where to start the story (what event gets the story going);
how much emphasis to give certain parts of the story/plot;
what point of view to use;
what to leave out (the backstory, which is everything that preceded the inciting event that you want to use to illuminate your character’s inner life);
how to use flashbacks and memories;
how to manage the pace (which is the way the story moves through emotional time for the reader);
how long your story should be; and
where to end the story.
The beginning of our story is nothing more than our careful decision about where to start the telling.
Likewise, the end is the emotional place we want our readers to end up. (“And they all lived happily ever after”—that’s a beginning if ever I heard one . . .) There are many ways to lead an audience to our designated destination.
Each choice changes both the meaning of our story and the effect it has on the reader. We get to choose the particular configuration of events—like words on a page, like notes in a musical score, depending on how we want Mary to feel while she’s reading our story. Our structural decisions will be influenced by our purpose in telling the story.
We move between scenes (which slow the pace down and bring readers right into the moment) and summary (narration or exposition). We pick important moments in our story for scenes, but sometimes we have to fill in gaps for readers by letting them know about something that happened outside the plot but is important to the story. We then have to quickly summarize a whole backstory or history. This is called “exposition.” Exposition is a condensed way of sharing information with the reader.
There are many options for how to tell a story:
linear—moving forward in time;
starting with the ending and working backward (like most murder mysteries);
the twist, where we invert the expectations we’ve been building all along;
picaresque—a sequence of events or episodes moving through fascinating places or experiences;
the story within a story, or “frame”—we frame the story, but we’re actually telling someone else’s story; or
nonlinear—moving between past and present.
Each choice impacts the reader’s experience. How do you decide which story structure to use?
You decide based on how you want your readers to feel at different moments.
Structure is more than what goes where.
It’s the ordering of the emotional experience for the reader.
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Tension
Think seduction.
What keeps us hooked is tension—not knowing the outcome. Will he kiss me? Will she kill him? Will she keep the baby? Who is the real father?
Every story must keep readers wondering what will happen next. The suspense arises because the reader cares about us, knows we’re in trouble but is uncertain if we’re going to be okay. The definition of suspense could be the anticipation of people we care about getting hurt. Writers are often given this advice: “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry. But most of all, make ’em wait.”
Our stories must create tension for the reader, the kind Hitchcock spoke about when he said, “There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it.” We intensify this by structuring revelation, whether it’s through drip-feeding elements of a powerful backstory that will in time explain the pain of the present, shocking our readers with the revelation of a clue, secret, or evidence, or composing a dilemma in which we are forced to face our worst fears.
Some other ways to create tension:
foreshadow events still to come;
have a ticking clock or a deadline (time is running out);
hint at warnings or omens;
insert premonitions, the “little did she know” device;
set up story questions;
withhold information from the reader;
build anticipa
tion; and
create surprises or hint at secrets.
You need to become accomplished at teasing the reader. The opposite is boring her.
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Touch and be touched
Albert Camus exhorted us to “live to the point of tears.” What is life about, what are stories for, unless they bring us into our hearts?
We write to touch and be touched. The deepest, most sacred element of writing is that we are connecting—with ourselves and with readers. To do this, we need to be plugged into our own emotional worlds. We cannot write if we’re numb to our own pain, grief, joy, lust, and longing—we have to be in touch with it all. Robert Frost wrote, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” We have to feel it first if we want our reader to feel it second.
Our job as writers is to make readers feel something.
“But,” I hear you mutter, “I can’t even make my three-year-old pick up her toys, let alone get the teenager to unload the dishwasher, how do I make anyone do anything?” Of course we can’t force anyone to feel anything. The only person we can make feel anything is ourselves. And the problem is that many of us are living not only a short distance away from our bodies, but a whole continent away from our hearts. For all kinds of protective, survival, and lazy reasons, many of us don’t go “down there” where the feelings are. It’s messy, and mucky and unpredictable. And it’s sore.
No one has said it better or more concisely than Ernest Hemingway, who said, “Write clear and hard about what hurts,” because “what hurts” is the connective tissue between us and our readers. They may not have buried a parent, or lost all their money, or had a father who went to jail (though that’s what we’re writing about), but they know loss, grief, failure, and shame. We’re all visited by the same family of feelings, which arrive in the form of different life experiences. Beneath the things that transpired is an undercurrent that is not cerebral, but emotional. It joins us to all readers.
Leonard Cohen said this in an interview about songwriting:
I think you work out something. I wouldn’t call them ideas. I think ideas are what you want to get rid of. I don’t really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans. They tend to be on the right side of things: ecology or vegetarianism or antiwar. All these are wonderful ideas but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart. I never set out to write a didactic song. It’s just my experience. All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience.
So write to touch.
While touching yourself.
Not in that way. You know what I mean.
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Tell the truth
When we write, there’s the danger that we might try to come across as someone we’re not. To bullshit a little.
A big part of our work as writers is to see through our own bullshit. Readers sense when we’re being pretentious and inauthentic and trying too hard. Writing must come from your true self. If you don’t believe deeply in what you’re writing, neither will your reader. As the wonderful writing teacher Brenda Ueland wrote,
What you write today you thought and created in some idle time on another day. It is on another day that your ideas and visions are slowly built up, so that when you take your pencil there is something to say that is not just superficial and automatic, like children yelling at a birthday party, but it is true and has been tested inwardly and is based on something. . . . It must come from your true self and not your theoretical self, from what you really think, love, and believe, not from your hope to make an impression.
In addition, your true self is where your writing voice is hiding. And if there is one clear writerly goal we can successfully achieve, it’s to find that voice.
But there’s no concept in writing more elusive than this one. Here are some gateways in.
Why are you writing?
Why must you tell this story? Write a few paragraphs on why you and why this story. Understanding your own deep motivations will help you wrap your hands around the themes that illuminate your story. The themes are the big issues that move you. Your writing voice will always somehow be entangled in these themes.
Why you are writing is more important than what you are writing about. The what flows from the why, not the other way around. The answer to why gives you credibility (which is fundamental to your writing voice).
Make “I contact”
One of the first rules of public speaking is to make eye contact with the audience. That’s how we connect and earn their trust. In writing, our challenge is to make “I contact,” to tell the truth about our experience. We create trust and credibility by speaking about real things in a real way.
To do this, we have to become deep observers of our internal states and to examine our lives, the way Plato exhorted us to. It’s not a quick overnight job, because we’re cultivating intimacy with our deepest selves. When our writing is limp and lifeless, it’s because we haven’t done enough work to make “I contact.”
Our writing cannot hide our experience—it reveals who we are. We have to go in deep to get to this place and stay down in the dark for a long time. We have to be in the silence until something yields. The harder we have worked to get to our own emotional truth, the more that shows up in what we write. Which is why it’s easy to spot cliché and platitudes. They’re recycled thoughts, regurgitated ideas. They are limp and loose because they are borrowed. They are not bespoke. They’re one-size-fits-all. Our words should never have that quality. When we write, it is our chance to offer something that is truly our own.
When we do, we produce something that is the work of hard internal labor. Readers feel the sighs, the cries, the howls through which our words were born. They feel the sturdiness of deep internal roots, the clarity of a thought long mulled. They sense our writing is the product of one who has worked hard to cobble it from the cliff face of experience. As they read it, there’s a kind of recognition, as something deep in their psyches arches toward it with a “yes.” It has the ring of truth to it. It’s not trying or posturing.
The writer Julia Cameron says, “Finding our voice has to do with finding our safety.” Safety comes from trust. We learn to trust that what we say has value when we are not trying to belong to an experience dishonestly.
Anyone can learn the craft of writing, but it takes courage and guts to go deep within and explore our own chaos. We can only shepherd our readers as far and as deep as we have been willing to go ourselves. How far are we willing to go? Only we can answer that question.
But in asking it, we enter a new conversational territory with ourselves. We listen closely and discover levels of consciousness and knowing that we have not yet tapped. We see how we have lived at high speed, never pausing to allow that hard thought or crushing feeling to reach us. We’ve been sublimating. Shut off. We commit to doing it differently. To going in with a lantern, a shovel, and a big, brave heart.
“I contact” is a lifelong intimacy, but these are four doorways I have found to be reliable: our senses, our emotions, our memories, and the way in which we reflect on our lives. As we move through each one, we sift through the moments we’ve collected that have stayed with us, the interactions we’ve carried, the sensual imprints, the stories—and we examine them with ferocious and forensic precision. Every memory is a threshold. Whatever makes us tremble is our teacher.
Say it your way, not in cliché
A cliché is never our voice because, by definition, a cliché is something someone else has thought or experienced. When something comes too easily or we are too glib, we’re likely in cliché territory.
The antidote to cliché is to look for the ambivalence or paradox in the experience. We can ask, What am I not seeing? What is not obvious? What is hidden or buried here? Our original voice will involve some pairing of contradictions and the way in which we hold them.
A clue about the truth of our experience is that it is never one thing. So in getting to our voice, we are often engaged in a difficult conversation with something we don’t quite understand. When we work this way, we come with a spirit of inquiry and a beginner’s mind.
The poet Mary Oliver reminds us in her poem “The Wren from Carolina” that all things are imbued with holiness, though some may appear in more “rascally” guise than others. Everything has depth and complexity. All things have a shadow side.
We should avoid cliché except when we want to use it deliberately to play into a convention. Our writing must always be self-conscious (i.e., know what it is doing).
Sentimentality is inauthentic
Sentimentality is dishonest. Motherhood isn’t “wonderful” (not all the time), nor is marriage, nor is any relationship or experience. Life is paradoxical. If we write about things in one dimension, we’re not telling the truth. We all know that experience is complex. If we write that an experience is only perfect or only terrible, the reader knows we haven’t explored it deeply, we’ve only skimmed along the surface. Some writing can get away with this—short, entertaining articles in newspapers or Sunday magazines, for instance. Some travel writing. Some romance fiction. If we are writing in one dimension, we must be doing so knowingly.
Some guidelines for telling the truth:
the first thing we write is a gateway to go deeper;
if it’s not grounded in our own felt experience or emotion, it’s not our truth;
if it feels scary to say out loud, we’re on the right track;
if it’s a cliché, it’s a cop-out;
if it’s sentimental, we’re romanticizing (and suppressing something);
if it feels risky and our heart is racing, we’re making progress;
if it doesn’t make sense, we’re getting closer;
ideas alone are not our voice—the head and the heart have to travel and meet at a mutually agreed-upon place;
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