The difference between telling and showing:
Telling Showing
He was angry. He clenched his jaw, curled his fists, and rose to his feet.
She was grief-stricken. Something cold flickered inside her; memories of her mother moved like minnows beneath a dark surface.
He felt relieved. He couldn’t stop the sigh that escaped his lips.
She is lonely. She looks for a familiar face, but never sees one.
He felt hot. Large half-moons of sweat grew at his armpits.
Justin was nervous. Justin couldn’t lock eyes with Catherine. He fumbled with his grey polyester tie, which only seemed to choke him up more.
Showing takes the reader right into the moment, into the memory, the emotion. Telling the reader what we remembered, felt, and saw summarizes, but does not allow the reader to emotionally connect with our story.
Metaphors
Well-chosen metaphors can enrich our writing. Too many metaphors make it seem like we’re trying too hard. Our writing should never get in the way of the reader and draw too much attention to itself. It should serve the story; otherwise it’s just showing off.
Metaphors extend our meaning by making interesting and unusual connections between things that are not usually connected, such as “the skateboard of my heart,” “the regatta of her moods,” “spelunking in my obsession,” “the jagged glass of his caress.”
Of his stroke, poet Tomas Tranströmer writes, “I am carried in my shadow like a violin in its black case.”
In Beloved, for which she won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison describes a crucial moment between Paul D and Sethe, in which he confronts her with the atrocity of what she’s done (which I’m not going to tell you, because that would be an epic spoiler and you really do need to read this book), Morrison writes: “Right then, a forest sprang up between them, trackless and quiet.”
Terry Pratchett, the late English author, instead of describing a dog as “revolting and smelly,” describes it as “halitosis with a wet nose.”
Beautiful writing viscerally ignites our senses and stokes our imagination.
Once you begin to investigate language, you will want to play with all its riches and craft something beautifully textured that is utterly your own.
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Tenderness
In one of the great anthems of the modern era, “Can I Get an Amen,” celebrity drag queen RuPaul sings that if we don’t love ourselves, we’re not going to be able to love anyone else.
But what exactly does “loving ourselves” mean?
It means giving ourselves a break. Dropping the judgments. Accepting our swirling imperfections. And letting a bit of kindness seep in.
All writing begins with just this kind of self-compassion.
To write, we have to own our voice and our right to write. I sometimes think that writing is an act of dynamic empathy—for ourselves and for others. In life, we’re often caught up in opinions, reproaches, and criticisms. Our culture teaches us to analyze, disparage, and bring others down to size. We ridicule people who make mistakes and vilify people on social media who disagree with us. Satire and some journalism are built on the impulse to demolish. This energy, as much as it is powerful and necessary in propaganda and in persuasive writing, is belittling and, at its core, arrogant. It is built on the idea of “them” and “us.” The subtext is, “You are so stupid, and look how clever I am.” Its impulse is to destroy.
This judgmental outlook is especially unhelpful for memoir writers. When we write our stories, we’re looking at ourselves and our lives as if we were watching ourselves in the mirror. But those are the same eyes that silently judge: I’m so fat. Are those new wrinkles? I wish I was prettier, I wish my teeth were straighter, my nose were smaller, my eyes less slanty . . .
While these voices inside our head may be difficult to tame, and may be the soundtrack to our lives, what is certain is that no one (not even our mothers) is interested in reading this kind of self-directed hate speech.
Van Jones, who was a close friend of mine when we were at Yale together and is now a CNN commentator, once said it to me like this—“No one trusts self-hating politics”—when I expressed to him my shame at being a white South African Jewish woman who came from privilege. What he meant was “Get over it—do the work you have to do to come to some place of peace with who you are—and then you are ready to do political work.”
Writing requires us to do the same, whether we’re writing about ourselves or about other characters. To write complex characters (where the character is not a cliché), we have to see all their facets—the heroic and the cowardly; the loyal and the lustful. Remember: we don’t have to write about our pain, but we have to write from it. In memoir, we may choose not to expose our self-loathing, shame, guilt, anger, resentment, and fear, but we have to know them intimately to write authentically about ourselves. And if ever we choose to go on to write fiction, we need intimate knowledge of the emotions we’re attributing to the imaginary characters we conjure up.
If we want to write—about ourselves or other characters—in a way that connects us to our readers, we have to be connected to ourselves. This means dropping the judgment and replacing it with compassion.
Think about it: if we write about ourselves with condemnation and criticism, or, alternatively, we skim over difficulties with platitudes, we almost render ourselves unreliable narrators—readers will feel our discomfort with who we are and find it hard to connect with us emotionally. Whereas, if we look at our wounded places with a soft gaze, and write about what we find difficult about being ourselves with tenderness, readers cannot help but connect with us. The upside too is that we give others permission to look at their own wounds with that same gentle regard.
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Takeaway
Please do not write your story to teach anybody anything. Your job in writing your story is not to lecture people or give advice.
Does this mean your story won’t impart anything or have a message? Of course not. There should always be a “takeaway” for the reader.
But we don’t want to assault our readers with our “message.” We are more sophisticated and subtle than that. We want to tuck it into the storytelling, secret it into our themes, stitch it into the structure. We want to show what we’ve learned and how we learned it. But we must allow our readers to draw their own conclusions and decide what meaning they can take from our experience to enrich their lives.
Since we are always asking, What’s in it for the reader? and we’re always thinking about Mary, we must make the transition from the personal to the universal. Simply by wrestling with our material and making meaning from our experiences, we will have a takeaway message for our readers. We don’t want it up in flashing lights, but slipped between our lines, like a subliminal message, that softly creeps into our reader’s heart when she puts our book down and sighs.
How do we know what the takeaway is?
We figure it out as we write our story. Our lives are filled with teachable moments; we just haven’t acknowledged them as such yet. Writing our story is partly about recognizing the journey we have been on, harvesting the wisdom from our own lives and making it relevant to others. Every life is a commentary on existence—and ours is as insightful, rich, and meaningful as anyone else’s, including Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Michelle Obama.
Here are examples from other books:
The pathos and the gift of life is that we cannot know which will be our defining heartbreak, or our most victorious joy.
— Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
You live inside your parents’ lives until, one day, they live inside yours.
— Donia Bijan, Maman’s Homesick Pie
Maybe what we say to each other is not so important after all, but just that we are alive together, and present for each other as best as we can be.
— Anne Lamott, Some Assembly Required
: A Journal of My Son’s First Year
Once we realize that our ordinary experience has this potential to offer huge insight into all of existence, we start to pay more attention to our lives. We become more curious, respectful, mindful. We learn our place in the great family of things.
Mary Oliver’s poem “The Swan” describes in exquisite detail a swan flying through the sky, and ends with three astonishing lines that point us to feel how a single beautiful image “pertains to everything,” and how this recognition is enough to bring us toward both an understanding of what beauty is for and an impulse to change our lives.
Don’t try too hard for a takeaway. As you write, ask yourself these questions:
What have been the biggest “aha” moments of my life?
What am I proud of?
What can I do better than anyone else?
What have been my wake-up calls?
What have I survived (big and small)?
What do I know now that I wish I’d known back then?
If I had to write my autobiography in six words, what would they be?
Your story is as much about what you believe—about life and all the craziness that happens in it—as it is about what has happened to you. Think of the events as merely the catalysts or prompts for you to share with the reader what you make of this strange, wonderful, heartbreaking, illuminating existence.
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Top and tail
Write your beginning and your ending. You can do this right at the end because by now you will understand the emotional journey you want your reader to take with you. Where do you want to find them and where do you want to leave them?
You want your opening lines to:
draw the reader right into the action, to place them in the middle of the story;
hook the reader into wanting to know more;
make the reader care about you;
give the reader confidence that she is in the hands of a reliable storyteller;
introduce your reader to a fascinating world or character; and
shock, grip, or in some other way be emotionally compelling.
I opened When Hungry, Eat with this line: “I wish I’d never kept this appointment.”
Here are some great opening lines from memoirs:
I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.
— Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle
I have a son my son is dead I had a son.
— Kate Shand, Boy
If you had met my father you would never, not for an instant, have thought he was an assassin.
— Magda Szubanski, Reckoning
It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.
— Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.
— Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
And your ending?
Leave your reader with your message or some story that holds your message. When Hungry, Eat ends like this:
People we love may be diagnosed with horrible illnesses, die in car accidents or become paralysed. . . . These things may indeed happen to us. Life is uncertain. All we can know is that the uncertainty remains, flickering like an infinite ember in the kiln of this incarnation.
Faith steers us towards finding a shelter amidst the uncertainties of life. . . . Faith is the labour of returning to this search. This nurturing of the space hallowed by our attention is a daily affair. A moment-by-moment devotion.
We do it one breath, one mouthful at a time.
What final words do you want to leave your reader with? What last taste do you want to leave in the mouths of their souls?
PART V
Then What?
Congratulations! You’ve just completed your manuscript. It’s champagne cork–popping time.
This sets you apart from 99 percent of other people who want to write a book. Finishing shows you’re committed, you have stamina, and you can set a goal and reach it.
Now go for a walk. A swim. A naked walk in the moonlight (what the heck, you’ve just FINISHED your draft—you’re a god!).
We’ll talk about what’s next when you come back.
P.S. Don’t forget to celebrate.
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Tragic drafts
Okay, I know you thought you were done. And you are. With the first draft.
But—please stay with me on this—writing a book is like climbing a mountain. As soon as we reach the peak we’ve been aiming for, we look ahead and see there’s another peak ahead. And, frankly, we’re buggered and don’t know if we’ve got it in us to get there.
That’s why we need to take that break. Step away. Do some knitting. Go on holiday. Make a scrapbook. Read Fifty Shades of Grey. Because what we’ve actually finished is our “shitty first draft,” a phrase coined by Anne Lamott in her fabulous book Bird by Bird (which is on the list of “Urgent Books to Help You Learn the Craft” in the appendix at the back). I prefer to call it the “tragic draft.” First drafts always are. It’s in their nature. The problem lies in our expectation that first drafts should be good.
Think of the first time you tried anything—a kiss (how sloppy, how where-the-hell-should-the-tongue-go?); a recipe (overcooked, raw, unflavored, soggy in the middle); a musical instrument (how the hell can it be so hard to strum?). Why do we expect that our first writing attempts will immediately sing on the page? They will be clumsy. Our drafts will be verbose. They will tell too much and not show at all and we won’t even know the difference. There will be sinkholes of cliché, minefields of passive voice, and we’ll think everything we’ve written is so marvelously profound and prize-winningly perfect. Our first drafts will suck in all these ways. They are meant to.
The problem is when we think it means we suck. Our tragic draft joins forces with our inner critic and soon we’re feeling like we’ll never write again. And that we ourselves are absurdly tragic.
I prefer to call our tragic first writing attempts “wabi-sabi drafts.” Wabi-sabi is a Japanese term, derived from art, which denotes the beauty of that which is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. We can learn so much from our broken attempts, from our ineptness and misshapen inelegance. We can grow in acceptance and compassion and find the joy in effort and grace. The questions I ask writers about their first drafts are:
What is imperfect about this draft?
What is incomplete about it?
Where are the cracks?
Where is the wisdom and beauty in this draft?
And, more important: what do you love about this draft?
Find what you love in what is broken and the brokenness will become part of the story you are telling.
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Tidy, tighten, trim, and tuck
What begins to rescue our first tragic draft is this part: the tidying, tightening, trimming, and tucking.
This is where we go back to the words. Each and every one. This stage is sometimes called “the rewrite,” but in truth, we often rewrite as we’re working on our first drafts. Once we have a version of our first drafts—printed out and ceremoniously filed or bound—we must now return to the manuscript with the aim of strengthening our sentences and polishing our writing. As the author George Saunders writes, “The struggle to improve our sentences is the struggle to improve ourselves. . . . Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one.” It matters how we come to this process. If we come grumbling and miserable to the task, we lose the chance to love the
words and sing the prose into shape. In truth, I have come to appreciate this part of the writing process more and more with every book I’ve written, and it has (quietly) become my favorite (*she whispered*).
Every time I reengage with a piece of writing, I remember that my love of language was inspired by the poet Dylan Thomas. From him I learned that the words we choose create a landscape of experience for the reader.
Later in life, in reading writers like Hemingway and J. M. Coetzee, I felt the power that comes from an economy of language. By choosing my words carefully, I assembled my identity not haphazardly but with architectural vigilance. As I found the right word, one after the other, the experiences the language was carving sharpened. Light refracted through the faceted crystal of each sentence. I understood my life better.
When we compress our language, we are forced to make bold choices: what will suffice? What is enough? Beautiful compression is the art of holding back, saying less, scaling down. We must write with as much detail as we can about the moments, people, events, places, and experiences that have shaped our lives. But each detail must serve the story. Writing is a process of refining what we are saying. It is a series of endless decisions.
Here are some ways to improve our writing:
By shortening and varying our sentences. Shorter sentences are often preferable to long, rambling ones. Intersperse long ones with short ones by culling the qualifiers (e.g., “somewhat,” “quite a bit”), which weaken writing; we don’t want too many.
By losing obvious words like “happy,” “sad,” “good,” “bad.” Find the worthiest word, the one that packs the most power. Mary Oliver reminds us to “look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.”
By continuing to ask, What am I saying? Writing is the process of winnowing your thoughts and emotions down to get rid of wobbles, lumps, and fuzziness. We know we’ve understood what we’re writing about when we can nail it down to one sentence.
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