Memoir Writing Lesson from Fiction

Fiction can offer powerful insights for memoir writers. I just began reading a classic historical novel, Divine Average, first published in 1952 by Elith Hamilton Kirkland. Like many novels, it’s written in memoir format, in this case an end-of-life memoir. It’s set in 1838-1858 in “that period of Texas history when ‘cow boy’ was a phrase with a controversial meaning and ‘Texians’ a nationality.

The second paragraph stopped me in my tracks:

I feel compelled at this time by the Spirit of the Holy Mother and the force of God to leave an account of the things that have happened to me and mine. It all lies on my heart like a confession that must be made before I can die in peace . . . a confession not only for myself, but for my husband, Range Templeton, who despises me now after loving me for twenty years, for my daughter Laska, lost to us and to herself, a companion to outlaws in the wilds of Mexico, and for my son, Luke Templeton, so bold of mind and pure in heart.

I know right away that Luvisa Templeton, “a consumptive, soon to die,” is confessing all for peaceful death, which she’s looking forward to “as deliverance.” This compelling reason to write creates a compelling reason to read. What juicy secrets is she about to divulge? What better way to hook my attention?

She immediately goes on to explain her time frame – the twenty years of her marriage to Rage Templeton – and her frustration at never being able to understand him. That sounds like a rich topic.

She then explains that she’s not penning this tome herself. She’s dictating it all to Mr. Bryson, a “very close friend to every member of the Templeton family,” which relationship she’ll explain in due course. Bryson is literate, articulate, better able than she to find the right words for her thoughts and feelings. Bryson has promised to place the completed manuscript “in the proper hands with instructions that it be preserved until such time as it might seem fitting to give it out for reading, in a book perhaps.” She continues:

Is it too much to hope that in some future generation these events may stir the minds and warm the hearts of men and women destined to know more and see further than those of us here now? Perhaps I attach too much importance to the life I have lived and the lives of which my living has played a part. But I yield completely to the compulsion that I must leave such a documentation. 

Like Luvisa, many of us write because we’re compelled to do so. In heeding that compulsion, we’ll do well to follow her fictitious example on several counts:

• Be clear about why you are writing and
• Who you are writing for.
• Be clear about the frame for your story, in her case a twenty year marriage and
• The story focus or theme, in her case what happened to her and hers. 
• Have a strong, compelling opening. 
• Get the tension/conflict going right away, in her case her husband who loved her for twenty years despises her now. Why? How did her daughter come to be in Mexico with outlaws?
• Seek help when you need it. Luvisa used Mr. Bryson, a sort of ghost writer. You may choose to use an editor, beta readers, reading groups, friends, even family to help you on your way. 
• Have a strong, compelling opening. 
• Postpone distribution if you feel it unwise to disclose it all now. 

Points to Ponder: Do you have a story you’re compelled to tell? Can you identify the frame and focus? What help might you need to get it written? 

I’m in Love with Volya Rinpoche

I never expected to fall in love with Volya Rinpoche, a bald, squarely-built Russian quasi-Buddhist monk who dresses in gold-trimmed maroon robes and sandals, has skin the color of acorns, and is a world-renowned spiritual leader and author. Neither did Otto Ringling, the narrator of Breakfast with Buddha, Lunch with Buddha and Dinner with Buddha, a trilogy of mind-bending, possibly life-changing novels by Roland Merulo . But who could resist that heart-melting smile, that endless compassion and infectious laugh? His naïve observations and whiplash fast “wessons?”

But wait. Nothing kinky here.As the story begins, Otto’s whacko, forever hippie sister tricks him into taking a road trip alone with this monk, her latest love interest. As miles and days pass, their relationship grows and Otto decides the Rimpoche is “the real deal.” Between volumes, monk marries sister, plots thicken, and Otto evolves. The novels are poignant in places, hilarious in others, always thought-provoking, and sublimely well-written. Otto’s acute observations on history, geography, philosophy and food are meticulously detailed.

I’ve always encouraged students of lifestory or memoir writing to read widely, to read like a writer, to find authors whose style they admire and immerse themselves in their work. Roland Merullo is my new hero behind the page. These digital volumes are full of pink highlights for exquisite description and gold ones for powerful points.

Although these volumes are clearly fiction, drawn from Merullo’s fertile imagination, they read like memoir. They are among those remarkable titles I occasionally find that convey Truth in concentrated form, more potent than most actual life experience could support. I consider them a prime example of the power of the fiction alternative.

The Buddha books came into my life at the perfect time (who believes in coincidence?). Over the last few months our nearly completed move from Pittsburgh to Austin has become unexpectedly complex and stressful, full of fretting and fear and second-guessing. I was convinced I had neither time nor the concentration to read. In spite of these self-imposed barriers, a book with a Buddha title slipped through the cracks.

I didn’t have time to not read these books. They reminded me of wisdom I’ve accrued over at least forty years, much of which I’ve ignored for the last many. They reminded me that I’ve largely fallen away from soul-enriching practice. They reminded me we can choose our reactions, our thoughts. Along the way, they altered and added perspective. I feel better now, stronger, and ready to forge ahead! Thank you Roland Merullo!

This is not the first time books have restored or enriched my soul and nudged me around corners. Should I include any of these time periods in a memoir, for example this move, it could not be complete without mention of these three books and their influence. I could take things further. Pat Conroy, perhaps best known for his novel, The Great Santini, wrote My Reading Life, a themed memoir devoted to books that have molded and shaped him.

What better time to snuggle down and read than these days of early darkness, of golden leaves and frosty mornings? Find an author you love and read ‘til your eyeballs cave in. Make highlights in ebooks. Put sticky tags in print ones. Collect heart-stopping phrases and notable elements of structure.

Write on: start a list of books that have affected your life and thinking. Write about these in your journal and develop your thoughts into an essay. Add a few of your favorite titles to a comment, as a tribute to the author and a beacon to fellow writers.

Six Things I Learned Going from Memoir to Fiction

Invited guest post by Carol Bodensteiner

Long time readers may be surprised to find a post about writing fiction on this blog about life writing. While it’s true that my focus is on memoir, lifestory, journaling and other forms that draw upon actual experience to express personal truth, sometimes the freedom of fiction is more effective in conveying truth. Carol Bodensteiner found this to be true. She has successfully written in both genres and her experience moving from memoir to fiction has lessons for all.

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I’d been a business writer all my life, so I was used to working with facts. Memoir was a logical first writing step. Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Girl, tells the stories of my childhood growing up on a family farm in the middle of the United States, in the middle of the 20^th Century.

When I finally raised my head from writing, publishing, and marketing the memoir, I looked around for what I’d write next. I turned to family-inspired fiction, which I’d never written before.  My novel, Go Away Home, which I indie published in 2014 and was acquired by Lake Union Publishing (an imprint of Amazon Publishing) later that year, is the result of that effort.

The road from memoir to fiction brought many adventures and a lot of learning. Here are six things I learned along the way.

1) A family story can be a great launching pad to fiction.

Go Away Home was inspired by my maternal grandparents. My grandfather died of the Spanish Flu in 1918. Throughout my life, I’ve been intrigued by my connection to this major world event. As someone used to writing from facts, a family story gave me a starting point: A story I cared to write and people and places that were familiar.

Writing the story as fiction was necessary for many reasons. One was that I didn’t have enough facts to write it any other way. Of course I never knew my grandfather and even though my grandmother lived until I was well into my 20s, I never asked her a single question about him or their lives together. And she was not the type to share. So though the story began with family, it is fiction.

2) Don’t get stuck on the facts

Once I got into writing the story, one of the biggest challenges was letting go of the facts. Since the genesis of this story rose from people in my family, and I knew a bit about the people, places, and events, my inclination was to use those facts. But I quickly found that the facts didn’t work for the story I was ultimately telling. They didn’t create a good story arc. There was no drama. On his website, Write the Truth, Robert McKee said, “The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: ‘But it actually happened.’”  Having gone this route, I believe him.

3) Do get stuck on the facts

Since Go Away Home is historical fiction, research was critical to creating the time period accurately. Clothes, transportation, hairstyles, technology, colloquialisms. The list of topics I researched and fact checked was long. Readers of historical fiction really care about the details. Writers must, too.

Research also helped shape the story. One example: Family lore was that my grandmother went to a sewing school. Research revealed that the town in question didn’t have a sewing school, rather that young girls apprenticed with seamstresses as a way to learn an important life skill and to meet a man to marry.  The idea that seamstresses were invited to their clients’ house parties had terrific dramatic potential, so I ran with that.

Another bit of fact to fiction. My grandmother took pictures, but the whole part in the book about the main character’s work for a photographer and her relationship with him is entirely fiction.  Most of the book is that way. Tiny fact. Huge fiction.

4) Planner vs. Pantser

Writers fall into two general camps: Planners and Pantsers. I wrote my way into Go Away Home, discovering the story through countless re-writes – by the seat of my pants. I always knew the end of the story; I didn’t know how we got there. In the first draft, the story started in 1900 and my main character Liddie was 10. In the second draft, the story started in 1915 and Liddie was 19. In the published draft, the story starts in 1913 and Liddie is 16. Believe me – those changes create seismic waves throughout the story.

Having used this highly inefficient “pantser” approach once, I’m reasonably certain that I’m a “plotter” at heart and will be more plan-ful in future writing.

5) Fiction is freeing

While I thought it would be easier to start with some facts because that was what I was used to, the reality was there was great freedom in starting with nothing. As the story developed (pantser), it became clear that connections were missing. I needed a scene to show my main character’s inexperience with men. No problem. I made up a guy. I found it was great fun to let my imagination run. Over and over, I filled holes with scenes that met a plot need.

6) New craft to learn

I learned a lot about creative writing as I crafted my memoir, much of which was also applicable to fiction. Dialogue, scene development, visual characterization – all come into play in both genres. Plotting was a new challenge in fiction writing, as I noted earlier. Developing multi-dimensional fictional characters was another challenge.

I used a number of techniques that contributed to creating the real, individual people living in my novel. I visualized people I know who were somewhat like the characters I had in mind. Writing exercises helped to identify key traits and to express them in fresh ways. I used Enneagram research to flesh out the positive and negative traits of various personality types.

From memoir to fiction, from craft to research, I will always be able to learn something new about writing, and for me, that’s great fun.

Go Away Home is available on Amazon in paperback and ebook formats.

Growing Up Country is available on Amazon in paperback, ebook, and audio book formats.

Carol Bodensteiner – Bio

Carol Bodensteiner is a writer who finds inspiration in the places, people, culture and history of the Midwest. After a successful career in public relations consulting, she turned to creative writing. She blogs about writing, her prairie, gardening, and whatever in life interests her at the moment. She published her memoir Growing Up Country in 2008. Her WWI-era, debut novel Go Away Home was acquired by Lake Union Publishing, an imprint of Amazon Publishing. It launches July 7, 2015.

Carol’s online links
Website/blog 
Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook

Write now: think of an interesting ancestor or other person who has influenced your life that you know relatively little about. Drawing on Carol’s experience, write a short story about how you imagine this person’s life might have been. Don’t worry about facts. Just let that story rip. Have fun with this!

Writing on a Hamster Wheel

I’m working on a complicated story right now. It’s total fiction, with no basis in my experience, and I’ve fallen into a trap common to writers of any genre, the hamster wheel syndrome. I know better than to do this, but I’ve been editing the heck out of what I’ve already written rather than forging boldly ahead to write the story. I know where it’s going – I’m just having trouble reading the markers along the path.

Yesterday I had a Skype visit with Ian Mathie, a prolific cross-genre author who pops out stories like a cat birthing a litter. Already this year Mosaique Press has released two new titles by him, making a total of six book-length volumes published over the last three years. This year’s first, Sorcerers and Orange Peels, is his fifth book-length memoir covering grippingly arcane experiences in a remote African village while working as a water engineer. The second, Chinese Take-Out, is a fictitious spy thriller based on valid history. 

As we chatted, I learned that he is nearing completion on two more novels and another memoir. When I mentioned my dilemma, he confirmed what I suspected: “... I just write the story and edit later.”

As much as I value Ian’s advice, this particular bit was old news. Who hasn’t heard some version before? For example,

• Write with your display off to avoid distraction.
• Write by hand.
• Set a time limit for cranking out XXXX number of words.

None of this advice addresses my specific version of the challenge. I do a lot of my writing when not at the keyboard. I think about this story constantly. What would I really do if I were in this situation? Or, How can I get them out of the campground at 4:30 a.m. without waking other campers? Or, Should they eat breakfast or fast? What are the forest service regulations about dogs in the national forest? Does El Sabio need to be on a leash?

This type of question is specific to fiction. If this were memoir, I’d know the answers. But even memoir writers have dilemmas about what to include and how to frame it.

A fresh start

This morning I sat down to write, determined to tackle new content, but wrestling with a few changes needed in earlier material that had become clear. Determined to capture them without spending another morning rewriting, I tried a new trick, writing the edit concepts down, like story ideas. I wanted them in the story near the relevant points. I could have used Comments in Word, but I hate the clunky way Word handles comments.

Instead, I inserted virtual sticky notes. These small text boxes have a pale yellow background, no border and a 2 point shadow on the bottom to make them look real – you know how sticky notes tend to bend upward just a smidge as you apply them. Right-clicking on the box border gave me the option of making this first one the text-box default for this document. To make them feel even more “real,” I created a style to make the text look hand-written. As a final touch, I changed the document layout from even 1.25 side margins to .75 and 1.75, making side margin room for these stickies.

After adding a few notes in the margin and using strike-out to indicate which paragraphs need to be deleted or revised, I forged strongly ahead with the story.

Who knew one little confession to a writing buddy could bear such powerful fruit? That rope he tossed lured me off the hamster wheel. Yes, I knew this stuff before, but sometimes we need a helping hand from a friend to use what we already know.

Write now: Seek advice from writing friends for dealing with your particular form of writer’s block. If the advice doesn’t fit, thank them anyway, and keep looking for a solution. Before you know it, words will be gushing again. Post a comment about your experience with writers block of various sorts, or send me an email. We need to pull together to beat this writing dis-ease.

Memoir as Training Wheels

Mary Gottschalk has proven her versatility as a writer by crafting a highly acclaimed  memoir, Sailing Down the Moonbeam, followed by a novel, A Fitting Place. Both volumes are gutsy stories, and in this guest post Mary explains how writing the memoir prepared her for the challenge of switching to fiction.

Memoir as Training Wheels

Writerly skills are for naught unless you have something you want to write about.

The story behind my memoir—a mid-life coming-of-age experience after I left a successful career to sail around the world at age 40—had steeped in my brain for two decades before I put pen to paper. Not once, in all those years, did the possibility of writing a novel ever occur to me.

But as the memoir evolved and my writing skills improved, I began to see that “the story” was much bigger than “my story.” Sailing across the Pacific Ocean struck me a metaphor for life: you can’t control your environment, the route is not well marked, and you often end up someplace other than where you set out to go. The core lesson of that voyage was that you learn the most when you step outside your comfort zone.

Suddenly I had a story with almost infinite variations. I itched to explore them. Voilà, my first novel about a woman who never leaves home, but is thrust out of her comfort zone when she is betrayed by those she trusts most. It is my first novel, but it will not be my last.

Learning the Writerly Craft

I often think of my memoir as the literary equivalent of training wheels.

With a memoir, the task is far more manageable than with a novel, where every element—story arc, characters, plot points, scenes, point of view—is in flux until “THE END.” With an infinite number of possible events and characters from which to choose, even an experienced writer can have trouble discerning whether a problem lies in the writing, in the story arc and structure, in the pace, in the mix of characters, or some combination of them all. For an inexperienced writer, sorting it out can seem all but impossible.

By contrast, the outer boundaries of my memoir were established long before the first word hit the page. I knew where the story began and ended, who the players were and what role they played. The plot points and scenes were constrained by reality. My job, as author was to connect the dots, not make them up.

Connecting the dots was certainly not enough to guarantee a good memoir. If you believe, as I do, that a well-written memoir should read like fiction, I needed to have much the same set of writerly skills as a novelist. As a neophyte, I was missing many of them when I started out. In retrospect, one of the great advantages of starting out with a memoir was that when things weren’t going right, there were fewer things to be fixed.

As a memoirist, I couldn’t change the trajectory of events, so I had to focus on doing a better job of building tension and establishing cause and effect within the existing storyline. I learned, by trial and error, to recognize which events moved the story forward. I discovered how it felt when my story began to unfold organically. I learned that ruthlessly cutting out events that serve no plot purpose could heighten the emotional truth of the story, with little damage to factual accuracy.

Similarly, I couldn’t create new scenes or new characters out of whole cloth. All I could do was focus on re-writing those that were flat, on learning how to make them come alive, on using them more effectively to carry the plot forward. My focus was on mastering the art of showing vs. telling, on finding the right balance between dialogue and narrative. I learned that what I didn’t say often had as much dramatic potential as what I did say.

Throughout the often painful process of repairing crippled parts of the story, it was easier to push forward, knowing that I had a clear idea of what I wanted the story to look like when it was complete. By the time I began my novel, I had developed solid skills in constructing a story arc, both for the book as a whole and for each chapter along the way. I knew how to use dialogue and develop my characters through judicious use of scenes. I still had a lot to learn, but completing the memoir gave me the confidence to attack one problem at a time, to avoid being overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.

The memoir served as my training wheels. Without it, there never could have been a novel.

Bio

Mary has made a career out of changing careers. After finishing graduate school, she spent nearly thirty years in the financial markets, first in New York, then in New Zealand and Australia, eventually returning to the U.S.

Along the way, she dropped out several times. In the mid-80's, at age 40, Mary and her husband Tom embarked on the three-year sailing voyage that is the subject of her memoir, Sailing Down the Moonbeam. When the voyage ended, she returned to her career in finance, but dropped out again to provide financial and strategic planning services to the nonprofit community. In her latest incarnation, she is a full time writer. Her first novel, A Fitting Place, was released May 1, 2014.

Find A Fitting Place on Amazon and iBooks.

Social Media Links

http://marycgottschalk.com http://twitter.com/marycgottschalk
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http://www.facebook.com/MaryGottschalkWriter
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marygottschalk/
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105973496280247274228/posts

Living to Write the Tale

A novel concept came across my radar lately in the form of a guest post request – the idea of planning to live a life worth writing about. Although I saluted the basic idea, my initial reaction was that such a post belongs in inspirational blogs, and does not fit the focus of this life writing blog. At first glance, it seems to contradict what I’ve said many times, that any life is worth writing about. I also failed to see the connection between establishing visions and goals and writing about life.

The second time I received a proposal about this, something clicked. The idea of taking charge of your life, however many days or years you have left is nothing new. I recognized that people like Elizabeth Gilbert did just that in her best-selling memoir, Eat Pray Love. She planned the sort of adventures she wanted to experience and write about and negotiated a book contract before she bought her plane ticket. A few purists felt that was contrived and perhaps a tad beyond the pale for memoir. But the vast majority applauded her spunk.

What was new this second time was realizing that life writing has powerful tools for making that planning effective, and they’ll work for any age.

These tools work because writing makes thinking visible. Once you see something on the page, whatever form it’s in, it’s easier to understand and manage. Use these tools to explore your hopes and dreams and develop ways to bring them about.

1) Journal: Use your journal to write about hopes and dreams.

• Make a bucket list of 100 things you want to do, visit, see, or experience before you die.
• Journal or freewrite about possible ways of doing these things.
• Explore reasons why you believe you can or cannot do any given one
• Dig into your beliefs and values.
• Record your dreams and explore desires hidden in them.

2) Write stories about things you’ve already done that felt especially fulfilling. Dig more deeply into these stories to explore what elements made them exciting or fulfilling and journal about ways to add more of this element to your life.

3) Write stories about things you dream of doing. Include yourself as the main character and give yourself all sorts of exciting challenges you’d live to have. Live your dreams on the page. Even if you never set foot out of your house, you’ll have much the same sense of fulfillment that you would gain from actually doing whatever it was.

Although it seems a bit eerie, visionaries have known for ages that vividly imagining something tricks the brain into believing it is real or really happened. If you write vividly about doing something, your brain will respond as if you have, and make it easier to “do it again.”

So whatever your age, finances or other perceived limitations, write yourself a life worth writing about, then live it to the fullest and go on to to write the tale.

Write now: pull out paper and pen and write yourself into an adventure you'd love to have in real time. Make it vivid, with full detail and emotion. Write a lot about how you feel as you “live in the story.”. Be exotic and daring. Write it in present or past tense, not future, and avoid any form or thought of “if.” Write this real. Polish the story and cherish it. Then put it away and see what happens.

Image credit: Coolcal2011

Seven Tips for Relaxing into the Story

We all know the feeling: sitting at the computer, arm wrestling words, hammering away at drafts that aren’t working, feeling stuck, threatening to throw our computers off the nearest bridge.

This is the stuff of WRITER’S BLOCK.

Two metaphors come to mind when I think of writer’s block. One is the legend of Michelangelo, chipping away at a block of marble, removing all the marble that isn’t part of the image he perceives to be hiding within the larger block.

The other is of pregnancy. Stories are initially conceived within the womb of memory and mind. The initial draft of a story is akin to a newborn babe, requiring lots of tending and shaping before the child emerges as a self-sufficient individual.

Here’s some good news. While as with chipping away marble or birthing a child, a certain amount of energy and toil is required, you can keep it to a minimum. How?

RELAX INTO THE STORY.

You may have heard of the concept of writing in a state of flow, where your creative powers are at peak potential. Relaxing into the story is one way to achieve a flow state. The decision is yours, and with practice, it gets easier. Use the following tips to thaw the line when your creative flow freezes up.

Take a relaxation break. It doesn’t have to be long. Get up and stretch. Move around the room, or better yet, go for a walk. Take several slow, deep breaths, focusing and your breathing and feeling your body relax as you release them. Relaxing your body and distracting your mind, even for a few minutes, can loosen the flow of new ideas.

Take a shower. Dozens of writers confirm that the flow of warm water over bare skin turns on a fire hose of creative insights and solutions.

Switch writing modes. Take a section that baffles you and draft three or more questions about it, for example

• What am I trying to say here?
• What really matters in this section?
• Why am I feeling so stuck about this?

Write the question at the top of a sheet of blank paper or journal page, and write the first thing that comes to mind. You may be surprised at the answers that pour out of your fingers.

Switch to free writing about your draft. Before you begin, take five or ten minutes to sit quietly with a simple meditation exercise of your choice to clear your mind. If you don’t have a favorite, try focusing on your breathing. Then start writing with your story in mind but no agenda and see where the story goes.

Take Anne Lamott’s advice and “write a shitty first draft.” This is a great way to start, because you’ll know it can only get better.

Play with the story. Revert to childhood and play “Pretend I’m a writer.” Since you are “only pretending”, you aren’t accountable for results, so you can really let ‘er rip. Write wild and crazy, even if your story is real, and even if it’s as serious as a funeral. You may end up tossing it all out, but more likely, you’ll find most of the material is good. You may toss of a great fiction story as a by-product.

Put your feet up. Take a tip from the picture above. If you don’t have a laptop to work on with your feet up, try writing by hand on a clipboard.

You may have observed from the tips above that relaxation is a key component in each. If stressing isn’t working for you, just quit stressing. If you can’t quit stressing, maybe you need to quit writing for the moment. When you feel more relaxed, have another go at it.

Write now: find a draft you’ve abandoned because you got stuck. Pull it out and use the tips above to get it out of the mud pit. Or start a new story about a challenging topic and use the tips to get it rolling.

Merging Life with Fiction

Today we have another international visitor, and a topic with an unusual twist. Mary Hamer explains how writing a historical novel, Kipling & Trix, gave her the opportunity to creatively showcase some personal experience in a setting that may be a more effective than memoir. Read on to learn how this is relevant for memoir writers.

It’s a challenge, writing memoir, to make all the other characters interesting, not just darling moi. One that’s especially hard when we’re writing about experience that’s been difficult or painful. How to give a rounded account, how to keep a balance? Avoid presenting ourselves as the sad victim or proud hero? As readers we all know what a turn-off that can be. And yet we want, we need to write into those painful experiences we’ve had to overcome. They’ve helped to make us who we are.

And they’re powerful: young film-makers in LA used to be told to think of the worst thing that had ever happened to them: and then find a metaphor for it, make a film about that. I’ve got a tip rather like that for memoirists. An exercise you might find helpful. It comes out of my experience of writing Kipling & Trix, my novel about the writer, Rudyard Kipling and his sister, Trix. When I realised that I too had been through an early experience that marked them, I felt I had what it took to tell their story.

Let me explain.

When these two were small—he was just coming up to six and she was three—their parents left them with strangers and went back to India. They meant it all for the best: India’s climate and fevers were dangerous for European children. All the British sent theirs back, if they possibly could. What was unusual in the case of Ruddy and Trix, though, was the treatment they got from the foster-mother their parents left them with.

This woman introduced terror into their lives. When she threatened them, vulnerable as they were, with Hell and the eternal flames in which they would be punished, how could they not be overwhelmed? They’d never heard of Hell, or heaven, for that matter. I’m sure the woman believed, like their parents, that she was acting in the children’s best interests, though she can’t have had much of an instinct for childcare or much understanding of her own desire for power and control.

We have testimony concerning the damage this caused. At the age of seventy, writing his own memoir, Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling was bitter about the fear and confusion planted in him at that time. His sister, Trix, never recognised her own confusion. Worse, she lived it and acted it out. You don’t have to be a therapist to make a connection between the impact of those early experiences on a developing three-year-old brain and the string of later breakdowns that Trix suffered.

As a child, I too had shared a similar experience, though it was decades before I understood how it had affected me. Then, at a time when I’d been working on a book about trauma, so knew enough to take them seriously, I had a flashback. Until then the memory of my Irish mother teaching me about Hell when I was small had always been quite neutral. Without warning, the emotion which had been missing from that memory returned and I found myself dizzy with shock, disoriented, lost. I was back in the body and mind of my five-year-old self.

From that moment, I knew the power of such teaching to undermine. Imagine then how I sat up, reading Kipling’s angry memory of being subjected to the same experience! I’d been studying his life, wanting to write about him but not sure whether I could find anything new to say. There are several excellent biographies. I certainly hadn’t fancied adding to them—all those footnotes! Now I had a new and original angle. One that made sense of Kipling’s lifelong battle with depression and his compulsion to write, to imagine his way out of pain. I decided to write his life in the form of fiction so I could position readers to enter his inner world and understand him from the inside.

I found his sister’s experience just as compelling. Trying to repair ourselves by writing seems to be instinctive. Like her brother, Trix wanted to write. She did succeed in publishing two novels with a number of stories and poems. But over time she lost confidence in her own voice. As a woman writer it was all too easy for me to identify with Trix. Inventing scenes of exhilaration and passages of writer’s block came readily! But I do believe that the story I’ve told about Trix in my novel, tracing her long struggle, is more powerful, more just to the trouble she caused and above all more interesting than any doleful account of my own fight to keep writing.

So where’s the tip for you memoirists out there? Look around. See whether there’s someone else’s story that resonates with your bad stuff. Try telling their story, instead of your own. You could make it an exercise: just a scene, a passage of dialogue. Make it really embodied, concrete, not just inside heads. You may discover fresh perspectives. Better still, you might decide that their story is something you could tell really well, using what you know from your own experience. Why not run with that?

Mary Hamer was born in Birmingham, UK. She has published four books of non-fiction, having spent years teaching in the university. She is married, with grownup children and seven grandchildren. Kipling and Trix is her first novel, and it received the Virgina Prize for Fiction in 2012. Mary’s website: http://mary-hamer.com/

The Writer’s Path

Although 99% of my writing is stored electronically in several places, I have a  filing cabinet in my office, with drawers 24" deep. The back of of them is hard to access. That’s where my oldest stories are stored, the ones I wrote in 1979 on my old Smith Corona electric at the beginning of my journey along my Writer’s Path.

Every few years I pull those stories out and am reminded again how utterly pitiful they are. True, they were fiction. Sort of. I didn’t know about lifestory writing yet, and would not have been brave enough to write openly anyway. Although some content is touching, descriptions were flat as Kansas, dialogue stilted and contrived. They jumped around. And they were preachy. I had an agenda when I wrote those stories and it wasn’t hidden. They were a start.

Twenty-five years ago, I knew nothing of creative writing classes or writing groups, and never thought to look for books on how to write. I was shooting from the finger tips, buoyed by A’s on research papers.

I fared a bit better when I became contributing editor for a local women’s magazine, getting favorable remarks on my stories from casual acquaintances. When my first book, Meetings: Do’s, Don’ts and Donuts, was published in 1997, I was horrified by the first round of editing. That red ink looked like blood in a war zone.  Humiliation rapidly morphed into hope and excitement at the prospect of learning to be a serious writer. That experience was a cram course in writing.

Since then I’ve taken writing courses. I’ve read stacks and piles of books on how to write, spent hundreds of hours reading websites and listening to webinars and podcasts. But even more, I’ve written and written, and I’ve edited hundreds of stories for students. I have written for at least those 10,000 hours presumably required for mastery, though I don’t claim any titles as such. I’m great at description, but I still have much to learn. My path continues to go up and down, rising overall.

Looking back at those early stories, even at early blog posts, I can see that yes, I have learned, slowly at first, then more rapidly as I climbed along that path. I have grown as a writer, and I hope I continue to do so as long as my fingers move. I still can’t crank out a masterpiece on the first try. I edit my own work, sometimes going back months later when it feels like a stranger wrote it. And I continue to rely on feedback from others for points of view I would never, ever think of.

New writers, take heart. While it’s true that some people are born with a gift for eloquence, even they have a learning curve – they just learn faster. Some people are born with an eye for painting, others with the right legs for running. We each have a gift. But even those without “the gift” can learn to produce respectable results.

With practice.
With guidance.
With collaboration.

Take classes. Read, both how-to-write books and memoir or fiction. Join a writing group. Above all, keep writing. You’ll see results much sooner than I did, because it took me forever to find people to help me along the path. You don’t have to wait. Please join our growing community of life writers on the Life Writers Forum on YahooGroups. Sign up for the mailing list of the National Association of Memoir Writers and participate in the free monthly teleseminar roundtables. And keep writing! Climb that writer’s path, one story at a time.

Write now: write a story about your earliest memory if you’ve never written before. Pull out the oldest story you can find if you’ve been writing for awhile and look for ways to improve it. If you don’t see any, show it to a writing buddy and ask for feedback. If you still can’t find any, congratulations. You are ready for publication!

Write for Emotional Impact

In 2007 I wrote two posts, “Color Me Obsessive,” Part 1 and Part 2, about a collaborative effort to compile a comprehensive list of terms describing emotions and feelings. With the help of classes I later taught, that list has grown to include 1100 words.

Many other posts here and on my Writing for the Health of It blog cover the physical and emotional health benefits of labeling and expressing emotion. But there’s a lot more to it. It’s not just for and about you.

Feelings and emotions are a corner stone of connecting with readers. Readers want to know what is going on in a character’s mind and heart. In the case of writing memoir, the only character you can speak directly for is yourself. That doesn’t mean that other people are restricted to the role of paper dolls. You can tell readers what you observe, assume, and hear them say.

The most obvious way of conveying these emotions is to express them directly as adjectives or verbs, but that’s limiting, and tends to keep a story glued flat to the page. In The Emotion Thesaurus Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman explain:

Readers have high expectations. They don’t want to be told how a character feels; they want to experience the emotion for themselves.

In previous posts I’ve urged you to practice tuning in to your own non-verbal cues when you are in various states of emotion, and to closely observe these cues in others. Keeping a journal of your observations gives you golden nuggets to use as you write, helping you satisfy those reader expectations.

However, if you are writing now, you need a huge database now, and you don’t have time to spend a few years observing yourself and others to develop a strong vocabulary for adding this element to your stories, and even if you did, you probably don’t know how to go about it. I didn’t. Fortunately, Puglisi and Ackerman explain:

To convey feelings well, a writer must also utilize nonverbal communication, which can be broken down into three elements: physical signals (body language and actions), internal sensations (visceral reactions) and mental responses (thoughts).

The book goes on to give you tools for doing just that. It begins with a brief section overviewing the three elements, demonstrating how to use them, and describing how to avoid common problems like telling, clichéd emotions, melodrama, over-reliance on dialogue, and more.

Over 90% of the book is devoted to an in-depth analysis of 75 key emotions ranging from adoration to worry. Each word entry begins with a definition, then moves on to exhaustive lists of physical signals, internal sensations, mental responses, cues of acute or long-term (name of emotion), what it may escalate to, cues of suppressed (name of emotion), and a writer’s tip.

When I finally got around to buying this book a few months ago, my heart beat a little faster as I realized that I’d struck gold, perhaps more than they realized when they wrote it. This material will definitely punch up my writing, but it’s also helping me become more perceptive of others and more accurately assess what they may be feeling. Some fortunate people seem to have been born with an innate sense of this. Others of us need all the help we can get to emerge from the “clueless” state.

You may wonder how to reconcile the 1100 emotions on the list I developed with the relatively paltry sum of 75 they assess. As I scan the longer list, I can easily cluster the terms as synonyms for the 75 core emotions in the book, so you can take the long list and reduce any of the other 1025 terms to its nearest core word and go from there. But even if you limit your emotional vocabulary to the 75 and use them in the masterful ways you’ll learn in this book, nobody is going to miss the more elaborate terms.

If you are serious about putting wings on your words, this is a book you’ll want to keep at your fingertips.

Write now: using the words angry, sad and happy, practice writing sentences or paragraphs that express those emotions through body signals – language, actions, or appearance. Write two sets of these, one from your point of view and also as you observe them in somebody else. Then from  your own point of view write about visceral sensations and inner monologue for each of the three emotions. Then look at a few old stories and look for opportunities to add impact by incorporating these additional modes.

Writing Around Obstacles

As anyone who has written more than a dozen life stories or begun a memoir knows, some stories flow onto the page more smoothly and easily than others. What do you do when a story jams up? What do you do when you start writing and realize you aren’t going where you thought you wanted to go?

Let me use this blog post as an example: I originally intended to write it to highlight Andrea Hurst’s AUTHORNOMICS Interview Series, which features weekly interviews with literary agents, editors, authors, marketing experts and more talking about their opinions on the publishing industry, writing, and what a writer needs to know. I wanted to tell you how valuable it can be to learn from experts in other genres as well as your own, and I wanted to alert you that I’m featured in an interview this week.

But that’s not enough to fill an entire blog post, so I decided to add a few more resources, for example a link to Kathy Pooler’s blog, Memoir Writer’s Journey. Kathy is a walking Wikipedia for life writers, with more resource links per post than anyone I know.

Jerry Waxler’s blog, Memory Writer’s Network, is crammed with wisdom and writing lessons gleaned from his deep study of over a hundred memoirs. He includes dozens of author interviews.

I could fill many pages with links to rich blog sites like Shirley Showalter’s Discover the Power of Writing Your Story, or SuziCate’s Water Witch’s Daughter, one of the finest and most consistent examples of scintillating description I’ve found. Linda Joy Myers’ Memories and Memoirs is full of great tips, along with the Women’s Memoirs site.

I save one of the best for last: the National Association of Memoir Writers. I saved this one for last because I hope you’ll click over to learn more about the 3-week NAMW short course I’m offering, beginning next week: Soaring High and Digging Deep: Tools for Refining Your Memoir, which I mention in the AUTHORNOMICS Interview.

That last link brings me back around to my original intent of discussing what to do when your story doesn’t go where you intended: Let it take a detour. Write around the log jam – or through it. If you encounter a flock of sheep on a New Zealand road, unless you plan to sit there for an hour, you must keep moving, very slowly, until you work your way through. You might later edit out extraneous material after you write to the other side, or perhaps you’ll find it has value after all, and leave it in. Today I cut a lot, but left in links I have been meaning to feature, “when the time is right.”

A second alternative is to set aside your keyboard and linear writing in favor of more visual ways of exploring and organizing memories and meaning. I’ve written a number of posts on some of these tools in the past, but reading about them and using them are two different matters. In the Soaring High and Digging Deep class, you’ll have the opportunity to discover their power by using them yourself and share your experience with others to learn even more.

To find out more about the class and memories in general, join me on February 9 on the free NAMW February Roundtable: Memories are Made of This … or Are They? Click here to sign up.

Write Now: Pull out a story you’re jammed up on and write aroudn your logjam. Just freewrite about it and see where you go. Surprise yourself. You can throw it away later, or you may find a gem. Try a tool like inner dialogue,  mind-mapping, or asking yourself questions. Sign up for the class and get help as you practice using new tools.

Photo credit: Susan Mack

Fact or Fiction?

An ongoing debate rages in the memoir world about Truth. What are the limits? How much creative license is too much? Where do you draw the lines between memoir and fiction?

The case for fictionalizing memoir is growing increasingly prevalent and strong. Proponents claim that all memory is fiction to begin with, since memory is based on perception and perception has to be interpreted. No two people perceive things exactly the same way, ergo perception is fiction. Thus all memoir is fiction, so we might as well call it that to begin with and avoid controversy.

Other positive points the fiction camp claims include:

Freedom to disguise characters and place, thus shielding yourself from disgruntled acquaintance, relatives, and lawsuits.

Freedom to embellish details as you wish.

Freedom to distort circumstances to enhance a point.

Freedom to write in third person and include other people’s points of views.

Freedom from concerns about inaccurate or incomplete memory.

Some truth can be expressed more poignantly in fiction than sticking to real life circumstances would allow.

Your muse has more room to dance, play, and toss out delectable insights when unfettered by reality constraints.

These are all valid points and they have artistic merit. There are times when fiction is a powerful alternative. But if you look closely, you’ll notice nearly all those points are based on fear. When the fiction decision is made from fear, it may be a cop-out. This fear may stem from the possibility of censure or offense, from insecurity about writing skills, or from anticipated consequences for baring your soul.

A case can be made that these are all surmountable, and that the rewards of writing your truth in your voice as your true story are likely to be greater than the rewards of writing fiction. Some point out that writing fiction is no guarantee that people won’t attribute it all to your personal experience anyway, as Kathryn Harrison found out when she wrote The Kiss.

Harrison’s first published book was a novel, Thicker Than Water, about a consensually incestuous relationship between a man and his twenty-year-old daughter. Critics claimed it was really a memoir. In truth it was fiction, though based on her own true story. According to her account while keynoting a writer’s conference I attended a few years ago, after writing her third novel, she became blocked and had to write the incest story as a memoir, The Kiss, to get it out of her system. Critics read the memoir and claimed it was fiction. She read parallel passages at the conference, and the memoir was more sparsely written with fewer details.

So how do you know which form will work best for you? It’s always a personal decision and the author’s choice. If you want more information to guide you through this choice, be sure to sign up for the 2011 Fall Memoir Writing Telesummit sponsored by the National Association of Memoir Writers. Eight experts will join NAMW founder Linda Joy Myers to discuss various facets of topic Truth or Lie — On the Cusp of Memoir and Fiction.

Click here to see the list of speakers, times, and topics, and sign up for this free event. Even if you can’t listen live, everyone who signs up will receive a link to listen to replays.

Write now: pull out a favorite memory and write the story as fiction to explore the difference it can make.

Beware of the Elephants

I had a head start on Memorial Day. Four weeks ago my siblings and I gathered with our spouses and most of our offspring to celebrate our father’s 90th birthday. I joked with him that being at the party was a little like attending his own funeral, because he got to hear so many people recount flattering memories of him. He laughingly agreed. It was a little like attending his own funeral in a couple of other odd ways: it took place in an events center in the cemetery, and he wore a black suit – a story we’ll be telling for a couple of generations.

Not surprisingly, the entire weekend was full of stories of long ago. The ones we talked about were the good times, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one making choices about which ones to bring up. I know we aren’t the only family with a herd of wild elephants living in our midst. There are the things we talk about and the things we let slide. in our case this seems fitting since, due to geographical diversity, we seldom see each other. (Twenty-five people convened from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, New Mexico, Texas, Illinois, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.)

On further thought I’ve realized that while it makes sense to stick to the smooth path at gatherings, the things we didn’t talk about contain the most meat and the juiciest story content. While we have plenty of hilariously funny stories, the gripping ones are guarded by the herd of elephants always nearby.

The question is how to go about this. Elephants can be dangerous, even deadly, as my husband and I learned from our guides in Chobe National Park in Botswana. Safari drivers are wary around elephants, keeping a respectful distance, a foot near the gas pedal, and avoiding confrontation whenever possible. Elephants are usually sedate, but you never know what will set one off, and they are a force to be reckoned with. Similar respect for relationship elephants is also well-advised.

Below is a list of suggestions for how to write honestly about the “good stuff” and still be welcome at family gatherings:

• Keep your writing private. This is always a safe strategy. You can always change your mind and share private material, but you can’t retract it once it’s been read.

• Limit distribution. As long as you confine readership to a limited audience such as a trusted writing group, you should be able to safely get the support and feedback you desire. You might also share with trusted family members, but that gets trickier. Things have a way of slipping out unexpectedly.

• Let the main characters read it privately. Sometimes reading a story is a powerful way of opening dialogues that otherwise would not take place, resulting in healed relationships and perhaps support for publishing your story more widely. But there are no guarantees. You’ll have to weigh the risks and make your own decision.

• Wait until the main character dies. You’ll probably outlive your parents, but depending on current ages, you may not want to wait that long. Ditto if your age group is involved.

• Wait until you die. If you are writing strictly for family, and especially if you have dark secrets of your own you’d prefer to to never confront, this may be a good choice. The Bridges of Madison County can shed light on this option, even though it is a novel rather than a memoir. Pay close attention to the reaction of the children Francesca leaves behind.

• Write your story as fiction. This option can free you to say a lot of things you might otherwise keep hidden. But do realize you’ll have to make drastic changes to keep insiders from inferring “the facts” behind your Truth.

• Tell your story to the world and let the chips fall where they may. You may find that it’s not nearly the big deal you thought it was.

Any number of variations are possible on these themes. Write your stories, privately at first, and then let your heart be your guide as you move down the path. Learn what you can from the writing, and then let compassion be your guide.

Write now: Recall some elephants from gatherings you have attended, whether they involve family or others. Write about these elephants, considering various points of view. See what you can learn from your stories, what new meaning may arise.

Photo: Sharon Lippincott

Tell It Like It Wasn’t

You know how you keep hearing the importance of writing your Truth, and telling it the way you experienced and lived it? And you know how sometimes that keeps your story bottled up inside you? Here’s a radical idea: tell it like it wasn’t. Now before I go any further with this, let me be clear: I am not advocating falsehood, nor do I condone misleading people. But it is true than sometimes you can best convey Truth by breaking away from truth.

The most common reason for memoir writers to lapse into fiction is to protect the privacy and identities of other people in your story. You may do this from compassion and integrity or from the desire to stay out of court. You can tell the Truth of what happened while altering enough facts to protect privacy and minimize damage to relationships and emotions – your own included.

Another reason is to gain the freedom to tell as story like you wish it had been. Perhaps you’ve always wished you’d signed up for the tennis team,  gone whitewater rafting on that outing with your buddies, or had the perfect come-back when that bully dissed you in front of all your friends. You may regret a road not taken. On the page you can explore those other branches. It may not take a novel to cover these bases. Fictitious short stories can be immensely rewarding and allow you to express the Truth of the option your wiser self would choose today. Write the story, write your dream. Postpone decisions about who, if any, your readers will be.

A third reason springs from limitations of writing in first person. Sticking precisely to fact precludes the possibility of reporting anyone else’s thoughts. In memoir, or first-person fiction, it’s an absolute no-no to tell the reader that “Sally deliberately told me a lie about that. She knew she was planning to … .” You can’t know that. You can tell us what you assumed, or what Sally told you, or someone told you Sally told them, but you can’t impute motives.

Finally, wrapping Truth in fiction, telling it in third person and a new setting distances it from you, scrubbing issues of personality from the equation. Some who may reject what you said as fact may be open to hearing your fiction. In a sense you are mythologizing your experience.

When you have tough Truth to tell, universal messages, separate the Truth from the facts and consider telling it like it wasn’t.

Write now: think of one of those times when you think, “If I knew then what I know now …” Write the story as it would have happened if you had known then what you do know now. Be wildly creative. It’s time for your Inner Censor to take a nap and your muse to come out and play.
Image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com