Category: Books

Books

A-Z Challenge: K is for…

…Keep on walking

This post is one of 26 I am writing for the A-Z Challenge on the subject of writing a memoir. I’m not an expert in writing memoirs, but I’m exploring the topic with thoughts about writing one, and am happy to share the fruits of my exploration.

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Inevitably, when you’ve written some of your memoir and have a lot still to go, your enthusiasm will wane. You will have doubts about where it’s all leading and whether it’s really going anywhere.

Linda Joy Myers and Brooke Warner call this the Muddy Middle.

And the advice? To keep going, of course. Persevere and eventually the sun will shine and you will find dry land.

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Tags Brooke Warner, keep on, Linda Joy Myers, muddy middle, perseverance

Books

A-Z Challenge: J is for…

…Journey

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I love this song, which is about the difficult journeys the Jews of Ethiopia undertook to reach Israel in the 1980s and ’90s.

Writing any book is a journey. Writing a memoir is a journey that’s likely to be full of emotion. As you travel through the episodes that make up the memoir, you discover and confront truths you hadn’t grasped before. You have to be prepared for the journey to change you.

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Tags change, journey, truths

Books

A-Z Challenge: I is for…

…Insight

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To write a memoir, you need to have reached the point where you have insight into episodes from your past that you didn’t have before. This is another reason why you need detachment.

Here’s an episode from my past, aged 15, plus a recent insight:

Mrs B is organising a skiing trip and I’m booked to go. I’ve never been skiing and I’ve never been able to go on a school trip before. I’m very excited.

Mum returns from the parents’ meeting.

“I met R’s mother and we had a long chat. She told me R is also going on the skiing trip.”

I nod. I don’t tell Mum, but I’m expecting trouble. R doesn’t like me. I don’t know why, but I know she doesn’t.

A few days later Mum tells me that Mrs B phoned her. “She’s very sorry, but she’s had to cancel the trip.”

I don’t believe that and my doubts are confirmed by L who suggested I joined the trip in the first place and is still going. How could Mrs B have lied like that?

Decades later, I don’t think Mrs B lied. I think my mother lied because she wanted to protect me from the truth, although really she didn’t protect me from anything and it would have been much better if we could have talked it through.

Note: I love to read your comments, especially when they’re attached to the right post. Please remember the Comments button is at the top of this post.

Tags insight, school, skiing trip

Books

A-Z Challenge: H is for…

…Humour

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You might be describing terrible events, but somewhere in the memoir there needs to be humour – for your own sake as well as for the reader’s. Readers need a break from all the tension, and so do you.

Probably the time you’re most likely to laugh is when you’re looking back at the former you. This is one reason why you need detachment.

Note: I love to read your comments, especially when they’re attached to the right post. Please remember the Comments button is at the top of this post.

Tags detachment, humour, looking back

Books

A-Z Challenge: G is for…

… Gornick’s Situation and Story

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In her book, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, Vivian Gornick differentiates between these two easily-confused terms. Actually, it’s not the terms that people confuse, because as far as I know Gornick is the only one who uses them. It’s the concept that there are two things going on.

Gornick’s “situation” is the collection of scenes, the where, who and what. The story is the emotional journey the narrator travelled while traversing the scenes. This is what the reader really wants to understand. Without a story, the situation has no interest, or not much.

To illustrate a major point in the book, Gornick describes a speech that moved her while others didn’t. When she analysed the reasons why this particular speech was different from the rest, she came to the conclusion that the speaker was able to choose who she needed to be for the purpose of the speech. That is, out of all her roles in her life, she chose the one that fitted the theme of her speech and stuck to it. She says, “Because the narrator knew who was speaking, she also knew why she was speaking.”

Who am I for the purpose of my memoir? I think I have to be a person who has been affected by social anxiety. The fact that I’m a wife, a mother, a sister, a cousin, a friend, a maths graduate, a former computer programmer, a dancer, a chief cook and bottle washer and more is only relevant if any of these roles have some bearing on social anxiety, or if social anxiety has affected these roles.

Do you know who you are?

Tags emotional journey, situation, story, Vivian Gornick, who, why

Books

A-Z Challenge: F is for…

… Feelings

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I’ve already made one whole attempt at writing a memoir and a start at another. Each time I brought another chapter, another set of scenes, to my writing group, they said, “But how did you feel?” And I was stumped. Because when these things were going on, I didn’t have any great thoughts. Generally, I felt sad but was sure I deserved what others did to me, that I was somehow to blame for it all. But each scene? They were just things I thought I had to suffer in silence. I didn’t really know what my feelings were.

This is probably the main factor that’s holding me back from trying again. How do I write about feelings that weren’t apparent to me at the time? How can I keep the reader’s attention without feelings?

Sorry, I don’t have any answers today. Maybe you do….

As always, or even more so, I’m looking forward to reading your comments. But please remember the comments button is at the top. If you comment on the wrong post, I have to go through a long procedure to move the comment, and I’d rather not. Thank you.

Tags feelings

Books

A-Z Challenge: E is for…

… Empathy

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How do you create empathy in your memoir? You certainly need it if you’re going to carry the reader along with you. It’s not by making yourself into a victim – not now, anyway. Readers can empathise with a child who has been a victim, but not with the adult who has remained a victim. By the end of the book, they want to see signs of positive change, however many setbacks there have been along the way.

How do you create empathy in the childhood scenes? By bringing them alive. Include conversation, little details, sounds, smells and, above all, feelings. Now you know what the next post is about.

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My next A-Z post will appear on Sunday.

Tags empathy, positive change, victim

Books

A-Z Challenge: D is for…

… Detachment

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There are two (or more) I’s involved in a memoir: the I that’s writing the memoir and the I that takes part in every scene in the memoir. It’s important to keep the two separate. You are not the same person you were when the scenes you are describing took place.

Detachment is what enables you to laugh at your former self and to understand truths that were not clear at the time. We’ll be coming back to these traits in future posts.

Detachment is what enables you to recreate yourself. I’ll leave you with a quote by Orson Scott Card:

You know how writers are… they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

Tags detachment, the other I

Books

A-Z Challenge: C is for…

…Craft

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How do we get from starting to write to a ready-to-publish memoir? Many qualities make up the craft of memoir writing:

Memory
Detachment
Insight into the past
Story-telling
Humour
Ability to draw the reader in
Order
Logic
Understanding
Perseverance

I’ll be discussing these in future posts. Can you think of any to add?

Edit: Many thanks to Angela Brown and Rosalind Adam who added these:

Honesty
Self-belief

Tags craft, qualities

Books

A-Z Challenge: B is for…

…Beginnings

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Where do I begin? Every beginning is hard to write, whether it’s the beginning of a fictional story, an essay or a memoir. The beginning has to draw the reader in, to make the reader want to finish the page, the chapter, the book.

But the good thing is: the beginning doesn’t have to be written at the beginning. You can write it in the middle, at the end or whenever you like. It’s often easier to write it at the end when you know what it has to introduce.

Tags writing the beginning