How Reading Fiction is Helping Me Write My Memoir
Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@kathypooler
“A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I’m creating a form of fiction. “~ Isabel Allende
How Reading Fiction is Helping Me Write My Memoir
One of my greatest struggles in writing a memoir which spans twenty-five years is to balance scenic details with narrative summary. Key moments are highlighted in scenes but there are stretches of time that need to be summarized and condensed. They all need to feed into the overarching theme of the story which , in my case, is :
Hope steps in when a mother’s love for an addicted child is not enough.
A memoir needs to read like novel…
So I decided to refresh my brain with the fiction techniques that draw me into a story.
I turned to the masters…
The recent death of acclaimed novelist Tom Wolfe piqued my interest in his work and I checked out one of his novels from the library, I Am Charlotte Simons (2004) . Since the seven-hundred and thirty-eight pages was intimidating, I sat down to read the first few pages to see if it was worth my time.
And I kept reading for thirty more pages. After I returned home, I found myself looking forward to getting back to it. While every writer has their own voice and you can’t really teach another person how to write, I knew there was something I could learn about storytelling that would help me with my memoir.
After one hundred and fifty pages I not only committed to finishing this book but reading it reinforced the lessons for my own writing.
What is it about his writing that makes me want to keep turning the pages?
*The story starts with action and appeals to the senses. Here’s the first sentence of the prologue:
Every time the men’s-room door opened, the amped -up onslaught of Swarm, the band banging out the concert in the theater overhead, came crashing in, richocheting off all the mirrors and ceramic surfaces until it seemed twice as loud.
*The prose is descriptive and free-flowing.
It was a mild May night, with a pleasant breeze and a full moon whose light created just enough of a gloaming to reveal the singular, wavelike roof of the theatre, known officially here at the university as the Phipps Opera House, one of the architect Eero Saarinen’s famous 1950s modern creations.
*He reveals the characters through sensory details and makes me care about them. In this case, the protagonist, Charlotte Simmons is at her high school graduation preparing to deliver her valedictorian speech
The subject of all this attention sat in a wooden folding chair in the ranks of the senior class, her heart beating fast as a bird’s. It wasn’t that she was worried about the speech she was about to give. She had gone over it so many times,she had memorized and internalized it just the way she had all those lines when she played Bella in the school play, Gaslight. She was worried about two other matters entirely: her looks and her classmates.
*One hundred and fifty pages in, the plot slowly revealed itself in layers, while steadily building tension.
I know that sweet, book-smart, small-town Charlotte is headed to a major university, filled with streetwise, beer-drinking students who care more about sports and partying than about academics. A universal coming-of -age tale. The conflict is brewing.
As a post-script, I did get through the 738 pages, often times skipping over the details but by then I felt as if I knew these characters intimately. It brought home the point that the right amount of detail keeps the reader engaged.
How can a memoir use fiction techniques to draw in a reader?
Tobias Wolff brings me right into this scene in This Boy’s Life (p.136) when he begs his drunken step-father, Dwight, to slow down while driving:
“Please,Dwight,” I said
“Please,Dwight,” he said.
And then he took us through the turns above the river,tires wailing, headlights swinging between cliff and space, and the more we begged him the faster he went only slowing down for a breath after the really close calls, and then laughing to show he wasn’t afraid.”
His whole memoir is filled with action scenes like this that put me right in his skin and make me want to keep reading . I am not only with him in that backseat , I also have a vivid sense of Dwight’s character through his details. It is a great example of what novelist Gail Gaymer Martin notes in her article on Descriptive Scenes,that selecting the right amount of detail-not too much or too little-is important in building tension and moving the story along. Bringing the reader into the scene requires a careful selection of words and details at the right pace.
Andrew Peterson, author of First To Kill talks about how scenes advance the story. He describes his publishing journey,reinforcing the importance of never giving up. I really liked his reference to Joe Jackson’s quote from Field of Dreams,”If you build it, they will come” He shows how his persistence and multiple rewrites eventually paid off. That’s encouraging to me in the writer’s trenches attempting to find the right words, details and action to move my story along.
As I continue to write my story I focus on sensory details, the right words and the action that will keep my reader close to me in my scenes. In the meantime, I will keep building, so the readers will come
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How about you? What do you think moves a story along? For memoir writers,does reading fiction help you in writing memoir?
I’d love to hear from you. Please join in the conversation below~
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This Week:
Thursday, June 7, 2018:
“Writing Authentically About Difficult or Painful Topics by Wendy Brown-Baez: A WOW Blog Tour.”
Wendy is the author of Catch A Dream, the fictional story of a woman’s healing journey from her homeland in war-torn Palestine to Israel.
Next Week:
Monday, June 11, 2018:
“Reading , Writing and Taboo Topics by Memoirist Nancy Richards”
Nancy is the author of two memoirs about dealing with forgiveness after childhood abuse. Mother, I Don’t Forgive You and her most recent one, Mother , It’s Hard to Forgive You
