How to Find Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc (There May Be More Than One)

Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash

Today’s post is by Bonny Reichert, author of How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty.

It was a frigid January afternoon, four years ago, when, after a pile of earlier drafts, I sent the version of my book proposal that my agent finally deemed “ready.” We had met at an online speed-dating-type event for authors and agents and, after signing, we’d been working together on this one document for about six months. Many parts of the proposal, like the pitch and the summary, the description of audience and the proposed marketing plan, had come together relatively easily.

“But how are the outline and chapter summaries coming along?” said my agent—I’ll call her Jenn—every time we spoke on the phone. “What about the narrative arc?”

“Right,” I said firmly. “I’m working on that.”

“Good,” Jenn said. “Because honestly, nothing is more important than the arc.”

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The book, How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love and Plenty (released today, with Ballantine PRH in the US and Appetite PRH in Canada) is a food memoir about my experience growing up in the shadow of a traumatic family history, and my journey toward discovering who I am in spite—and because—of that history.

My dad almost starved to death during the Holocaust, and it was stepping into the kitchen and becoming a chef myself that ultimately helped me find joy and make peace with the past. But back when Jenn and I were working on the proposal, I knew the book was about food and my dad and resilience and the Holocaust, and not much more. A progression? An arc? Truthfully, I had no idea.

What I did know was a bit about how to fake it ’til you make it. So, I began to map out chapters, corresponding to key events from my past, as well as foods and food memories that were significant. Soon I noticed clusters: a large cluster of events (and flavors) from childhood; another forming around a short trip to Warsaw I took with my dad as a younger adult; a third big cluster from a more recent solo trip to the ghettos and concentration camps of Poland. From there it wasn’t much of a leap to see that the book would begin in childhood and end sometime after that second trip to Poland. To find the arc, all I had to do was connect the dots chronologically, right?

For the proposal, I managed to create chapter summaries that were fluid enough to convince Jenn that I had the arc figured out, and good enough to get the unwritten book sold at auction in both the US and Canada with a few sample chapters. It was a better outcome than I could have imagined, and I was thrilled. It was not until I started to write in earnest that I realized I had a problem.

The problem was not the first third of the book which, in my outline and summaries, was too long and too detailed but still well defined. Nor was it the last third which, once I had come up with my structure, came to me in a rush, almost fully formed. No, fellow writers, it was the middle, which was a thin rickety bridge I was trying to build between the solid poles of beginning and end.

A memoir is not the story of your life, but a story from your life. I knew this and yet, I didn’t really understand it until I found myself attempting to write my way from childhood to midlife without stopping at every heart break, career change and childbirth along the way.

I did my best, and I got my first draft in on time. When it came back from my editor, it had many admiring and encouraging notes, but the ones that said, about some of the middle chapters, “Why is this here?” and “What does this mean?” were the most confounding. And the most important.

I struggled with the next draft for several weeks, until my editor helped me realize I had to take the middle of the book apart to liberate it from the constraints of strict chronology. I had to cut and regroup and sharpen. I had to transform real life into a narrative path specific to my book, my themes and my message.

Here are some of the tools I used to make that transformation:

Chart the emotional journey of the book—try to draw it. Where is the inciting incident, rising action, climax(es), denouement? Where is the book flat, emotionally?Dig deeper into those flat or saggy sections. Use reverse outlining to discover what those passages are saying and doing within the context of the book’s journey.Move problem sections around according to narrative and emotional logic. For example, when I reverse outlined, I noticed I had a few different moments of “existential crisis” sprinkled over seventy pages. Once I decided to group them together thematically, the section began to sing.Understand there will be many things you want to say that don’t fit the book you’re writing. What is emotionally resonant in your life is not necessarily the same as what resonates for the reader inside the world of the book.Don’t try to force your story into any particular shape. The point is just that you’re working deliberately and charting a path with intention. Some “arcs” are not arcs at all but zig zags, spirals, reverse arcs, etc.

How to Share an Egg was in copy when I was preparing to speak at a memoir conference on this exact topic last spring. It had been several weeks since I’d looked at the book, and I pulled out the bound pages my publisher had sent and studied them with a little more distance. It was only then that I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. The book doesn’t have one single arc, but rather, a series of them: There is the main arc that carries the plot about the character (me) and her journey to come to terms with her family’s past (the Holocaust), and then there are others—a “food arc,” that traces the culinary journey of the book; a “dad arc” that charts the changing relationship between father and daughter; a romantic arc that tracks a divorce and the relationship after it, etc. The arcs overlap, and they peak and valley at slightly different times, but overall, their shapes are similar, resolving, for the most part, by the end of the book.

Before my talk last spring, I charted these arcs on a sheet of paper: black for the main arc, pink for food, blue for the Dad arc, and green for romance. Together they look like a colorful mountain range. I keep this diagram taped to the wall near my desk as I begin work my next book. It’s not that it’s going to help in any practical way—every book is different, and I know there are no shortcuts. Still, it makes me happy to know my creative mind was making something logical and organized before my quotidian self even had a clue.

Learn more about How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty by Bonny Reichert.