Performing emotional surgery on ourselves

Recently I read a memoir that made the New York Times bestseller list—but I never got to know the author—the main character. I applaud her for her long and noble deed, but she didn’t endear herself to me. She didn’t let me know her enough to care about her.

Do you know what I mean? Have you ever struggled to get into the main character and care for him?

Here’s the author’s problem: Her memoir read as if it were a report. An essay. It lacked emotional depth because she failed to let readers into her emotions and thoughts and reactions.

She wrote about living through tough situations and relationships and choosing to do brave, selfless acts, but she kept her emotions on the surface. She remained a one-dimensional person. Rather like a stick person.

Readers need more than facts and action.

We memoirists need to show (not tell) our weaknesses, failures, and conflicts—as well as joys and successes and fulfilled dreams and answered prayers. When we describe how we felt during those times, we let readers inside our hearts and emotions.

• What was the event’s or person’s significance?
• What was at stake? Spell out possible outcomes, potential consequences.
• How did you feel about the situation you were in? What sensations zinged through your insides?
• Did you ask yourself questions? Pray? Squeal? Tell yourself to remain calm? Or…?
• Did you have conversations about the event or person? If so, share that through dialogue.
• Re-create the tension, or relief, you felt at the time.
• If this was a turning point, a defining moment, let readers experience it with you.

Avoid exaggeration and over-the-top drama. But if you cried, make your readers cry—either tears of joy or sorrow.

If you asked hard questions and got no answers, let readers struggle with your lack of answers.

If you laughed out loud, make your readers laugh, too.

If our heart raced, make your readers’ hearts race.

The memoirist I mentioned at the top, the gal whose book kept me at a distance, can teach us important lessons:

Here’s what I suspect the author failed to do what successful memoirists must do:

Good memoirists must be willing to invest time in searching their hearts and memories.

Sometimes we need to dedicate years to that process—reliving and questioning and pondering and unraveling and connecting the dots.  

We do a doggie head-tilt, we examine what we didn’t have the courage to examine before, we reevaluate, we ask ourselves if we should now come to a different conclusion. We try to make sense of it all.  

And we dig deeper still: We ask God to help us discover what He was up to in the midst of it—and from beginning to end.

In the process, we’ll probably need to do another doggie head-tilt. Sometimes He uses a seemingly insignificant event or acquaintance to bring us to one of life’s most significant turning points.

Digging around in our memories to answer the question, “What was God doing?” can take a long time, as does the reflecting stage, but the hard work of finding answers can lead you to hidden, valuable treasures! That’s where you’ll realize, more than ever before, that God, in His goodness, has been loving and leading you all along.

Deep retrospection and meaningful reflection can feel like cutting open old wounds.

The reflection and introspection required to write a memoir can feel like performing emotional surgery on ourselves.

Like actual surgery, the goal is to

look deep inside to see what’s going on,

and then to fix what needs fixing,

and then put everything back together in the right order,

and in the right place,

and to stitch the “patient” back together.

After that comes healing and strengthening.

And after the contemplation, the digging, the searching, the musing, the mulling over—we climb up the next step: We find words to describe what we’ve learned years later—those gems we’ve unearthed, all the answers we found to the questions we’ve been asking. When we put our stories into words, God uses them to encourage and inspire others, our readers.

Readers yearn for authenticity. Be vulnerable with your readers. Honest about the real you. Make them care about you.  We must let readers into our hearts and thoughts and fears and hangups and questions and agonies—and we let them into our joys and victories, too.

“… Characters come alive when you pick the particularly telling details that can make the difference between a cardboard character and a real live person,” writes Judith Barrington (Writing the Memoir).  

We avoid coming off as a “cardboard character” by finding words and penning unique details—not only physical, but especially emotional, psychological, and spiritual details—that describe us and our experience and the process we’ve gone through from beginning to end in our memoir.

Angela Ackerman writes that a “‘shared experience’ is what powers up that empathy link between the reader and the character. Add this to emotion-rich dialogue, and . . . snippets of the character’s thoughts and internal sensations (visceral reactions), and we can convey a powerful emotional moment!”

Angela suggests the following:

“What did your body do? How did it express itself? What did you feel inside—a heaviness in the chest, pain twisting your throat? Lightheadedness from a surge of adrenaline? Skin sensitivity? Recreate the emotional moment and allow your senses to take over. Then, write it down.”

Let’s look again at one of Angela’s points: “Recreate the emotional moment and allow your senses to take over.” To help you with that, don’t miss my blog post about Method Writing, a practice Bill Roohrback wrote about in Writing Life Stories.

A final note: We all do our best to write well, but we still need critique partners, beta readers, and editors to help perfect our efforts. They can take the fresh look that we can’t—we’re too close to our own stories. Read more at Have You Lined Up Your Beta Readers Yet?

I recommend you sit at Angela Ackerman’s feet—be a regular reader of the blog she and Becca Puglisi publish, Writers Helping Writers. Both share a wealth of wisdom, experience, and instruction. Usually they address writers of fiction, but almost everything pertains to memoir, too.