How and when to write the seared, charred, blistered parts

 

I’ve seen this happen too often and saw it again when my friend began writing his memoir—by writing about the most traumatic year of his life. Yikes!

 

When memoirists start by writing the super-painful stuff, too often they become overwhelmed all over again with the devastation they endured—and soon they give up writing altogether. Don’t let that happen to you.

 

Please hear this: Begin your memoir by writing your easy stories—the happy stories, the funny incidents, the fascinating experiences. That way you can ease your way into both writing and doing the reflecting that memoir is.

 

You don’t have to write your chapters/vignettes in the same order they’ll appear in your completed memoir. Write them in any order that’s easiest for you. Later you can organize them in the best way.

 

My heart wants you to fall in love with:

• remembering,
• and pondering,
• and discovering the good stuff you overlooked in the past,
• and making sense of what used to mystify you,
• and with writing,
• and with choosing just the right words,
• and with fashioning your story as a gift for others.

 

For now, give yourself permission to begin with easy stories. Tackle your hard stories later.

 

Even if you’re not physically putting your aching, tender, throbbing accounts into words (with pen and ink or on a computer screen), you are working on the story. I can’t explain how that works but, behind the scenes, your heart and brain are working on how to write the troubling stuff.

 

Let your heartache marinate for a few weeks or months—or however long it takes. Pour out your heart to God. Wait patiently before Him, putting your hope in Him (Psalm 62:5-6).

 

He bends down and listens to you, He hears and answers (Psalm 116:1-2).

 

Stay alert. One day you’ll be vacuuming the car, or playing catch with your grandson, or folding laundry, and you’ll have one of those A-HA! moments.

 

Or maybe you’ll hear a song, or someone else’s story, or a Bible verse, or a poem and, out of the blue, God speaks, or maybe nudges, offering you insight and clarity about your hurtful experiences.

 

When that happens, listen. Jot down notes to yourself. You’ll be mining treasures. Later you can use your notes to compose your rough draft.

 

Speaking of your rough draft: It is for your eyes only.

 

Because of that, you can write it all—the seared, charred, blistered parts, the questions you never had the courage to ask aloud, the doubts you kept secret, the anger you kept bottled up. You will revise your memoir numerous times before you publish it so keep this in mind: You can always delete, or revise, the bleeding and raw portions of your first draft. For now, just wrestle them into writing, for your own sake.

 

Invite God to sit close beside you as you write. He wants to help you remember, maybe to see things differently, to notice the ways He helped in the past and continues to help you day by day, year by year. He wants you to see there’s a good place for you on this side of your pain.

 

Memoirist Kathleen Pooler said this of writing her two memoirs: “When I first started writing out my stories, facing painful memories was difficult. As I kept writing, new insights revealed themselves to me . . . just through the process of facing them and writing about them. I experienced healing through reading my own words and began to feel I was on the other side of pain.”  (Kathleen Pooler, Ever Faithful to His Lead and Just the Way He Walked)

 

Make ‘em cry along with you as you cry

 

For the past few weeks, we’ve considered Wilkie Collins’s advice to writers: “Make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em wait.” (If you missed earlier posts about “make ‘em laugh,” see list and links below.)

 

If you can make ‘em cry, you’ll pull readers into your story.

 

And you do want them to read your story, all the way to the end.

 

Why?

 

Because whether readers realize it or not, they’re looking to you for answers and direction. They want to know how you coped with life—sorrows and joys, victories and defeats, despair and hope.

 

They’re looking for a takeaway—that part of your story they will always hold close because it changed their lives.

 

Be sure your memoir has takeaways: your insights that they can apply to their own lives, lessons you learned that will guide them in the future, a resource for living life well, a reason to hope, a reason to trust God, a better understanding of themselves.

 

So let’s get back to making ‘em cry. That’s one way to leave readers with the blessings of your takeaways but, to receive them all, readers have to keep reading, and you can keep them reading if you make ‘em cry along with you as you cry.

 

Oh, but it’s hard to write about our life’s most painful parts!

 

The ache. Heartbreak. Grief. Anguish.

 

So many of us avoid writing the painful stuff.

 

Am I describing you? Have you been unable to write about the stuff that opens up old wounds?

 

How many of your stories remain untold?

 

Mick Silva says writers must be willing to take a chance—to risk examining our hard bits and pieces—and then to risk writing about them.

 

“That necessity to risk is why writing takes courage above all else,” he says.

 

“Risking pain to seek the deeper truths about yourself and life, risking sharing what you know.

 

“Risking paying close attention when you experience pain or fear, knowing it means you’ve been chosen to understand, express and explain this particular view of it best. . . .” (Mick Silva)

 

Writing about our sorrows can bring us healing (more on that in coming weeks), but there’s more—there’s another layer to your storytelling: God can use our stories.

 

God even planned for us to share our stories:

 

2 Corinthians 1:3-4 tells us that the God of all comfort reaches out to comfort us in our troubles so that we can comfort others with the comfort we have received from Him.

 

That means writing about how God helped you through painful experiences is a sacred calling, a ministry.

 

Take, for example, Dana Goodman’s experience:

 

“During my intense grieving moments, other people’s stories gave me words to describe the ache that was indescribable. They gave me hope that a new day would dawn, and I would not be stuck in the black forever.” (Dana Goodman, author, In the Cleft: Joy Comes in the Mourning)

 

And so, we write.

 

“In a world that groans of brokenness

and screams of injustice,

it matters that we hold our creative candles

right up next to the pain.”

Settle Monroe

 

A word of caution:

 

Writing about heartaches and wounds can be excruciating—because to write them requires us to relive them. If we haven’t healed enough to write those stories, we must wait until we can relive them and write them.

 

Next week we’ll look at one technique to help us write—but only when we are ready.

 

In the meantime, pray and ask God to help you write the painful stuff. Doing so can help your healing and can help readers, too—maybe in ways you could never have imagined.

 

Related posts:

Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait

Humor in your memoir: “like a sneak attack”

Using humor the right way in memoir

Make ‘em laugh: an instant connection

 

 

Make ‘em cry

 

“Our best stories evoke an emotional response, touch a deep cord, and motivate action and change,” writes Peter Guber, famous storyteller.

 

Think about a time when a story—a book, a movie, a speech, a personal conversation—brought you to tears. That’s what Peter Guber is talking about: That deep emotional response.

 

Ask yourself how that changed you, that story that made you cry. If you set aside time to ponder that, you’ll probably come up with the answer.

 

Similarly, if a reader makes an emotional connection with you by reading your memoir, he will do more than keep reading. He will also become a different, better person for having read it.

 

Your job, then, as a memoirist, is to tell your story in such a way that readers get stirred up inside and respond emotionally. Your job is to make your story so impactful that it inspires action and change.

 

One way to do that is to follow Wilkie Collins’ advice: “make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em wait.”

 

For the past few weeks, we’ve considered how to make readers laugh. (If you missed those posts, click here.)

 

Now we’re going to look at how to “make ‘em cry” because that, too, is important in creating a relationship between you and your readers.

 

But first, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: Sometimes people wonder—mainly men, I suspect—why we should include sorrows and struggles and tears in our memoirs.

 

The reasons are many: “Our sufferings and pains are not simply bothersome interruptions of our lives,” writes Henri Nouwen.

 

If Nouwen is right, then what are our suffering and pains?

 

Let’s look back. If we look back and reflect and examine, we’ll recognize that often during our hardest times, we learned our most important lessons.

 

Difficulties can get our attention when we’ve been in denial.

 

They can make us cling to God.

 

They can give us a holy discontent over things that are not right in our lives—and inspire us to change.

 

Sorrows can be the stuff of turning points and second chances.

 

They can lead to personal victories.

 

And then sharing those stories can benefit readers. When we make ourselves vulnerable and write about our hurts, readers recognize they have something in common with us.

 

That, in turn, invites them to enter into our stories and learn lessons for themselves through our experiences because:

 

“Stories can be a stand-in for life, allowing us [readers] to expand our knowledge beyond what we could reasonably squeeze into a lifetime of direct experience . . . . We can take in the stories of others . . . [and have] opportunity to try out solutions.” (Peter Guber)

 

Always remember this: God can use your story. That’s why the Bible teaches us to tell our stories:

• Go tell your family everything God has done for you (Luke 8:39).
• O God, let each generation tell its children of Your mighty acts; let them retell stories of your power (Psalm 145:4).
• Always remember what you’ve seen God do and be sure to tell your children and grandchildren (Deuteronomy 4:9).

 

Next week we’ll take a deeper look about how to “make ‘em cry,” but for now, experiment.

 

Go back in time, re-live one or more sad parts of your story and jot down thoughts and reactions and questions and fears and prayers.

 

Reconstruct your experience for readers.

 

Keep in mind you’re working on a rough draft. You can revise it later but for now, get something in writing.

 

You can do this!

 

Make ‘em laugh: “an instant connection”

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed our recent posts on “Make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em wait.”

 

You’ll remember that Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) gets credit for that advice, though he said he borrowed the idea from the music hall; some speculate he borrowed it from Dickens.

 

Whatever its origin, speakers and writers follow that advice for obvious reasons: it keeps audiences engaged.

 

In writing your memoir, then, “Make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em wait.” I prefer to change Collins’ order—in many cases, I like to make ‘em laugh before I make ‘em cry.

 

Next week we’ll look at making ‘em cry, but today, we’ll finish with “make ‘em laugh.”

 

Remember: humor helps draw readers to you. It encourages bonding and allows readers to be involved with you in your story.

 

Humor makes you seem real. You are no longer a vague author lurking in shadows. Instead, your reader has spent a happy time with you and, as a result, she likes you. She wants to know you better.

And there’s a lot to be said about combining vulnerability with humor:

 

“The blend of vulnerability and humor,” writes pastor Chuck Swindoll, “established an instant connection that allowed what I had to say to slip past their defenses and find a warm welcome in their hearts.”

 

Chuck’s advice works for memoirists. He goes on to say:

 

“Humor will help you ‘say it well.’ When handled with care, humor will also endear you to your audiences, who will then give you greater access to their hearts.” (Touching Others With Your Words)

 

If you missed recent posts on making ‘em laugh

in your memoir, click on the links below.

 

And be sure to come back next week for “make ‘em cry.”

 

“Make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em wait.”

Humor in your memoir: “like a sneak attack”

Use humor the right way in your memoir