Back to Basics: Your memoir’s middle and end

 

Last week we began looking at your memoir’s all-important story arc. (If you missed it, click on Back to Basics: Your memoir’s all-important story arc.)

 

The story arc is like a pathway.

It carries the memoirist and the reader

from the beginning of the story,

to the middle,

to the end.

 

Last week we concentrated on your memoir’s beginning, in which you tell readers about something you wanted or needed and the obstacle that was hindering you.

 

This week we’ll move on to your memoir’s middle.

 

Tell readers of progress toward your goal but also tell them that obstructions (some of them new) piled up, your struggles intensified, and issues got complicated—either internal or external—and they threatened to keep you from achieving your goals, meeting your needs, and/or making your dreams come true. Usually, the biggest challenge comes toward the end of your story's middle.

 

Now let’s look at your memoir’s end. This is where you detail how hurdles, hindrances, and complications came to a climax.

 

Dr. Linda Joy Myers writes that in this third phase, the end, “. . . the threads and layers of complexity reach a peak—the crisis and climax of the story. Here the character is tested, where [your] true depth of learning and transformation is revealed.”

 

Dr. Myers continues, “The crisis may be thought of as a spiritual challenge or a ‘dark night of the soul,’ where the deepest beliefs and core truths of the character are tested. The climax is the highest level of tension and conflict that the protagonist must resolve as the story comes to a close.

 

“There’s an aha at the end,” she says, “an epiphany when the main character has learned her lessons and can never return to the previous way of living.”

 

Adair Lara explains it this way: “You try a lot of things to solve your problem, with mixed results. You have setbacks, you make mistakes and you push on, until you either get what you wanted, or you don’t, or you stop wanting it. . . .”

 

A memoir’s ending is about transformation and resolution. It shows readers how you finally succeeded—how you got what you wanted. . . .

Or not! Read on. . . .

 

Sometimes in a memoir’s ending, we see that the main character didn’t get what she originally wanted, but what she got was even better. Diane Butts says:

 

“Now, this ‘want’ is different 

from what they are actually going to get. . . .

But what they get in the story is infinitely better for them,

they just don’t know it at the outset of the story.

When, through your story, the [memoirist] gets this better thing

instead of what they originally wanted,

they are a changed character.”

 

For example, take my experience in South America from my memoir, Please, God, Don't Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger's Memoir. Here's a blurb about the book:

“What’s a comfortable, and cowardly, suburbanite to do

when her husband wants to move their young family

to rural South America

to teach missionaries’ kids?

She prays, ‘Please, God, don’t make me go!’”

 

In my memoir, I wrote that eventually I became willing to go to South America—and I had a good attitude about it.

 

When I first arrived, I still had a good attitude . . . but . . .

 

But equatorial heat and culture shock brought me to my knees. My “want” was to turn around and go back home to Seattle. I was desperate. I refused to unpack and plotted to run away.

 

But after living there for three months (and 87 pages into the book), I had fallen in love with the place and my job.

 

I wrote in my memoir:

 

“God had sent me where I didn’t know I wanted to go.

And it occurred to me, with a jolt,

 that I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving

at the end of the school year,

only six months away.

I couldn’t leave—I wouldn’t!”

 

I experienced what Diane Butts wrote about: I got something better than what I wanted at the outset. I was a changed person.

 

In summary, then, tell readers what you now know, understand, or believe that you didn’t before. Tell them how you changed in the process. Maybe, like me, you had a change of heart because you recognized the unexpected Plan B was better than your Plan A.

 

Remember:

People read memoirs

to learn how to handle similar situations

that arise in their own lives.

In that way, you become a role model for them,

an inspiration,

even an answer to prayer.

 

Come back next week and I’ll offer more help with your memoir’s all-important story arc.