Your memoir’s ministry: “through us, with us, in spite of us”

 

“Writing can be a true spiritual discipline,” writes Henri Nouwen.

 

He highlights one of the core aspects of writing memoirs—the necessity of, and blessing of, introspection and reflection and analysis of what happened in the past.

 

He points out that as we write, “new ideas emerge, ideas that surprise us and lead us to inner places we hardly knew were there.” Nouwen calls those “deep wells of hidden treasures.”

 

“Writing can help us concentrate, to get in touch with the deeper stirrings of our hearts, to clarify our minds, to process confusing emotions, to reflect on our experiences, to give artistic expression to what we are living, and to store significant events in our memories.”

 

“Writing can also be good for others who might read what we write,” Nouwen says. “Quite often a difficult, painful, or frustrating [event] can be ‘redeemed’ by writing about it. . . . Then writing can become lifesaving for us and sometimes for others, too.”

 

Nouwen continues, “Each human being is unique. . . and nobody has lived what we have lived. . . . What we have lived, we have lived not just for ourselves but for others as well. Writing can . . . make our lives available . . . to others. We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told.” (Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey)

 

Maybe you doubt what Nouwen claims—maybe you doubt your story can be lifesaving for others.

 

Many would-be memoirists struggle with that.

 

But look at what dear Mick Silva discovered:

 

“For such a long time, I felt my story wasn’t important. . . .

I didn’t know who my story had made me. . . .

But exhuming it, the healing has been profound,

pulling me from ashes of charred memories. . . .

And the things I’ve discovered have been treasures. . . .

Through writing I’ve discovered that . . .

protecting and preserving our stories

is about discovering God’s story.

What he did through us, with us, in spite of us,

continually pursuing that story

is a matter of faithfulness and obedience,

to become aware and invest in this life he’s given.

To speak its life-affirming power in proper words and context,

it can be the delight of our lives,

an endless source of inspiration.”

(Mick Silva, Higher Purpose Writers)

 

“We are storytellers,” writes Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros. “With the help of God, it is up to us to steward our calling and steward it well.”

 

Believe this: Your story is important. 

Write it!

Make your life and your story available for others.

 

Do you know what a story arc is? And why it's important?

Recently we looked at using a poem or Bible passage as a theme for your memoir, which is nifty because it automatically hands you an outline—a structure, a framework—for your memoir. (Click on How can you hand your readers a coherent, organized story? and Must-know info about your memoir’s theme.)

But not all memoirs are based solely on themes. Some are based on your experiences set in a time period with beginning and ending dates.

For example, a lady in one of my memoir classes wrote about several years when she worked as a chef for a prominent senator and served dinner to, among others, the President and First Lady.

What about you?

• Perhaps a whole new world opened when you worked your way through college as a farm hand in Wyoming.  
• Did you serve in the military?
• Did you battle post-partum depression?
• Did you work in a foreign culture?
• Did you face a crisis or natural disaster that threatened to undo you?
• Did you find joy in an unexpected place or relationship?
• Did a seemingly insignificant event change the course of your life?
• Did a heartbreak turn into a blessing?

The ideas are endless. All the above examples would have a beginning date and an ending date. Such a memoir would then be based on a slice of your life or a snapshot of your life (compared to an autobiography which begins with day one and covers everything).

If you write a memoir based on a specific time period, you need to learn about a story arc, sometimes called a narrative arc.  

Do you know what a story arc is?

Author Adair Lara wrote: “When I began work on my memoir . . . I didn’t know a thing about arcs. I thought, I lived this story. I’ll just write it down the way it happened. . . . It was as if I decided to build a house and just started nailing together boards without giving a thought to blueprints. I put up some strange-looking houses that way, in the form of inert drafts filled with pointless scenes. I would have saved myself a lot of time if I had drawn an arc.”

But, she explains, “Back then, I hadn’t even heard of an arc. Now I know it’s the emotional framework of a memoir.”

Many memoir teachers will tell you to structure your story this way:

Act I or The Beginning,

Act II or The Middle,

and Act III or The Ending.

Act I, The Beginning: You introduce yourself to your readers and tell them, specifically, what you wanted or needed or planned—but you also write about a problem or a challenge that surfaced and threatened to mess everything up. Perhaps you were hit with a financial setback, had a psychological issue, a spiritual need, or a relationship struggle. Maybe something or someone threatened to undo your career or destroy your reputation. Maybe, like me, you learned your husband developed different goals in life than you had.

Act II, The Middle: You tell readers that obstructions piled up, your struggles intensified, and issues got complicated—either internal or external—and they seriously threatened to keep you from achieving your goals, meeting your needs, and/or making your dreams come true.

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. . . .”

Act III, The End: You detail how hurdles, hindrances, and complications came to a climax.

Dr. Linda Joy Myers writes: “In act three, the threads and layers of complexity reach a peak—the crisis and climax of the story. Here the character is tested, where the true depth of learning and transformation is revealed.”

This is where you, the protagonist, had to make decisions:  Did you battle on and overcome? If so, how did you go about it? Or, instead, did you have a change of heart because you recognized the unexpected Plan B was better than your Plan A?

Dr. Linda Joy 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.”

How do you do that—how do you discover that epiphany?

In true memoir form, you reflect on what happened to you. Peel back layers and dig deep.

That might take a long time but doing so is probably the most important part of discovering your real story.

Take a closer look than you ever did before. Recognize—maybe for the first time—the ways you changed. Then tell readers what you learned, how you transformed, how you became a stronger, better person.

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,

an answer to prayer.

For more info about story arc, click on Cate Macabe’s post, “Writing a Memoir Like a Novel: Story Arc,” and Adair Lara's post, “The Key Elements of Writing a Good Memoir.”

“You leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences”

The landscapes of your stories, the natural settings, influenced who you were becoming in the past and who you are today.

Maybe your place soothed you, maybe it roughed you up.

Your place, its geography and culture, impacted how you think—and even how you speak.

“How hard it is to escape from places!

However carefully one goes, they hold you—

you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences,

little rags and shreds of your very life.”

(Katherine Mansfield, English writer)

Perhaps your place’s weather impacted your appearance. And maybe even the way you work.

For example, after living on the equator for 11 years, where blazing heat forces people to move s-l-o-w-l-y, I’ve concluded that my most significant place, western Washington, and the Pacific Northwest’s cool, clammy climate, allows folks to accomplish a lot more than a hot climate does.

The geographical factor, in turn, influences and persuades when it comes to philosophies, accomplishments, and lifestyles. In Seattle, I rubbed elbows with others that high-energy region begat:

Starbucks, Amazon, Microsoft (Bill Gates went to high school in our part of town), Costco, Boeing (I grew up a five-minute walk from Bill Boeing’s property and, as a kid, took many a hike through his woods), Nordstroms (I went to school with one of the Nordstroms).

In Seattle, in contrast to equatorial living, people walk fast. They talk fast. There you find can-do entrepreneurial philosophies. Pacific Rim philosophies. Environmental philosophies. Rainforest-dwellers’ philosophies. Loggers’ philosophies. Coffee philosophies. Volcano-survivor philosophies. Earthquake-survivor philosophies. Ferry-rider philosophies.

Your territory—good or bad—influenced your identity and your dreams. 

Your place whittled you and carved your wings so you could fly into your future and become the person you are today.

Notice how Dr. Linda Joy Myers invites you to enter her childhood through setting, a sense of place. She writes about:

“… living in Oklahoma, in the middle of the Great Plains, in a town that literally was in the middle of nothing but land and wheat and sky. The wind molded us, pushed and pulled us, threw red dirt in our faces, lifted our hair straight up. As children, we had to lean into the wind to walk….

“The golden wheat throbbed against the deep blue sky, all of it was everywhere, there were no boundaries. The wind stoked the wheat into the amber waves of grain of the song, and at night the moon rose, huge and round and smiling over the tiny specks of people that appeared insignificant in all that magnificence.” 

Barry Lopez writes that he was “shaped by the exotic nature of water in a dry Southern California valley; by the sound of wind in the crowns of eucalyptus trees; by the tactile sensation of sheened earth, turned in furrows by a gang plow; by banks of saffron, mahogany and scarlet cloud piled above a field of alfalfa at dusk; by encountering the musk from orange blossoms at the edge of an orchard; by the aftermath of a Pacific storm crashing a hot, flat beach … the height and breadth of the sky, and of the geometry and force of the wind.” (We are shaped by the sound of wind, the slant of sunlight)

  

“… However we feel about

a particular place in our lives,

or whether the drama that unfolded there

was one of joy or sorrow,

the invitation in writing memoir is this:

explore the personal and other meanings of your place.

Doing so can not only help you locate your story

in a concrete and complex world,

it can help you discover its larger meanings and connections.”

(Tracy Seeley, author of My Ruby Slippers, the Road Back of Kansas)

Read that last part again: “… the invitation in writing memoir is this: explore the personal and other meanings of your place. Doing so can … help you discover its larger meanings and connections.”

That’s key in writing memoir: discovering personal meanings, larger meanings, and connections.

So, search for specific words to describe your places—vivid words, distinct words, quintessential words, words unique to that locale.

Here’s a perfect example:

“If we read the Palestinian poet Darwish … we will find ourselves mouthing jasmine, doves, olives, veils, whereas if we read a poet like Marcus Goodyear, we will find ourselves breathing to the staccato of cactus, cattle, tree poker.” (L.L. Barkat)

Are you writing about:

• a summer in Jamaica?
• Marching in Vietnam war protests?
• Falling in love? Or out of love?
• Watching a loved one die?
• Giving birth?
• Sitting with an Oscar-winning actor at a church dinner?
• Serving meals in a homeless shelter?

Picture those settings as if for the first time. That will help you recapture your sense of place. Use sensory details (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste).

Your readers need you to develop the key settings in your memoir. That will allow them to join you in your story—and that’s important because that’s how they’ll get the most out of it.

If readers can enter into your story with you, if they can experience your story with you, then your story can be more than words on a page—it can change your readers’ lives.

Related posts:

Must-know info about your memoir’s sense of place

Make your memoir come alive through a sense of place

Creating a sense of place is essential for your memoir

Use setting to ground your memoir and keep readers reading

Do you need to work on your memoir’s outside settings?

Send us your stories about mothers and motherhood

Have you written stories about your mother in your memoir? If she died young, did another woman step in to mother you—perhaps an older sister, aunt, stepmother, or grandparent? Do you have a special relationship with your mother-in-law?

Maybe your entire memoir is about that significant mother-figure, or possibly you include short vignettes about her here and there.

Or maybe you’ve written about your life as a new mother, empty-nest mother, stepmother, grandmother, or great-grandmother.

Sweet moments, 

     hilarious events, 

          personality quirks, 

               tragic loss, 

                    courageous decisions, 

                         integrity, 

                              tenacity, 

                                   or high adventure

                                        —all make for great reading.

Here’s an opportunity for you:

Send us one of your vignettes! I’ll share one or more here on SM 101.

For now, spiff up your rough draft. Strive for clarity, fix typos, and make your sentences sing.

Go deep. Go beyond mere memories. Reflect: Look under the surface. Search for overlooked significance. What was God doing at the time? Mine those gems!

“ … The author must impost a coherence

on events he chooses to include

that may not have been present as he lived them….

It’s that selectivity that transforms a memoir

from a report to a reflection

which gives meaning to the events

which might not have been evident to the author

as she lived them.”

(The Author’s Dual Role in Memoir, Biff Barnes)

Write about your delights as well as your doubts. Ask questions even if you have no answers. Include your thoughts—even your struggles—concerning your mother, yourself, and what was happening.

Explore. Untangle. What did you learn about yourself? About mothers? Motherhood? God?

“As memoir writers,” Dr. Linda Joy Myers writes, “we are trying to find a perspective, even forgiveness and compassion, for ourselves and others as we write our stories.”

Helpful Tips:

Click here to review the definition of memoir.

Character development

Each person is complex. Develop your character’s shortcomings, redeeming qualities, beliefs, prejudices, body language, tone of voice, attitudes, and quirks.

Was she sentimental or no-nonsense? Hilarious or dour? Consistent or inconsistent? Gentle or gruff? Did she stand tall or did she slouch? Was she optimistic or pessimistic? Did she stress the importance of table manners? What else was important to her?

Emotions

Incorporate emotions—about both happy, joyful events as well as scary things and grief—not all stories have happy endings.

Bring in adventure and humor where you can. Click on How to Add Humor to a Sad Memoir, Lisa Romeo’s post about how, why, and where to include humor in a sad memoir.

Our earlier post, Method Writing, is a must-read for writing about emotions.

Sensory details

If you want readers to enjoy your stories, you must include sensory details. Invite them to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell what you experienced so they can enter your experience with you.

Don’t miss our earlier post, Details: A must for your memoir. It’s packed with resources for you.

Your opening

A story’s beginning can make it or break it. It can invite readers in—or send them away. Most writers experiment with many openings before they get just the right one. Some don’t even try to write it until they’ve finished the main body of the story.

Helpful links:

Leads, Part 1

Leads, Part 2

Leads, Part 3

Leads, Part 4

Your ending

Pay attention to your story's or your vignette’s conclusion. A weak ending can make a story fall short of its potential impact, but a strong one makes a memoir shine.

Helpful links:

The beauty of memoir: Your vignettes’ strong endings

Maximize the power of your vignettes’ endings

Ready, set, go!

Polish one of your vignettes (let’s say up to 1000 words in length) and send it to us. We’ll publish one or more soon. We’ll give you our email address if you leave a comment below, or on SM 101’s Facebook Page, or send a private message.

Happy writing!

Tuesday Tidbit: Polish your writing skills at a writers conference

Cecil Murphey says, 

“If your New Year’s resolution 

was to learn how to write 

or to become a better writer, 

one of the best decisions you can make 

is to attend a writers conference.”

In March, Cec will be the keynote speaker at the Blue Lake Christian Writers Retreat held at Blue Lake Camp in Andalusia, Alabama.

Cec is a man I studied under at a writers conference a few years ago, a man with a most remarkable heart and extraordinary skill. He has authored or co-authored more books than any other living writer—135 books and counting. Several have been on the New York Times bestseller list for years at a time.

In addition to two keynote speeches, he will teach three workshops (see below) and will take appointments for one-on-one mentoring.

Cec’s three workshops are Ghostwriting, Memoirs and Autobiographies, and Writing About the Hard Issues.

In his workshop on memoirs and autobiographies, Cec will teach the difference between the two and how to write both.

I can’t think of a better person than Cec to teach a workshop on Writing About the Hard Issues. This dear man has experienced more than his share of hardships—and yet he has survived and thrived and now loves to help others do the same. The conference website describes his workshop this way: 

“Because of the pain and the trials in your life, 

you have a message 

that can offer healing and encouragement 

to others. 

But to write about them effectively 

you must relive the experiences 

and allow old emotions to emerge. 

We’ll discuss how to make these feelings work for you 

to deeply impact readers.”

Learn more about Cecil Murphey at his website, and learn more about the Blue Lake ChristianWriters Retreat at its website.

Give serious consideration to attending this retreat. It could change your life and your writing.

Wayne Groner: Simplify Writing Your Memoir with Three Best Practices

You are in for a treat today: practical info and inspiration for writing your memoir from author and personal historian, Wayne Groner. Be sure to check out Wayne’s new book, A Guide to Writing Your Memoir or Life Story: Tips, Tools, Methods, and Examples.

Simplify Writing Your Memoir with Three Best Practices

The number one roadblock to writing memoir is where to start. Rolling in our heads are many wonderful stories involving a great number of learning and growing experiences. This is especially true as we consider God’s blessings and how he changed our lives. We want to get it all out and don’t know where or how to begin. The best way to begin is to simplify.

First, decide to write a memoir, not an autobiography or family history. This keeps you from wandering in uncontrolled directions and it defines your parameters for research.

Time periods are what distinguish the three story types.

Autobiography is from birth to today. It is an autobiography if you write about yourself and a biography if you write about someone else. Celebrities and politicians often are subjects of biographies and autobiographies.

Family history uses genealogy, photos, and stories to tell about your ancestors. You may start several centuries ago and stop at any date you choose.

Memoir covers a short time period or series of related events such as childhood, teenage years, military service, trauma, spiritual journey, and so forth. Your stories tell key experiences that influenced you and how you changed, such as Growing up Amish by Ira Wagler and The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. 

Books of the Bible are mixtures of the three types. Biblical authors didn’t write to display types, but to show God’s compassion to humans with stories told through laws, history, wisdom, prophecies, hymns, poems, and letters.

Second, define your motivation for writing. All creatures feel the need to be connected, whether honeybees or humans, wolves or whales, amoebae or anteaters; whether by village, tribe, pack, household, school, work, neighborhood, city, county, state, country, religion, or politics.

What are your reasons for wanting to be connected?

Do you want to become famous?

Make loads of money?

Find personal enjoyment?

Honor family legacy?

Give back to the community?

Help your children and grandchildren

understand and appreciate their heritage?

Find personal or family healing?

Share your journey of faith to inspire others?

Set the record straight?

Marriage and family therapist, author, and memoir writing instructor Linda Joy Myers puts it this way:

“The most important ingredient in writing a memoir

is motivation–

a passionate reason to get the story on the page,

a ‘fire in the belly’ feeling

that what you have to tell is important

and significant.”

Aspiring Olympians become motivated by watching winning Olympians and noting their times or scores. The Olympians-to-be wrote the winning times on a note attached to a refrigerator door or cover of a spiral notebook. It’s okay to have more than one motivation, but more than three muddies your focus and can be overwhelming. Think of how your story not only will make a difference in your life but in the lives of those who read it.

Third, focus on key events by making a list of memory joggers, brief notes to help you remember experiences. Memory joggers speed up your writing process and give you freedom to write.

Your goal in listing memory joggers is not perfection in details; it is to remember that events occurred. 

You could outline your entire life story using memory joggers, similar to the approach Linda Spence takes in Legacy: A Step-by-step Guide to Writing Personal History. She divides a life into nine major segments: beginnings and childhood, adolescence, early adult years, marriage, being a parent, middle adult years, being a grandparent, later adult years, and reflections. In each segment, she lists questions to help you remember what might have been going on in your life. She has more than 400 questions throughout the book.

Start your list of memory joggers by preparing nine pieces of paper or computer files, each with one of Spence’s major life segments at the top, or whatever segments fit your memoir’s purpose.

In each segment, write a brief line or two about activities you were involved in during that time. Your list could include a handful of activities or dozens. Don’t write complete sentences or paragraphs and don’t try to write a story; just bits of information you will refer to later when writing your stories.

Here are a few prompts to get your juices flowing:

• Old family photographs
• School yearbooks
• Travel photos
• What you were doing when big news events occurred
• Your first car wreck
• When you learned to ride a bicycle
• Letters from family and friends
• Family Bible
• Newspaper on the day you were born or other dates you select; search your browser for vendors
• Family heirlooms: jewelry, books, furniture, clothing, dishes, and so forth
• Names of family members and friends
• Persons who most influenced you, for better or worse
• Those who guided your faith journey
• Firsts: first date, first driving lesson, first job, first child, and so forth
• Accomplishments and failures with lessons learned
• Saddest and happiest events
• Serious illness
• Death of a loved one
• Treasured friendships
• Friendships gone bad

      

With these three tools–story type, motivation, and memory joggers–you will be well on your way to a satisfying and successful journey of writing the memoir you want.

Personal historian Wayne E. Groner is author of A Guide to Writing Your Memoir or Life Story: Tips, Tools, Methods, and Examples, and other nonfiction books. He is president of Springfield Writers’ Guild (Missouri). Follow him at www.waynegroner.com and on Facebook.

From settling old scores to singing new songs

“The memoir-crazed 1990s.” Do you remember that era?

William Zinsser (one of my favorite writing mentors) reminds us that, “Until that decade memoir writers drew a veil over their most shameful experiences and thoughts; certain civilities were still agreed on by society. Then talk shows came into their own and shame went out the window.”

It was an era, he says, when “no remembered episode was too squalid, no family too dysfunctional, to be trotted out for the titillation of the masses.”

Memoirists, like talk shows, disclosed shocking information, indulged in self-pity, and sought revenge from those who wronged them.

“Writing was out and whining was in,” says Zinsser.

But, he points out, those types of memoirs didn’t stand the test of time.

“The memoirs we do remember from the 1990s are … Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, and Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life.” (from “How To Write A Memoir” in The American Scholar; emphasis  mine)  

 “If these books by McCourt, Hamill, Karr, and Wolff represent the new memoir at its best, it’s because they were written with love. They elevate the pain of the past with forgiveness, arriving at a larger truth about families in various stages of brokenness. There’s no self-pity, no whining, no hunger for revenge…We are not victims, they want us to know.” (Zinsser’s Inventing the Truth; emphasis mine)

Their stories’ message: “We come from a tribe of fallible people and we have survived without resentment to get on with our lives.”

He counsels memoirists: “Don’t use your memoir to air old grievances and to settle old scores; get rid of that anger somewhere else.” (from “How To Write A Memoir” in The American Scholar; emphasis mine) 

That somewhere else could be a journal or a fictionalized version of the story. Or it could be in a first draft. Dr. Linda Joy Myers says, "Write your first draft as a healing draft. Get out what you need to say. Make it bold and real. Then stand back and think about how you want to revise it for publication." (from Will My Family Get Angry About My Memoir?; emphasis mine)

The important thing is to vent, to deal with the problem, to find healing and forgiveness and closure. Just don’t seek revenge in memoir.

There’s another reason to avoid seeking revenge in memoirs. Cecil Murphey and Twila Belk said well it on Facebook a few days ago: “Whenever I condemn others, I am condemning myself. Whenever I judge others, I give God permission to judge me.”

Jesus said it this way, “Do not judge others, and you will not be judged.  For you will be treated as you treat others. The standard you use in judging is the standard by which you will be judged. And why worry about the speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own?… Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye.…” (Matthew 7:1-5, NLT)

I suspect that’s what Thomas à Kempis had in mind when he wrote, “We are too quick to resent and feel what we suffer from others, but fail to consider how much others suffer from us. Whoever considers his own defects fully and honestly will find no reason to judge others harshly.”

Yep, nobody’s perfect. Each of us has failures and shortcomings.

So, have we asked God’s forgiveness? And then have we forgiven ourselves? (Read more at How do you deal with this elephant in the room?)

In writing our memoirs, let’s extend to others the same forgiveness, grace, and mercy God has extended to us. (Read more at How do you write about your family’s baggage?)   

Zinsser, with grace, encourages us to strive for the best goal: to do all we need to do to “elevate the pain of the past with forgiveness.”

And isn’t that what “singing a new song” is all about? (Psalm 40:1-3, Psalm 96:1, Psalm 149:1, Isaiah 42:10)

And why should we sing a new song? Because God says, “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” (Isaiah 43:25)

And He says, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” (Isaiah 43:18-19)

How can we not sing a new song in praise of the new things God has done in and for us? How can we not sing a new song after God has turned our harsh wilderness into a lush place?

Yes, sing a new song!

And isn’t that one of the most important elements of memoir? Memoir is about the old you and the new you, and how you got there, and what you learned along the way.

“The main character … —in a memoir it’s you!—is changed significantly by events, actions, decisions, and epiphanies,” writes Dr. Linda Joy Myers. “The growth and change of the main character is imperative in any story, and is the primary reason a memoir is written—to show the arc of character change from beginning to end.”

So, write about the old you, write about the new you, write about how you got there, and what you learned. 

Sing a new song. 

“Elevate the pain of the past with forgiveness.”

Related posts:

“Remembering only the pain, or only the joy, would be incomplete”

Does forgiving leave room for forgetting AND remembering?

Your memoir: sharing about sin and God’s forgiveness

The Four R’s of Memoir Writing, by Mary Gottschalk

“You leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences”

Continuing with enhancing a sense of place in your memoir:  

Why make a big deal about creating a sense of place?  

Because the landscapes of your stories, the natural settings, influenced who you were becoming in the past and who you are today.

“How hard it is to escape from places! 

However carefully one goes, they hold you—

you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences, 

little rags and shreds of your very life.” 

(Katherine Mansfield, English writer)

Geography played a role in shaping you. It served as a backdrop.

Your environment molded you—maybe it smoothed you, maybe it roughed you up.

Perhaps your place’s weather defined your appearance.

The territory—good or bad—sculpted your identity and your dreams.

Your place whittled you and carved your wings so you could fly into your future and become the person you are today.

Notice how Linda Joy Myers invites you to enter her childhood through setting and place. She writes about: 

 “...living in Oklahoma, in the middle of the Great Plains, in a town that literally was in the middle of nothing but land and wheat and sky. The wind molded us, pushed and pulled us, threw red dirt in our faces, lifted our hair straight up. As children, we had to lean into the wind to walk.… The golden wheat throbbed against the deep blue sky, all of it was everywhere, there were no boundaries. The wind stroked the wheat into the amber waves of grain of the song, and at night the moon rose, huge and round and smiling over the tiny specks of people that appeared insignificant in all that magnificence.”

In We are shaped by the sound of wind, the slant of sunlight, Barry Lopez writes that he was “shaped by the exotic nature of water in a dry Southern California valley; by the sound of wind in the crowns of eucalyptus trees; by the tactile sensation of sheened earth, turned in furrows by a gang plow; by banks of saffron, mahogany and scarlet cloud piled above a field of alfalfa at dusk; by encountering the musk from orange blossoms at the edge of an orchard; by the aftermath of a Pacific storm crashing a hot, flat beach.… the height and breadth of the sky, and of the geometry and force of the wind."

“… However we feel about

a particular place in our lives,

or whether the drama that unfolded there

was one of joy or sorrow,

the invitation in writing memoir is this:

explore the personal and other meanings of your place.

Doing so can not only help you locate your story

in a concrete and complex world,

it can help you discover its larger meanings and connections.”

(Tracy Seeley, author of My Ruby Slippers, the Road Back to Kansas)

Your place’s philosophy also persuaded you, for better or worse: 

For example, after living on the equator for 11 years, where blazing heat forces people to move slowly, I’ve concluded that my most significant place, Seattle, and the Pacific Northwest’s cool, clammy climate allows folks to accomplish more than a hot climate does. That geographical factor, in turn, influences philosophies. In Seattle, I rubbed elbows with others that moist, mildewed, high-energy region begat: Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon, Costco, Boeing (I grew up a five-minute walk from Bill Boeing’s home), Nordstroms (I went to school with one of the Nordstroms). Pacific Rim philosophies. Environmental philosophies. Rainforest-dwellers’ philosophies. Volcano-survivor philosophies. Earthquake-survivor philosophies. (And daily I recognize that the Pacific Northwest’s geography and philosophies have many contrasts to my current place: the heart of the continental U.S.) 

“If the place is important enough in the character’s life;

if on the most basic level he spent enough time in it,

was brought up in it or presided over it, like the Senate,

or exercised power in it, like the White House;

if the place, the setting, played a crucial role

in shaping the character’s feelings,

drives, motivations, insecurities,

then by describing the place well enough,

the author will have succeeded in

bringing the reader closer to an understanding of the character

without giving him a lecture,

will have made the reader therefore not just understand

but empathize with a character,

will have made the readers’ understanding more vivid,

deeper than any lecture could.”

(Robert Caro)

For your memoir, search for “crackly words” (Priscilla Long) to describe your places—specific words, vivid words, words unique to that locale. 

“If we read the Palestinian poet Darwish … we will find ourselves mouthing jasmine, doves, olives, veils, whereas if we read a poet like Marcus Goodyear, we will find ourselves breathing to the staccato of cactus, cattle, tree poker.” (L.L. Barkat)

Examine your manuscript. Look for ways to enhance a sense of geographical place.  

If you’re writing about a time of feeding your soul and spirit, describe your setting.

Are you writing about a time your wellbeing wasted away? Describe the setting.

Did you find healing? Describe that setting.

Are you writing about a summer in Italy? Marching during the civil rights movement? Falling in love? A summer job in Alaska? Watching a loved one die? Walking out on your abusive spouse? Meeting the First Lady? (My mother did.)

Picture those settings as if for the first time. Doing so will help you recapture your sense of place, make revisions, and invite your readers to join you. Be sure to include sensory details (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste). 

Your goal is to help readers experience what you experienced.