Tuesday Tidbit: Hemingway’s advice for you

“Don’t be discouraged because there’s a lot of technical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it,” said Ernest Hemingway, advising a beginning writer, Arnold Samuelson, age 19.

“It’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself.”

Read that last part again: “so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself.”

You want readers to enter your story, to experience your story alongside you. That’s how your story can make a difference in their lives. That’s how God can use your story to inspire, heal, and mentor your readers.

Work hard to make your memoir that kind of memoir.

Join (or form) a writing group. Critique each other’s manuscripts.

Attend writers’ conferences.

Study the best writing books available, like On Writing Well by William Zinsser, The Writer’s Portable Mentor by Priscilla Long, and Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington.

Follow the best writing blogs, too. I recommend the blogs in the right column.  

To make your memoir the very best it can be, you’ll need to make revisions and edits, but it will be worth it in the end.

Pray about your writing and rewriting. Ask God to guide your work and use your finished memoir to bless others. 

There you have it, your Tuesday Tidbit.

Back to basics: What is a memoir?

Sometimes in the midst of writing our memoirs, we need to make sure we’re on the right track. That’s why from time to time we must remind ourselves what a memoir is.

A memoir is so much more than spinning yarns and passing on tales.

Since the genre of memoir confuses some people, let’s get back to basics: What is a memoir?

A memoir is not autobiography, which documents your life beginning with the day of your birth.

Instead, a memoir focuses on one segment of your life—a specific theme or time period.

You can write a memoir on a theme, like coaching Little League baseball, or volunteering, or foster parenting.

Or you can write a memoir about events that occurred during a specific time period, such as the three years you worked in a fast-food restaurant, or the first five years of parenting triplets, or your tumultuous college years during the hippie revolution.

Whether your memoir is based on a theme or a slice of your life, you’ll explore your topic in depth. And you’ll include only details that belong—only people and events relevant to your story.

A key component of writing a memoir is reflection. If you want to write a memoir, “reflection” must be your middle name.

Instead of simply recording facts about what happened on the surface, you must reflect: ponder, examine, muse, unravel, disentangle, and then make sense of it all—put everything back together in the right order.

Reflect: Look back, go deep, relive key experiences and relationships. Inspect them all. Do some soul-searching. Reevaluate your experience.

Most would-be memoirists need to work on reflecting adequately because it takes time and it can be painful. Richard Foster observes, “The sad truth is that many authors simply have never learned to reflect substantively on anything.”

Reflect: Look for significance you missed in the past. Search for those profound lessons you overlooked years ago. Make time to discover insights, healing, and blessings that were there all along.

And notice what God was doing. Find His footprints and fingerprints—they’re all over the place.

I’m not suggesting we all have supernatural experiences to share, stories that would make the evening news and get tweeted around the world. Nor do I believe Christian memoirists need to mention God on every page.

Here’s my point: Whether or not you knew it at the time, God was with you during each event you write about—not just watching from afar, but working on your behalf, working out His good plans. Spend time discovering what He was doing, and from time to time, let your readers know. Discover the higher, wider, richer stories in your experience.

What was God doing as you see it now, in retrospect? Look for deeper lessons God had for you in the events of your memoir.

• Looking back, what did you learn about yourself?
• What patterns in your faith did you discover that you hadn’t noticed before?
• What did you learn about God?
• Do you now have a better understanding of God’s purpose for your life?
• How did the experience change your life? What new person did you become?
• How did the experience strengthen your faith for future challenges?

God can use your stories to help others—not just kids and grandkids, since not all of us have them—but also siblings, cousins, aunt and uncles, nieces and nephews, coworkers, church friends, neighbors, and even people you’ll never meet.

“As Christian writers,

we can rarely change the circumstances of others—

but we can change their outlook on life.

Every day the headlines proclaim more tragedy,

more bad news.

Every day we wake up to more heartache and heartbreak.

It’s easy to feel defeated. To want to give up. To lose hope.

That’s where the job of the Christian writer comes in—

we need to constantly hold out hope

in this desperate world….

Christian writers: Do your job.

Be the light. Hold the torch of hope high.”

Kate Motaung

I think I've fixed the problem with links, but if not, I'll post them in the comments below.  Thanks for your patience.

On wordiness and “little timidities”

When you finish the first draft of your memoir, you might feel like celebrating—and you should! Go ahead and celebrate!

But don’t think you’ll be publishing that memoir soon. First you have a lot of editing and revising to do, and part of that process is having critique partners give you feedback. They can help you notice and correct many boo-boos. (Click on Critiques Make Your Writing Better.)

But before you involve critique partners, do everything you can to make your manuscript as perfect as possible.  Part of that includes fixing all types of wordiness:

Henry was overweight at that point in time.

I took a boat to get me to the open-air market.

I drove to the hardware to buy some nails.

She  managed to call called the salon and made an appointment.

She headed into the market to try and buy some chicken to eat for supper.

He packed up the car.

His beat included some of the nearby neighborhoods.

She worried about the dogs that came and barked at her toddler.

Grandma tried to calm her down so the rest of us could settle down for the night.

He wanted to spend some time learning learn about the Clallam Indian culture.

It involved negotiation on several different levels.

Professor Smith will make a decision decide Friday about Ken’s oral exam.

Often (but not always) you can cut “that” from a sentence. Here’s an example: “I know that you are busy but I think that this is information that you need to know.” Here’s another example: “He was afraid that I’d spoil his birthday surprise.”

William Zinsser offers this advice: “Prune out all the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: ‘a bit,’ ‘a little,’ ‘sort of,’ ‘kind of,’ ‘rather,’ ‘quite,’ ‘very,’ ‘too,’ ‘pretty much,’ ‘in a sense,’ and dozens more. They dilute both your style and your persuasiveness.

“Don’t say you were a bit confused,” Zinsser continues, “and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be confused. Be tired. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.” (On Writing Well)

This type of Editing can be tedious, 

but think of it as polishing and perfecting a gem. 

Invest time in making your memoir sparkle.

Write Tight

The wise old guideline, “write tight,” means to cut extra words.

Write tight: Be concise.

Avoid wordiness.

Economize.

Streamline.

Trim fat.

Remove jumble.

Cut off dead wood.

Declutter so your readers won’t get bogged down and give up on your book. As The Grammar Girl says, “Readers don’t want to rummage through a messy verbal flea market to discover one or two sparkly gems of information.”  

“Vigorous writing is concise,” says William Strunk, Jr. “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”

Joseph M. Williams says, “Some words are verbal tics that we use as unconsciously as we clear our throats,” words like actually, particular, really, certain, virtually, individual, basically, generally, and practically.

He gives this before-and-after example:

“Productivity actually depends on certain factors that basically involve psychology more than any particular technology.”

Williams offers this revision: “Productivity depends more on psychology than on technology.” (from Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace)

Remove redundancies such as: I repeated again, he shrugged his shoulders, John gave her true, accurate facts, Eliza served various different appetizers, Teddy ate each and every piece of chocolate.

Often (but not always) you can cut “that” from a sentence. Here’s an example: “I know that you are busy but I think that this is information that you need to know.”

"Prune out all the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: 'a bit,' 'a little,' 'sort of,' 'kind of,' 'rather,' 'quite,' 'very,' 'too,' 'pretty much,' 'in a sense,' and dozens more," writes William Zinsser. "They dilute both your style and your persuasiveness."

"Don't say you were a bit confused," Zinsser continues, "and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be confused. Be tired. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident." (On  Writing Well, Fourth Edition)

The Grammar Girl says:

“Keep an eye on the verb ‘make’ when it us used in constructions such as ‘make a decision,’ ‘make a correction,’ and ‘make use of.’ Here’s an example of a bloated sentence:

“‘Seth Bullock will make a decision tomorrow about whether his calling is hardware or law enforcement.’

“Change ‘make a decision’ to ‘decide’ for a leaner sentence:

“‘Seth Bullock will decide tomorrow whether his calling is hardware or law enforcement.’” (from How to Write Clear Sentences, by The Grammar Girl)

What clutter would you remove from the following sentence? (Leave your revision in the comments section below.)

“My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.” (Elmore Leonard)

Often “try to” is another phrase to delete; note the Leonard quote above and the following: “Try to recapture the wonder of being a child.”

How would you revise the next sentence? 

"The good thing about it is that it's one I can complete in fairly easy segments."

Look over your current manuscript. Read it aloud because your ears will hear what your eyes overlook. Then, cut out the clutter and tighten it up.

If you write tight, your readers will appreciate your story’s fast pace and clarity. Instead of stumbling over piles of words and phrases, they’ll focus on your message.

You’ll enjoy these additional articles on writing tight: Jody Renner on Uncluttered Prose (She includes before-and-after examples.)

How to Write Clear Sentences, by The Grammar Girl

At Sharon Lippincott's blog, agent Harry Bingham tells of cutting 70,000 words from a manuscript "to tease out the amazing story that lay buried within. The shorter and more focused the manuscript became, the more appealing it grew."

“When you read a great book, 

you're reading an author 

willing to cut 

thousands of words.”  

Donald Miller

Especially for wordsmiths, ink-slingers, and painters of words

Wednesday we began looking at the art of writing long sentences, and if you are a wordsmith—an ink-slinger, a painter of words—you’ll enjoy today’s lesson.

Pico Iyer has high praise for long sentences (see The beauty of long sentences if you missed it), but writers must be cautious because “Most of us aren’t terribly good at writing good, long sentences,” according one of my favorite teachers, Peter Jacobi.

“If we write not-so-good long sentences for not-so-good readers,” he says, “confusion sets in—fast. The reader forgets by midsentence what the root of the sentence was about.” (The Magazine Article)

To test for clarity—or lack of it—in any sentence longer than three typed lines, Joseph F. Williams suggests you read it aloud. (His paragraph, below, will leave you with a smile.)

“If the process of reading one of your own long sentences gives you the feeling that you are about to run out of breath before you come to a place where you can pause in order to integrate all of the parts of the sentence to get a sense of how its whole fits together to communicate a single conceptual structure, you have identified a sentence that your readers are likely to wish that you had revised. Like that one.” (Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace)

So what are you, the memoir writer, to do?

For starters, notice how other people write long sentences. Some don’t work—as Williams so cleverly showed us above—but others do work well.    

Here’s an example of a brilliantly crafted sentence. It’s worth your time to linger and savor it:

“Riding down to Port Warwick from Richmond, the train begins to pick up speed on the outskirts of the city, past the tobacco factories with their ever-present haze of acrid, sweetish dust and past the rows of uniformly brown clapboard houses which stretch down the hilly streets for miles, it seems, the hundreds of rooftops all reflecting the pale lights of dawn; past the suburban roads still sluggish and sleepy with early morning traffic, and rattling swiftly now over the bridge which separates the last two hills where in the valley below you can see the James River winding beneath its acid-green crust of scum out beside the chemical plants and more rows of clapboard houses and into the woods beyond.” (from the novel Lie Down in Darkness, by William Styron, quoted in Elements of the Writing Craft by Robert Olmstead)

Olmstead helps us analyze Styron’s sentence:

“… The weight of the train at ever-increasing speed [is] evoked in the first line, and the rest is the landscape that sweeps past our window. The images come to us rapidly and clearly because we are moving so quickly and because our eye focuses through the window as if it were the lens of a camera.”

The sentence “mirrors the action of the train, moving over the page the same way the train moves over the land. What the sentence says and does are the same.”

Olmstead points out how Styron crafted his long sentence (121 words!) so well: “… tobacco factories with their  ever-present haze … sweetish dust and past the rows … brown clapboard houses which stretch down … for miles, it seems, the hundreds of rooftops all reflecting … roads still sluggish and sleepy with early morning traffic, and rattling swiftly ….” and so on.

Here’s what Olmstead wants us to notice: “The words in italics are simple, but they make the sentence work. They are as important to master as the clever turn of phrase. They are like gristle or cartilage. They are the stuff between joints and bones that smoothes the action. Without them, the setting goes flat.” (emphasis mine)

Retrieve your rough drafts and look for places long sentences would be effective.

Maybe you, too, have written a vignette about a train ride, or about lifting off a dirt airstrip in a six-seater plane in the jungle, or the desert. (I have.) Have you ever bungee jumped? What other scenes come to your mind—stories in which long sentences, like Styron’s, would work?

Don’t be intimidated: go ahead and experiment with long sentences because they can add texture and dimension to your writing.

Keep in mind that “Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the second or third time” (William Zinsser) so read them aloud and if your experimental sentences don’t work, keep tweaking them—or even toss them, for now.

Most of all, have fun!