Pin down inner qualities that define your memoir’s main characters

 

The people in your memoir, the ones who shaped your life, for better or for worse, are the people your readers want to know.

 

Last week looked at developing your main characters from a sensory perspective (sight, sound, smell, feel, taste), and this week we’ll dig even deeper and tackle what’s even more important—we’ll work on your main characters’ inner qualities. (If you missed last week’s post, click on Write life into your memoir’s main characters.)

 

Readers want to feel like they are alongside you, looking into the same faces you’re looking into. They want to experience what you experienced, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. They want to feel familiar with your main characters.

 

To achieve that, you need to go beyond a physical, sensory description: Develop a multi-dimensional person.

 

Which specific dimensions of your main characters significantly impacted you?

 

• What mattered most to her?
• What did he believe was his life’s purpose? What did he live for? What motivated him?
• What were his values?
• Her convictions?
• Was he selfless or selfish?
• Touchy or grace-giving?
• Faithful or fickle?
• Patient or impatient?
• Forgiving or bitter?
• Brave or cowardly?
• Nurturing or aloof?
• Confident or insecure?
• Gentle or abrasive?
• Generous or stingy?
• Was she domineering?
• Was he humble?
• Was he quick-tempered?
• Was she arrogant?
• Manipulative?
• A peacemaker?
• What was endearing about her?
• Annoying about him?
• Comical, scary, heroic?
• What did she obsess over? And was that a good or bad obsession?
• What did others say or think about that person?

 

For example, Frederick Buechner writes, “Like her father, my grandmother had little patience with weakness, softness, sickness. Even gentleness made her uncomfortable, I think—the tender-hearted people who from fear of giving pain, or just from fear of her, hung back from speaking their minds the way she spoke hers.” (The Sacred Journey)

 

A word of caution: Readers don’t need to know everything about your main characters.  As Roy Peter Clark says, “To bring a person to literary life requires not a complete inventory of characteristics, but selected details arranged to let us see flesh, blood, and spirit.” 

 

Know what information to include and what to exclude.

 

For example, if your memoir focuses on your grandmother’s commitment to nurture her kids and grandkids, develop her from that perspective. Readers probably don’t need to know that she struggled with insecurity or impatience or lack of courage.

 

Peel back layers. Readers want to know what was happening between the lines. What was happening beneath and beyond the sensory details? What was going on inside? What were that person’s thoughts?

 

You don’t need to flesh out every person in your memoir, but readers want to feel connected to your main characters. Your job is to create realistic characters—to accurately portray those most important people without overdoing it.

What was it about the person’s beliefs,

goals,

fears,

experiences,

successes,

failures,

quirks,

character

or values

that impacted your life?

 

Revise and polish your memoir in those places

where your main characters need to come to life.

 

Develop characters your readers can visualize,

but go beyond that:

Create living, breathing, vibrant,

memorable characters—

people who are believable, knowable, and well-rounded,

people readers can relate to.

 

How can you retrieve your faded memories?

 

Writing your memoir can surprise you by bringing past events into a new light. As you make time to remember and ponder, new insights into old experiences will surface. Puzzle pieces will fall into place.

 

Frederick Buechner explains what he discovered when he penned his personal stories in The Sacred Journey and Now and Then.

"They gave me more of a sense than I had ever had before of how as far back as I could remember things had been stirring in my life that I was all but totally unaware of at the time.

"If anybody had predicted when I was an undergraduate at Princeton that I was going to be ordained as a minister ten years after graduation, I think I would have been flabbergasted.

"Yet as I wrote . . . I found myself remembering small events as far back as early childhood which were even then leading me in something like a direction but so subtly and almost imperceptibly that it wasn't until decades had passed that I saw them for what they were. . . .

"The events were often so small that I was surprised to remember them, yet they turned out to have been road markers on a journey I didn't even know I was taking.

"The people involved in them were often people I had never thought of as having played particularly significant roles in my life yet looking back at them I saw that, for me, they had been life-givers, saints." (Frederick Buechner, Originally published in Telling Secrets)

God longs for us to remember what He has done (Psalm 105:5), but we so easily forget!

 

Memories are vital components of memoirs, so how can we retrieve the faded ones?

 

If you kept a journal in the past, you have a treasure. It will be packed with events and details and personal insights that you might have forgotten over the years.

 

Old letters—that you wrote or received—can also help remember significant events and people.

 

Look through your Bible, devotionals, or Bible study materials. If you’re like me, you’ve jotted memories and dates in the margins.

 

Some people print and save special emails they’ve sent or received.

 

Here’s another idea to help you retrieve your memories of a key place: Sketch a floor plan and/or the neighborhood. Maybe you’re writing about your childhood home or about Boy Scout camp. Or maybe you’re writing about an office building in a bustling city. Sketching that place will help remember details.

 

While you draw, memories will bubble up and percolate.

 

Don’t believe me? Give it a try! As you sketch, jot down notes about who was with you and what significant events took place there.

 

But that’s just the beginning!

 

Memoirists go beyond remembering the past. Memoirists search for significance. Relevance.

 

Pondering, unraveling, piecing together, reflecting—all are necessary ingredients in memoirs. Tell readers what you now see, in retrospect. Look for deeper meanings and connections, as Frederick Buechner did, above.

 

Looking back, what did you learn about yourself?

 

What patterns did you discover that you hadn’t noticed before?

 

How did the place and people shape your life? And prepare you for your future?

 

Maybe, like Buechner, you'll notice that you'd been on a journey you didn't even realize you were taking.

What was God doing? What did you learn about Him? Like Frederick Buechner, did you discover God’s purpose for your life?

 

When you pull your memories out of hibernation, give yourself plenty of time to examine them and answer the above questions.

 

Look for relevance you might have missed in the past.

Search for profound lessons you learned.

Notice defining moments and turning points.

Make time to discover insights.

Identify healing and blessings that were there all along.

Uncover your richer, higher, deeper, wider story.

And then share it with others.

Do you hear that? Will your readers hear that?

Some sounds have died out. Have you ever thought of that?

In your memory, some sounds live on—they are a perfectly normal part of your everyday life—yet they could be sounds your kids or grandkids have never heard.

I thought of that recently when I saw a post on Facebook, and that reminded me of something I found a few years ago: 11 Things That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard.

Sounds like:

• a rotary dial phone
• a manual typewriter
• a cash register
• and that bell that used to ring when we pulled into a gas station

If those memories make you smile, you’ll enjoy Kara Kovalchik’s 11 Things That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard.

Enjoy that list, but add to it. Make a list of your own unique sounds and include them in your memoir.

Think about the sound of milking a cow—the sound of warm milk squirting into a metal bucket. I suspect most of your readers have no idea what that sounds like.

People acquainted with only gas or electric “fireplaces” might not know about crackling and hissing sounds that real logs make in real fireplaces.

Those who grew up pre-photocopy machines will remember the sound a mimeograph machine makes.

Did you grow up listening to air-raid sirens? I did.

In my recently published memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir, I included sounds of howler monkeys, Honda 90 motorbikes, bulls chomping on hibiscus plants outside my kitchen window, and mosquitoes buzzing my ears at night.

In my other memoir, Grandma’s Letters from Africa, I recall awakening to the Muslims’ pre-dawn call to prayer from a nearby mosque. I remember the rustle of sun-baked grasses and of lying “in your cot at night, listening to the night sounds—the hollow, terrifying roar of the lion, the bark of the zebra, the ghostly laugh of the hyena, and the pad, pad of invisible feet.” (Camera Trails in Africa, Martin Johnson, 1924)

Frederick Buechner writes of sounds from college days: “I hear the clatter of feet on stone steps and wooden steps, the rifle-shot slap of books dropped to the writing arms of seats in lecture halls. . . and [in the dorm] the playing of everybody’s phonograph at once—‘Honeysuckle Rose,’ ‘People Will Say We’re In Love,’ ‘As Time Goes By.’” (The Sacred Journey)

For your readers’ sake, for your memoir’s sake, do the necessary work to make sounds come to life.

Need help remembering? Close your eyes and go back to that time you want to recapture. Or look through old photos, or read books written in that era. Ask friends and relatives to help you remember.

Also, click on Amber Lea Starfire’s blog post. Even though she’s addressing journal-writers, her advice works for memoirists, too. She’ll help you pin down sounds from your past.

Most of all, have fun writing.

 

Your memoir’s key people: Include only relevant details

For the past two Thursdays, we’ve looked at ways to polish your memoir and make it as user-friendly as possible:  After all, you want people to read it—but you want more than that: You want them to feel immersed in it. You want readers to experience what you experienced.

Today we’ll focus on creating realistic characters. (You don’t need to flesh out every person in your memoir, but readers want to get acquainted with your main characters.)

What are your character’s most significant features and actions and habits and mannerisms? Include sensory details—details pertaining to the five senses: seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing.

In The Orchardist, Amanda Coplin’s main character, Talmadge, looks like this—this is what she wants the reader to see:

          “His face was as pitted as the moon…. His ears were elephantine, a feature most commented on when he was younger, when the ears stuck out from his head; but now they had darkened like the rest of his sun-exposed flesh and lay against his skull…and were tough, the flesh granular like the rind of some fruit. He was clean-shaven, large-pored; his skin was oily. In some lights his flesh was gray; others, tallow; others, red. His lips were the same color as his face…. His nose was large, bulbous. His eyes were cornflower blue…. and his lips were as pure and sculpted as a cherub’s….

          “His arms were sun-darkened and flecked with old scars. He combed his hair over his head, a dark, sparse wing kept in place with pine-scented pomade.”

Develop a multi-dimensional person: go beyond a physical, sensory description. What was endearing about her? Annoying about him? Comical, scary, heroic? What did she obsess over? And was that a good or bad obsession? What did other people say or think about that person?

Frederick Buechner writes of New Testament character Paul:

          “Paul’s mads were madder and his blues bluer, his pride prouder and his humbleness humbler, his strengths stronger and his weaknesses weaker than almost anybody else’s you’d be apt to think of…. [H]is contemporaries accused him of being insincere, crooked, yellow, physically repulsive, unclean, bumbling, and off his rocker.” (from Wishful Thinking and later from Beyond Words)

Peel back layers:

Readers need to know what was happening between the lines.

What was happening beneath and beyond the sensory details?

What was going on inside?

What were that person’s thoughts?

What was it about the person’s history, 

beliefs, 

goals,

fears, 

experiences, 

successes, 

quirks, 

failures,

character, 

or values 

that impacted your life?

For example, Frederick Buechner writes,

          “Like her father, my grandmother had little patience with weakness, softness, sickness. Even gentleness made her uncomfortable, I think—the tender-hearted people who from fear of giving pain, or just from fear of her, hung back from speaking their minds the way she spoke hers.” (The Sacred Journey)

Your goal is to accurately portray the most important people in your stories without overdoing it.  Know what information to include and what to leave out: Include relevant details; leave out irrelevant ones. If your character was an avid fisherman and a Kansas City Royals fan but those details have no relevance to your story, you can probably leave out that information.

Roy Peter Clark says it this way:

          “To bring a person to literary life requires not a complete inventory of characteristics, but selected details arranged to let us see flesh, blood, and spirit. In the best of cases—when craft rises to art—the author conjures a character that seems fully present for the reader….”

Revise and polish your memoir in those places where

your main characters need to come to life.

Develop people your readers can visualize, but go beyond that:

create living, breathing, vibrant,

memorable, significant characters.

Choose precise words to briefly but adequately flesh out

the most important aspects of key people,

people who are believable, knowable, and well-rounded.

If you can achieve that,

your readers will feel acquainted and connected

with your memoir’s most important characters.

If you missed the last two Thursday posts, click on:

“When you say something, make sure you have said it”

The importance of “place” in your memoir

Do you hear that?

Some sounds have died out. Have you ever thought of that?

In your memory, some sounds live on—they are a perfectly normal part of everyday life—yet they could be sounds your kids or grandkids have never heard.

I thought of that a few days ago when I read 11 Things That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard.

Sounds like:

a rotary dial phone

a manual typewriter

a cash register

and those bells that used to ring when we pulled into a gas station.

If these memories make you smile, you’ll enjoy Kara Kovalchik’s 11 Things That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard.

Enjoy that list, but add to it. Make a list of your own unique sounds and include them in your memoir.

Think about the sound of milking a cow—the sound of warm milk squirting into a metal bucket. I suspect most people have no idea what that sounds like.

People acquainted with only gas or electric “fireplaces” might not know about crackling and hissing sounds that real logs make in real fireplaces.

Those who grew up pre-photocopy machines will remember the sound a mimeograph machine makes.

Did you grow up listening to air raid sirens? I did. 

I’m working on a memoir about three years in a remote spot in South America. My sound lexicon contains sounds of howler monkeys, Honda 90s, bulls chomping on the hibiscus plant outside my kitchen window, mosquitoes buzzing ears at night, and many more.

Frederick Buechner writes of sounds from college days: “I hear the clatter of feet on stone steps and wooden steps, the rifle-shot slap of books dropped to the writing arms of seats in lecture halls… and [in the dorm] the playing of everybody’s phonograph at once—“Honeysuckle Rose,” “People Will Say We’re in Love,” “As Time Goes By.”… (The Sacred Journey)

For your readers’ the sake, for your memoir’s sake—to help your memoir zing, to add to your readers’ enjoyment—do the work necessary to make sounds come to life.

Need help remembering? Close your eyes. It’ll probably help.

And click on this link for Amber Lea Starfire’s blog post—it’ll help you capture and pin down sounds from your past.