“I’ve failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant”

 

I have one more important tip for you, following up on last week’s post about the need for clarity in our writing. (If you missed it, click on “If there is any possible way for readers to misread or misinterpret what you write, they will.”)

 

To communicate effectively with readers,

aim your writing at an eighth-grade audience.

 

You read that correctly.

 

Years ago, when I studied journalism, instructors taught us to write in a way eighth-grade students could easily understand.

Recently I saw the same advice so it must still be the best practice.

 

What’s true for journalists is true for memoirists: Aim at an eighth-grade audience.

 

Ken Follett, Welsh author, says his goal is to make his prose “utterly easy to understand.” He calls it “transparent prose.”

 

“I’ve failed dreadfully,” Follet says, “if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant.”

 

You know what Follett means.

You have had the unpleasant experience

of reading a sentence or a paragraph

two or three times

before you could figure out the writer’s message.

Don’t be that kind of writer.

 

Revise your sentences and paragraphs

and chapters until they are

“utterly easy to understand.”

 

Have fun!

 

Writing your memoir: “A lump in the throat and a deep, wordless feeling”

Prolific writer Frederick Buechner says that when he writes books, they “start—as Robert Frost said his poems did—with a lump in the throat . . . with a deep, wordless feeling for some aspect of my own experience that has moved me.” (Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation)

Do you know that “deep, wordless feeling” that longs to find its way from within you and into black and white on paper?

If so, you’ll find encouragement and inspiration from Donald Murray’s words in The Craft of Revision:

If you haven’t yet begun to write your memoir,

begin today!

Write so you can discover what you want to say,

and then rewrite to make sense of that

“deep, wordless feeling,”

and share your story with others.

Tell yourself rewriting is not punishment

Writing your memoir’s first draft is an experiment. Even your second and third and fourth drafts are experiments.

It’s like trying on for size—like taking five yellow dresses off the rack and heading toward the dressing room. When you slip into them and look in the mirror, you discover only one yellow is the right shade; you look washed out in the other four.

So, you keep only the one yellow dress that’s the right shade—

and in writing,

you keep only the sentences

and words

and paragraphs

and openings

and endings

that fit—those that work best.

You can also compare writing and rewriting and polishing to arranging flowers in a vase. You do your best to create beauty but when you stand back, you see the bouquet is lopsided, or you didn’t distribute the colors well, or you’ve left a gap, so you rearrange it, tweaking it here and there until it’s just right.

With dresses and with flowers and with writing, we need to stand back, take another look, and adjust accordingly.

We can view rewriting and editing and polishing as a pain in the neck, or maybe even punishment—OR we can consider it an enjoyable process of enhancement.

Amber Lea Starfire writes, “As a teacher, it always surprises me when beginning writers resist the revision process, because that’s often when the best writing takes place.

“I think of the first draft as a kind of rough sketch—the bones of the piece,” she continues. “It’s during the revision process that the skeleton acquires muscles and flesh and features. And I often have to do major surgery, restructuring the skeleton, before I can write what needs to be said.” (You’ll enjoy Amber’s post, Writing is Revision is Re-Writing is Craft.)

Good writers revise and rewrite, often many times.

Dinty Moore says, “The difference. . . between writers who are successful in finding an audience and those who struggle, is when and where in the revision process a writer throws in the towel and settles for 'good enough.’” (Read his How to Revise a Draft Without Going Crazy.)

Don't settle for  just “good enough.”

Tell yourself rewriting is not punishment—

instead, rewriting is beautification.

So, beautify! And have fun!

Tuesday Tidbit: “A lump in the throat and a deep, wordless feeling”

Frederick Buechner says that when he writes books, they “start—as Robert Frost said his poems did—with a lump in the throat . . . with a deep, wordless feeling for some aspect of my own experience that has moved me.” (from Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation)

Do you know that “deep, wordless feeling” that longs to find its way from inside you and into black and white on paper?

If so, you’ll find encouragement and inspiration from Donald Murray’s words in The Craft of Revision:

Begin! 

Write so you can discover what you want to say, 

and then rewrite to make sense 

of that “deep wordless feeling” 

and share your story with others.

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.

Tuesday Tidbit: Simplify

Fix redundancies in your manuscript. For example:

Josh repeated again.

Adam read each and every book.

The witness gave true and accurate facts.

Grandma sent me various different recipes.

Remember: Write tight!

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

Sneeze post

If you’re not following Spiritual Memoirs 101 on Facebook, recently you missed these and many more:

In How to Capture Your Toughest Memories, Amy Jo Burns says, “…the hardest scenes to write were also the ones that had been the hardest to live, and certainly the hardest to relive and remember. How do we begin to dissect the moments that changed the trajectories of our lives? These difficult scenes are often the most integral to our narratives, and they take time to develop and understand.…”

Do you want to remember more details to include in your memoir? Close your eyes and see what happens! Read more at Closing your eyes boosts memory recall, new study finds.

Following up on that idea, here’s a quick exercise Amber Lea Starfire developed to help memoirists remember sensory details—and yes, she is a fan of closing one’s eyes to retrieve those memories. This is a practical, helpful blog post. You’ll find the exercise at her blog post, From Memories to Memoirs, Part 3—Remembering vividly.

In Polish Your Prose, Nephele Tempest writes, “… the time will come when you need to edit.… I’m referring to that nitty gritty editorial process of looking at your work word by word, sentence by sentence, and examining the language you’ve used.” She offers storytellers and wordsmiths a cheat sheet to help with editing.

Patty Kirk offers another tool to help rework your stories: Read them aloud. “Hearing your sentences spoken lets you know whether they’re clear and natural-sounding—whether someone actually could speak them…. And it doesn’t work to read to an empty room. You need a warm body, a listener, to complete the communication.” Read more at Revising Aloud.

Happy writing!