I’m asked to be a judge of memoir writing contests from time to time. As I sort through the pages, I notice certain patterns and bad habits that lead me to put a manuscript in the “no” pile. Let’s look at some of the ways that a contest judge views the early pages of a manuscript. Note: if you have a lot of errors on the first or second page, your judge will not read on.

1. Misspelled words and incorrect grammar suggest carelessness or ignorance, suggested that you are not ready to be  a professional.
2. Incorrect placement of periods and quotes, and the framing of dialogue means the person was either careless or doesn’t know correct usage. “My mother loved the new dress,” Betty said, taking off her hat. Note that the comma is just in front of the quote, and the attribution is simple, using the word “said.” “Screamed, shouted, muttered”—are almost never necessary in creating believable dialogue, and it shows that you’re a beginner.
3. Misuse of “it’s” and “its,” ‘your” and “you’re” “there” and “their” are my pet peeves. These mistakes show up all over the internet and even in newspapers—shocking! But just because it is everywhere doesn’t make it right.
4. Flat language, such as using “there is, there were, there are”—too much of the verb form “to be” leaves the work listless. Nothing is happening when things are just “being.” Find active verbs, work on reconstructing sentences so they are moving along and interesting.
5. Dangling participles that don’t modify correctly show the person doesn’t understand how to diagram a sentence. Remember, in the old days, you had to know how things hooked together and you knew what modified what! “Driving in the car, the dog hung his head out the window.” Here, the dog hopefully was not driving! Correction:  “As I drove the car, the dog hung his head.”
6. At the beginning of a shorter essay or vignette, it’s best to bring in the action, characters and situation early in the story. Long rambling explanations of the back story or hard to follow pieces of history confuse the reader. What is the through line of the story? Where does it begin and end through the character’s eyes and experience?
7. What growth, change, insight, or new revelations does the main character—in a memoir it’s you!—have by the end of the vignette? Too often stories meander unfocused to the last page, and the reader does not get the point.

Final suggestions: As you write your first draft, allow yourself time to add in details and ask yourself questions: did I use scenes and sensual detail? Does the reader, who does not know me, see and experience my world through their senses? Does spell check give the correct answer for every word—often it’s incorrect for the default setting in grammar and spelling, and you have to check each word yourself.

Think of your work as having layers, each encounter with your manuscript leading to a more polished story. And, don’t forget to enjoy the process!

National Association of Memoir Writers to Offer New Memoir Writing Tele-class this Fall

6 Memoir Writing Tele-classes with Online Writing Support Component

Writing Your Memoir One Story at a Time

Instructor:  Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D.

When:  6 Fridays Beginning October 1st (class will not meet October 15, 2010)
Time: 1 PM PDT | 2 MDT | 3 CDT | 4 EDT
Cost: $175 for NAMW Lifetime Members / $190 for NAMW Annual members / $325 for non-NAMW members | Become a NAMW member to receive a discount!

Writing a memoir is fun, challenging and…it asks you by the nature of being what it is, to dance with your memories, to dig into the images in your mind, and to relive them by recreating them on the page. Most of the time, this is enjoyable. How I enjoyed capturing some of the special moments of my life with people I loved—my great-grandmother in her garden, Mr. Brauninger my music teacher skipping into the fourth grade class, soaring on his violin. Other memories were more challenging—my mother coming and going on the train, the family struggles that I witnessed, my pounding heart.

This six week course will address both the emotional and the technical aspects of writing a memoir from truth and secrets to the reasons for writing in scene and learning about plot. You will be able to share vignettes from your own life in the workshop and receive feedback and support from your fellow writers.

Join us for “school” this fall in a memoir workshop that anyone can join. You do not need to already have a memoir started. You can begin now or come with your work in progress.

Class Outline:

Week One
Secrets and truth. Family conflicts. Having a Beginner’s Mind. Mining Your Memories

Beginning means to be open to what needs to come. Sometimes we need to figure out how to deal with the secrets and family issues before we can feel free to write. We will talk about truth, secrets, how to begin, and how to create a safe writing world for yourself in this first meeting. You will begin to list the memories and snapshots you want to capture.

Week Two
Themes of your Life and Your Turning Points

We will talk about the importance of finding your themes; the turning points exercise helps you to do this. The themes of your work are a thread that continues throughout the piece, a path through the forest of ideas and words. Dark and light stories in your memoir—keeping the balance.

Week Three
Scenes; Sensual Details, and Creating Memories on the Page

Scenes are important building blocks of stories. We will talk about what makes up a scene, and learn about using sensual details of sight, sound, texture, and taste.

Week Four
Dialogue and setting; Character Portraits; Painting with Words

Creating worlds with words. Painting with words. Word play by writing quick flashes to capture moments. Experimenting with language, imagery, and snapshots.

Week Five
The narrative arc; how to understand what it is and how to use it to help you craft your memoir. The narrative voice, narrative arc, and plot create a structure for your work.

Week Six
The Power of Writing a Memoir

We will wrap up the course by listing the ways you can keep your writing life going, finding a schedule and developing a plan for your memoir. The benefits, challenges and rewards of writing a memoir and keeping your writing life supported are all part of being a writer. Issues such as healing, resolution, and forgiveness are part of this week’s discussion.

Writing to heal yourself is a very powerful process. If a writer has a deeply personal and painful story, how should he begin to get it onto the page?

Start by considering the special moments in your life, the turning points that changed the direction of your life in a significant way. Make a list of these moments, at least ten to twenty, and write down the significant event and when it occurred. Memoirists can feel overwhelmed by the large number of memories they have, so the turning point and timeline tools that I talk about in the book help to organize memories. We need to sift through to find the most important stories as a spine around which to build a longer work.

I also suggest that writers keep track of the “dark” and the “light” stories so they are not so overwhelmed by the more painful memories, and make sure they follow a “darker” story with a happy one that allows them to sink into the fullness of a delicious pleasant memory.

Learning about story structure and scenes is another way to contain and put in perspective the events of our lives. A story, unlike a journal entry, has a structure—a beginning, middle, and an end, and is constructed with a goal in mind and a plot with dramatic action.

When we write a scene, we find ourselves in the places and times of our lives in a kind of creative hypnosis. A story uses scenes to bring the past to life. A scene takes place at a particular moment in time, and draws upon the use of sensual details—smell, sound, texture, description, color, and taste, along with characters, dialogue, and action. In a story, we are both the narrator and the “I” of the story—the main character. This dual point of view helps to create a witnessing experience of ourselves as we write from our current point of view about who we once were, an artful weaving of then and now, past and present.

Alice Miller, a Swiss psychiatrist, said that being witnessed is a significant part of the healing process, and points out that while we need others to witness us and our stories, we can witness ourselves by becoming self-aware.
Writing allows us to witness the stages of our lives, and when we read others’ memoirs, we witness and empathize with them, thus deepening our connection with humanity and giving us new ways to think about our own lives.

If you have memories you don’t want to detail in your memoir, create distance. Write about what happened in the third person: “she” or “he” instead of “I.” Write as if you are watching the event unfold in a movie. Write a scene about a difficult incident, but make it turn out the way you wanted it to, ending it positively. Tell what happened before and after a difficult incident. Write around it, but not about the event itself. These techniques are protective–when you are ready to go deeper, you can do it later.

To tune into this powerful work, keep adding to your list of turning points. And remember this: the researchers that explored writing to heal found that writing happy stories was nearly as healing as writing about painful moments.
Remember that when you write your memoir, you are weaving a new tapestry of your life one story at a time.

Research has shown that writing positive stories about ourselves is as healing as writing about bad memories, but I’ve observed big changes when writers dig in the darkness for deeper levels of truth. We all want to avoid unnecessary pain, yet healing comes from balancing our system and not staying trapped in memories and negative feelings about the past. Our fears, anger, jealousy, insecurity, and hurt are real, but they can interfere with living with a sense of peace, forgiveness of self and others, and juicy creative energy.

Writer’s I’ve worked with find it helpful to weave back and forth between the dark and the lighter stories to create balance, and recover from the heaviness of writing painful stories. The path of emotional healing is like cleaning out an old wound: it hurts while we are cleaning it out but we feel better afterward.

Make a list of the dark topics that you suspect are important, but aren’t yet ready to write. List them by title or theme. Write down the age you were when these difficult times happened. Write down what you did to cope with the event at the time. How do you feel now about the incident? What would you have liked to happen differently? Place these stories on a timeline so you can get a perspective on the clustering of events.

Make a list of the light stories, stories that bring you a feeling of well being, happiness, contentment, and safety. They may include memories about love, spiritual experiences, and miracles. Stand fully in the light of the positive stories and feel them in your body. Hold the images of the positive stories while you consider the dark stories list. This technique helps to integrate the polarities of our psyche.

The reader needs relief too, as most readers will put a book down if there are uninterrupted dark stories. I alternated dark and light chapters in my memoir Don’t Call Me Mother so the reader could enjoy moments of lightness and joy while also learning about the story of abandonment that weaves through the book, and I brought the reader to an ending with forgiveness and healing.

The power of writing a memoir is that the truth really does make you free. You don’t have to share your story with anyone. Having the freedom to express yourself freely and fully can release you from the story you have lived, and allows you to move forward with grace and forgiveness. Keep writing!

Many writers are torn between the desire to tell the truth and the internal/external pressure to keep family secrets. What do you recommend they do?
It’s important first for the writer to get her story on the page, to write her own truth. Each person has a point of view and his own story that no one else can tell, so he needs to claim it and discover its wisdom by writing about it. This process creates a new perspective that brings forth layers of memories and insights. Exposing these layers is part of the healing process.

And there’s the hot topic in all my workshops: secrets. Secrets are energy magnets. The force it takes to keep secrets hidden is energy that could be used for growth and creativity. So often though, the shame and guilt associated with secrets keep feeding the darkness and the fear. Secrets maintain a great power over us, and we are diminished by them. We become co-conspirators to family dynamics that we don’t agree with and want to break away from. So we get caught in a conflict—to speak or not to speak? Do we remain closed and complicit, or open up and take the risk of losing friends and family, of being ousted from the family, or shamed once again into submission? These are choices that we need to make consciously and with care.

I tell my students to be open to writing two versions of the story: first, write for yourself, to clear out your emotional closet and sort the events that are jumbled up in your mind. Research has shown that writing the unadorned truth is powerful and creates changes in the brain—in other words: it’s healing.

When you put real people in your book, especially if they are identifiable, they should be notified. Even if all the portraits are positive, we’re exposing a real person to the eyes of the world. The convention is to have people read the sections they appear in, if you are on speaking terms. If not, change the names and identifying characteristics, even if that means changing names for the character, the streets, town and anything that exposes them. If published, the legal branch of the publishing company can vet the manuscript as well, but since so many memoirs are self-published, I think it’s important for people to keep these ethics in mind.

Putting the publishing concerns aside for a moment, I think the writer first needs to listen to the voice within, the true author of the story–yourself. Write what you have to say as if no one will read it–you can review it later. You will be different from the writer who began the story. Writing the story will transform you, heal you, and give you a feeling of empowerment.
Be brave–write your story!

Mary had much more to share, and the NAMW members that were on the line were mesmerized by her suggestions and even inspired to begin writing poetry. They can tune into the audio on our website to hear the whole teleseminar.
I agree with Mary–through my own experience writing poetry, reading to groups, and freeing my imagery
that my writing was enhanced by reading and writing poetry. I recommend that everyone try it!

Writing a story has a different kind of power. A story has structure—a beginning, middle, and an end, and in a story, we use scenes and other writing techniques to bring the past to life: characters, dialogue, and action.

A scene takes place at a particular moment in time, and draws upon the use of sensual details—smell, sound, texture, description, color, taste. In a story, we are both the narrator and the “I” of the story—the main character. This dual point of view helps to create a witnessing experience of ourselves as we write from our current point of view about who we once were, an artful weaving of then and now, past and present. Alice Miller, a Swiss psychiatrist, says that being witnessed is a significant part of the healing process.

To start creating stories from your memories, list the ten most important events or turning points, moments that changed your life. Write each vignette one by one, focusing on your emotions and the meaning the story has for you. This will give you a good start to a memoir or life story. After you have several stories, you can quilt them together in whatever order you desire.

Dr. James Pennebaker, one of the premier researchers in the field of writing and healing, says, “Story is a way of knowledge.” This is a very exciting idea—to think of a story as having a life of its own, to imagine that a story can teach us something as we write it. I have discovered this to be true in my memoir writing and coaching. When memories are kindly invited to join us at the table, when we put fingers to keyboard or pen to paper, something interesting starts to happen: as we write, fresh and strange ideas meander onto the page, unexpected sentences arise out of us, thoughts and feelings that we hadn’t thought of in a long time. We wonder if we should delete these unexpected sentences, we may feel alarmed, ashamed, excited, even giddy. This is great! It means that you have allowed your true expression to come through. It means you burst out of your usual control, and allowed an inner wisdom to speak through you.

In my book I talk about the ways that memory is stored in the brain and explain how traumatic memories are stored differently. We might stay stuck in the trauma, even having flashbacks and feeling traumatized all over again as memories replay in our minds. Putting our experiences into a story—even a fictionalized story—helps us to reprocess our memories and frees us to move forward. Researchers found that the immune system is improved by writing for only 15 minutes four times a week.

As you write, it’s important to make sure you also capture the positive stories of your life, keeping a balance between dark stories and the lighter ones of happiness and joy. If you write only ten minutes a day, you can begin one of your vignettes, finding new meaning and appreciation for who you are and create new opportunities for a better future. It takes courage to write our truths, but the rewards are great. Begin today!

Tips for Writing to Heal
1. List 10-20 important turning points in your life. Create a timeline and plot these events on your timeline so you can see how the events cluster.
2. Choose one or two new turning point stories a week to write. Be sure to use sensual details and write scenes.
3. If you write a darker story, follow it up with a lighter one for balance.
4. Genealogical and historical research can help to create understanding and compassion for your ancestors. You can write from the point of view of your father, mother, or grandparents after you discover some of the details of their lives.
5. Write from old photos—describe the photo in detail, and then imagine what happened before and after the photo captured that moment in time.
6. Write freely—don’t listen to your inner critic.
7. Notice how you feel empowered as you claim your voice, your memories, and your past.

As Becky and I talked about it later, it warmed our hearts to be at the workshop where for 4 hours, everyone’s focus and energy was on writing, books, creativity, and imagination. We projected our younger selves into the scene using our imagination, wishing that we’d had this kind of summer morning long ago. I showed them how scenes worked, reading from my book Don’t Call Me Mother, and talked about the Power of Memoir as a way to heal. The kids were brave and shared their work, and later when Becky talked about critique groups, they even got up and role played with smiles and good humor. The lunch afterward was delicious and the ride home went fast as Becky and I talked over the day. Inspired by the creative kids and the workshop, we sorted out plot problems in our novels all the way home!
It was a perfect writerly day for all.

Jane Friedman’s energizing workshop
After teaching my memoir group, I battled traffic and got to the conference in time to tuck into the workshop by Jane Friedman, the publisher and editorial director of F+W media and the Writer’s Digest Community as soon as I arrived. Throughout the year, I listen to a lot of authors, writers, teachers, and publishers talk about the current state of writing and publishing, too often hearing something like: “Sure, go ahead and write, but don’t get your hopes up. Publishing is in a transition, and it’s hard to know what will happen. There’s so much competition that you shouldn’t count on anyone accepting your work, but you can write if you want. Have fun!”

Jane’s message is very different. The summary of what I heard was this: “All of you are creative and there are so many ways to participate in the ongoing conversation in the world. Technology has expanded so that we can draw upon all these new ways to connect—from traditional publishing to blogs, social networks, radio, webinars, ebooks, podcasting and so on. Just write, get your work out there in every way you can. Over time the energy will build and you will make new connections, find new opportunities to publish, and create new ideas. It’s ongoing and creative. Join in and express yourself.”

After listening to her explain the current state of publishing, writing, and connecting, you could feel a lively energy buzz around the room, and uplifting of creativity, a juicy excitement about what we are all doing. Everyone knows that we work better in an atmosphere of support and optimism, so the seeds were planted there for the young people in the audience as well as us adults—to keep writing, creating, and connecting!

The young girls who spoke in the workshops knew so much about writing and literature—I was really impressed. They were writing stories, checking out ebooks and blogs, and were tuned into the online community of newsletters and social networks. It all is so natural to them, they’ve grown up with computer since babyhood. The rest of us are catching up!

In my work with memoirists, it’s important to work on several levels at once: writing—creating new material that comes from somewhere inside us. Re-shaping and revisioning—looking again at our work, seeing it anew, which is what revision means. Being open to continue the creative process in a new way. And sharing our work with the world, when we’re ready, and when we’ve taken the work to fullness and completion.
In the meantime, we need to find our writing tribe, whether in “real” groups face to face, online, or in the social networking and blogosphere where thousands, perhaps millions of writers from all over the world are making new friends.
I have to go now. I need to post on Facebook, Twitter, check my other blogs, check in on the Writer’s Digest Community which I recently joined, and…oh, I’d like to get some writing done on my book too!
Keep writing! Everything you write makes you a better writer.