You are here: Home / Archives for memoir writing

Inspiration and Flow in Memoir Writing

By 1 Comment

 

Writers, and all creative people, have a range of ease for the output of their creative art—from freeflowing river to arid desert—and for many years, creative coaches have tried to explain why and how we achieve the desired state, and how to avoid the desert.

You know about this—you have an idea, or you don’t but you sit down and the writing bubbles out of the ends of your fingers and onto the page. You experience the joy of this flow, feeling that you’re simply a conduit for something erupting from you. It is a state of flow, a state of being that is pleasurable, natural, and rather exciting. The problem is that no one can sustain it. Many modes of persuasion have been tried to stimulate this state, from drugs and alcohol to meditation and visualization. Clearly there are healthy ways to stimulate creativity, but still it is an elusive jewel, and we are left with the fact that we have to work with the state of the human mind which is ever fluctuating.

The root of inspiration, is spirare, which means to breathe. We breathe in this special state of creative flow. We need to approach our creative state with respect and with a sense of appreciation for its fragility. One of my favorite authors Brenda Ueland writes about inspiration in her book If You Want to Write. Think about and spend time with these inspirational suggestions, and better yet, read her book!

Inspiration comes slowly and quietly.…imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

If [you have] an idleness when you walk alone for a long, long time, or take a long dreamy time dressing,  or lie in bed at night and thoughts come and go, or dig in a garden or drive a car for many hours alone; or an idleness where you sit with pencil and paper  or before a typewriter quietly putting down what you happen to be thinking—that is creative idleness.

…thoughts come so slowly. For what we write today slipped into our souls some other day when we were alone and doing nothing.

I love the last quote the most! What slips into your soul when you’re not looking?

Journal about these questions.

What are your creative techniques? How do you get started writing?

What kind of environment do you need? What feeds your creative soul?

 

Want more inspiration? Join the National Association of Memoir Writers Friday, March 30 for the Free Memoir Writing Telesummit   Memoir Writing in the Digital Age. Learn from Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, Lynn Serafinn, the author of the 7 Graces of Marketing, , Dan Blank, Social Media guru and founder of WeGrowMedia.com, Tessa Smith McGovern founder of echook.com, Brooke Warner, Executive Editor at Seal Press and expert coach at Warnercoaching.com. Sign up to get the free audios for the day!

Filed Under: Blog, National Association of Memoir Writers Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Memoir Writing Tips for Creating Story Structure and the Narrative Arc

By 2 Comments

Memoir writers struggle with plot and structure for a very good reason: they think they know the plot. They assume that writing “what happened” is enough to create a memoir, and think that putting journal entries into the computer can be their memoir. A memoir is a story, created and constructed with skill and focus. It can be chronological or it might not be. Writing a memoir asks for you to dig deep into your biography and come up with scenes that bring a reader into your world fully and inspire them to keep reading–something about you and your story is relevant to their lives.

Some tips for thinking about story and plot:

  •        A story has a reason for being told—this is your theme.
  •        Unlike journaling, a story has a form—a beginning, middle, and an end.  Another way to think about this is that your story, your book, needs to have a dramatic structure: Act One, Act Two, and Act Three.
  •      Something significant happens in each scene of the story, the point of the scene.
  •      The main character, the protagonist—in a memoir it’s you!—is changed significantly by events, actions, decisions, and epiphanies. 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.
  •      All stories have conflict, rising action, a crisis, a climax, and a resolution.
  •      By the end, the story world, the world where the protagonist began, is transformed.

Focusing your Theme in the Arc

As you plan your story, clarify your themes. Being clear about them will help you to build your book toward the final resolution of the theme’s questions and conflicts by the end of the narrative arc, the end of the book.

Many memoirists explore how certain events changed their lives irrevocably, such as Lucky by Alice Sebold, the story of a rape, or surviving a bizarre and chaotic childhood in Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. Another theme is recovering from the death of a loved one—The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, or Paula by Isabel Allende.

Patricia Hampl’s The Florist’s Daughter or Mary Gordon’s Circling My Mother shows the heartbreak and challenging difficulties of aging and dying parents. Sexual abuse is explored in Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, and mental illness is the topic of Girl, Interrupted by Susan Kaysen, and An Unquiet Mind by Kay Jamison. There are countless varieties of themes, but though books may have the same theme, the stories, language, and structure make each book unique. It’s imperative that you develop your skills to allow your story to shine.

To clarify your choice of theme for your narrative arc, ask the following questions:

  • What is the main, overarching meaning of my story?
  • What is my book about? (One sentence.)
  • How does my book end? What do I want the reader to understand and learn?

Three Acts of Dramatic Structure

Not all books follow this plan for the story, but many do, as do many movies. Most memoirists don’t think about the arc of the story at all, getting lost sometimes in a forest/trees dilemma of too much detail. If you learn more about this, you have more choices in how you think about and develop your story. 

Act One (Beginning): the set up of the story, introduction of characters and situations which show conflicting desires and complications through different scenes. During this act you present the who, what, when, where, and why of the story.

Act Two (Middle): Drawing upon scenes and summaries, the story action rises through conflicts, complications, and challenges the protagonist keeps attempting to solve, but as the story progresses, even more complications develop that thwart an easy or quick resolution.

Act Three (End): In the last act, the protagonist wrestles with the forces that have been working again her, which is shown through what is called the crisis and the climax of the story. After that, is the denouement or the falling action that resolves the loose ends of the story. 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 the protagonist must resolve as the story comes to a close.

Read fiction and memoir with these ideas in mind. How soon do you understand the themes in books that you read? Do you see a beginning, middle, and end structure in fiction and memoir that you’re reading?

What are your three favorite memoirs, and why? Do you have favorite fiction books from childhood–what were they and why?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , ,

Are there Secrets in your Family?

By 2 Comments

 

 

My beautiful grandmother in her 30's

 

 

 

No one ever saw how my grandmother looked when she was upset—hair frizzed, lips caked with coffee stained lipstick, rage pouring from her eyes as she ranted and raved. Sometimes I would stand in front of her for two hours, afraid to move. I wondered if the neighbors heard her ranting, I found out years later that they had heard the shouting and the crying, but in the fifties what went on behind closed doors was considered no one’s business.

 

Besides, when people act irrationally, we feel ashamed. Maybe we feel responsible—could we have prevented the outburst? I worried about what I did or could do differently to keep her from getting angry again, but some of the time it was not about me—since we lived alone together, there was no one else to scream at but me.

Forty years later I realized that my grandmother must have had something wrong with her, and it would be on my mother’s deathbed that a diagnosis came forward—for her and my mother, who ranted and behaved irrationally too—“Bi-Polar.” Naming this monster that made these beautiful women in my life so angry and sad, that made them ugly and distorted was a huge relief. It helped me to forgive them and to have compassion for them—this naming. I wondered if they had been diagnosed earlier and had some medical help, if our lives could have been different.

 

My mother Josephine--mid-1950s

 

Many of you know about the research by Dr. James Pennebaker that carrying secrets puts a huge burden on the mind and the body.  We can release this burden and come to greater health through writing. I write about this in my book The Power of Memoir, and Victoria Costello, author of A Lethal Inheritance, is going to talk about it this Friday at our National Association of Memoir Writer’s member teleseminar.

Victoria combines her research and her own family experiences with mental illness in her book, and shares the stories with us—a very brave thing to do!

Here’s a link to the book review I wrote where you can read more about her book and her story. We are going to talk about the value of finding out about your family history as you write your memoir. I have done a lot of genealogical research both in dusty courthouses and at Ancestry.com to try to unearth layers of secrets, chipping away at the burden I used to carry.

Do you have secrets that scare you? Have you tried writing them down—just for you?

How about family history research—have you done it, and has it helped you with your story?

Join me and Victoria:

March 16, 2012
11AM PDT; 12 MDT; 1 PM CDT; 2 PM EDT

Memoir Writing: Finding Your Way through Your Family History

Victoria Costello, Author of A Lethal Inheritance

 

 

 

Filed Under: Blog, Writing As Healing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Memoir Writing Tips and Quotes

By 2 Comments

 

One thing I love about being part of the National Association of Memoir Writers is that I get to talk with lots of authors, teachers, coaches, and people in the book writing world. Early in the month, I enjoyed my conversation with Brooke Warner, Executive Editor of Seal Press, and an advisory board member at the National Association of Memoir Writers. We discussed ways you can write faster, better, and with an awareness of the stages of writing. Writing is about process, writing is about tuning into your story and your book, and listening to it whisper in your ear. In some ways, writing is about magic as well as hard work.

Quotes from Brooke:

 “I believe in writers being published! They might choose traditional publishing, a small press, or self-publish. But the important thing is to write the best book you can write.”

“A book has a life of its own—it wants to be expressed. The book will tell you what it wants to be.”

“Writing is risky.”

We discussed what gets in the way of writing flow:

  • Perfectionism—this creates a paralysis that allows no forward movement.
  • Preconceptions—of what the work “should” be.
  • The Inner critic—yammering away about something that is not yet even written.

Quotes from Linda Joy:

“There are three stages to the writing process: the (shitty) first draft, the muddy middle, and the top of the mountain. By far the longest stages are the first two.”

“Find your turning points as a way to focus your work—moments of meaning that contain a point or focus for your story.”

Ask yourself:

  • What do I want the reader to learn?
  • What is the point of the story/chapter/scene?
  • How does this paragraph, vignette chapter and scene relate to my theme(s)?

Another tip:

Focus your writing in bursts of 500 words—about two double-spaced pages. If you write 500 words a day, you will have a book in six months.

How much do you write each day? Each week?

What is your goal to finish your book?

To learn more about writing your memoir quickly, join us for the Free Memoir Writing Telesummit Memoir Writing in the Digital Age March 30! Sign up to get the free audio of the whole day which includes Mark Coker of Smashwords, Lynn Serafinn, 7 Graces of Marketing, Dan Blank, WeGrowMedia, Tessa Smith McGovern, eChook, and a session with Brooke Warner and yours truly–Linda Joy.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »