Archive for the ‘Biography’ Category

Your Autobiography is the First Step Towards Writing Your Memoir

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

The first draft of my memoir included my entire life, starting from my first year in the apartment above my dad’s drugstore in north Philadelphia. Who were those people I grew up with, my mother and father, my brother and sister? What was it like developing from a baby into me? I poked and prodded at my past and sorted the resulting scenes into chronological order. After a year of research and another of writing, I can now read about my dramatic tensions, the dynamics of family and friends, hopes and fears, obstacles and allies. My life makes far more sense than ever before.

And so, perhaps I’m done. Writing my life from beginning to end is a real accomplishment that makes me proud of myself, not only for of having written it, but also for having lived it.

But I don’t feel done. I want to take the next step and share my life with others. The problem is that readers don’t want a compendium of my entire life. They want a Story – that is, a dramatic form that we all have learned since we were children. My life does not by itself contain this form. To engage readers, I must find it. First I must craft a blurb dramatic enough to attract interest. Then I need to write the book so it compels readers from the first page to the last.

What do you cut away to make it more pleasing?

To create his crowd-pleasing statues, Michelangelo started with a raw block of marble. His task was to chip away everything that didn’t belong. Memoir writers face a similar task. The compelling story lurks somewhere within the vast range of memory. Now we have to figure out what to remove. That’s not so easy. Life was all one thing. Splitting off parts of it may feel disturbing or even painful. And yet, if the final product is as beautiful as Michelangelo’s Pieta, this creative pain would be worthwhile.

Pain is not the only reason it’s hard to remove parts of your life. While polished stories are bounded by the first page and the last, daily life provides no sharply defined markers. Day after day, events run together. We have to find the story within those days, through our own creative process.

Say I want to share my visit to an Ashram in India in the ’70s. Should I start when I board the plane, or do I back up and start the journey as a Jewish nerd growing up in north Philadelphia? Do I finish when I return to the U.S. and move into a commune, or do I move forward a few months when I return to my cubicle as an engineer in the Nuclear Power industry?

Suppose I want to tell about the incredible thrill of receiving a standing ovation from the board of directors of a nonprofit writing group when I was 50 years old. Do I start with the phone call I received from the director? “I appreciate the honor, Foster, but I’ve never done anything like this before,” I said. “You’ll do fine,” he said. “Just be yourself.” Or do I backup and show how incredibly shy I was just two years earlier, so nervous  at my first talk at Toastmasters my voice was swallowed up in a hoarse whisper, and I sat down flushed with humiliation after polite applause.

Wending my way through these options requires more than simply finding the most interesting scenes. I need to reveal the forces that propelled my life along its path, and more importantly why a reader should follow me.

A different metaphor, don’t tear anything away

Perhaps the image of a block of marble is misleading. Life is not really a shapeless blob. In its own way, the entire journey was a lovely creation, the life of a complete human being. Perhaps the transformation from the innocence of a little baby all the way to the end is a sort of Pieta in its own right, and we are all destined to end up draped across God’s lap.

The challenge is to somehow offer readers my sense of this fullness, but to do so at a smaller scale. Perhaps, if I adjust my lens to a higher magnification I can see my own passion play embedded in each moment like William Blake’s “world in a grain of sand.” Focusing on the drama, pleasures, and intrigue of a smaller part of life might not require any chipping away after all.

A popular form of computer graphics, called a fractal, looks like a beautiful set of swirls, a sort of mathematical paisley print with teardrop shapes intertwined in miraculously intricate patterns. The remarkable thing about fractals is that when you zoom in closer and closer, you continue to see exotic beauty and detail. The intricate patterns within a tiny fraction of the image are every bit as mesmerizing as the designs that emerge in a canvas as big as the night sky.

I tinker with focal distance, zooming in on particular events. Around each one I see a cluster of passions, needs, and dreams. That younger guy who flew to India was following an inner drive that had started years earlier, before he even knew his own path. And that older guy who spoke to a group of nonprofit leaders had a different constellation of circumstances and emotions.  What was he thinking? Why was it such a milestone? Now my challenge is less about cutting out and more about homing in on the details that surround a key event. By identifying the drama in each situation, I can develop a bright, creative reflection of that one part.

My original project of writing about my life resulted in a book that was too long and too complete to be accessible to most readers. But now I have transformed that longer work into a sourcebook, from which I can draw more tightly focused artistic renderings. Hopefully, the end result will please readers as much as the whole thing has pleased me.

—

Writing Prompt

From your entire scope of memories, select a particular incident, and try telling it as a self-contained story. What was the driving force of the event? Where would you start? Where would you end? Develop it as a short story. Try events of various sizes and see how they hang together as stories in their own right. For another exercise, try to organize the same set of events as a chapter in a larger memoir. Finally, imagine writing a whole book, with this event as its centerpiece.

Note
To see examples of fractals on the web, type the search term “Fractal Images” into your search engine.

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Posted in Biography, How-to, My own life | 6 Comments »

Seeing History Through The Eyes of One Man

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

[A review of "The Man on Mao's Right: From Harvard Yard to Tiananmen Square,  Life Inside China's Foreign Ministry" by Ji Chaozhu.]

Ji Chaozhu’s memoir “The Man on Mao’s Right,” let me enter the modern history of China, a country so vast and so important on the world stage, it seems like I ought to be talking about it in hushed tones. This planet cannot be understood without understanding this nation of a billion people, and yet, just a few decades ago, China was an ancient dragon, trapped in what looked like an unshakable slumber, set upon by the British and then the Japanese, and creaky in its old ways. Then came Mao Zedong who shook the dragon awake. But he did it behind an impenetrable curtain erected by mutual distrust. Western journalists were excluded and few westerners had inside information.

To visit the Amazon page for Man on Mao’s Right, click here

In the early 70’s, the walls between the U.S. and China became porous and news and diplomats began to speak. Now in our time, the walls are collapsing and the cultures growing towards each other in ways I couldn’t have imagined. So how do I catch up on all that history?

Ji Chaozhu’s memoir offers a crash course in the history of modern China, provided through the eyes of a man who was in the thick of it. Ji was an English translator for the two main characters of Communist China, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Ji Chaozhu was present during some of the most powerful diplomatic exchanges in the twentieth century.

History this large teaches me about the human race
Chairman Mao believed that China was being held back by their culture’s strong emphasis on worshipping authority and ancestors. He was afraid these backward-looking tendencies had made his country weak. To bring China into modernity he felt it was crucial to undermine respect for the past.

Mao stirred up distrust for what he called “The Four Olds,” Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas. The strategy went too far, and this disrespect for the past plunged the country into chaos. In what Ji Chaozhu calls the dark ages of modern China, from 1966 to 1976, mobs of teenagers publicly humiliated and beat people who had attained the very things that make a civilization successful. Like everything that happens in China, the proportions were staggering. Ji estimates that a million people were beaten to death or forced into suicide for their educational, artistic, and social achievements.

Ji Chaozhu compares the period known as the Cultural Revolution with the book “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding in which a group of boys stranded on an island lose all civilized values and revert to the behavior of animals. By outlawing respect for the past, Mao transformed China into a gigantic real-life “Lord of the Flies.”

What does this have to do with the memoir you might wish to write? In my opinion – everything. Memoir writers are the keepers of our culture’s pas. We maintain the long view. By remembering and passing along our stories, we link the past with the present. Ji Chaozhu’s life provides a wonderful motivation to capture and share the story of your life. One person at a time, we memoir writers recount life across decades and help people young and old develop their own best understanding of how to live.

Lessons about ghost writing
Fleeing the invading Japanese armies in the late 30’s, Ji’s family moved to the United States. As a young boy, Ji grew up in America, an outsider intent on blending in. As a student at Harvard, he made many American friends, and enjoyed the bourgeois perquisites of western life. When he left Harvard and moved back to China to support Mao’s new government, he was an outsider again. His years in the U.S. cast a shadow over his authentic Chinese identity.

I love stories about mixing cultures, perhaps because of my own grandparents’ immigration to the United States and my experience of growing up Jewish, a minority religion in a Christian dominated country. Like me, Ji’s two cultures made him feel like an outsider and kept him under constant pressure to unify his two identities. These contrasts and tensions between cultures provide a rich layer that holds my interest.

Ji Chaozhu spent his entire adult life translating back and forth between the two cultures. But when it came time to translate his own long life into a story that could be appreciated by the west, he turned to an accomplished memoir writer and biographer, Foster Winans. Foster brings his all-American past to the table, as well as his skill at converting the events of a lifetime into compelling prose.

Long Span of Time, some good things about a long life
Ji experienced many setbacks in his life. When his family was forced by the invading Japanese army to flee their ancestral lands, his father told him that the Chinese people are like ants who continue to strive and climb, finally reaching their destination, not on wings, but by great and powerful persistence.

His father’s advice to be patient helped Ji cope when, during the Cultural Revolution, he was repeatedly transferred from his diplomatic mission to work on pig farms, supposedly to scrub away his “bourgeois tendencies.” In reality this punishment was regularly imposed by the paranoid regime to maintain absolute obedience.

Memoir Writers Bring the World Together
When Mao won control over the government of China, United States leaders were so disappointed they behaved like small children. At an important diplomatic meeting between the two countries in1954, Zhou En Lai extended his hand in friendship to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Dulles turned and walked away. His insulting gesture made front page news all over China and poisoned the relationship between the two countries for 20 years. As Theodore White later wrote, “It was probably the most expensive display of rudeness by any diplomat anywhere, ever.”

Throughout the Cold War, when the U.S. and China seemed so far apart they would never see eye to eye, Ji stayed focused on his father’s advice, believing in the power of persistence. Over time, he witnessed a much greater understanding between the two nations. And still, Ji keeps applying his passionate belief in harmony across the cultural divide. When thanking the people who had helped him bring his story to the west he says,

“I am indebted to all these good people for taking such care with my legacy and helping me open a window into the soul of modern China in a way that I hope will bring us all closer together.”

In Stephen King’s memoir “On Writing” he says that writing is like magic. It allows people to communicate across space and time. When reading a memoir like Ji Chaozhu’s “Man on Mao’s Right” I feel this magic multiplied by a thousand-fold, or perhaps a billion. By sharing his own world, Ji Chaozhu has opened up a channel through which I can feel the connections of entire nations. And that’s true for all memoir writers. Through our individual story, we help communicate the entire experience of a lifetime, break down the barriers of difference, and create deeper mutual understanding.

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Posted in Biography, Book Review, Literary Non-fiction | 2 Comments »

Bookstores provide valuable information for memoir writers

Friday, May 16th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

According to successful author, Jonathan Maberry, from whom I have taken many writing courses, “despite the power of online marketing, bookstores still provide vital information to any writer who wants to get their work into print. By exploring bookstores, you can find what’s hot and get ideas for your own work.” Last year, to learn more about memoirs, I followed his advice and went to the bookstore.

I was disappointed to see books written by people about themselves muddled together with books written by historians or celebrity watchers. The Biography and Memoir section contained mainly books about kings, presidents, generals, and movie stars, interspersed with some blockbuster memoirs like Tobias Wolff’s “This Boys Life” and Jeanette Walls’ “Glass Castle.” I had little interest in Biographies at the time, and found it clumsy to pick through the shelves to find the few memoirs.

However, since that first visit, memoirs have gained considerable respect from booksellers. Every time I go to the store, there are one or two fewer biographies, and one or two more memoirs. In fact, it’s now closer to an even mix, and memoirs have even pulled out in front with a table in the aisle devoted to the latest offerings.

For example, this week I picked up “A Three Dog Life,” by Abigail Thomas, about a woman’s relationship to a husband who has lost his mind in a car crash. Being with him is similar to living with someone who has the cognitive deficits of Alzheimer’s. But unlike Alzheimer’s, his tragedy happened in an instant, shifting her role overnight from a loving partner to fulltime caregiver. It’s a human tragedy both frightening and compelling, and the book offers me exactly what I seek from memoirs: an opportunity to emotionally share a life outside my personal experience.

I was helped in my purchasing decision by a testimonial on the front cover from none other than the king of the bookstores, Stephen King himself, who called it “the best memoir I have ever read.” His recommendation pushed me to the next step and I opened the book to check out the writing. I found it to be haunting and compelling. So I paid for it.

If you want to write for the public, try this as an exercise. When you walk into a book store, take advantage of that out-of-body training you received in astral-projection school. Float up a few feet and watch yourself scanning the shelves. Which ones catch your eye? Why did you reach out and pick one up? Which part of the cover copy gets you to read further or put it back? Use these observations to imagine the way you would present your own story. If you can see yourself picking up your own book and wanting to know more, your observations provide valuable information about how to achieve success.

After browsing the memoir and biography section, I strolled over to the books about writing. (I’ve never understood why they call this section “Reference” but that’s often the way it is.) There I scored another hit. Unlike last year, when the books about writing a memoir were skimpy (I recall seeing only one), this time I saw a half a dozen, another indication that this trend in publishing continues to grow. While browsing, I stumbled across an interesting looking book called “How to do Biography,” by Nigel Hamilton. This turns out to be a wonderful find. (“Luck favors the industrious,” or something like that.)

While I’ve been annoyed with all those biographies on the “Memoir and Biography” shelf, I’ve recently become more interested in learning what those authors can teach me. They must have an enormous amount of information about how to turn a life into a story. Of course, since biographies are written by someone else, they don’t have the same introspective slant. And since the genre often tends more towards historical facts than towards story telling, there are other differences. But surely there are many areas of overlap.

To help me understand this process, I’ve joined the Association of Personal Historians, an organization whose charter is to help other people tell their story. Personal historians, by helping someone write their memoir, live somewhere in the middle between the two genres. Joining the organization will give me access to their shared expertise. And it looks like this book “How to Do Biography” is going to offer an overview of the whole subject. From the first few chapters which I have already devoured, it appears to be accessible, and informative, offering history and insights into the whole project of life-into-story, including chapters on autobiography and memoir.

Finally, I browsed the magazine rack, and to my surprise scored again. There was a magazine in the literary section with the peculiarly punctuated title of “Memoir, (and).” This is a journal devoted to memoir writing, including poetry, photography, essays, and so on. This was proof that the trend towards memoirs continues to grow, and the resources and outlets are richer than ever. Hopefully my purchases will help keep my local bricks and mortar bookstore open, so I can go and actually touch books, open them, and see which ones I like.

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Posted in Biography, Book selling | 5 Comments »