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Stylistic innovation in Sean Toner’s clown story

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

While most of the memoirs I review are book length, I recently read an award winning short story “The Head Clown” by Sean Toner, published in a wonderful online literary collaboration called “webdelsol.com.”

“Head Clown” is about Toner’s summer by the ocean, where he worked in a bookstore, and to earn a few extra dollars he took a job dressing up as a clown and selling balloons on the boardwalk. From this mundane situation, the author has crafted a brash, luxurious tale that worked the magic all good stories are supposed to do. It opened a window into the author’s world, his people, his attitudes, his sweaty palms. By focusing tightly on each moment he brought me into his world, endowing scenes with color and character, creating depth of emotion and variety of insight. Toner’s exquisite attention on small details provided me with so much pleasure I was sorry to see it end.

One of the writer’s noblest jobs is to offer his or her self-awareness to the reader. In fact, when I was younger I received much of my appreciation for the nuances of life through the eyes of authors like Samuel Beckett and Charles Dickens. Their wordplay revealed the creative power within each moment, providing some of my most intellectually stimulating sensations.

Nuance versus clarity
Despite my passion for rich writing, I had no idea how to emulate it myself. Writing in a journal for years, words flowed freely, but without an audience, my style never grew. Then to earn a living, I wrote technical manuals. When I finally turned my attention to a broader audience, I focused entirely on clarity. I achieved simplicity, but my “just-the-facts” style lacked the verbal pleasure my favorite authors had given me.

Sean Toner’s story awakened memories of sitting with a book and enjoying the words rolling around in my mind, making strange connections, sending shivers of activity through my brain, setting off other recollections too distant to even identify, like the rumbling of thunder that seemed to rattle the substrate of reality itself.

“Head Clown” comes to me at a perfect moment in my journey as a writer. I recently listened to an audio course from the Teaching Company called “Building Great Sentences, Exploring the Writer’s Craft” by Professor Brooks Landon of the University of Iowa. In it he regrets the loss of style in modern prose. His observations started me pondering.

As a hippie in the 1960′s, I lived in Spartan rooms, sleeping on the floor. Piles of books fed my mind, but no decorations or knick-knacks personalized my space. Professor Landon and Sean Toner, like participants in a literary intervention, helped me see I had done the same disservice to my writing style as I had done to my life style. With their help, I gained the courage to fling off my literary hair shirt and open up to the joys of excellent sentences. Here are a few tips I took away from Sean Toner’s “Head Clown” and Professor Landon’s Teaching Company lectures.

Short is not the goal
One of the measures of effective writing, according to many modern systems, is to reduce the length of sentences. Software programs even use sentence length as a measure of “good” writing. Landon warned against judging a sentence by its length. Some long sentences are horrible, and others are beautiful, clear, and uplifting. He showed the difference, and offered suggestions for long sentences that inform and entertain.

One plus one equals three?
When I edit, I often try to simplify my descriptions, following Sol Stein’s famous advice, “one plus one equals a half.” In his book “On Writing,” Stein said it’s punchier to use one adjective than two. While his idea enhances simplicity, it risks stripping away nuance.

Brooks Landon offers an alternative. He observes that if the first word that comes to mind is insufficient, you naturally want to say it again a slightly different way to express the truth. By adding a couple of different approaches to an idea, you can offer the reader several slants that elaborate on your view.

While Sol Stein’s advice often leads to tighter writing, I appreciate Brooks Landon’s permission to say something in more than one way. His perspective expands my options to give more to my readers.

Speculation
When writing a scene, we are taught to look to the senses, what we see, smell, hear, taste, and touch. But this formula misses the additional vein of material running behind our eyes and between our ears. Our thoughts provide the reader an additional way to relate to our viewpoint. For Landon, this is the hallmark of good writing: “Bring your unique self to your reader.”

Sean Toner offers an excellent example. He looks out the window at a woman crossing the back yard. She stops and talks to some children. He can’t see what they are looking at, so he offers several possibilities. His speculation intensifies my curiosity, drawing me into the external scene and also providing a glimpse into Toner’s mind.

Metaphor
Landon loves metaphors, but he has a hard time convincing his writing students to use them. I know why his students are reluctant to follow his advice. Metaphors are as risky as crossing a pit of alligators by crawling along a slimy log. A bad metaphor sounds weird, and so the writer must work harder and take more chances. It’s easier just to walk around. Sean Tone is not shy about metaphors. For example he compares a tall fair-skinned man to a golden sycamore, allowing me to see the sun shining through the canopy of a forest. The image deepens my connection with both Sean’s imagination and this aspiring clown’s appearance.

Humor
When Toner looks out the window and tries to understand what the woman and children might be pointing to, he speculates that they may be looking at a dirty magazine or a man buried up to his shoulders in dirt. The resulting laugh creates an extraordinarily sophisticated psychological sensation. By pulling me so far into his own mental process, Toner has created a moment of intimacy, like brushing up against a stranger at a party, a thrill of forbidden contact. The laugh provides an abrupt and pleasurable discharge of that tension.

This interplay between intimacy and distance is one of the purposes of memoir. We tell about our life experience, which brings us all closer. At the same time, we turn the events into a story, which allows us to take a step back. Whether your memoir is as short as a man buried up to his shoulders, or as tall as a golden sycamore, you too can use word play, speculation, metaphor, and humor to contribute to the multi-dimensional power of your story.

Writing Prompt
Follow each of these strategies from “Head Clown” to add style to your anecdote.

Notes
For more about Sean Toner, see his home page.
For more about the Teaching Company lecture series, by Brooks Landon, University of Iowa, click here.

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Style, humor, and other tips from Doreen Orion’s Travel Memoir

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

Lots of artists have tried to represent a starry sky, but few of their paintings became famous. What was it about Van Gogh’s rendition that was more popular than everyone else’s? The difference is not in what he painted but how. Style makes a difference in writing, too. Lots of people write about motoring around the country in a portable home. But Doreen Orion wrote her travel memoir “Queen of the Road” skillfully enough to attract an agent, a publisher, a bookstore, and then a reader (me). I bought it, read it to the end, and enjoyed it enough to share with you.

If you have any doubt that style is at least as important as content, consider “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” by Lynne Truss, a book about punctuation (!) that is so cleverly written there are three million copies in print.

Writing tip: To capture the attention of agents, publishers, and readers, you don’t need a perfect style. Just the best one possible. So start from where you are and then proceed: take classes, practice, and read about writing. In addition read books that have a style worth emulating. For example, by reading “Queen of the Road,” you can discover and imbibe some of author’s way with words.

Comedy as a stylistic choice
One reason I kept turning pages was Orion’s comedy. Her riffs start out restrained and dry, and then she exaggerates and twists so by the time I realize she’s joking I’m already laughing out loud. One of her humor tactics is to put herself down. In a style reminiscent of Joan Rivers she portrays herself as superficial, a lover of fashion above all else. By creating this shallow character, she sets up gags, provokes banter with her husband, and gives herself plenty of room to grow. This head room comes in handy in her Character Arc, when she shows the personal lessons she learns during her travels.

How does she do it?
In a discussion I had with Doreen on the Writer’s Forum, AbsoluteWrite.com, I asked the writer how she developed her knack to make me laugh.

Doreen Orion: “When I decided I wanted to concentrate on comedy in my screenwriting 10 years ago, I started challenging myself to be funnier in “real” life. I really do think like most knacks or talents, it is something that gets better with practice. So, I did. The feedback I got was mainly from other people not getting my jokes (or in some cases getting ready to punch me). I also took screenwriting workshops which helped a lot.”

She continues with another tip that could help any writer improve their style.

Doreen Orion: “I’ve been screenwriting for a decade, and along the way have studied acting somewhat (not to be an actor, just to understand the process actors go through), in order to write scripts actors would be attracted to, as well as help me in my character development and dialogue. No matter what I’m writing – scripts or books – I say EVERYTHING out loud on my final edits. If it’s dialogue, I actually act it out in voices. It’s amazing what I find that worked in my head, but doesn’t when spoken.”

The bus as a crucible for romantic comedy
Putting two people together in a confined space generates dramatic tension. If they hate each other, the situation turns vicious, like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, duking it out in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” If they love each other, it comes out comically, like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Orion’s marriage tends towards the comic variety.

In one passage that had me laughing out loud, she is nervous because her husband is tailgating the car in front of them. She says, “Listen, I don’t want to be a nag and I know whenever I tell you you’re getting too close, you just lament that you could have bought a system with radar, but don’t you think…?”

“Why would I need a system with radar when I’ve got the Nagavator,” he chuckled.

When I listen to impeccably timed verbal sparring on reruns of “Frazier,” “Seinfeld” or “Everybody Loves Raymond, ” I wish I too had a team of comedy writers to script my snappy retorts. So when I heard Doreen and Tim going at it so cleverly, I assumed Doreen made it up. It turned out my guess was wrong. Her written scenes actually replay real-life banter. Here’s what Doreen said when I asked her about it.

Doreen Orion: “Tim and I have always laughed together. A lot. I honestly don’t think many days go by in my life where he doesn’t make me laugh so hard I cry. I believe that being funny is like any other “talent,” if you work at it, you get better. So, since we also enjoy trying to top each other, Tim has definitely made me funnier over the years. As a result, our humorous dialogue isn’t really writing; it’s dictation.”

Funny dialog transcribed from real life
The next question is, “how do writers repeat dialog so accurately?” I asked Doreen if she could share her technique.

Doreen Orion: “I’ve never used a recorder – I just write it down. During our Queen trip, since I hoped I’d get to write a book, whenever Tim and I had some funny interchange, I’d just jot it down. Whenever we took day trips away from the bus in our Jeep, I had a small notebook, took notes on people we met/places we saw and again, any funny dialogue, then would transcribe those notes into a file on my laptop later that day on our return.”

Keep notes
A whole slew of memoirs take advantage of contemporaneous notes and journals the authors kept during the period they cover in their book. For example, when Alice Sebold, author of “Lucky” was going to the police station to identify her rapist, her writing teacher Tobias Wolff looked her in the eye and said, “Remember everything.”

Joan Didion, author of “Year of Magical Thinking” kept notes during her year of grief. Martha Beck’s memoir “Expecting Adam” and Kate Braestrup’s “Here If you Need Me” both use notes they kept during the period. Carol O’Dell journaled while she was caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s. Then she relied extensively on her journals when she wrote the memoir “Mothering Mother.”

In addition to recording events, journaling serves another purpose. Journals help the writer organize ideas into a coherent whole, one of the basic elements of mental health. So by deciding you are going to write a memoir next year, you might be able to gain a number of benefits. You become more conscious and organized about your life, and then as you become clearer about what you went through, you can share your observations with your readers.
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Note:
Even memoirs about a period many years earlier can take advantage of journals. William Manchester’s World War II memoir “Goodbye Darkness,” published in 1980, refers to his wartime diaries.

And when Xujun Eberlein researched her memoir essay about growing up in China, she had lost her own diary, but did find one kept by her sister during these tragic years.

Note:
Read my other essays about Doreen Orion’s Queen of the Road

Identity moves too in Doreen Orion’s travel memoir
Pets, motion, and other tips from a travel memoir
Doreen Orion’s brilliant memoir about last year’s midlife crisis

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Doreen Orion’s brilliant memoir about last year’s midlife crisis

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

When Doreen Orion’s husband noticed they were getting older, he suggested they buy a recreational vehicle, take a year off from work and drive across the country. She fought the idea at first. (What’s a story without some sort of conflict?) It sounded cramped, and she would only be able to take a hundred pairs of shoes. Eventually she gave in, went on the trip and wrote about it in this delightful memoir, “Queen of the Road.”

When I first started studying memoirs, one question I asked was “Are travel books really memoirs?” It seems like cheating, since the events just took place last year. But upon reflection and further reading, I have discovered that books like this one are lovely containers for musings and sharing of the author’s life experience. So if this is cheating, give me more.

In fact, by understanding how she put her book together, I see the goal of a memoir. It is designed to take you inside a real person’s experience of life. Inside the author’s point of view, we see what they see and how they see it. It’s the closest thing to mind-melding we can get on this planet, and if the author sees interesting things in a fun way, we enjoy the experience. Doreen Orion satisfies these goals fabulously.

As a traveler, she sees interesting stuff. Traveling across country provides endless opportunities for description, so like any memoir writer, she had to select the scenes that will add up to a good read. Her choices tend towards a mix of “famous yet quirky” like the vast Wall Drugstore in South Dakota, a huge mountain-carved statue of Chief Crazy Horse, and that strange place a guy built in Florida in the 1920′s out of chunks of Coral. (see my notes below for more about these travel details.)

Her observations inside the bus are just as interesting as what took place outside. She has some great scenes with her husband, while he drives and she sits there with the dog and cats. She keeps it interesting by playing up her fear of crashing, rolling, and smashing when they approach overpass or hit a bump. She portrays her phobias with grace and humor.

Within this mix we are working through Doreen’s midlife crisis. Since I (along with a few million boomers) am recently discovering the weird fact that I keep getting older every day, midlife is a topic that is particularly interesting. Considering that both Doreen and her husband are psychiatrists, she could have applied a lot of analytical fire power, but instead of getting all heavy about it, she just has fun.

So let’s see. It’s a midlife crisis book. A travel book. A memoir. A romantic comedy. An introduction to the RV lifestyle. It even has cats and dogs. This tremendous variety becomes one of its most intriguing stylistic features. And it’s a story. Her scenes add up nicely to give me a picture of the whole trip. She lets me feel the rhythm of their day: sleeping late; socializing with neighbors in the RV camp where everyone is just passing through; unhitching their tow-along Jeep to do some sightseeing; and then back on the road, bouncing along, navigating, and making jokes to pass the time.

And that brings up a valuable lesson for writers. Just as important as the fun things she sees is the fun way she describes them. Her style is engaging and keeps the pages turning, a crucial requirement for any publishable book. I always get in trouble with the literati when I say things like this, but Doreen Orion’s memoir reminds me of Shakespeare’s plays, at least in one regard. To appeal to a mixed audience, Shakespeare laced the dialog with sophisticated innuendos for the intellectuals and gags to keep everyone guffawing. Orion does the same thing in Queen of the Road. She’s funny.

Within this simple premise of a travel book about two people at midlife, there are hidden a number of clever layers that create a wonderful read as well as a wealth of ideas that you might be able to apply to your own memoir. In fact, I find so many aspects of the memoir enjoyable and informative that when I tried writing them all, I ran out of time before I ran out of ideas. In future posts, I’ll have more to say about the many lessons from Doreen Orion’s Queen of the Road.

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Writing Prompt
Write two synopses of your memoir. The outside story will describe events in the world. The inside story will describe emotions, such as fear, hope, and disappointment. Each of these stories should feel like a journey, with a beginning, middle and end.

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Note:
About 20 years ago, I saw a documentary on public television about a guy who had built a sort of artistic compound, out of thousand pound blocks of cut Coral. I was intrigued by the weird fact that no one understood how this man moved this big rocks without any equipment. When I was in Florida, I went to see this strange out-of-the-way tourist attraction myself, and I was delighted to read Doreen Orion’s view of the place. Here is a note I found on the web with a link to the full article.

The Secrets of Coral Castle
Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida, is one of the most amazing structures ever built. In terms of accomplishment, it’s been compared to Stonehenge, ancient Greek temples, and even the great pyramids of Egypt. It is amazing – some even say miraculous – because it was quarried, fashioned, transported, and constructed by one man: Edward Leedskalnin, a 5-ft. tall, 100-lb. Latvian immigrant. Working alone, Leedskalnin labored for 20 years – from 1920 to 1940 – to build the home he originally called “Rock Gate Park” in Florida City.

Crazy Horse Statue
During the 1930′s, Chief Henry Standing Bear watched in silence as faces of great white leaders emerged from the ancient granite of Mount Rushmore in his ancestral Sioux homeland: George Washington in 1930, Thomas Jefferson in 1936, Abraham Lincoln in 1937 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1939. Finally, in the fall of 1939, the Sioux leader wrote an appeal to a Connecticut sculptor who had worked on the monument: ”My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too.”

Half a century and eight million tons of rock after the sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, acted on that appeal, the defiant eyes of Chief Crazy Horse once again glare across the Black Hills of South Dakota. One year from now, on June 3, 1998, sculptors plan to dedicate an 87-foot-tall version of his fearsome visage, a monument taller than the Great Sphinx of Egypt and higher than the heads of Mount Rushmore, 17 miles away.

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6 Life Story Writing Prompts Inspired by a Book of Short Stories

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

By Jerry Waxler

Xujun Eberlein’s book of short stories “Apologies Forthcoming” are accounts of growing up in the 1960′s in China. [Read my review and interviews.] Since the stories are based on her life and times, I thought I could learn a few lessons about how to turn life into story. I was right. Here are some of the lessons I learned for writing a memoir, along with some writing prompts to help you apply these lessons to your own life.

Interaction of individual and society
When Xujun was a young girl, deadly fighting broke out between two factions of Red Guards, mostly teenagers who fought each other with deadly force to prove themselves the true upholders of the Chinese Revolution. Because of social upheaval, her parents lost their jobs, she was unable to go to school, and her sister died. These stories provide extraordinary examples of that strange and complex fact of life: our individual journey is intertwined with our society.

Writing Prompt
Review the periods you want to write about and look for historical forces and trends that were shaping your own experience. How did the economy affect your household wealth? What members of your family have been influenced by war? What community upheaval or natural disaster or social trend took place? When you have identified a meaningful intersection between your individual life and the larger community, write a story about it.

Use the short story medium to shape your memoir
When trying to describe real life, the multitude of themes, dreams, and people become tangled, making it difficult to weave it all together. Xujun solves this problem by biting off one specific challenge at a time. Focusing on that one theme, she develops its context, then shows how the emotions rise, crescendo and resolve.

In one of the stories, the main character had an affair with a married man. As time went on, the girl’s emotional dependence grew. She became jealous of the man’s wife, and fell farther into despair. In the end, she broke through the tangle of emotions with a surprise. In another story, she left her family and went to the country to work in the fields. As a city-girl in a town of farmers, she clumsily stumbles against local customs, creating disturbing tensions.

Even though each story stands on its own, they add up to provide insight into a young girl’s life in that time and place.

Writing Prompt
What Xujun did in fiction, you could do in reality, developing a series of stories that gradually add up to portraying your life. Review your list of powerful transitions, such as a love gained or lost, an accident, illness, peak accomplishment, or realization that changed. (If you don’t have such a list, start it today.) Describe a single scene that represents that transition. Then surround this scene with context to turn it into a self-contained story. At the beginning, introduce the dramatic tension. Then encounter and respond to obstacles. In the end, resolve the dramatic tension. (To extend it beyond a self-contained story, end the piece with a hint of the dramatic tension that comes next.)

Create empathy for the protagonist
Xujun’s protagonists stir my compassion. In each story, I worry about the protagonist’s plight, feel the loss of her sister, want her world to be more sane. Her goodness and suffering help me suspend disbelief and accompany her through her trials. Like the fairy tales of Cindarella and the Ugly Duckling, Xujun’s protagonist is often misunderstood. Xujun the author should know about being misunderstood. She is smart, but the people around her don’t care. China in the Cultural Revolution has turned against smart people.

Writing Prompt
Review one of your favorite anecdotes, or write a new one, and then step back and look at it from a reader’s eyes. What emotions will help readers bond with you. How have you been an outsider in your own world, misunderstood by people you are reaching towards? Will readers be urging you to grow, to find your niche, to be loved?

Friends
When Xujun’s protagonist relates to the people in her life, whether coworkers, friends, or family, I feel her respect for them and her desire to be respected in return. These emotions haunted me so much I asked the author why she was so focused on friends. She asked me where I saw it, and I said, “Everywhere.” She replied that friendship was a revered part of her culture. It also happens to be a wonderful part of my life, too, and yet in my writing, friendships often disappear into the background. Her stories inspired me to pay more attention to the emotional clout supporting characters can convey.

Writing prompt
Consider how friendships can enrich your readers’ experience of your life. Friends’ perspectives help you see your world in a different light, their companionship provides relief from loneliness and gives you someone to talk to, and their support helps you overcome obstacles. Write a scene that emphasizes such interactions.

Sexuality while coming of age
As Xujun’s protagonist grows from child to young adult, her friendships become complicated. Later in life, she again feels a tug of war between sexual attraction and friendship. She masterfully shares the power of these emotions, while at the same time maintaining the privacy of her world and the decorum of mine. This delicate balance of intimacy and power is known in literary as well as psychological circles as “maintaining appropriate distance.”

Writing prompt
You may assume that sexuality is too heavy-handed or too personal a subject to include at all, or perhaps you have gone to the other extreme, including erotic scenes that may offend or drown your readers. Consider using Xujun’s model, and follow a path down the middle. Try writing a scene in which you convey as authentically as possible your unique experience, while understating or hinting at the mechanical parts. The power of the written word is that it gives readers the opportunity to fill in the rest.

Unique characteristics make us all “foreign” to someone
When Xujun tells about her life in China in the sixties, I lean into every word, drinking in glimpses of a portion of this foreign, mysterious world I have never seen. So what does this have to do with writing my own memoir? I can’t change my past to be as exotic as Xujun’s. But perhaps I don’t need to.

When I look at my life through the mirror, I realize that growing up in a row home in Philadelphia is foreign to Xujun. This fact becomes more apparent when I look at my bookshelf. In every memoir, my curiosity about the author’s world compelled me to turn pages. Whether I was learning about Brooke Shields’ postpartum depression, or Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s life in the foster care system, or Linda Joy Myers’ childhood in a broken home in the Midwest, or Barack Obama being raised by a white mother and visiting his African father, or the authors of “The Pact” who grew up on the mean streets of New Jersey, or Henry Louis Gates or George Brummell, growing up in the segregated south. We are all exotic to each other.

Writing Prompt
Identify parts of your life that reflect your unique past. Did you grow up on a farm? Went to a university? Joined the army? Had kids? One of them had a disability? As you list the parts of your life that make you unique, consider what you look like to someone who grew up in a different world. Write three character sketches of readers who might think parts of your life were foreign.

Conclusion
Xujun’s collection has reached my desk at an exciting time. Short stories are in a resurgence. This medium offers many of the pleasures of a book, but within a more compact form. They explore fascinating issues of growing up in another culture, during a complex time. And they offer insights into writing that can help you write about your life.

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Notes:
For an example of stories that emphasize foreignness, see She collected stories by Italian American women. Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta, editors, “The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture.” (Feminist Press, 2002) Louise DeSalvo is the author of a valuable book about memoir writing called “Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives.”

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

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Keep your memoir in touch with changing gender roles

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

(You can listen to the podcast version by clicking the player control at the bottom of this post or download it from iTunes.)

After high school, instead of going to college Jancee Dunn looked for work. She got a job at Rolling Stone magazine, and became a celebrity interviewer. As I read her memoir, “But Enough About Me” it struck me that this book was completely different from the books I read when I was younger. For one thing practically all the books I read in high school and college were by men. I started reviewing books that influenced me at different periods of my life, and discovered remarkable patterns, both in myself and in the culture around me.

Sensitivity to current gender roles
In the 60′s, I knew a few things about feminist issues, but those issues took a backseat to my male-oriented questions. For example, would I end up fighting in Vietnam, and how in God’s name was I supposed to form a relationship with a girl when I was too shy to talk to her? Decades later, my relationship with women and feminism have evolved. In addition to outgrowing my bashfulness, I have come to expect women in leadership roles in every walk of life. Women are professionals and business people, warriors, politicians, and of course, writers.

Once I focus on these changes in gender roles, both in individuals and in the culture, I understand so much more about how to write to today’s audience. It turns out I have to toss away many of the lessons I learned while I was growing up. For decades, I’ve eliminated the obsolete “him” to refer to the “universal man.” That’s a given in our present culture. Now, looking more carefully, I see additional nuances that need to be adjusted.

Increasing sensitivity to the role of women as consumers
When people talk about movies now, it is common to hear some categorized as “chick flicks.” The publishing world has its own version of this called “chick lit” routinely mentioned at writing conferences by the editors and agents who decide what books are hot. Just a few years ago, I didn’t understand these terms. Now I would describe them as stories with greater emphasis on relationships, feminine success stories, and in general presenting the world through a feminine point of view. The culture has become sensitized to the variety of ways men and women are looking for information and entertainment. And this collective discussion has helped me tune in, too.

So how does this realization help a memoir writer?
As I make the journey from being a reader of books to a writer, this line of thinking offers me additional insights. I was already looking at my audience as a collection of cultures, and generations. Now I add genders to the mix. To learn more, I turn toward the memoirs I am reading.

In John Robison’s memoir “Look Me in the Eye” he reaches out to his mother later in life to try to sort out their memories. And Jancee Dunn in her memoir “But Enough About Me” portrays her respectful connection with her father. These comments about relationships to an opposite sex parent provide a glimpse into the way gender begins to affect us from the time of birth. The presence of our parents in a memoir can share these attitudes with readers.

Just as I am striving to catch up to the current feminine role, some women my age are trying to do the same. In a writing group, one woman fretted that her voice sounded too “personal.” I didn’t understand her concern. Since we were discussing her memoir, I assumed “personal” was exactly what she was trying to achieve. Then I realized she may be struggling with some of the same issues I am. During her education, she too read mostly male writers. Now, writing her memoir in the twenty first century, she needs to update her sensibility to the modern acceptance of a feminine literary voice.

Another memoir rich with this historical unfolding of the relationship between the sexes, “Navy Greenshirt: A Leader Made, Not Born” by Diane Diekman. The author enlisted in the Navy in 1972. When she started, it was a man’s world, by almost any definition. And yet she brought an attitude of relentless mutual respect, expecting to be treated with dignity and insisting on treating others the same way. Her focus on the high road broke barriers. By the time she left, she had advanced to the rank of Captain.

I was never a woman and I was never in the navy, and so all of my ideas about what such a career would have been like were formed from lurid headlines, snap generalizations, and simplistic assumptions. Reading Diekman’s memoir I traveled territory that was inaccessible in my own experience. Through the author’s eyes, I witnessed an honorable group of men and women, devoting their lives to serve their country, while at the same time doing their best to keep up to date with the evolving sexual mores of our times.

Kate Braestrup, author of the memoir “Here If You Need Me,” is a member of the State Game Wardens Service in Maine. Despite her bullet-proof, or more correctly “ballistic” vest, she doesn’t attend crime scenes to catch bad guys but as a chaplain, she brings her natural warmth to provide spiritual support. She did not claim that only a woman could do this job. In fact, the previous chaplain was a man who moved on to offer spiritual guidance to motorcycle gangs. So her effectiveness was not because of her gender, but in harmony with it. She let me feel how her femininity contributed to the pleasures and wholeness of being human.

When Jim McGarrah, author of the Vietnam war memoir “A Temporary Sort of Peace” told his dad he was joining the military, his dad tried to stop him. “All I thought when my father argued violently to keep me from enlisting was that he must be jealous because his war was over and I might win more medals in mine. I don’t think I ever considered he had learned through experience that the word man was just the back half of the more important word human, or that being a better human rather than a better man might be a loftier and more beneficial goal.”

McGarrah spent a lifetime recovering from his 1960′s teenage assertion of “manliness.” And as he struggled to regain wholeness, he was hampered not only by the backward drag of post-traumatic stress, but also by his attitude towards women. Overcoming his training that they were subservient was part of his psychological journey, and like Diekman, and for that matter all of us who lived and grew through these decades, his personal maturing of relationships between genders paralleled the culture’s.

As I research my own memoir, I too look across these decades and see how my understanding of the two genders during this period has deepened in step with the awareness of my culture. By exploring these evolving relationships I am treated to another profound truth. That is that memoir writing is not a static snapshot, but a moving story that sweeps across time, showing who we were, how we have grown, and how we continue to keep step with an evolving world.

Marketing prompt: To turn your writing from a journal for yourself to a written communication that will be enjoyed by readers today, ask who are they, and what will they get from your writing. Write a sketch of a typical reader. How old? What have they learned so far? Where are they heading next?

Writing prompt: Who are your favorite authors? Write about the different payoffs you get from the male versus female authors?

How will your gender affect your own story? How do you think key moments would be different if you were the other gender? (Use this insight to consider how each gender might respond to your story.)

Note: Gender in my life reading
If I read books by women agonizing over meaning, I don’t remember them. All my writers were men. Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Ferdinand Celine. Surely there were women authors who also agonized. They just didn’t come under my scrutiny. About 15 years ago, I read my first book by a feminist, “Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem” by Gloria Steinem, a book I found to be informative more about self-help than about being a particular gender.

One of the best books I have read about memoir writing is called Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by literature professor Louise DeSalvo. She offers many important insights into how writing your story can change your life. While the book did not emphasize feminist perspectives, DeSalvo is a world expert. Earlier in her career, she made her name as a top scholar on Virginia Woolf, one of the first of the modern feminine writers.

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Celebrity interviewer turns the camera on herself

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

By Jerry Waxler

(You can also listen to the podcast. Click the player control at the bottom of this post or download it from iTunes.)

Jancee Dunn was an ordinary girl from the suburbs of north New Jersey who dropped out of college, became a cub reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, and stayed there for 18 years. At her zenith she told the world about celebrities on MTV and Good Morning America. In the memoir “Enough About Me, How a Small-town Girl Went from Shag Carpet to the Red Carpet” she became the object of her own reporting. Thanks to her reporting skills, I empathized with her as she started her career, a nobody waiting at the doors of some of the most famous people in the world. “Oh my God, what must it feel like meeting a famous girl band, or rock and roll star?” Naturally her knees turned weak, but she went in anyway, and I kept turning pages.

For example, she interviewed singer Barry White, who gave her a big wet kiss at the door and treated her to a romantic dinner for two. Then she closed the door behind her. When she emerged a couple of hours later I don’t know what happened, in a virtuoso example of informing without revealing. Her discretion could provide a good model for other aspiring memoir writers who wonder how to explain awkward situations without getting into trouble.

During an interview with an unnamed celebrity who recently completed a month at rehab, he suggested that drugs were only a phone call away and asked if she would like to get high. She politely declined, and then went to the bathroom where she called her sister to explain the situation. Her sister said, “Are you crazy? Get out of there.” Jancee said, “But he’s so persuasive.” When she arrived home later, feeling shaken, she phoned her father, who talked to her about the routine details of his afternoon plans. His patter about gardening and errands soothed her and reminded her of all that was stable in her life.

Turned to the reader and offered interviewing tips
Walking with Jancee into interviews made me curious about how she worked her magic, getting the stars to say things they hadn’t said a thousand times. How did she work her way into their confidence? Occasionally she turned towards me and offered an insider tip. For example, in one of her more elaborate strategies, she started a celebrity interview by sharing a tidbit of gossip she heard about the star on the radio that very morning. Excited by this news, the star called over her publicity manager and they had a good laugh. By then, everyone was loose, and treated Jancee as a fine, generous person.

The anecdote showed me Jancee was smart, and gave me some insights into the mind of a celebrity. But I kept thinking about her interviewing tips long after I closed the book. In retrospect I see she was doing the same thing with me that she was doing with her stars. She was taking me into her confidence, making me feel like an insider. I felt her generosity and opened up to her. By turning towards the reader, she connected with me. I’m going to file this strategy away. Perhaps I can offer my own readers insider insights that will make them feel open with me.

Memoir of an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances
While I enjoyed learning about her interviews, this is a memoir, and I wanted to know more about her as a person. Rather than trying to be a star herself, she explored her life as an ordinary person. Her refusal to claim stardom for herself became a story element, providing a dramatic contrast between her own life and the lives of her interviewees. Her father was a manager at J.C. Penney’s, so loyal he named his daughter “Jancee” as a tribute to his employer’s initials. As children, when she and her sisters visited the department store, they were treated like royalty by the other employees. It was like being the fairy princess of suburbia.

In other memoirs, the exotic tastes and smells of food demonstrate the author’s ethnic life. Jancee uses food to show her background, too. Her family ate only beige and tasteless food. Think macaroni and cheese and Velveeta on white bread. These unremarkable food choices set a tone for her life.

What about inner struggles? Without the dark, there’s no way to emphasize the light. In Jancee’s memoir, the darkness came through her relationships with men. Her two disastrous boyfriends provided insight into her struggle to grow. The first guy was a sort of innocent sleaze, who left most of her self-respect intact. The second one was more self-involved, and his neediness and lack of care for her inner process pulled her into a darker place. When she started lying to her family, I wanted to cry out, “You’re going the wrong way! Turn back!” Eventually she realized that her strength came not from this self-involved guy but from within herself and her roots. As she pulled away from him, I felt dramatic relief, the sign of a good story.

Jancee found a compelling central arc to tie her book together
While she was paid to inform us about the world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Jancee really celebrated the world of normal people, returning to her unglamorous roots as her safe haven. This contrast between her ordinary life and the lives she reported created dramatic tension. As the subtitle says, it wasn’t just about the famous nor just about suburbia but about how a suburban girl interviewed famous people. By the end of the book, she made it clear she was a regular person, with ordinary feelings, family, and circumstances.

So how did her simple life relate to the life of the stars? In one scene, she joins singer Loretta Lynn making fudge. They were talking so much, the fudge didn’t turn out right, and the next day, a courier delivered a better batch to Jancee’s door. It was a gesture that reached across the divide, a star saying “look, I’m ordinary too.” While the masses of celebrity watchers long for the stratospheric heights of stardom, Jancee raises the possibility that at least some of the stars aspire to normalcy.

I love her comfortable, trendy approach, not only to her stars, but to her readers. Through years of experience as a reporter and interviewer, she has apparently gained the knack of turning to the reader or viewer. I too am looking for a comfortable open voice, and her example inspires me. I look for other opportunities in my life when I have been forced to open my voice, such as in public speaking at Toastmasters, or doing interviews, or writing letters. It turns out that blogs are an excellent tool for finding a voice. Blogging creates a conversational atmosphere that leads to a more intimate connection with readers.

Many themes run through Jancee Dunn’s memoir. Her suburban roots, her meteoric rise as a reporter, her relationships with family and men. And yet, in thinking about the book, my mind returns to the central theme. Her ordinariness pulls the whole thing together. And while the subtitle of the book claims she made it to the Red Carpet, I’m not so sure. I find Jancee’s real intention is right there in her dedication, in which quotes Emily Dickenson. “Who am I? I am nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too?” Thanks, Jancee for grounding me in ordinary life, while you share your story, your insights, and your tips for interviewing the stars.

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Writing Prompt: If you can’t find dramatic tension in just one theme of your life, look for two themes and explore the contrasts and conflicts between them.

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Note: Memoir writers sometimes think the only way to get published is to be famous. If you’re looking for a counter-example, check out A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel, a popular memoir by a very ordinary person. It’s her writing and observation that makes it so interesting.

Visit Amazon’s listing of Jancee’s book by clicking this link.

Check out Jancee’s website to see what she’s up to these days.

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Memoir writing lessons from the heart

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

(This blog is also available as an audio file. See the Podcast player control at the end of this post.)

Perry Foster was an ordinary business man until he found himself on the wrong end of a cardiology exam. Now he bears a scar on his torso that looks like it was zipped shut, which makes him a member of the zipper club. When he chose to record his experience he was not drawing upon years of training as a writer. He simply wanted to tell his story and his memoir “Hands Upon My Heart: My Journey Through Heart Disease and Into Life” is the result. Whenever I read a memoir, I look for lessons. How did the author put it together? How did his words create the emotions as I was reading? I have found that new authors, in their passion to explain what happened, often provide lessons every bit as good as the ones I learn from the pros.

Memoir like a novel
One of the most basic lessons in this book is Foster’s knack of telling a story like a novel – that is, he lets me see events for myself. His descriptions are so quintessentially “show don’t tell” that reading the book is like attending a “show don’t tell” seminar. Take for example a stressful scene in a doctor’s office when Foster’s wife pulls out a bottle and takes two aspirin, showing the headache rather than telling it. And precisely because the example is so basic, its lesson is easy to learn. If he had written, “she had a headache,” he would be reporting a fact that was inside her head, not his. A slightly improvement would be dialog. If she had said “I have a headache” at least he would not be reading her mind. But now she becomes the one who is telling. When he shows her taking the two aspirin, readers can see the evidence for themselves.

Foster also does a good job staying within a time frame. He immerses himself within each scene, providing sensations that let me lose myself in his world. Since the book starts around the time he learns his heart is failing, I know little about his history until he is sedated for a surgical procedure. In his drug altered state, he describes a picture perfect flashback from his childhood. This ploy supplies background about his family, and the flashback also provides pacing, letting me linger there with him while surgeons are poking at his body.

His observations include his own thoughts, feelings, and body reactions. These internally directed observations take me inside his experience. “Does anyone ever wake during surgery?” he asks his surgeon. He notices the taste of perspiration dripping from his upper lip. After this frightening meeting he becomes furious with his wife for trying to relax while she was waiting. “You’re buying a romance novel,” he asked in a restrained voice. “How could she?” he thinks.

Edgy characters make me turn pages
From the beginning Perry Foster showed me his messy emotions. He was afraid for his heart, angry at the doctors, and edgy with his wife. His thoughts are often judgmental, and paranoid, and I think, “No wonder this guy’s heart is a wreck.”

I also wonder how he could be so honest about these feelings. This is a big issue for me, because my instinct is to hide my imperfections. “Hands Upon my Heart” shows me that disclosing authentic feelings, even if edgy and flawed, creates human warmth so palpable I want to pick up the phone and ask him about his health.

Perry Foster’s nervous tension serves another purpose. It increases dramatic tension. Consider Shakespeare’s characters Hamlet, and Ophelia, or Romeo, and Juliet. Their edginess creates suspense because you’re never sure what they’ll do next. Foster achieves the same effect. I kept turning the pages to see how he will juggle the pressure of his disturbing emotions.

Will he grow?
I love character development in a book. By the time I reach the end I’m hoping some lesson has been learned. Because this is such a satisfying payoff for me, as soon as I recognize the character flaw I start anticipating how the person will grow. It’s part of the suspense that keeps me reading. I found this suspense especially acute in “Hands Upon my Heart,” where Foster seemed like such a likable guy, I couldn’t wait for him to find inner strength and peace.

In the end the author does become more accepting of his situation and his wife, but his changes did not match what I expected, resulting in a feeling of being let down. What can I learn from that? It feels like a variation on the famous advice offered by Anton Chekhov. If you show a gun in the first scene of a play, you should fire it by the end. It looks like this advice could also be applied to character development. When the beginning of the book shows dramatic tension in the character, then by the end that tension should be relieved.

My expectation that Foster was supposed to grow during the course of the book raises a fascinating question. Should a memoir take me on a perfectly crafted ride, or must it follow the course of events, precisely? My view is that from the same raw material, a storyteller could craft a thousand different stories. The memoir I end up actually reading is not the person’s life, but rather a creative representation of it. And it turns out that telling the best possible story provides a benefit to the writer as well as the reader. The more you strive to tell a good story, the more you learn about your life. Perry Foster’s “Hands Upon my Heart” has stimulated and informed my thinking about these issues, and as I look for the story within my own life, Foster’s work will be one of the sources for my deeper understanding.

See my other essay about Perry Foster’s memoir by clicking here.

See also: Dee Dee Phelps was another adult learner who developed her writing skill not as a professional writer but through workshops. Read her insights in the interviews we reported here.

See also: Chekhov’s Gun, a wikipedia entry

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Too many secrets hide my spark

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

(This blog is also available as an audio file. See the Podcast player control at the end of this post.)

When I was 12 years old, I used to sneak out by myself and set fire to autumn leaves. The excitement of the flames blinded me to the danger. Fortunately I never did any damage and was never caught, but now I look back on my actions with horror. I hate the way these memories make me feel, and generally avoid talking about things that make me sound like a criminal. As I work on my memoir, such memories confuse me. Should I include them or leave them out?

Of course I could pretend they never happened. But that solution perpetuates a problem I’ve been trying to overcome since I was a child. I used to believe that people weren’t supposed to have emotions, and I did my best to pretend I had none. The earliest example of this belief comes from seventh grade. I was scandalized when my fellow classmates burst into laughter over some sexual innuendo. How childish! To distance myself from humiliating feelings, I spent my teenage years doing homework or working at my dad’s drugstore. When I wanted a break, I read science fiction novels. This tendency to separate myself from emotions made me seem distant and aloof. I was in a sort of self-imposed exile from the human condition. It took years to break through my own walls.

Gradually with the help of therapy, a graduate program in counseling, and the support of compassionate friends, I learned that emotions are as necessary for a satisfying life as eating. I knew I was making progress when, in my fifties, I walked into the office at Villanova University’s graduate program in counseling psychology. Two of my tenured professors were experimenting with a remote controlled whoopee cushion. They roared with laughter every time the device let loose a simulated fart. I laughed along with them, perhaps not with their childlike glee, but at least I wasn’t horrified, the way I would have been when I was 12.

Now that I’m writing my memoir, I wrestle with every detail that was illegal, immoral, or embarrassing. It all seems so private, and yet it’s all part of my life. How do I decide? To do this right, I remember that the end product of my disclosure is not an encyclopedia. It’s a story. When Michelangelo was sculpting David, he started with a block of granite, and tossed away the rubble to expose the beauty hidden within. By writing a memoir I must discover the real me in a pleasing form.

I dredge through memories, not certain yet what to put in. At this stage, I’m just looking for the raw material. The most dramatic period was during my college years at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the Vietnam War protests. My adult years are less colorful. I reminisce about my visit to the Great Pyramids on my 30th birthday, and then feel the frustration on my 31st birthday when my boss ordered me to help clean out the septic system.

I slip again into the turmoil of my adolescent years, and as I muse I notice a powerful connection. Around the same time I was in junior high school glowering at classmates for laughing at sexual references, I was sneaking out at night on secret missions to start fires. Wow. Freud claimed that if repressed emotions don’t come out one way they’ll come out another. My adolescence would have made a terrific demonstration of his point.

That’s interesting but must I write it in a memoir for all to see? My childhood preference tells me to skip the whole mess. But to sanitize my story means overriding decades of effort to break out of this shell. Without edgy moments, my memoir will be about a boring person. If I include them, I will be able to show the tension between what is and what can be. By acknowledging the messiness of the journey, I not only make myself appear more human. I discover some of the most exhilarating aspects of my experience. My imperfections are exactly what forced me to grow. Over the years I’ve been weak, confused, afraid. And it’s okay! That’s what drives me to become stronger, more accepting, smarter, and braver.

By releasing myself from my habit of secrecy, I learn about my own human nature, and can apply my learning to understand others. For example, my teenage misadventures help me appreciate the complexity of that period for other people as well. It turns out that sharing the authentic story can also forge intimate connections between people. When readers and writers share tales, we connect sublime parts of ourselves: our desire to learn, grow, love, and be loved.

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5 memoir starters for beginners

Friday, November 16th, 2007

by Jerry Waxler

When you face a daunting task, the only way to start is to take the first step. But what if even the first step seems daunting? Like the Gumption Trap in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you can’t start your journey until you make peace with that first step. Memoir classes are one excellent way to coach you onto the road. And in fact there may be even gentler ways to start. Use techniques for self-reporting that you can find within ordinary life. If you’re already doing some of these, use them as the starting point from which to extend your writing and turn it into a more complete story of your life.

Letters and newsletters
For at least two thousand years, letters were an important way for people to keep in touch at a distance. The telephone made it so much easier to connect that it looked like personal letter writing was fading into oblivion. Now, with the development of blogs, email, and online family newsletters, writing is making a comeback. By writing letters to your relatives and friends, or articles for your family or group newsletter you can keep in touch while you develop parts of your memoir.

Job and school applications
A more structured method of organizing your past comes when you apply for a job or school. On the application you list previous employment, education, and related achievements. While it doesn’t include much narrative, it’s an ordered sequence of major events in your life, and as such demonstrates a fundamental technique of memoir writing. Expand the list by adding more events, including births and deaths, relationships, moves, and other critical changes in your life. Your list will help you frame out your memoir.

Online profiles
LinkedIn and Facebook want me to explain to strangers who I am. Online dating services want even more information. These profiles convey a glimpse of who we are through tiny fragments like favorite books, pets, and sports. At first I hated trying to tell about myself this way. When I approached it more playfully, I realized it’s not a bad exercise for creating the persona of the protagonist of my memoir.

Twelve Steps Moral Inventory
The fourth step of the Twelve Steps program is designed to help people climb out of the traps of the past by conducting a “fearless moral inventory.” If you have ever been through this process, you have already engaged in a courageous detailed self-examination. If you have never been through this process, look around for books about facing difficult memories, such as, John Bradshaw’s books, “Homecoming” and “Healing the shame that binds you.” While originally intended for addicts, these resources offer advice for anyone who wants to face regrets, embarrassment, and shame. By unraveling the knots of the past, you can set yourself free from backward pulls. And as you develop your story, you’ll find the strength, hope, and other emotions to help you move forward.

Keep a journal or diary
Journaling is a fantastic habit that can help you deal with emotions, get you in touch with your writing voice, and gather your memories. Journaling means writing just for you with no concern about a potential audience. By setting aside readers, you soothe the inner critic, allowing you to put words on paper, without worrying about what anyone thinks. (Stephen King in On Writing says to write your first draft with the door closed.) The goal is simply to find a safe place to transfer words from mind to paper. As you write in your journal, you sort out emotions of the day, as well as sorting out events that took place decades ago. Experiment. Brainstorm. Sketch. For example, snoop around your high school homeroom for a few journal sessions. Who sat next to you? What did you have for lunch? What set the class tittering? Get creative about asking yourself questions. You’ll be amazed at what turns up on paper, and with practice, you’ll develop an easier relationship with converting mental images into a written narrative.

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Read memoirs like a writer – Purpose of a scene

Saturday, October 13th, 2007

by Jerry Waxler

Sometimes a memory from days, months, or years ago will pop into the foreground. For a moment I’m back in the original experience, often from my childhood home, my dad’s drugstore, or walking around the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, where I went to college. Once I’m in the scene, I can look around to find more detail. In fact, this is a good trick to cultivate to gather material for writing memoirs. When I work with such memory glimpses in my memoir workshops, it almost always results in interesting, and often revealing moments in a person’s life.

Recently, I finished reading Expecting Adam by Martha Beck, about how her Down Syndrome baby changed her life. A few days later a scene from the book started playing in my mind. Martha is in a hospital examination room with her husband, waiting for a nurse. While they are waiting, her husband fools around with the equipment. Here’s a passage from the scene that jumped into my mind:

“This must be the ultrasound thing,” he said, picking up the metal detector. It had a plastic handle, which was attached to a flat metal disk. John held the disk to his ear, then rubbed it along his forearm. “Put that down,” I said. “You’re going to break it.” “No I’m not.” He poked the buttons on the keyboard.

It intrigues me that I remember a moment in Martha Beck’s life, a woman I’ve never met. Remembering a scene from another person’s life is a perfect example of why I read memoirs. I can now glimpse a bit of her world. But as a writer I want to know more, not just about her life but about how she told her story. I’ve been trying to “read like a writer” for years, and frankly, I have been failing miserably. Once I’m inside a fictional story, I enjoy suspending my disbelief, and don’t want to disturb it by figuring out how the author got me there. It’s different when I read memoirs. When I connect with a real person telling me about a real life, I seem to be able to keep my wits about me. This lets me absorb not only what they are telling me but how. By watching my own emotional response to the story, I am gaining deeper insight into the story teller’s knack. So what does Martha Beck’s scene in the hospital teach me about writing?

The first thing I notice is that the repartee is so relaxed it reduces the tension of being in a hospital. While John is putting Martha at ease, the scene is putting me at ease. The ordinariness of it makes it easy for me to be there with them.

Second, it gives me a glimpse of their relationship. In this one snippet, I learn that John uses humor to distract his wife from an awkward situation. He’s a nice guy.

Another function this interchange played was pacing. The episode takes place at a crucial moment. She’s about to have her amniocentesis, and since the book is about her baby’s genetic defect, the reader knows the medical procedure is important. But instead of jumping ahead to the test, she takes a small detour, slows down, and brings us into the room with her. It’s a classic technique of pacing, and something I should have known from years of reading fiction. But I didn’t really learn it until I saw it in a memoir.

Fourth, the scene shows her physical surroundings. A memoir isn’t just about introspection. By showing me the inside of a hospital, or a classroom, or a school psychological testing office, she shows me the places where her life happened.

Fifth, it shows me her uniqueness. Lots of people have prenatal tests. If she had rushed through it, Martha’s experience would have been just another one. By slowing down and describing personal details, I feel like I know what that moment was like for her in particular, rather than a person in general.

Sixth she is teaching me a technical fact. When John played with the ultrasound equipment, I started seeing it and even touching it. Once I became oriented to the machine, I gently and enjoyably learn a little about sonograms and amniocentesis. For example when the technician saw how the fetus was positioned, she marked an X on Martha’s abdomen at the spot where the needle could be safely inserted. I always wondered about that.

Now that I’ve learned these writing lessons, I can try using them to enrich a scene of my own. I might want to teach something to the reader, show the nuance of a relationship, and by adding this sort of detail, the reader can relate to me not as a general person but a unique person, telling a story that can only be told by me. In a story I submitted to Ronni Bennett’s story site, I dig through my memory for a scene that will help the story in some of these ways. If you’re interested in submitting stories, or reading reader-submitted stories check out this site.

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