Category Archives: How-to

What to do with regrets in your memoir

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by Jerry Waxler

When I remember my life, sometimes I get hot flashes when I stumble on things that make me feel stupid , things I wish had never happened. Regrets can be so uncomfortable they sometimes make me want to run away from my memories altogether. If you feel your regrets are interfering with your desire to write, you have company. We’re in it together. We all have regrets of varying degrees of intensity burning away in our past. And so, even though your regrets are uncomfortable, they offer another lovely benefit to writing your memoir. You will gain a deeper understanding not only into your own mind, but into the inner workings of everyone you know.

This is one of my favorite things about writing memoirs. It brings you face to face with the human story. Yes, it’s true that you can only directly see the one human story that you happen to have lived. But through this laboratory experiment you can learn so much about what makes people tick.

To explain how to use regret to go deeper into your very human condition, I’d like to offer an example, but this is as hard for me to talk about as it is for anyone. For the sake of explaining this idea, I’ll overcome my self loathing and admit that when I was little, I took some coins out of my older brother’s drawer. It was stealing, and there it is, like a zit on my memory, making me feel like a thief, making me feel like less of a person than I aspire to be. Now let’s look at the variety of options available to me as I tiptoe around my initial reluctance to even admit it ever happened.

Even though I’m embarrassed, I could just tell the story. That way, I get it off my chest. And I hope that people reading about it will assume I was just a normal kid. That’s exactly my attitude towards other people who tell about their childhood transgressions. Why shouldn’t they feel that way about me?

Once I’ve written about the incident, I can think it through. Why did I do it? What was I thinking? How did my actions affect other people? What did I wish I could have told people, or how could I have paid for the crime? My brother was probably hurt and felt a little less safe with his stuff. I learned from my experiment in dishonesty that when I stole things I felt bad. That was part of my training as a young man.

After writing it and thinking about it, I could delete it. There’s no rule that says I have to make public every darn thing that happened to me. If I don’t like the way it looks on paper, I could delete it and move on.

I am the writer, and this gives me enormous flexibility to soften the impact of the incident with phrasing and positioning. When I first stole those coins, I felt terrible guilt. I was betraying my older brother. If I downplay the guilt, and look closely at the human elements, I find that all those big emotions, the sense of betrayal, fear, and guilt, flooded me as a child, but don’t sound like such a big deal now. When I look back, the act itself was almost ludicrously simple. Once he found out, I gave the money back. All that remained were my miserable feelings.

In the process of writing, insights creep into your story. You are applying today’s wisdom to help you explain actions from the past, and in the process, the regrets lose some of their power. You don’t feel like such a miserable cad. Veils of regret lift and you see the incident more clearly. If you want to learn more about your self, you can even use these intense moments as beacons, lighting your way into the interior of your psyche. As you unravel the impact of one, it will lead you to other glimpses into the dynamics of your past.

Look for other examples when that particular power expressed itself. If you stole something, talk about your guilt, about owning stuff, about how stealing was so important it made it into the top ten commandments. Talk about how you hated it when someone stole something from you. Talk about the tension and confusion you felt as a little boy, unsure of your role, unsure of yourself, and how money represented power, and how the coins you stole weren’t just any coins. They were steel pennies your brother had collected from the cash drawer at dad’s drugstore. Coin collecting was a special bond your brother shared with dad and you were too young to get into the club. If you took a few of those coins, perhaps you’d get some of the love.

What if you’re not sure whether to write it or not? Be careful, and take your time. Once it’s out on paper, you can never retract it. Bill Clinton stated publicly that he never inhaled marijuana. Since marijuana was illegal, it was his choice not to admit he had broken the law. Jimmy Carter said he lusted in his heart. Admitting his flaw probably improved his public image, showing him as a real human being. But notice that having made these statements, there they are in the public record forever.

If you’ve written about your regrets, you’ve already benefited by thinking them through, seeing nuances, and trying to understand the implications. The increased richness of your memories now belongs to you. And like a pin hole in a balloon, you’ll come back later and find that much of the tension from the old emotions has been deflated. It loses its hold on you. Now it’s just a story. Perhaps some time in the future, you’ll find a perfect time to share it, where fits in with something you are trying to illustrate.

If remembering this experience continues to feel damaging, talk to a therapist and see if you can work it out with help. Regrets are like heavy weights. By letting them go, you can live more fully and energetically today.

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Brooke Shields teaches mommies and memoir writers

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by Jerry Waxler

I picked Brooke Shields’ book “Down came the rain” off the shelf. The dust jacket gave me reason to believe it was deeper than just another name-dropping celebrity puff piece. Flipping through it convinced me it genuinely focused on her issues of having a baby, and so I decided to give it a chance. Now that I’ve finished it, I can say that I liked it. It was a decent read, not because of literary genius. But even though I wouldn’t read this just for the beauty of the sentences, there is a sort of straightforward genuineness about the way it is written. It feels authentic, and I think that’s one of the most important qualities of any memoir.

In addition to a genuine voice, I also found other reasons to enjoy and recommend this memoir as a good read and a teaching tool for aspiring memoir writers. Just as the cover promised, its central function was a story about a mommy. I believe it does a lovely job of showing how a young, first time mother deals with some of the issues of having a baby. By reading this story I gained insights into what it’s like to be a troubled mom. In fact there are so many bits about how she overcame obstacles, it reads almost like an instruction book for moms, addressing the question, “how to get over the hump if your baby doesn’t feel like the best thing that ever happened to you.”

People are so saturated with the expectation that the moment of seeing the baby will be the best moment of a lifetime. But in about 10% of women, this experience is very different. Moments after the powerful physical act of childbirth, it’s possible a woman may not feel emotionally receptive to the baby, and for Brooke this lack of connection was an extremely disturbing experience, as she watched in horror at her own less than spectacular response. She does a terrific job of helping us understand this situation. Her focus on this issue kept the book interesting, tying her experiences together into a coherent whole. Here are some of the topics she covers:

  • When she felt depressed, she denied she had a problem, blamed herself and refused to rely on medication.
  • She didn’t want any help from anyone.
  • She spends a fair amount of time showing how breast feeding saved her from her depression and created a bond with her baby. (No it’s not titillating. Despite the celebrity value of those particular body parts, this discussion really is for moms.)
  • She offers a fascinating insight into the fact that having a baby changes her relationship to her own mother. Now she’s bumped up a notch in the hierarchy, no longer just a child, but now a mom as well.

I think the most psychologically insightful material was the contrast between her grandiose expectations of a perfect connection with her baby, and the real feelings she experienced, as a tired, somewhat overwhelmed and flawed human being, who does not respond in such a storybook manner.

Writing Prompt

Teaching turns out to be a lovely dimension of memoirs. Adding a teaching element to your story will help hold it together. It potentially can make your book interesting to a special-interest audience. And by binding the story into a unified whole, it gives the reader an additional incentive for turning to the next page. As you work on your own memoir, consider what sort of lessons you would share. Did you learn to garden as a method to cope while your mother was sick? Did you learn to fly an airplane, while you struggled for a job after getting out of the military? Or like Brooke, were your lessons more emotional? Explain how you and your child coped with bullying while he grew up with Down’s Syndrome. Or even more abstract still, are your lessons spiritual, like Anne Lamott’s lessons in Traveling Mercies?

As you look for teaching moments to share with your readers, stay true to the central power of memoir writing. Share your authentic experience, and as the lessons unfold, let the readers watch. Like Brooke Shields’ memoir, combine the force of your authentic voice with the unifying principles of the lessons you want to teach. So as you read “Down Came the Rain,” you could be enjoying and learning about the following aspects of memoir writing:

You may be enjoying hearing deeper background about an “old friend.” (That’s what the star system is about. While most of us have at most a few hundred people in our social network, she has a few hundred million. I don’t understand it, but there it is.)

You could be learning about how to relate to a child, especially if you feel disconnected. This information about postpartum depression could even be life saving if you’re in that situation and need tips about how to handle it.

You could be enjoying an interesting story, opening a window into the lives of people you don’t know, nor will ever experience firsthand. Since I’m not a mommy, nor a celebrity. If I want to understand what either of those experiences is like, I have to read stories about them. This expands my horizon as a human being, lets me relate more genuinely to people who are different from me, and makes my world a richer, friendlier place.

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To improve your memoir, break down the code

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by Jerry Waxler

My dad owned a neighborhood drugstore in north Philadelphia, and on the nights he was able to make it home for dinner, most of the conversation centered around him telling us about the menagerie of characters who streamed through the store and gave him endless raw material. We sat and dutifully listened, but since there was no rule about equal air time, I grew up without having picked up even a smattering of skill to help me tell stories of my own.

In fact, I spent quite the next several decades story-less, feeling awkward about reporting on what happened to me. And though I didn’t realize it at first, I gradually noticed that my lack of storytelling was cutting me off from people. Stories are how we tell each other who we are, and so without stories, I felt isolated. Once I noticed how important it was to be able to tell stories, I set out to learn in adulthood what I had not learned as a child.

It turns out that with a little digging you can find storytellers who will teach you their craft. For example, Charles Kiernan, coordinator of the Lehigh Valley Storytelling Guild, has been studying story telling for years. For him, storytelling is a performance art. He looks like Mark Twain, including the flowing mane of hair and bushy mustache, and when he dresses in period costume, it’s like listening to your own copy of Mark Twain. In addition to the performance and folklore aspects of storytelling, he’s also interested in creating them.

Here’s the simple, powerful lesson he shared with me, that he’ll be teaching in more detail at the Augusta Heritage Folkarts Festival in West Virginia, July 8-13, 2007. Say you’re sitting around at a family gathering, and the older adults start telling stories about Uncle Bob. The ones who knew Uncle Bob start laughing, and everyone else glazes over. They never met Uncle Bob, they didn’t know his pranks, or the sadness underneath his smile, so the story isn’t working for them. The problem is that so many family stories contain codes. The people who know the code can make sense of the story, and those who don’t know the code are left out.

It’s like that old joke about a newly convicted criminal in the penitentiary. Someone down the cellblock screams out the number “68″ and all the other prisoners crack up laughing. The newbie asks what is going on, and his cellmate says, “We’ve heard these jokes so many times, we just tell them by the number.” It’s the same with family stories. As storyteller Charles Kiernan, coordinator of the Lehigh Valley Storytelling Guild, explains it, say you’re at the dinner table celebrating a holiday with your extended family. You start telling stories about Uncle Bob, and all the adults who knew Uncle Bob crack up, while the kids who don’t remember Uncle Bob glaze over. Why are they staring at the ceiling, waiting for an excuse to get away from the table?

Kiernan’s family-oriented workshop will teach students to slow down and instead of telling stories in code that only insiders understand, they’ll learn to tell the story in a way that can be understood by listeners who never met Uncle Bob. The trick is to describe him in more detail. What did he wear? What was his hair like? What room do you picture him in? Sit down with someone who didn’t know him and describe him in as much detail as possible, so your listener could pick Bob out of a crowd.

If you want to tell a story, look closely at your language, and “unpack” it, laying out its content for everyone to appreciate. With a little learning you can turn the joke known only to the old inmates into a joke you can share with kids and strangers.

While this advice sounds simple, I consider it to be brilliant. For one thing, it acknowledges an important fact. Just because we think we’re telling a good story doesn’t mean the listener is hearing a good story. That in itself is a powerful piece of information, because most of us think that when we tell about events, we are doing the best possible job sharing the story. It turns out, the storyteller plays a crucial role, shaping a bunch of events into something worth listening to. Once we realize this fact, we can start looking for tricks to give our stories more impact.

Secondly, the message is brilliant because it is extraordinarily fundamental, sweeping across all aspects of storytelling. For example, I was preparing to write a description of my years in college, and was hoping to explain how the music of the times influenced my feelings. I could hope that by simply mentioning that the Beatles were intense or important, I might be able to convey what I was feeling, since everyone really knows about the Beatles. But I remembered Kiernan’s advice about avoiding code words, and thought how that applies to those icons of the sixties. If I just mention the word, “sixties” or “Beatles” I might hope everyone understands what I mean. But they will only get what they think, not what I think. That’s like the prisoner saying “68.” I have to tell a story.

So how can I unpack my thoughts and feelings about the Beatles? I’ll talk more about that in my next blog entry, and put into a scene what I mean by the coded word “Beatles.”

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Life and Death in Memoir

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 by Jerry Waxler

I have enjoyed thousands of stories that involve brutal murder and outright assassination. Why am I so attracted to mayhem, when most of the time my thoughts are no more edgy than wondering what’s for dinner, or what I am going to do tomorrow? It turns out death is closer to everyday life than you might think. Just turn on the news — murders, war, disasters, disease, terrorism.

Even in the most innocuous circumstances, life and death battle under the surface. Take food for example. Fine cuisine sounds like it’s about pleasure and elegance. But that need for food is caused precisely by our need to stay alive. We try to stay as far to the alive side as possible, which results in eating more than we need. But eating too little can cause death. This balance drives so many decisions, even when we’re not thinking about it.

It’s the same thing when we pursue a career. On the surface, we’re driven by many things, by challenge and drudgery, pride and frustration, but we also need food on the table and a roof over our heads. In short, it keeps us alive.

When you tell your own life story, listeners and readers, without necessarily realizing it, are tuned in to the issues that kept you alive, or brought you nearer the edge of death. You can keep them engaged by becoming more aware of these forces, and learn how to insert them into your tale. Here are some examples of the way life and death might enter your memoirs:

If you escaped Hitler’s clutches, your story becomes a fascinating race for your life. But even if you didn’t have such a dramatic escape, look for any instances when death came near. When I faced an aggressive, armed policeman during a 60′s war protest, walked away from a broadside car crash, was mugged by a gang of kids, survived self-imposed starvation when I decided to eat only fruit, sitting peacefully one moment by a campfire and then thrust into panic as flames raced through the parched grass and leaves of the forest floor, I came a closer to the precipice. Children are especially vulnerable, so childhood memoirs like Jeannette Walls’ Glass Castle feel like cliffhangers, as we wonder how those kids are still alive. In Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, some babies lost the fight.

When important people in your life die, these are potential areas of trauma. Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking centers on this confrontation with death. In my life, I have lost my older brother, Ed, when he was 37, and my first cousin, Jules, when he was in his twenties. And there was John Kennedy. How did their deaths affect my life? Since then, my parents died, and friends have died, events that feel like a great, mysterious knot, tying together the forces of life, death, and love.

In war, people kill each other all the time. Even though most wars happen far away, they affect us in so many ways, whether we fought in one, had loved ones go off to war, been caught as a civilian in war, protested war, or fled from war. Whenever war touches your story, it parts the veil between life and death.

When I was sixteen, I read about the Nazi death camps. Only a few years earlier, across an ocean that seemed very small, millions of people had been murdered for being born into the same religion I was. Since then I have watched many people take their groups seriously enough to kill for them. So when you write about the group you are in, or ones you interact with, it might be appropriate to wonder about the deadly nature of group identity.

Look at the faces of sports fans when their team loses. It’s a moment of grief. Games are battles, in which adversaries fight, and the loser of the game symbolically dies. Kids cry over games. Gambling and other addicts step even closer, risking their property and sometimes their lives for the next fix. By conveying this visceral connection in your memoir, between competition or addiction, and the quest for life, your reader will be able to feel its power.

Wrinkles in the skin at first seem a mere cosmetic annoyance. But signs of age remind us that we are not going to live forever. As friends die, you may look more closely at the meaning of life. In fact this quest is a great reason to write your memoir. When you become aware of the dance of life and death, it prods you to dive in deeper to understand the urgency and intensity of your own story. And when you feel this connection, your reader will feel it too.

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Publish! How to share your memoir with readers

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by Jerry Waxler

Once you’ve written your memoir, will it languish in a drawer, waiting for the day when your heirs will find it? I doubt that plan will inspire you. I have always thought it morbid to worry too much about what will happen to my remains after I’m gone. I want to share my writing now. And there are so many options that can provide that satisfaction.

Writing feels like a very private act, just between your thoughts and the paper, while publishing by definition exposes you, connects you, lets others in. But it turns out writing and publishing are more connected than they first appear. This entire system of words was developed by humans to communicate with each other. Paper is simply a clever repository, where words wait until it is time to fulfill their potential. Here is a summary of the ways that writers move these words from paper to a reader’s mind.

Traditional commercial publishing
Commercial publishing is a business, and like any business, you must learn the ropes, make contacts, find what the market wants and is willing to pay for, and then make a deal. You’ll have to learn how to write queries to gain their attention, and you’ll have to prove to them that there are lots of people who admire you enough to buy your book. If you don’t prove you have lots of such people, most publishers will pass you by. All of these requirements are doable, but they take you far beyond your initial goal of sitting alone and writing.

Self-publish
You can bypass the commercial publishers and publish it yourself. This means no begging. You have complete control. And with control comes responsibility. No matter how good a writer you are, it’s worthwhile to hire a professional editor to fix typos and grammar indiscretions as well as to streamline clumsy sentences. And you’ll need to design the cover and format the book. It’s all up to you. But when you’re done, you’ll have published a real book that you can sell at lectures, give to family members, and market to the public.

Self-publishing technology 1 – Print on Demand
When you have a completed work, you can get it set up as a print-on-demand book through any one of dozens of such companies. They only print what you sell. There are no boxes of books in your basement.

Self-publishing technology 2 – Short run printing
Once you get your book ready for a publisher, you can have it printed in a short run, of 50 or 100 at a time, more economically than you might expect.

Blogs and websites
To get your life into the public, blogs make it as easy as writing in a diary. You might start out just for you, and as you find your voice, you might hook up with others of like minded interest or experience.

Writing groups, critique groups, memoir groups
Writing groups are a wonderful way to share creative time with a few other people, telling stories about writing, swapping tips, critiquing each other’s work. Because you share so much of yourself, these connections can turn into lifelong friendships.

Special interest groups
If your story appeals to special interest groups, like veterans, or an ethnic, religious, or professional group, your book will make a wonderful talking point to earn you invitations to meetings and to become an expert in your community.

Repurpose your material for magazine and other writing
You can keep going, using the material you researched for your memoir as raw material for non-fiction articles as well as for more storytelling and fiction.

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Showing ideas is harder than telling them

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by Jerry Waxler

I’m a person who admires ideas, so when I try to talk about my life, I want to talk about ideas. And yet, storytelling is largely about action. How do I turn my predilection for ideas into a story? That’s why I’ve developed a method to gather together scenes for a memoir, but even with this method some things are harder to show. Take for example my recent memory about how important books were in my life. Books are filled with ideas, and ideas were important to me especially in high school and college. How will I ever describe the centrality of ideas, when ideas themselves do not make good storytelling material?

To help me understand this question, I’m looking at the way other memoirists handle the same issue. Take for example, Tommie Smith’s “Silent Gesture.” He is a teller, telling about his life. I am interested, and keep turning pages. I like him and what he’s done and what he stands for, and want to know more about him. And while he occasionally shows me a scene, a lot of the book is filled with him telling me about his thoughts. Tommie might say, “I was good at running and kept winning race after race.” It’s accurate and informative. But I can’t enter into it with him. On the other hand, George Brummell in “Shades of Darkness” shows everything. In Brummell’s book, he walks down the street tapping his cane, stumbling into things, cursing when he gets lost. I can feel his situation. I’m there with him.

So how would I tell about the importance of books in my life? I could list them, and tell about them. For example, “Catch 22 made a big impression on me, along with other books that broke down the barriers of logic, and showed me that all is not as it seems.” Nice statement but it doesn’t take you into my life. So I look for a scene that includes a book. Here’s one. This scene provides a window into my world. It takes longer to write but it lets a reader get to know me a little more, and see a couple more parts of my world. By the way, this snip of narrative is not polished. To write a blog every day I’m going to have to publish drafts, not something I like to do. Let me know if you think the unpolished writing distracts from the point. Here’s my example of a scene with a book:

For my birthday, when I was twelve, my father gave me Robinson Crusoe. It was a plain orange book. It didn’t even have a picture on the cover. I placed it in the little stand by my bed, and just glowered at it for weeks. I wanted a Hardy Boys book. I used to go to the candy store where there was a shelf of Hard Boy books. I would pick them up and just stare at them. I could feel their mystery calling to me. But when I begged dad to let me exchange Robinson Crusoe for a Hardy Boys book, he refused. It was one of the few times I felt pressure from my dad. I knew it was the right thing to do and I knew I was being a brat. It was a case of pleasure taking priority over conscience. Finally I gave in and started to read it. Once I adjusted my mind to the old fashioned language, I got into it. I started to feel more smitten with this guy landing on an island and trying to survive. When I was done, what had started out as an insult turned out to be an opening. I was hooked on classic literature. And what started as a reason to feel separated from my dad turned into a reason to feel grateful to him. His gift to me that birthday was more than just a book. He gave me a gift by pressuring me to stretch beyond my limits.

That scene conveys an idea about my relationship to books. Now, if I’m going to include such an abstract point in my memoir, I need to look for others. Oh there’s another one. In ninth grade, I was more interested in the science fiction book I was reading than I was in my English class. The teacher walked up behind me and caught me in the act of reading. It’s an ironic sin to be caught reading a book in English class, but he never forgave me.

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