Memory Writers Network

by Jerry Waxler

The tiny town of Bethlehem in Southeastern Pennsylvania has a lot going on. It was the birthplace of Bethlehem Steel, it sports an 81 foot high Christmas star, hosts the annual regional music bash called Musikfest, is home of Lehigh University and Moravian College, and has its own public radio station, WDIY where I’m being interviewed today. It also happens to be the home of Lehigh Valley Storytelling Guild. Storytelling interests me, not because I’m an expert but because I’m human, which is the chief prerequisite for interest in stories. We start learning stories from the time we’re babies, and we become attuned to them through a life time of exposure. In fact, they are everywhere, and form the basis for the way we look at the world, learn about people, and let people learn about us.

When I started to explore life-writing, I realized that while I’m an expert story listener, I have a lot to learn about story telling. Since stories are everywhere, you would think that learning about telling them should be simple. Many successful writers recommend that you learn the art of writing stories by emulating the books you enjoy reading. My problem with this method is that once I dive into the story I stop thinking about writing. In a trance, I turn the key on the door of his apartment, put my briefcase on the table by the door, and recoil in fear at the sound I heard in the other room. It’s hard for me to break out of this trance and analyze the writer’s technique.

It’s easier for me to draw lessons from memoirs. When I read a memoir, a significant proportion of my attention is already focused on learning lessons from the protagonist’s life. I want to understand what makes his or her world work, what’s special about it, what I can see that will help me live in my world. So since I’m already learning, it turns out to be natural for me to learn lessons about storytelling. And I can learn from first time authors, as well as from the masters. I find many lessons about storytellers from beginners, such as Margaret George’s Never Use your Dim Lights, or George Brummell’s Shades of Darkness or Harry Bernstein’s Invisible Wall.

Another place I learn about story telling is from people who teach writing. One comprehensive book for storytellers is a 400 page classic called simply Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee. Since good screenwriting is good storytelling, don’t worry about the fact that your life may not be made into a movie. If you’re serious about representing your life as a story, I recommend you dig into such material, and learn more about how stories are told. Not only will you be learning to tell your own story. You’ll learn to see more perceptively into the stories you read, watch, or hear.

I love trying to understand what makes a story tick, so it was with great delight that I spoke with storyteller Charles Kiernan, from Bethlehem’s Storytelling Guild. If you want to learn how to tell stories, it makes sense to ask a storyteller. All you have to do is find one. Since I knew about Kiernan’s guild, I turned to him to ask him his ideas about stories. It turns out he was just getting ready to teach a workshop he’ll be presenting at the Augusta Heritage Folkarts Festival in West Virginia. July 8-13, 2007. This was a perfect time to have that conversation, because he told me about the lesson he is preparing to give at the Folkarts Festival. It is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard for turning life into story.

So what was the simple powerful advice Charles Kiernan offered? The gist is, “Break down the code, and spell it out.” Stories are like space ships and time travel machines. So even though I learned about this storytelling trick in a tiny town, I can use it to tell stories that transport me around the world.

I’m going to explain it in more detail in my next blog entry.

by Jerry Waxler

I’m reading a book by journalism professor, Jack Lule about using myth to find story. I recommend his book Daily News, Eternal Stories to anyone who is looking to find a structure for their story. Lule wrote it to explain why some news stories jump into the headlines, while others don’t. My purpose in reading it is to pass along ideas that can help you structure your memoir.

His first myth is “The Victim.” In his example, a man on a cruise was murdered by terrorists, and elevated by the news media to the status of a hero. Since the man was in a wheelchair, the only reason the terrorists could possibly have for killing him was that he was an American. They used him as a symbol, killing him out of hatred for the nation. The news media accepted the terrorist’s symbolic message, allowing the man to stand in as proxy for all Americans. And once the victim became accepted as a symbol, he could be used for an additional purpose. The media and politicians used his story to send a message back to the terrorists. It’s as if the terrorists were saying “we hate you and we’re going to kill this guy to prove it,” and the American media responded by saying, “Oh yeah. Well we are strong anyway, and you don’t scare us, and we’re going to admire this man to prove it.” Many people who have been elevated throughout history from victim to hero were used in this symbolic way to represent their group. The murderers hated the group and used the victim as a symbol, and the admirers showed love for this victim, and rallied around in order to strengthen their identity and defy the murderers. For example, many of the Christian martyrs are remembered because of the way they were singled out.

While this myth is powerful in news and history, it is not an easy myth to apply in memoir. I believe one reason this is difficult to use in memoir is because to be elevated from victim to hero, your story must be told by others. If the news media declares that you have been singled out as a representative, then you can be elevated. It doesn’t work as well if you declare yourself a victim. On the contrary, you look like a complainer if you come forward and say “I’m a victim.” It loses its mythological power. In fact, “I’m a victim” can deflate a story, taking the energy out of it.

In scanning my experience with memoirs, I can think of one effective tale of a victim, Nien Chang’s “Life and Death in Shanghai.“ Her daughter was “arrested” or more accurately “disappeared” by the Red Guard during the infamous Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960’s. It’s a beautiful tale, carried not so much by tragedy of the daughter’s victimization but by the mom’s strength, and her struggle to hold up and maintain her poise despite persecution. The crime that Chang’s family was being persecuted for was their western education. As western readers, we can identify with their victimization. In the same manner as Lule’s mythical victim, the hatred that was being directed at that family was symbolically directed at us!

In most memoirs, even if the author has undergone horrific suffering, the energy that moves the reader is not the suffering but the courage required to cope with it. For example, in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, he never complains about being the victim of his father’s abandonment. On the contrary the whole book is a sort of celebration of survival. The reading public didn’t canonize McCourt for being a victim, but rather placed him on their shoulders for surviving.

For memoirists, the victim myth is a cautionary tale. Be careful about declaring yourself a victim. It probably won’t help your heroic image. Consider the dynamics of Tommie Smith’s memoir, a Silent Gesture. The reason I went to see Smith at a book signing this year, and bought his book, was because I wanted to understand the greatness of a man. He came from a poor black family in the segregated south, went on to set world records as a runner, won Olympic Gold in 1968. Then on live television in front of millions of people, he raised his fist in the Silent Gesture. In the tumultuous 60’s this was seen by blacks as courageous. From the media’s standpoint, it was defiant. Smith was blacklisted. He went on to teach and coach, but without the fanfare or success he deserved. See my previous post about Smith on this blog.

As a reader, and a student of history, I ought to be loving every minute of this memoir. But it doesn’t turn out to be a page turner. I think one problem with the telling of this powerful story is that he became entangled in the dark side of the myth making process. Instead of being adored by the media as a Gold Medalist, Smith was turned into an ingrate who abused his privileged position. No advertising contracts, television spots, or fancy coaching jobs resulted from his spectacular athletic achievement. He should have been singled out as a hero, but because of one wildly audacious act, from the glory of victory he slid away into anonymity, or perhaps more accurately like Nien Chang’s daughter, he “disappeared.”

His story is messier than the one Lule singled out in his section on the Victim. Smith was not a guy in a wheel chair, murdered outright. He was at the time, the fastest man alive, and then after he stepped off the podium, he was just a guy, trying to raise a family. It becomes a difficult story to tell. If you are stripped of your glory by the media, who then will tell the story of your courage and survival? It’s a fascinating question. Probably the only credible answer is in a memoir.

I recommend Smith’s memoir for anyone who wants to get inside his experience, whether you are curious about those events and the man behind them, want to learn more about memoirs, or are curious about the workings of the myths that drive our public stories. The book offers lessons for memoirists. How fame doesn’t guarantee success. How the public is fickle, and seems to have a mind of its own. And how myths of heroes and victims play out in Smith’s life.

As you read it, embrace what you like, and consider what you would do differently. From such an interesting life, he ought to be able to shape a compelling story that would again grab the attention of the world. He had the podium, and used it for a silent gesture. A memoir gives him a chance to tell it in words.

What approach would you use? Leave a comment here and let me know.

A writer on the AbsoluteWrite.com Life Writing Forum asked an interesting question. “Should a memoir have multiple sub-plots?” I love questions that make me think, and this one had me scratching my head. A best selling fiction work might have several sub-plots, each overlapping and interweaving to keep the pace racing along. For example, a detective story might have a love story embedded in it. Each plot has a plot line, with its challenge (catch the murderer or catch the lover), setbacks, and resolution. Would that work in a memoir? There are no rule books about memoirs that say what you can and cannot do. So without a rule book, I came up with two different “right” answers. The first “right” answer is that if you want to write a publishable book, and want to know what publishers are publishing, then take a look at the bookshelves. After you’ve read 10 or 20, you can get a sense of what’s out there, and how they work. While there are enormous variations, I think you’ll see a trend in the way they treat the sort of structure issue you’re wondering about.

Take for example, Tracy Kidder, a Pulitzer prize-winning non-fiction writer, and one of the founders of the literary non-fiction movement. In his memoir My Detachment, Kidder takes a straight-line approach, moving his story along with the unfolding of events. This is fairly typical. He starts as a young man, lets us know some of the issues that make him who he is, and then gradually shows how he signed up for military service, without any particular plan. It just seemed like the right thing to do. And so it goes, through his tour in Vietnam. The pacing is provided by the writer’s unfolding understanding of life.

And Harry Bernstein, in his highly publicized memoir, The Invisible Wall, does the same. Both of the stories have things going on in the background. Kidder’s memoir took place mainly during his tour of duty in Vietnam, and Bernstein’s took place in England, during the first world war. (Yes. That’s the first war! He got his first book deal when he was 93, giving new support for the old saying, “it’s never too late.”) In fact, the way events unfold in the world-story are important for establishing the pacing of the book.

One memoir I have read recently that does not follow a simple path was Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. As far as I’m concerned, she is in a genre of her own. Her memoir writing skills reach to the edges of my ability to analyze. In the memoir, she mentions that her author husband was “rereading a book to find out how it worked.” That’s a great tip from a professional writer about how to see into the workings of a complex piece. And the Year of Magical Thinking is complex. I need to reread it.

Didion has a brilliant knack for inviting me into her mind, and showing me reality through her eyes. Her writing reflects the inside our own consciousness, where time jumps around like crazy. I can glance up at my bookshelf, see a book about England, start musing about my trip there, reach for my cup of coffee and leap back to needing to put on another pot, all within a split second. But stories typically don’t report what happens inside the teller’s mind. The process of writing a life story really boils down to a translation from one language to another - from the language of thought and memory which leaps, swirls, and hides, into the language of story, which can be followed sensibly by a reader. They are very different languages. And if you are looking for a way to do that translation and tell an authentic story, a good place to start is along the throughline of your life events.

Most published memoirs don’t make use of multiple plots, which makes me believe that when we read about someone’s life, we are expecting a methodical unfolding, waking up in the morning with the protagonist and going through the day with them without too much literary device at work. This still provides plenty of opportunity for a rich story, just not a complex one. Take Jeannette Wall’s bestseller, Glass Castle, for example. She has a variety of themes. Two astonishingly self-centered parents with the emotional maturity of fifteen year olds. Her siblings, fellow inmates in this asylum, provide support and adventure. Drifting from town to town. Many crazy experiences. And gradually, from the chaos, emerges the seeds of adulthood. She plans to escape. And with all of this, she tells the events in the order they unfolded. Same with Tobias Wolff’s memoir “This Boy’s Life.”

The power of a memoir comes from the unique unfolding of a person’s life. I know that’s what I want when I read a memoir. I want to walk a couple hundred pages in their shoes. What sort of unique story do you have to tell? Perhaps when you tell your story, you visualize it unfolding along multiple plot lines. Which brings me to my second “right” answer. It’s your life, and if you feel your story can best be told with sub-plots, do it. If you want to really take flight, try packaging your story as “fiction based on real life.” This would give you the best of both worlds — the freedom to create a complex novel, establishing a pacing that you feel works best for the story, while at the same time, drawing from the rich source material of your own experience. On your book signing tour, answer questions about which parts are real and which parts aren’t. Your readers will feel like you’ve taken them into the heart of your story.

by Jerry Waxler

When the blogging craze first started it looked “self indulgent” - who wants to hear people talking about themselves? But this craze had legs. It turns out people love to talk about themselves, and to hear about each other. There is something oddly soothing about hearing another person’s tale, whether it’s about a daytrip or romance or hobby. And so, blogs continue to be popular, giving people a chance to come out from behind their barriers and share more than ever. It is a modern form of intimacy.

I suppose people who lived in a small village might have had more intimate connections, where everyone grew up together and knew everything about each other. We don’t live in those villages anymore. But we do have the internet, and this is letting us create our own customized community, a really big one, just like that crazy visionary Marshall McLuhan said. When I first read Marshall McLuhan in the 60’s I thought his ideas about a global village were cool, but unrealistic. That was the era of television, when you sat back on your sofa, and passively watched slick, over-produced shows. Television created a passive, almost zombie-like public. But now the internet is taking over. A recent study found that college kids are online 3 hours a day! Inside their dorms they are getting to know each other around the campus and around the world. As we settle in to the twenty-first century, the world is starting to take on some of the qualities of McLuhan’s vision of a village.

The internet has given our voice a global reach. Free blogging, forums, email, podcasts, video posts, photos, online communities, and yes even those old tried and true websites. We have so many more ways of touching each other. Much of the communication through these media focus on the tales of the day. Blogs often resemble diaries. That’s a start, but you can push that intimacy much further by writing a memoir. Instead of dashing off snips of thoughts from a day, share your whole story.

I love face to face writing workshops, opportunities to meet and teach and learn with real people, seeing their expression, feeling their presence. But it’s hard to gather people together in one place. They are busier than ever. It’s expensive and time consuming to go across town, let alone across a region, and we are all juggling obligations, including the desire to just stay home. But on the internet - Ahhh. You can dance and bob, jump and swirl, through the pages, like lightening, looking for images, ideas, people, places. It sets the mind free.

While I continue to enjoy personal contact, with each passing year I can see that the wave of the twenty first century is moving the village out of the face to face realm, a loss of one kind of intimacy, but in exchange it reveals a new kind of village at a distance. That’s okay. We’re people and we need each other. We’ll take what we can get. And when we look at these changes as opportunities, it turns out that by by applying the ideas of memoir to reveal your own experiences and turn them into narrative, you can get to know other people, not as faceless conversations, but as fully engaged actors sharing the stage of life. My goal is to provide a cross roads, and encouragement and insight that lets people share their story.

From the simple space of my desk, at 5:00 AM, a cup of coffee by my side, in front of a bank of fluorescent lights to jumpstart my morning, I am ready to communicate with the world. To do so, I need to find what works. What do people want to know? What do I have to offer? I can experiment, and learn by blogging. Blogs are good practice, to help me learn the art of talking about myself in a way that is useful and interesting to others.

When I’m near home in my physical “village” if you can use this term on a modern, automobile driven neighborhood where most people are strangers, I want to look normal and bland. But on the internet I can show how I am unique. By sharing my own journey, and encouraging you to share yours, we can individually and together, story by story, reverse the falling apart into isolation, and turn this world into a global village. I think when people get to know more about the person inside the shell, we’ll start appreciating each other more, and learn how to help each other in new ways we have yet to imagine.

By Jerry Waxler
To learn more about how to write a memoir, I spoke with Foster Winans, author of the bestselling book Trading Secrets, (St. Martin’s Press, 1986), a memoir about his involvement in an insider trading scheme while he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal. It hit the best seller charts, partly because his situation made headlines, and also because of the excellent writing. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, was excerpted in “Esquire Magazine,” inspired the Oliver Stone film “Wall Street,” and won Foster rave reviews from critics, who said, “Winans can make you feel what is happening better than most fiction writers.”

Since then he has written more than thirty books, including ghost writing memoirs about other people’s lives. This gives him an intimate involvement in the memoiring process. I learned about Foster’s memoir ideas a number of years ago, when I took a class at the writing center he founded in Doylestown, the Writers Room. To find out more about how he applied his journalistic skills to his own story, I spoke with him in his office in Doylestown down the street from the Writers Corner, the new tenants of the original Writers Room.

One of the tips he told me about writing memoirs was the value of context when writing your own story. The more grounded you are in the concrete facts of life around you, the more capable you will be at telling a story that your reader will relate to. “If you’re unclear, your reader will pick it up immediately.” To gain a detailed recollection of his own story, he did things like visiting the public library to find the weather report for the night of a key incident. His book shows this dedication to detail. In fact, this attention to the way Foster’s world worked is a good reason for aspiring writers to read his memoir. I highly recommend Trading Secrets, as a perfect example of how a memoirist can employ the events in the world around him to drive the story forward.

While this was a memoir about Foster’s experience, there is exquisite attention to the detail of Foster’s world. Of course, there are the expected descriptions of city streets, limousines, and country homes. Any writer needs to let the reader see the room or surroundings, to set the stage, as it were. But he goes further, showing us not only what his world looks like but how it works. He describes how editorial decisions are made at the Wall Street Journal. He shows what a stock broker does in between deals. He even tells about ups and downs of the stock market, to show us the way his world was moving and being moved by money.

Take a few moments to sketch out this method for your own memoir. Consider how the world around you affected you, and how you could research and portray the workings of that world to help the reader stay engaged in events in your life. So for example, if I was going to write about going to college in Wisconsin in the sixties, I would read books about the protest years at Wisconsin. I could visit the campus, and walk through the buildings where I walked when I went to school, and take photos to place in my folders. A student in the memoir class I taught yesterday wanted to tell about a crisis in his life because a routine eye operation had gone bad. To help us see his world, he could research similar operations, and tell about the incidence of blindness, its causes, where people go for help, and what sorts of outcomes can be expected. Such information would help his readers place his personal experience in context with the experience of people around him, and in turn around us as well.

Foster also addressed a common question memoirists ask. How did he pull all the information together to turn all these events and memories into a story? For this, he employed another skill from his journalism training, a keen appreciation for research and organization. He wrote out all the facts of his story on index cards, and then shuffled them around until they fell into place in the story. He suggested this system for others. In fact, he found it written in an essay, and has been using it to great effect, offering yet another demonstration that writers can learn by reading. Once Foster had the basic outline together, he created a folder for each outline point, and started putting information about that key point into that folder. “I became an insane filer.” He said his research was exhaustive, and felt like he was preparing for a marathon. By the time he actually sat down to write the book, it took him four weeks. “It was all in the preparation.”

In addition to skills he learned as a journalist, he also employed basic storytelling and screenwriting techniques to help him organize his story. In the parlance of drama, each crisis or turning point in a story is called a “beat.” By looking for the beats in his own experience, he was able to construct the pacing and flow of his story. His goal was to end each chapter with a cliff hanger. As Foster said, “The job of the writer is to get the reader to turn the page.”

To some writers, Foster’s advice for pulling together a memoir might sound too formal, suitable more for a dispassionate journalist than an intimate portrayal of one’s inner life. But his journalistic tendencies don’t interfere with his appreciation for the emotional intimacy a memoir can generate. He told me a moving story about an incident with his mother that was triggered while he was writing his memoir. To give the reader background about his life, Foster described his relationship with his mother, who he described as controlling and intrusive. It was a perspective he felt needed to be told. But his mother stayed true to her intrusive form, and insisted on reading it. He warned her she may not like it, but ended up acquiescing. When he came down to the kitchen the next morning, she was still sitting at the table where he left her the night before. She asked, “Is that the way you really see me?” They had a long talk, perhaps more open than they ever could have had under any other circumstance, and from that experience, Foster found a greater degree of understanding and peace with his mother than he dreamed possible. “In the end, I realized I did not need to embarrass my mother to make the story work so I removed the negative references, replacing them instead with the things I admired about her.”

Naomi Gal’s novel, Daphne’s Seasons, is about an Israeli woman who loses her husband in a suicide bomb attack. She moves to rural Pennsylvania where grief plays out against the protagonist’s first experience of four seasons. Daphne’s Seasons is Gal’s 16th book, and the 5th novel. This is the first one available in English. Gal is a Creative Writing professor at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA.

JW: Could you tell me about how your life experience as an Israeli informed your novel, Daphne’s Seasons?

NG: The first part of the book is immersed in pain. Having lived most of my life in Israel, I know about pain. I have seen time and again parents bury their children who paid with their lives for the ongoing war. Since Israel is a small country, there is one - sometimes zero - degrees of separation. So pain was always close and I could express it in my novel.

JW: Give me an example of a scene in the book that reflected your own life.

NG: My favorite chapter in the book really happened to me. Very much like Daphne, I was sipping my morning espresso at my window seat gazing at the green lush meadow, counting my blessings. Then, at leisure I went up to my computer and the news was screaming at me from the screen: there was a suicide bombing in Jerusalem and all the beauty around me disappeared, I was back on the traumatic scene of death, carnage, destruction, agony and pain. In the novel, Daphne lost her husband in a pretty much similar kind of blast, and she, like me, realizes that no matter how far away you run, and how glorious nature is, you cannot escape the horror of terror.

JW: How did it feel to write about that pain?

NG: When I started writing Daphne’s Seasons (my own title for it was Changing Seasons) my life was better than Daphne’s. But when she was recuperating, my life was falling apart so I went back to review the parts of my manuscript that described pain, and added, and added. It was so strange that it was almost funny, the way life was imitating fiction.

JW: Did this writing about Daphne help you deal with the pain of your memories?

NG: I did feel catharsis. Writing is an amazing way to let go of pent up feelings and turn suffering into a story. Weaving my threads of agony freed me in a way only art can.

JW: How does your real-life move to Pennsylvania enter into the experience of your fictional character?

NG: She moves to rural PA and slowly starts a process of healing with the generous help of lush mother nature. Daphne, very much like me, is a daughter of the desert. Israel is an arid country and except summer there aren’t really other seasons. So I could easily write about the solace Mother Nature bestows on Daphne.

JW: That’s funny. I grew up in Pennsylvania and I know a lot of people who want to move away get away from the seasons. Your perspective might help them come to peace with being here.

NG: Yes, seasons were an amazing revelation for me. Their healing power was good to me as it is to Daphne. I am still awed by the lush flowers of spring, by the unpredictability of summer, by the changing colors of fall leaves and by the serenity of snow in winter. Nature allows you to feel deeply the change of seasons in your own life cycle, it gives one hope since there is a constant renewal and change.

JW: What else can you share about how you have used your life experience in your fiction writing?
NG: All my fiction is based on memory one way or another. I am thinking back to all my novels, even the unpublished ones I wrote in my teens and twenties. It is always about me, even when it looks different. Daphne, as Nora, the protagonist of Soap Opera, my first novel, written in Hebrew. These were “un-liberated” women who go through transformation thanks to dramatic events in their lives. I guess my life was always a quest for freedom mainly as a woman. Fiction allowed me more dramatic changes, my life was more of an evolution than a revolution. Daphne’s husband has to die tragically so that she can grow out of the shadow he cast over her, and the same goes for Nora, in Soap Opera, who is confined to a hospital bed after a car accident and can at long last look at her life from the outside. I guess fiction is a condensed form of memoir, a more dramatic one. You can skip lots of mundane details.

JW: So if someone was wondering if it’s okay to weave their life experience in their fiction writing, what would you tell them?

NG: When Gustav Flaubert, who was very different from his protagonist Madam Bovary was asked how could he write with so much credibility and accuracy about a woman so different from him in every respect he allegedly said: “Madam Bovary is me.” So yes, I believe we always write about ourselves, even when our characters seem different. We can only rely on our experiences and system of beliefs no matter how and what we write. Everything we write is a memoir to some extent. At times a wishful one. All my protagonists have daughters. I have sons but always wanted a daughter. Daphne, as well as Dea, the heroine of my novel Lovend are accomplished pianists. I love music but I can’t play.

Virginia Woolf in “Room of one’s Own” cites a passage from the novel “Jane Eyre.” Woolf complains that Charlotte Bronte is talking for herself and not for her character, but I really can’t see the difference.

JW: Have you thought about writing a memoir?

NG: I prefer fiction to memoir because fiction allows me to better hide. Many years ago I had a personal column (this was before internet and blogs) and every week I would write about personal matters, and then all of a sudden I couldn’t do it any more. I needed privacy, so I started hiding behind characters in novels. That way I could improve, change and give free rein to my imagination. I love inventing. I can embellish and ameliorate reality.

JW: As a writer and a writing teacher, what other advice would you like to pass along to people who are thinking about writing their memoir?

NG: Everyone has a story is what I say when I teach creative writing and every story is worth writing and reading. I wish my parents, my grandparents and my great great grandparents would have written their memoir, but they didn’t and they are all dead and there is no one to ask the many questions I would love to ask. So write, write, write. Don’t discriminate. Just write as much as you can, editing will come later. Go back into your past and start with memories that are vivid, you will find out that as you write less vivid memories will surface and find their way to the paper (or computer). There are techniques to overcome your fear of writing or what I call your ISJ (Interior Supreme Judge) who sits there criticizing and prevents you from writing. Learn to tame her (or him) and one of the ways to trick your ISJ is with automated writing, early in the morning, before ISJ wakes up or late at night when she is tired. Write even if you don’t like what you are writing. Later you will be able to discern the good from the bad. For now, just write. You can record your voice if you are computer shy, but writing your memoir is a great opportunity to befriend this practical contraption.

by Jerry Waxler

The Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group (www.glvwg.org) held its annual meeting April 27-28, 2007, and I found all sorts of valuable writing insights, that I want to share with memoir writers.

I went to a workshop for non-fiction writers given by Jack Lule, professor of journalism at Lehigh University, and author of “Daily News, Eternal Stories, the mythological role of journalism.” His talk was about using mythology to write non-fiction stories. I knew I was going to be interested in his ideas, because I have been reading and writing about how to use the Hero’s Journey to help write the story of your life. My ideas on this topic were derived from several books, mainly Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces and Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, Mythic Structure for Writers, as well as other experiences in my workshops, and my own analysis of storytelling. So I was looking forward to hearing what a university professor had to say on this topic. I was not disappointed.

The first thing he did was emphasize the importance of story. This might seem surprising coming from a journalist. Journalists are supposed to just write what they see. Right? But Lule started noticing some news caught fire, and some didn’t. He began looking for the reason for this difference, and he realized that when a story just conveys information, it does not generate energy. The stories that have the most energy are organized as a story, not as “information.”

This is a powerful observation for an aspiring memoirist who is trying to gather the facts of their life and turn them into a good read. But the next problem is the obvious question, “how do you find the story?” I’m glad you asked. Through years of observation, Lule realized that the stories that caught the public’s imagination looked a lot like myths. The idea that myths are built in to our collective consciousness is a familiar perspective to those scholars who study Carl Jung. His ideas have become canonical observations in the cultural and psychological thinking of the twentieth century.

This could be a fabulous insight to help journalists or memoirists who want to organize information into a story. But what good is this information for those of us who have don’t have time to go back to school, or read dozens of books on Greek, Norse, or Celtic mythology, and then derive from all that reading the lessons that could help our writing?

That’s where teachers and writers like Jack Lule come in. Through examples and explanations his book helps us find the “myth power” that fuels the story. Some of the myths he mentioned in his talk are the “trickster”, the “great mother,” and the “hero figure.” Armed with this information, we can then use it to find the myth that applies to our facts. Such insights could help us organize our memoir, make it more compelling and engaging. With the help of Lule’s book, which I immediately bought, I expect to find additional ways to use myth for storytelling. myths that Lule offers.

I’ve already written about the Hero’s Journey in both of my books, Four Elements for Writers, and Learn to Write your Memoir in Four Weeks. Now leaving this workshop I felt that in just 50 minutes, my writing reach had been extended. It was a great way to spend an afternoon, and I expect to be able to make use of this information for the rest of my life.

by Jerry Waxler

The Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group (http://www.glvwg.org/) held its annual meeting April 27-28, 2007, and I found all sorts of valuable writing insights, that I want to share with memoir writers.

As a memoir writer, I am writing about life experience, so it was with eager anticipation that I attended a talk “Writing from life experience” by keynote speaker Gary Fincke, professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, and author of a book called “Amp’d, a father’s back stage pass” about rock and roll bands - not just any rock and roll band, but his son’s. Fincke attended more than 60 concerts, and then wrote a book about his experience. This is a style of reporting called Immersion Journalism. Years ago I read a pioneer in this genre: Tracy Kidder’s “Soul of a New Machine,” in which he moved into a computer lab, and wrote about their development process. The book launched not only Kidder’s career, but also launched an entire genre of what has become known as literary non-fiction.

As a writing teacher and a writer, Fincke thinks a lot about how to write what you see. In his genre of literary non-fiction, he doesn’t have to be a distant observer. He includes himself in the picture. This style of journalism bumps up and begins to overlap with what memoirists try to do. We show the life we lived, a life in which we were active participants. Memoirists are all immersion journalists. We inhabit the world of the protagonist but when we try to report on what we see, there is one difference from journalism. We observe life not through our present eyes, but through our memory.

One of the most interesting tips Fincke offered about how to write about life experience was so simple. It was to “look again.” The first time you see something, you only see the surface. When you look again you see it deeper. Another great piece of advice was to describe things specifically. He didn’t just describe the backstage at every or any rock concert. He described a particular one, the particular smells, the beer cooler, the ratty sofa. And then he said, “Don’t just talk about what you think. Readers want to see and experience things for themselves.” It was all great advice.

Since Fincke will be publishing his memoir early next year, I asked him what are the differences between memoir and journalism. He said one key difference is that in memoir, you want to return to the state of mind that you were in when you originally experienced it. That strikes me as being a significant point.

When you write about something you are observing now, you have more control over your state of mind. I can look up from my computer and describe the two book cases next to me, four shelves each, the uneven way books are lined up, some on top of each other, and the top of the cases piled high with recent acquisitions. I could focus on one book, a chemistry book sits snugly on the shelf. I have not referenced this book for years, while the ones I’m using for my current projects lie heaped in piles on the floor. Because I’m in the present writing about the present, I can dance and weave, playing around all I want with the details, and my feelings about those details, But when I write a memoir, I have to rely on memory. Memory is a strange animal. It can be a beast that snarls, and wants me to remember the hurt first, filtering all facts through the lens of my feelings.

When I studied chemistry in high school, it was not my A subject. I feel myself walking in the hall after class, fearing the other kids understand the material more than I do, and afraid that means they like me less. Am I remembering it because it’s a “real” incident or because in that time, I was always worried about whether I was liked? Now, I look again. This time I see the teacher showing us a supersaturated solution, a clear liquid. He threw in a grain of sand and from the clearness exploded beautiful blue crystals, somehow both jagged and orderly. That transformation from the possible into the real fills me with some subtle hope. Beauty is sometimes hidden, and it just takes a grain of sand to reveal it.

When Gary Fincke’s memoir is published next year, I will look at his two books and see how his observations differ. In Amp’d, he wrote as an immersion journalist, using his current powers of observation to describe his son during those concerts. In the other, his memoir, he observes through the filter of memory. These differences in the way we report reality are issues every memoirist faces.

by Jerry Waxler

The Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group (www.glvwg.org) held its annual meeting April 27-28, 2007, and I found all sorts of valuable writing insights, that I want to share with memoir writers.

First, I went to an all day workshop presented by Regina McBride, author of several novels, including her most recent, The Marriage Bed. The purpose of the workshop was to help us get inside one of our characters, and open our imagination so we could write more naturally. This was an intriguing concept for me. As a non-fiction writer, I don’t have characters. But I want to learn more about character writing to help memoir writers. So that morning, for the purposes of the workshop, I invented a fictitious character that would be a version of me.

The exercises were based on work she had studied as an actor, and it was very simple. She turned out the lights, and guided us into a sort of “writing meditation.” (She didn’t call it that, but that’s essentially what it was.) She told us to relax, sit deeper in the chair, find areas of tension, and release them. Breathe deeply. Then long silences. Then she asked us to imagine we were in our character, and she suggested writing prompts that would get us going. Then she turned on the lights and we started writing.

Out of those exercises came some great writing by the other attendees, all of whom were fiction writers. I found my own invented character to be fascinating and events unfolded for him in a way that I wouldn’t have anticipated, but that added to my understanding not only of him, but of me as well. He was a 26 year old man who had graduated college with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. He had no sellable skills and no interest in acquiring any, and when he could no longer stand being broke, he took the job his brother-in-law offered him to be a furniture salesman. This has similarities to the way my post-college years worked. By changing my name, and putting myself in a fictional setting, I was able to describe, and feel, my clumsy approach to coming of age in a more poignant and convincing way than I could have if I had tackled this description head on. As I was writing it, tears came to my eyes, and after I read it, Regina said “I can feel the isolation.” She seemed very sad when she said it.

I have heard about this effect of writing fiction to capture one’s own life, and know from talking to people that this method has helped them get in touch with feelings and express them. But seeing it for myself made it part of my own experience. It opened doors of memory, and made available to me a powerful technique I recommend to other aspiring memoir writers.

I’ve been hard at work making memories this week, and helping others make their own, or more accurately record their own. In one week, I’ve given three workshops, one on telling the story of your life at the Writers Corner, one on getting started writing at the Quakertown Library, and one on finding meaning on your memories at GreenshireArts. I’m also taking a workshop on memoir writing at West Laurel Hill Cemetery. I learn so much from workshops, whether I’m giving them or taking them. People in a room, all sharing the introspective project of writing, stirs up lessons and insights, like how passionate people are about writing, and sharing their story. I love that. At every step there is something to learn, and I keep learning more so I’ll have more to share. I’m having fun, and in my surveys, people say “Inspirational, and motivational” so my students are having fun, too.

The amazing thing about all of this is that as I teach about writing memories, and seek to find the stories in my own life, I can’t help but notice that I’m making more memories every day. Take last night for example. As many times as I speak in public, preparing for talks often makes me nervous. Sometimes I was nervous there could be a large crowd, and other times that no one would show up. I was nervous because this was my first talk at a Library, and my first talk since I published “Learn to Write your Memoir in 4 Weeks.” The library talk means that I’m going to be talking about writing to a general audience, and I know there will be a huge range of experience.

Once you get used to it, being nervous isn’t too bad. The adrenaline was actually making everything sharper. My perceptions were more acute, and my thoughts were more intense. To get through the day I worked on a series of calming strategies, such as seeing the audience as dear friends with whom I was having a chat. But my favorite strategy arises from the storytelling work I’ve been doing. I looked at the evening’s performance as a chapter in my life. Yesterday, when I woke up, I thought, “In 12 hours, I will be giving the talk. That’s a little scary. In 24 hours, I will be looking back on the evening, and it will be over.” Based on previous experiences, I expect it will have gone fairly well. Of course I didn’t know the details in advance, like how many people would show up and how the conversations would proceed. But as I was telling myself this story about past, present, and future, I was calming myself with the passage of time, and more importantly the passage of story.

It turns out that every minute is tomorrow’s memory. That might seem obvious or cosmic, but in either case it is an inescapable fact that I might as well try to take advantage of. While I’m working through the stories of my life, why not work on the story I’m living right now? I can craft my actions to lead me in the direction I want to go, to achieve the goals I want to achieve. It helps me skate on the surface of obstacles, which I know will soon be past, and it helps me retain a sense of purpose.

The first time I heard the concept of making memories was years ago, in Victoria Island in British Columbia staying at a Bed and Breakfast run by a retired couple. The sun was shining brightly through picture windows that opened down a hill towards the docked boats in the harbor. Someone at one of the tables said something about vacations making memories, and the whole idea of time popped free from its moorings and yesterday, today, and tomorrow ran together in a delicious blur. Having fun in the blur was my job that day. Teasing it apart and writing about it gives me an opportunity for pleasure for the rest of my life.