Tag Archives: structure

Telling a Memoir’s Backstory by Seesawing in Time

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by Jerry Waxler

Read Memoir Revolution to learn why now is the perfect time to write your memoir.

In previous essays in this series, I’ve attempted to explain the way memoir writers structure their stories. In one sense, this could be a simple question. We lived it chronologically, so we ought to tell it chronologically. And yet, one of the memoir writer’s goals is to keep it interesting, and that means learning the storyteller’s craft. Storytellers since the beginning of time have been looking for the best way to weave in various aspects of a story to keep it interesting and engage the mind of a reader. This series has offered some insights that I hope will help you on that quest.

The final method to consider is a sort of pinnacle of the attempt to tell the backstory. I’ll start out with three examples. Each one starts with the intense dramatic conflict of adulthood. Then once they hook the reader, they jump to a chapter about childhood. Then in the next chapter they return to the adult story. Each timeframe is clearly established so you always know exactly where you are in time. It’s as if you’re reading two interwoven memoirs, one of earlier life interspersed with the later one.

Alternating back and forth between the past and present, these authors achieve the best of both extremes, providing psychological background of the author’s formation, and also providing a direct, compelling tension in the adult situation.

The Orchard by Theresa Weir

The book starts just as the main conflict of the story is about to begin. Theresa Weir is working in a bar, about to meet her husband-to-be. Marrying into a farm family seems wrong in every possible way, and so, we are swept along by the conflict inherent as the couple falls for each other, obviously for all the wrong reasons. It’s nonsense. A mistake. It will never work. Then, as the present-day conflict amps up to the boiling point, she returns to her dysfunctional childhood, and inserts entire chapters from early in her life when her parents essentially abandoned her. This material from childhood adds psychological depth to her character and helps her reveal the whole person, not just a small slice of one.

By starting with adulthood, she lets us understand where we’re going. Then when she weaves in the childhood, we’re already invested in this complex person. So where did all this complexity come from? She lets us live those younger years with her as well.

Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham

A young man, pursuing an engineering career, leaves it all behind so he can ride his bicycle around Vietnam to try to understand his roots. His adult life is intense, with confusion about his identity as a Vietnamese in America and his relationship with his edgy father. As he cycles around Vietnam, we realize the danger he has placed himself in. It turns out that many Vietnamese hate those who have moved to America. They have a scornful name for these hated betrayers, viet-kieu. In the thick of this adult story, he alternates chapters that show his childhood life leading up to the war, and the family’s escape from the communist takeover.

In his next book, Pham extends his inquiry across more generations. In Eaves of Heaven, A Life in Three Wars he tells the family history through the eyes of his father, a ghost-written memoir of his father. This other memoir also repeats the two-time frame method, showing his father’s early years growing up in the French version of the Vietnam War and then later years coming up to the American invasion. Taken together, the two memoirs Catfish and Eaves, describe the escape from Vietnam and entry into the U.S. from the point of view of three generations, a fascinating journey through the history of a family and a country.

Riding the Bus With My Sister, by Rachel Simon

The book is woven from two fascinating stories. The headline story is about her attempt as an adult to become close to her mentally disabled (what used to be called retarded) sister, Beth. Beth’s main activity is riding buses all day every day, and Rachel decides that if she is going to get to know her sister, she will have to ride the buses too.

Interwoven with this excellent story of love between two adult sisters is a second time frame, about growing up with an abandoning mother, who was unable to cope with the stresses of motherhood and finally ran away from the family. The two stories meet up, as the young sisters grow into adulthood.

Why interspersed backstory works so well in these three cases

All three had serious dramatic conflict in both time frames. With enormous dramatic tension in childhood. In Riding the Bus as well as Orchard, the family was under pressure from parental dysfunction. In Catfish and Mandala, the author was in a war.

And in the later time frame, each author was also under major conflict. In Riding the Bus, Rachel Simon was a high-functioning journalist who was trying to make sense of her responsibility to her sister, and also a secondary story pressure that she was also lonely and seeking. In Orchard, Theresa Weir was a misfit, with absolutely no direction in life, who married into a farm family, and had to make the leap from a drifter to a family that literally had roots in the soil. In Catfish and Mandala, the author went on a dangerous cycling tour, with native Vietnamese hating him for being an American, which was cruelly ironic because earlier he showed how some Americans hated him for being Vietnamese.

All three of these books stand out as exceptionally successful. The Orchard was an Oprah pick. Catfish and Mandala was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Riding the Bus with My Sister was made famous by a movie adaptation.

Does that mean that it’s a surefire winner and that you should copy it and use it? It’s not that easy. Finding a working structure for your memoir is going to require an organic evaluation of the way your own life experience unfolds and the story you want to tell.

Consider two combat memoirs which took very different approaches. In A Temporary Sort of Peace, Jim McGarrah’s gut-wrenching Vietnam War combat memoir, he stayed in one time frame. William Manchester’s equally gut-wrenching combat memoir Goodbye Darkness shows him returning to the scenes of his battles in the Pacific in WWII and attempting to quiet his demons. The two authors made their own very different choices.

As you continue researching your own memoir, step back out of the details and try to visualize the way your chapters and sections are coming together. Can you picture your earlier formative years as a separate story from the later one?

Writing Exercise
Write a description of each of your two stories, the backstory, in which your younger self undergoes formative experiences. Then write a description of the second time frame.

Now think about these two stories. Does each story have a good beginning, middle and end? Does the first one naturally provide background for the second? Do they flow from one to the other in time, or is there a big gap between two main stories?

Might they work as a series? Consider the way Frank McCourt wrote Angela’s Ashes about his youth, and then wrote two more books, ‘Tis and Teacher Man as a sort of de facto trilogy. Or how Carlos Eire’s two memoirs, Waiting for Snow in Havana and Learning to Die in Miami tells a long story in two parts.

Are they equally balanced or is one more important than the other? Consider the example of Ruby Slippers by Tracy Seeley. So much of the book was about an adult investigating her childhood, that the child’s life faded into the background and the adult’s inquisitiveness took center stage. Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls had the opposite effect. The book seemed to be all about a child growing up, and yet, one of its greatest strengths was the tiny sliver at the end about her later rapprochement with her parents.

How the story falls together in the reader’s mind will depend on these questions of structure. Take your time. It’s your life, and if you want to turn it into a great story, don’t be surprised if you have to work at it with the same creative obsession that you expect from the authors of the books you read. And even if you started your project simply trying to tell a good story, you may find that by peering closely and with great creative passion at the structure of your memoir, you will come to understand, at a much deeper level than you ever thought possible, the structure of your life.

This is the seventh and final essay in a series about how to structure a memoir. Here are links to the whole series:

How Should I Begin My Memoir?
One of the most puzzling questions about how to structure a memoir is “Where do I begin?”

How Much Childhood Should I Include in My Memoir?
Since memoirs are a psychologically oriented genre, we want to include enough background to show how it all began. But how much is the right amount?

Should You Use Flashbacks in Your Memoir?
Flashbacks provide important background information, but you need to use them carefully so you don’t confuse your reader.

More Tips about Constructing the Timeline of a Memoir
The timeline of a memoir contains the forward momentum, and the laying out of cause and effect, so it’s important to learn the best techniques for laying it out.

Beware of Casual Flashforwards in Your Memoir
In real life, we can’t know the future, so to keep your memoir authentic, try to avoid sounding like a prophet.

How a Wrapper Story Helps You Structure Your Memoir
When you try to tell your own unique story, you might find that you need an additional layer of narration to make it work. Here are a few examples of writers who used wrapper stories.

Telling a Memoir’s Backstory by Seesawing in Time
If you want to tell about the childhood roots of your adult dilemmas, you could follow the example of these authors who wove the two timeframes together.

 

For brief descriptions and links to all the posts on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my book Memoir Revolution about the powerful trend to create, connect, and learn, see the Amazon page for eBook or Paperback.

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

Should You Use Flashbacks in Your Memoir?

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by Jerry Waxler

Read Memoir Revolution to learn why now is the perfect time to write your memoir.

One way to resolve the “where do I start” dilemma is to jump straight into the action, and then come back later to fill it in with flashbacks. Flashbacks consist of entire scenes, inserted out of chronological order. Even though life takes place in chronological order, flashbacks give you the freedom to jump straight into the thick of the action. In addition, they offer another stylistic benefit. They can increase the power of an otherwise boring scene.

Travel Memoirs and Flashbacks

In his memoir, Zen and Now, Mark Richardson retraces the path traveled by Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The miles of road streaming by provide Richardson perfect empty canvas on which to paint scenes not only from Pirsig’s book but also from other times in his own life. The weaving of time, thoughts, and place feels seamless, and the pages roll by with the same grace as the miles.

I’ve since read other travel memoirs that use this technique. Andrew X. Pham has plenty to say about other times in his life during his bicycle ride through Vietnam in Catfish and Mandala and Cheryl Strayed takes advantage of both of these benefits in her artful use of flashback in Wild.  She sweats and struggles with her backpack on a wilderness trail, and effortlessly integrates her remembered scenes to provide an ever deepening spiral of character development. Thanks to her impeccable stylistic control, and the neat trick of inserting the past scenes when nothing much is happening around her, Strayed uses flashbacks to her advantage.

However, even though the open road provides a blank canvas on which to paint flashbacks, not all travel writers use it in that way. Throughout Sam Manicom’s year-long motorcycle ride in his memoir Into Africa, he only briefly mentions that he grew up on that continent and provides no scenes from the earlier period, and Doreen Orion does not say much at all about her past during the road trip on her RV in Queen of the Road.

Flashbacks Require More Craft

Many memoirs follow chronological order because that’s the way life really happens. However, when you first start writing, your memory asserts its own order, or rather lack of it. During the research stage, memories jump around like lightening from one period to another, touching on a variety of scenes only tenuously connected to each other. When you first wrote this hodgepodge it might have made perfect sense. But readers won’t be able to reconstruct your life in the order that it actually unfolded.

Story reading is very different than memory, and so, a big part of the memoir writer’s job is to sort the raw material of memory back into the chronology of actual events. Gradually you will tease apart the causes and sequences of things, and present them in the most compelling possible manner. Good writers work hard so their readers can work easy.

However, as you develop your story, and continue to look for the techniques that will keep readers fascinated, you may decide the final version will benefit from a flashback, and that requires work to make sure the reader is oriented in time and space. You never want the reader to ask, “where am I again?” Such ambiguity disrupts their precious attention.

So how do you gracefully insert a flashback without disrupting the reader’s concentration and ensuring they know exactly where they are in time? If you on a hike through the wilderness, it could be easy for the reader to realize your childhood bedroom scene is a flashback. But what if your flashback scene is in the same place and with the same person? The two scenes could bleed into each other, leading the reader into ambiguity and confusion.

The movie Wayne’s World provided a comedic exhibit of how to make a clear transition. The characters signaled the return to an earlier time by making a silly noise, wiggling their fingers and shimmying the video. That exaggerated device highlights the importance of letting everyone know the timeframe is shifting.

For example a time shift in books often occur at a chapter break, or is signified with extra line breaks and printer’s marks. The first phrase of the first sentence should make obvious reference to the shift in order to acclimate the reader. For example the weather in one time frame is cold and in the other it is warm, or it could be a clear verbal signal. “Back in the earlier time, life was good.” You could even mention the date. Doing it right is crucial and it requires polish and skill to pull it off effectively.

Sometimes a jump in time can be signaled with a prop. So if you are touching a briefcase at the airport, waiting in line, and then you remember a previous scene. You jump back into that scene. Then, when you are ready to return, you feel the weight of the briefcase in your hand and hear the person at the counter asking if they can help you. One of the great ah-ha moments in cinema comes when Christopher Reeves’ character in Somewhere In Time travelled back in history to meet a lover. When he glances at a coin with a future date, the shock hurtles him out of the past and back into the future.

Perhaps You Didn’t Need to Go Back

If you don’t believe your earlier years would add anything to the story, don’t force yourself to include them. It may be that your story starts much later . Lots of excellent memoirs offer very little backstory. For example, in many memoirs about the period called launching, when the author is attempting to move out into the world, there is very little consideration of earlier years. Every ounce of their energy seems to be focused on the future.

  • Publish This Book by Stephen Markeley: A young man, just out of college tries to figure out how to earn a living as a writer.
  • Japan Took the JAP Out of Me by Lisa Fineberg Cook: A young newlywed moves with her husband to his job in Japan and must figure out life marriage and career.
  • Enough About Me by Jancee Dunn: A young woman enters the workforce and ends up interviewing celebrities. In her new role, she still must figure out how to be herself.

In every memoir, the structure is determined by the author’s best attempt to provide a powerful story and each author uses different devices. In Dani Shapiro’s launching memoir, Slow Motion, she does provide many important flashbacks of her earlier life. At the other extreme, backstory can be extremely brief. In Holy Cow by Sarah McDonald she mentions that she travelled to India because a stalker scared her away from her home in Australia.

Do Midlife Psychological Dramas Need Roots?

Many memoirs focus on challenges later in life, when events or psychological pressures cause us to rethink our direction. For example, in Accidental Lessons, David Berner tells about his midlife crisis, during which he drops out of his successful career and marriage and attempts to reinvent himself. He writes the whole story from the point of view of a middle-aged guy in a junior position as a school teacher, and offers hardly any glimpses of his earlier life. I found the book engaging, and psychologically compelling. In her midlife course correction  Sonia Marsh tackles the world head-on, and tells about her move to Belize in her memoir Freeways to Flipflops. The journey is told with very few flashbacks.

Other writers who experience a shift in awareness later in life choose to start their story from many years earlier. For example, when John Robison realizes in midlife that has had Asperger’s syndrome, it helped him understand himself. In his memoir Look Me In the Eye, he starts from childhood and describes his whole life in chronological order. When Boyd Lemon retires, he wants to make sense of the mess he made of his three marriages. He organizes his memoir Digging Deep as a series of three long flashbacks, remembered from the present.

Writing Prompt
The decision about how you structure your story will be influenced by your creative approach to the dramatic arcs of your life. Explore the possibilities by writing one or more synopses, as if you are writing a blurb for the back of your book, using third-person so it feels like you are talking about someone else. Experiment with a variety of approaches. For example, write a blurb about a memoir of your childhood. Write one about the journey of launching into adulthood. Or write about some other powerful event or period that you feel might be story worthy.

As you proceed in your memoir writing journey, hone these blurbs. A side effect of refining them will be an improved understanding of your whole project and will help you find your way amid the complexity of memories.

Notes

This is the third part of the series about how to structure a memoir.
How Should I Begin My Memoir?
One of the most puzzling questions about how to structure a memoir is “Where do I begin?”

How Much Childhood Should I Include in My Memoir?
Since memoirs are a psychologically oriented genre, we want to include enough background to show how it all began. But how much is the right amount?

Should You Use Flashbacks in Your Memoir?
Flashbacks provide important background information, but you need to use them carefully so you don’t confuse your reader.

More Tips about Constructing the Timeline of a Memoir
The timeline of a memoir contains the forward momentum, and the laying out of cause and effect, so it’s important to learn the best techniques for laying it out.

Beware of Casual Flashforwards in Your Memoir
In real life, we can’t know the future, so to keep your memoir authentic, try to avoid sounding like a prophet.

How a Wrapper Story Helps You Structure Your Memoir
When you try to tell your own unique story, you might find that you need an additional layer of narration to make it work. Here are a few examples of writers who used wrapper stories.

Telling a Memoir’s Backstory by Seesawing in Time
If you want to tell about the childhood roots of your adult dilemmas, you could follow the example of these authors who wove the two timeframes together.

For brief descriptions and links to all the posts on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my book Memoir Revolution about the powerful trend to create, connect, and learn, see the Amazon page for eBook or Paperback.

A Memoir Author Comments on His Beginning and End

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by Jerry Waxler

Author of Memoir Revolution: Write Your Story, Change the World and How to Become a Heroic Writer

In this final section of our interview, I ask David W. Berner to share more about writing his memoir,  “Accidental Lessons.” Questions in this part of the interview dig in to the choices he made when constructing the book.

(Read my essay about Accidental Lessons, here.)

Beginning of the memoir

Jerry Waxler: In my experience, one of the hardest parts of finishing a memoir is to review the structure and decide exactly how to begin, so I am always curious about the way authors start their stories. I find yours especially intriguing. You start with the breakup of your marriage, and then you backfill, providing the back-story through reflection. I like the way the book is structured, and I’m trying to understand what made you pick this beginning. If it was me, I would have been tempted to start the book while you were still a newscaster, and then show how that world began to fall apart.

So how did you arrive at the particular structure that you published? What other ways did you consider? Help me understand your experience of wrestling with this structure. Was it daunting to pick one, and not do the others? If so, how did you come to peace with that decision?

David Berner: My first couple drafts were far more linear in nature – this happened, then that, then that. Frankly, that sort of story structure bores me a bit. Life is not linear. Sure, the clock ticks away in one direction, but during that time we all reflect, stop and think, try to recreate old times and invent new times. At the risk of sounding too existential, I wonder if there were no such thing as a clock, time as we know it, would life be linear?

As mentioned before, my original first chapter was not the first chapter that ended up in the book.  So I did play around with different ways to let the story unfold. But essentially, the structure was based around the school year, so starting with a startling moment in that school seemed natural.

Although I played around with the structure a bit, I did not consider major, 180-degree flips in the storyline. Frankly, you can make yourself crazy as a writer considering what you could do, or should do, or could try. Sure, adjustments, many times big ones have to be made. But fixing, adjusting, editing, shaping will become a never-ending ritual if you let it. At some point you have to say – this is it, this is what I’m going with, this seems to get the job done. Trust it and believe in it.

Ending of the memir

Jerry Waxler: I love the way the school year provides you with a natural frame of reference that can help you tell the story, and helps me read it. How did you choose this framework, and how did you decide where to end it?

David W. Berner: The structure seemed a natural to me. The school year framed the story and acted as a bookend, you might say. I had that in mind all along. It’s just that I wanted the all-important reflection to come within that framework, not be somehow transported out of it. I also think because the story is not completely linear, that framework of the school year helps the reader stay on track.

Through every draft, the ending was always the ending. That email that is tacked on my wall, the one I reference in the epilogue of the book, is still there above my desk. It reminds me daily of that very special year and those students, and renews my commitment to teaching every time it gets shaky, and yes, there are times it gets quite shaky. I hope the reader would finish the book with the belief that although our past may be gone through the passage of time, it has left an indelible mark, a branding on all of us. And we should not dismiss it even when it’s painful or troubling; we should embrace it, use it to our advantage, and savor it until it becomes a memory that can be used as fuel to move us along in our lives. My mother always used to say, “It’s not what happens to you, it is how you deal with what happens to you.” I think that message comes through in Accidental Lessons.

Jerry Waxler: What are you writing next?

David Berner: I’m the Writer-in-Residence at the Jack Kerouac Project in Orlando this summer, and absolutely honored and humbled to have been awarded this time at Kerouac’s old apartment in the College Park neighborhood. The room where I’m writing is Jack’s old room. Maybe you don’t believe in these sorts of things, but there’s an energy in that room I hope I can bottle. It’s where he wrote The Dharma Bums, a book like all his others that was creative nonfiction before there was creative nonfiction. His work was always autobiographical, a memoir hybrid, I might call it. I’m hoping to complete a first draft and begin a second on another memoir while I’m here, this one based on a road trip I took with my sons. It’s really a father-son story, reflecting on all the men who came before me in that long line of fatherhood and how what they did well, and not so well, resonates in the generational DNA.

Notes

David W. Berner’s Home Page

Click here for information about the Jack Kerouac Project

Three Part Interview with Author David W. Berner
Interview Part 1
Interview Part 2
Interview Part 3
The author of the memoir Accidental Lessons answers questions about the craft and experience of writing the book.

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.

A Memoirist Talks About the Backstory of His Memoir

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by Jerry Waxler

Writing a memoir is a journey. In addition to finding and writing material, we also strive to improve our skills, the same road taken by the authors of all those books that have entertained and informed us since the beginning of our lives. In addition to the lessons they have recorded between the covers of their books, many writers are also happy to teach. In this third part of my interview with Rick Skwiot, novelist, writing teacher, and author of the memoir “San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: Memoir of a Sensual Quest for Spiritual Healing,” I pry into his insights about writing.

Jerry Waxler: I was intrigued to see you immersed with these characters. You wanted deeply to learn from them about letting go and just living. And yet, you kept diving into your books. It was an interesting character portrayal of yourself, a guy who wanted to find himself in the culture and yet kept finding himself in books. I can relate! How self-conscious were you of this self-portrait? Did you have to work at the self-portrayal, or did this emerge naturally from events.

Rick Skwiot: I don’t think I consciously crafted a self-portrait here. I was just trying to report on this guy who went to Mexico and found himself, and how that came about. For most any memoirist, there are two first-person characters: the author/narrator who is writing it and the historical character who experienced the events in the book’s scenes. The author has some temporal distance from that other first-person character, in my case, the man I was some 25 years ago. I think I was able to write about him with some detachment because he isn’t me, but a character from my past who has no current existence. This was even more apparent to me when I previously wrote my childhood memoir, Christmas at Long Lake, which takes place on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1953, when I was six years old. In fact, in early drafts I used third person to describe the six-year-old Rickey, since he seemed another person to me. (My agent and the first few publishers who read the manuscript found this rather off-putting, and I subsequently agreed and changed it to first person.) Anyway, in writing San Miguel de Allende, Mexico I was able to draw from extensive journals I kept in those days, a day-by-day reporting of what I did, what I read, and what I thought. So I was able to recount fairly accurately who I was in those days, and to perceive the significance of events then thanks to the authorial distance of some decades.

Jerry: In your book you show scenes when you are reading great works of literature or working on your own writing. I enjoy this aspect of your book. You let me watch your literary coming of age, during which you drink in the literature that came before you so you can learn how to write your own. Could you say a bit about your choice to put your literary passions into the story of your stay in San Miguel Allende.

Rick: I think you’ve said it pretty well, Jerry. The great literature I was being exposed to then for the first time affected me deeply and altered me–it was an important part of my experience. And these were the giants I was, and am still, measuring myself against as a writer. I know there are all sorts of writers just as there are all sorts of people, but in my heart I never really wanted to be a commercial writer but a writer of literature. This was a great and difficult leap for me, to aspire to do that, as I came from a working-class environment where there were no writers, much less literary artists. Being a creative artist just wasn’t on the radar for me. But as I grew and developed and gained confidence, I kept raising my goals and expectations for myself. As I show in my memoir, at the time I first went to San Miguel de Allende I was still very unsure of myself as a writer and an artist–I had hopes, but that was it. But I also had some great mentors who pointed the way–Chekhov, Simenon, Cather, Hemingway, et al. These were my instructors and role models. They were pivotal in my development and important characters in my life, even though I had never met them. Thus they had to be characters in my book.

Jerry: Fascinating. That explains a lot. Your journey from a working class family to an young man who wanted to be a literary writer is an unspoken subtext to the memoir driving the protagonist. It’s like I am now seeing the backstory that makes the book work even though in the book you don’t show scenes from that childhood. I love it. Many memoir writers struggle with how much backstory to put into their memoir, and now I’m seeing that sometimes it’s okay to let the  character’s personality speak for itself.

Rick: Exactly. The reader will get it if it is embedded honestly…I’m now writing a novel in which an angel from Writer’s Heaven, Ernest Hemingway, acts as a mentor to my protagonist, so I’ve been immersed in what the real-life Hemingway had to say about the craft of writing. I think his “Iceberg Theory” from Death in the Afternoon applies here: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.” In San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, there would be no struggle, no story, if our protagonist had come from, say, a family of writers or artists or successful people who paved the way for him–or at least it would have been a different type of struggle. But I knew my working-class backstory (and the role it played in my struggle) and had previously written about it with affection in my childhood memoir Christmas at Long Lake. There you see that while I had no material class advantages to speak of, I was given one great gift, a hard love that granted me emotional security and kept me grounded–which ultimately enabled me to venture out spiritually, intellectually and artistically. As to my Mexican memoir, I sensed rightly, I think, that any extensive digression into my childhood or my frugal family background would interfere with the narrative drive and perhaps come off as self-indulgent.
In the next part, I ask more questions about Rick Skwiot’s journey as a writer.

Click here for Part 1 of the interview with Rick Skwiot

Click here for Part 2 of the interview with Rick Skwiot

Notes

Rick Skwiot’s Blog, “New Underground”

Rick Skwiot’s Home Page

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.

Turning Journals and Notebooks Into a Memoir

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by Jerry Waxler

Author of Memoir Revolution: a guide to memoirs, including yours.

When Rick Skwiot moved to Mexico in the 1980s, he had two goals. He wanted to find himself spiritually and also find his writing voice. Years later, he wrote about the trip in the memoir “San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: Memoir of a Sensual Quest for Spiritual Healing.”

In the first part of this interview I asked Rick to help me understand more about the spiritual aspects of his search. Now in this and following parts, I ask about his literary journey. The book explains that he wanted to be a writer. I wanted to learn more about how he fulfilled those dreams by turning his powerful life experience into a book that invites readers to relive it with him.

Jerry Waxler: You mentioned your writing journals quite a bit, since writing was one of the things you did to pass the time. Explain how you used your writing notebooks while you were in Mexico.

Rick Skwiot: My journals were crucial in my development as a writer. Not only did I record events of my life, but I also, as you suggest, wrote fictional scenes there, experimented with writing styles, penned criticism on the books I was reading, recorded my dreams and more. It was a mishmash of fact and fiction that would likely misinform and mislead any reader other than myself. My journals were a cauldron from which a writer emerged, finally. They also taught me the discipline of writing every day and thinking every day, examining my life and the world around me with a sense of writerly investigation. For a writer, most everything is research and potential material, which makes us such charming companions, half vulture, half snake-in-the-grass.

Jerry: As you were attempting to write the memoir, what help were your original contemporaneous notebooks? How did it feel reading that old material?

Rick: A curious thing occurred regarding the notebooks’ content. I had mined the notebooks/journals years earlier when writing my two novels set in Mexico, and had not revisited them in perhaps ten years. But when I did I found that the fictionalized versions of events, from my novels, had come to be my reality, how I remembered things. My contemporaneous reporting of events shocked me at times, for I had not remembered things that way at all. This showed how unreliable memory (and perhaps a memoir) can be, and alerted me to the power and truth of fiction. I was also surprised by how hungry I was back then. I was on a compulsive quest to find myself, and my journal notes underscore how serious and driven I was, how dead set on saving myself. It was somewhat frightening in retrospect, for I saw what peril I was in at the time, and found myself feeling sympathetic and paternalistic toward my former self.

Jerry: How have your habits and strategies with notebooks changed over the years? How do you use them now?

Rick: Nowadays I don’t keep a regular journal and only start doing so when I am beginning to work on a book. Then I use a notebook to sketch out plot, dialogue, scenes, characters, etc. So it is more of a workbook than a journal. Also, I think my life has become much more mundane–which is a mixed blessing–and doesn’t inspire journal entries. Also, I have come to trust my memory, which is a writer’s capital, his material. I know everything that has happened to me is in my mind, in my conscious or unconscious, and that it will surface in some form when I need it. I noted this in particular when writing my childhood memoir, Christmas at Long Lake. When I began writing a scene and put myself in that place emotionally and, through the imagination, physically, I began to see and remember–the sights, smells, words, feelings–from my childhood. It was in some ways a very moving experience, spending time again, in that way, with my late parents, when they were young and vital. Most bittersweet and affecting for me.

Jerry: Many aspiring memoir writers look at their pile of notes, their many memories, and feelings, and are daunted by the prospect of turning them into a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. What was that like for you, as you tried to find a theme or organization or thread of this book?

Rick: That’s always the most agonizing and daunting part of writing a book, organizing and structuring it. What I try to do, and what I advise my writing students to do, is to think in terms of scenes–as in theater, compressed, meaningful action that takes place in real time at one location with a few important characters, and dialogue that drives the narrative forward and reveals character. I will note down what scenes I feel are obligatory, scenes I know I want in the book, somewhere, or that need to be there. Then I start to organize them in some effective way–whether it’s chronologically, thematically, geographically or whatever. I often do use a schematic in doing this–I draw boxes that represent scenes–so I can see what needs to happen first, what relationships and interconnections there are between various incidents and characters, and so I can easily move things around. Once I arrive at a workable ordering of the scenes, I can write them (or often I write the scenes first and worry later about where they go.) The last thing then is to write the summary and transitions, the authorial intrusions, if any, and needed exposition. Of course this is a very messy and recursive process, and difficult and potentially heartbreaking. You can write the whole book and then see that one particular scene is out of place, so you have to tear the book all apart and do another organization and a lot more work. This was even more daunting in the pre-computer days, when each draft meant having to re-type the whole manuscript. But I was happy to do it, as I thought such rigors weeded out the dilettantes and other writers not as insanely committed as I.

Jerry: There was a rhythm to the way the book was set up, with your initial burst of enthusiasm, some rethinking, then a trip back to the states and the start of a second round. I liked the rise and fall and rise again. It felt organic and natural. This is especially important for writers because the middle of a book is supposed to be the hardest, keeping the energy moving during the “long middle.” It’s hard enough to get the overall structure. You have done an excellent job of finding internal structure too. Talk about how you worked through the material looking for the shape.

Rick: I am gratified that the book’s structure “felt organic and natural,” because it was arrived at after a lot of trial and error and anxiety. Yes, I did labor over it, and it changed shape drastically over the ten years of its gestation. At last–and this came after numerous drafts over the years–I settled on starting the book in the middle of things, at the pivotal and dramatic point when I broke my ankle playing basketball on the Mexican team. Then most of what happens in the first half of the book is told in flashback. This gave me the opportunity to order things thematically and control pacing. Part two, my return to Mexico, is told more chronologically. The key for writers is the get the story going right off the bat, to get and hold the reader’s interest and attention. Once you have some conflict or problem on the table that captivates the reader, then you can begin to layer in some of the needed exposition, in a judicious way. This applies to creative nonfiction as well as fiction. It is perhaps the most difficult thing about writing a book, keeping the narrative driving forward.

End of Part Two

In the next part, I ask more questions about Rick Skwiot’s journey as a writer.

Click here for Part 1 of the interview with Rick Skwiot

Click here for Part 3, A Memoirist Talks About the Backstory of His Memoir

Click here for Part 4 of the interview with Rick Skwiot, Tenacity of a Writer

Click here for Part 5 of the interview with Rick Skwiot, Novelist or memoirist

Notes

Rick Skwiot’s Blog, “New Underground”

Rick Skwiot’s Home Page

More memoir writing resources

For brief descriptions and links to all the posts on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my book Memoir Revolution about the powerful trend to create, connect, and learn, see the Amazon page for eBook or Paperback.

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

Stephen Markley Interview Part 4: Structure of a Memoir

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by Jerry Waxler

The first thing that caught my attention when I picked up Stephen Markley’s “Publish this Book” was that it was a parody of itself, a memoir about “writing this very book.” This trick of self-conscious awareness, or “meta” as it has come to be called, played a big role in my thought process in college. If my friends and I observed something, we could then continue the discussion by making a comment about making the observation. It’s a mental twist I still enjoy 40 years later. In fact, now that I think of it, this might explain my interest in memoirs. First, we live our lives. And then the memoir is our commentary on what we just lived. A memoir is by its nature “meta.” But Stephen Markley’s memoir is even more meta than that. In this Part 4 of my multi-part interview, I ask him about his fascination with the structure of memoirs, and the shape of his own.

How you playfully constructed the long middle

Jerry Waxler: One of the known problems with writing a book is that you have to somehow keep the middle moving along. In writing classes I’ve heard it called the muddle in the middle. As usual, you do a great job of sending up the long middle, by using an extraordinary trick.

You separated your mind into parts, and dramatized the battle between the parts. Wow, talk about being able to discover the conflict within everyday life. This was a lively, intriguing technique. I think any author who fears they won’t be able to find the dramatic tension in their lives ought to study some of the devices you used in your book to realize how the author discovers and accentuates tension that is already there.

One thing that surprised me about this technique was that you used the terms Ego and Id, to show your personality being broken into parts. I would have thought these Freudian terms were old-fashioned. They were already starting to lose favor back in my day. So help me understand, were you using Freudian terms to be retro, or are these terms pretty widely understand in your generation as well?

Stephen Markley: I chose the terms because they are very identifiable. Everyone has heard of them, even if they might not be able to give the exact definition. Plus, I loved the idea of part of myself being this completely self-consumed narcissist and the even deeper part being just plain fucking crazy.

Jerry: One of the things I love about reading memoirs is that it helps me understand how other people think, what they believe, and so on. With your Ego and Id battle, you’ve given me a front row seat, but into what? How well do these scenes reflect your own inner process? Do you actually think about the battle of your mind? Were you trying to develop an authentic glimpse into your inner process?

Stephen: Obviously, everyone is more complicated than a simple three-way personality battle. I used that device because 1) it was comical and 2) it allowed me, Stephen Markley, off the hook. I had embodiments of poor decisions or cruel things I said or did. This sounds cowardly, but it helped me write more honestly. The crucial scene comes at the end, after I’ve found out that the book will be published, and my Ego’s swagger is suddenly gone. Because the only purpose the Ego ever serves is to buffer the writer from cold reality, criticism, and setbacks. When the Ego realizes the biggest obstacle has suddenly been removed, he becomes terrified. It was my way of showing that all ego is always a shield.

How authentic is any of this? I have no idea. I’d say it’s as close to the bone as I could cut. But when you’re sawing off your own arm, you might think you’re halfway done and look down to discover you’ve barely pierced the bicep.

How do young people end a memoir?

Jerry: In memoir writing workshops, many young people are nervous about writing memoirs because their lives have not arrived at the conclusion. For example, if an author had not yet married, how would they reach closure on loneliness? You seem to have addressed this problem head on, but not with a simple answer. You use a variety of literary devices to reach a conclusion. The strange thing is that you reach the end in several ways: with a relationship, with a long footnote (huh?), and with the publication of “this very book.”

Your ending was a send-up of memoir endings, and like your joke about discussing false memoirs in a false scene, you are ending the book with a variety of ways to end the book. I’m amazed that you have so much interest and passion about the form that you are sending up the whole structure of a memoir. Your youthful craziness is applied so beautifully to this writing challenge it makes me proud to have been young once. Thanks for this fun exploration of story form.

Stephen: You’re welcome.

Extreme Meta

Jerry: Your memoir takes the prize for meta- a book about itself. I told my writing group about the concept of your book, not really expecting them to understand what I was talking about. The moment the first sentence had left my mouth, they cracked up laughing. Your publisher apparently liked the joke, too.

Books that were huge in the college scene in the 60’s often had this self-referential or ironic or self-aware humor. An example that comes to mind is Catch-22 with all of its paradoxes, like the fact that Major Major Major was bullied because people thought he was being arrogant, which turned him into a recluse and yet also promoted him to becoming a major.

Just as the ironies and paradoxes did not detract from the serious points of Catch 22 (war stinks, power corrupts), I felt that your humor did not interfere with your serious points about the difficulties of growing up, the hunger of the aspiring artist, and the urgent relevance of compassion lurking within your devil-may-care attitude.

Do you find that self-referential humor is still a hallmark of college reading? Has the meta thing struck your college audiences as a big deal? Have you decided to hang your hat on meta, or do you think you’re just passing through?

Stephen: While I certainly don’t think the obsession with self-referential humor is anything particularly new, I do think the generation I’m a part of just finds it really engaging and useful given the times. Aside from that, books that call out people’s bullshit will always be popular. I remember reading “Catch-22” and just being floored. Same with “Slaughterhouse-Five,” and “Breakfast of Champions.” Young people just like to hear that the old and wise are actually old and unimaginative. It gives us hope that we can do better. As far as “meta” goes, I think that label is basically a buzzword. If you read my book, you do discover fairly quickly that for all its meta posturing it is as old-fashioned and classic a story as there is: young man on journey faces obstacles, ponders love, loss, friendship. It’s as sweet and simple as it comes, and that story will never go out of style.

It’s possible my next project will also be thoroughly meta, but that’s OK, I think, because it will be meta in an entirely different way than “Publish This Book” was. When it comes to choosing projects I will be driven entirely by my own inner angels and demons (with the possible influence of loads and loads of cash money).

Notes

Visit Stephen Markley’s Home Page

To read my review of the book, click here.

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.

To learn about my 200 page workbook about overcoming psychological blocks to writing, click here.