Writing Lessons: Need Help With Your Memoir? Call The Midwife
A FEW WEEKS AGO I ran a piece about getting help from a sibling while writing memoir. But how about getting professional writing help? What does that look like, and how does that work? When I was introduced to Anna Whiston-Donaldson, I knew I had the person to answer that question. After Anna began chronicling a horrific and life-altering experience on her blog, she was contacted by a publisher who offered a book contract and someone to midwife that book with her. Rare Bird, just out, is rocketing its way to great sales. And for good reason: It is a remarkable read.
Getting Help Writing Memoir & Getting Results
By Anna Whiston-Donaldson
I was grateful yet apprehensive when my publisher hired an experienced author to help me while I wrote my memoir. I had a feeling that level of support was unusual, but the circumstances surrounding Rare Bird were hardly ordinary either. This publisher was taking a big chance on me, a first-time author still in the dark months after losing my 12-year-old son, Jack, in an accident, and he wanted to help me succeed.
He and I both believed that there could be great value in capturing a snapshot of early grief, even at its most raw and real, so we came to an agreement and plunged ahead. The editorial helper called herself my “doula”– a support and guide in the birthing process of Rare Bird. I was grateful because I didn’t know how to write a memoir, and I’d never taken writing classes, yet this opportunity was upon me.
As I found my way, I used my doula as a coach and a mentor. I asked her questions such as, “How do you draw people into a book when the most gripping scene, in this case Jack’s accident, is already known to any reader who even glances at the book flap?” She told me that readers might lose patience if I strung them along in anticipation for too many pages, with the accident hanging over them.
She also encouraged me to write more, even if I wasn’t sure it would ever make it into the book. She was confident that somehow the themes of the book would rise up out of my writing. “Tell me about how you met your husband. Maybe you could write more about losing your mother.” She then helped give me the confidence to throw those very words away when they turned out to be superfluous, boring, or distracting. I didn’t enjoy throwing away what I considered well-written, gripping, chapters, but she helped me see that while those might be A BOOK, they didn’t need to be THIS BOOK.
Sure enough, as I got farther into it, three things kept bubbling up: early grief, God, and Jack. That was the book.
Having a mentor also helped strengthen my own opinions. For just as a doula helps deliver a baby and then goes on her way, I knew that ultimately this book was my baby, not hers, and I could trust my instincts on what was good for it and what wasn’t.
Even though I was physically and emotionally depleted when I took on this task, I learned to listen to and trust what I did know. For example, I knew early on which title was the right one for the book, despite numerous meetings and emails and brainstorming sessions to the contrary. I also knew that I needed my chapters to be short, although I’d been advised to make them 15 or 20 pages each. The book ended up being fifty short chapters.
My instinct also helped shape the narrative, as my experience of the whiplash highs and lows of grief did not mirror a traditional story arc in which the conflict and tension grow and grow through the body of the book ultimately leading to resolution. I also resisted working purely chronologically, because I was intent on NOT having the book be a one year linear progression that would perpetuate the myth that grief gets tied up with a bow on the one year anniversary of a person’s death. Instead, I played with time a little, starting the book shortly before the accident, moving forward through the accident and early days of grief, and then looping back here and there to give glimpses of what our family life had been like before. I trusted this fluidity, and my doula helped me plug chapters in where they made the most sense.
Having a memoir mentor, or a doula, was one unexpected blessing of my writing experience. I was at first concerned that she would want to write my book for me, and that it would somehow become hers, not mine. What I found, instead, was someone to encourage me, guide me, and ultimately help birth something I love and of which I am proud.
Rare Bird, an excerpt
What if heaven is boring, Mom?”
“Eternity seems like way too long to be in any one place.”
“Forever scares me.”
Jack was afraid of heaven.
We would talk about it at bedtime, and I wondered if I was the best person to calm his fears. Sure, I wanted to go to heaven someday, but I couldn’t imagine it being all that great. I’m not musical, so choirs of angels don’t appeal to me. Streets of gold and jewels? Ick. Over-the-top opulence struck me as gaudy—a cheesy amusement park gone wrong.
And the idea of constant worship freaked me out too. It has always been hard for me to truly let go and worship God. In fact, one of the easiest times for me to really get into worship, swaying, clapping, and calling out to Him, happened to be at a retreat in Indiana—a plane ride away from anyone I might know. I guess you could say the idea of holding up my arms in the air or falling on my face in worship makes me mildly uncomfortable, so I didn’t relish the idea of doing it for all eternity.
And then there was my mom. It was a hard sell for me to believe there could be any better place for a forty-six-year-old woman than with her kids, on earth, where they needed her. She was the heart of our home, and home was where she belonged.
And what if heaven was too formal for her? She loved Jesus—the dusty-footed, sinner-loving Jesus. Would heavenly Jesus be a little too…stuffy for her? She liked to dig her hands in the dirt, eat half a pound of gumdrops in one sitting, throw back her head and laugh, and screw up the punch line of the only joke she knew. Can you even do those things in heaven?
After she died it was as if a steel wall came down between the two of us, between here and there. Heaven felt so far away. I saw no signs indicating she was okay. I felt no closeness, just absence and lack. I did not comfort myself knowing we would see each other again someday, because I wasn’t sure if that’s even how it worked. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, only to be disappointed later.
Fortunately, I didn’t dump all of this on Jack, but I just listened in his bed in the dark to his concerns, which were similar to my own. We read a few books about children who had gone to heaven and come back. That helped. So did a conversation he had with a camp counselor when he was ten. “I’m not afraid of heaven anymore,” he announced as we debriefed after his week away. I got no more details, but I was relieved. Jack was now fine with heaven. But that didn’t really change my own views.
In the few weeks since Jack’s death I’ve gone from being someone who rarely thought about heaven to someone living with one foot here and the other there. My kid is in heaven. I don’t need to know the nitty-gritty, like how big it is, where it is, or absolutely everything you do there. But I need to know something! I never even let Jack go to a sleepover if I didn’t know the family well and what he could expect there. But now he’s somewhere very, very different, and I don’t really know what it’s like.
And here’s the strange thing. Heaven is central to our belief as Christians. We believe that Christ offers us eternal life in heaven, but in my almost four decades in church, I’ve rarely heard anything about what heaven is like. Aren’t we curious? Why are our minds not being blown by the fact that a soul can live forever with God? Do we consider ourselves too intellectual to consider the spiritual realm? And if so, why do we bother saying we have faith in the first place, when to have faith is to believe in something we cannot see? Are we so rooted in the here and now that we treat heaven just as some insignificant, distant reward?
I’m pretty clueless about heaven, and even though I want Jack’s new home to be better than anything he could experience here, I have a hard time accepting how it could be better than life with us.
In October, I write on my blog:
Heaven had better be:
Better than any stinkin’ Youth Group costume party.
And being trapped inside a Lego Factory over a long weekend with plenty of Cheez-Its and Dr. Pepper.
And the buzzy feeling you get when the person you have a crush on crushes on you back.
And sledding down a huge hill with your best friends until it’s cocoa time.
And a wonderful, fumbly first kiss.
And skiing black diamonds with your dad in Colorado.
And a high school debate trip to New York City with fun but slightly lax chaperones.
And praising God at a retreat and finally getting how much He loves you.
And sitting around with your friends at college laughing until your stomach hurts.
And falling in love.
And watching in person as the Yankees win the World Series…again!
And surprising your little sister by flying in for her college graduation.
And doing work that fulfills you and honors God.
And dancing with your mom at your wedding.
And holding your newborn baby—staring at your wife thinking,“We made this?”
And giving that baby a bath and zipping him up in footy pajamas.
Oh yeah, and sex.
Heaven had better be more wonderful than sex.
Okay, God? Good.
Excerpted from Rare Bird by Anna Whiston-Donaldson Copyright © 2014 by Anna Whiston-Donaldson. Excerpted by permission of Convergent Books, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Author Bio
A graduate of James Madison University and Wake Forest University, Anna Whiston-Donaldson taught high school English before becoming an at-home mom and writer. Her part-time work in a church bookstore solidified something Anna already suspected—books can change lives. Anna began blogging at An Inch of Gray in 2008 and has been featured twice as one of BlogHer’s Voices of the Year. When her family lost 12-year-old Jack in a flash flood in 2011, Anna was buoyed by the love and support of the online community. Anna enjoys thrift shopping and finding curbside treasures, and she will gladly take you on a “dumpster dive” tour of her house. Speaking to groups and encouraging women to connect with each other are two of Anna’s passions. Anna, her husband, Tim, daughter, Margaret, and Chocolate Lab, Shadow, live outside of Washington, DC. To learn more about Anna, please visit her at her website.
HOW TO WIN A COPY OF THE BOOK
I hope you enjoy Writing Lessons. Featuring well-published writers of our favorite genre, each weekly installment takes on one short topic addressing how to write memoir.
It’s my way of saying thanks for coming by.
Love the author featured above? Did you learn something in the how-to? Then you’ve got to read the book. And you can. I am giving away one copy, and all you have to do to win is leave a comment below about something you learned from the writing lesson or the excerpt. I’ll draw winners at random (using the tool at random dot org) after entries close at midnight Monday, November 10, 2014. Good luck!
I too hate books where grief lives a kind of orderly life all its own, building and building to some kind of climax and then disappearing. But I can see the temptation to write a story that way–storytelling encourages us to try to impose order on chaos, and sometimes this is not a bad thing. But to alter the real-life experience of grief into something more commercial or saleable does the reader (and maybe the writer, too) a disservice. Grief to me was (and is) a chronic physical pain, a kind of waxing and waning uber kind of soul wrenching toothache, a pain in a phantom limb, that limb being the person you lost, who was a part of you. It can seem not to be there at all just weeks after the fact, but a “relapse” can occur years later. Bravo for resisting the temptation to force the square peg that is life into a round hole. And thank you Marion for finding another memoirist who truly has something worthwhile to say.
Thank you Anna and Thank you Marion for this powerful excerpt and this practical information on writing with a book doula.
I have read Anna’s blog and have always been amazed at the depth she is willing to write about – out loud – for all of us.
I enjoyed reading about how she wrote Rare Bird and cannot wait to read it.
Thank you for sharing yourself with us.
As a hospice and hospital chaplain I have had to deal recently with a number of deaths of children. Even as an experienced veteran with death and dying, the death of a child still remains a challenge for me and many others in the field. As a writer myself I appreciate the challenge of writing about such difficult painful material. I also wanted to say a few words of appreciation to Marian Roach Smith for exposing us to such a wealth of writers and writing styles. This is indeed a lovely site, one that focuses on the humanity of our experience and writing as a truly fine art.
Thank you, Marion for coaching Anna as she created “Rare Bird.” The ‘doula’ image is priceless. I’m ordering the book on Amazon right now.
Hi, Beth. While I did not coach Anna during the writing of her book — her publisher supplied the doula — I am deeply committed to the idea of having someone to talk to, commune with, run alongside while we write. Anna’s story is a great example of how I came to that point of view. Thank you for stopping by. Please come back soon.
I didn’t think publishers were still risking their livelihood to hire an editor for a no-name, first-time book writer. How refreshing. But my comment is to say how wonderful Anna Whiston-Donaldson’s voice is. Her memoir is at the top of my list to read.
I also look forward to purchasing Ms. Roach’s The Memoir Project. Thank you for this brilliantly written teaser of Rare Bird.
I LOVE the idea of having a ‘doula’ for one’s writing project. A come-alongside person to provide support and guidance. What a wonderful idea.
Thanks for sharing an excerpt from Rare Birds. I want to read the whole thing now. And thanks also for offering a giveaway of a copy.
Wishing you a beautiful day….
Brenda
I love her story–all of it. From blog to book, a doula, no less! and her own exquisite writing. Beautiful discovery and I’m headed over to her website. Good discovery, Marion!
Marion — Thank you for this window into a memoir that I had not found yet. I most appreciated the ideas that writing memoir does not have to be entirely according to all the “should’s” that I’ve read about writing memoir. The result depends on what feels right, and it’s also a negotiation between the publishing professionals and the writers, whether they are fledglings or best-selling national names. Thanks for sharing Anna’s story.
Jan
Thank you for both the insight into how you wrote your memoir and an excerpt from it. Beautifully written and inspiring. I too know how I want my memoir to run, although, I’d love to have a doula.
Your discussions about heaven with your son and your own thoughts reminded me of discussions I had with an uncle as a child. I wanted heaven to be filled with never ending ice cream and his response was, “There is no ice cream in heaven. When you get there you won’t want it.” I, of course, being 6 or 7 knew I wanted ice cream.
I read Anna’s blog and knew I had to read this book as soon as it was out. I did – our little town library ordered the book and I had it in my hands quickly. Normally, I stay away from books that take me to places I don’t want to go, but Anna wrote this so well. The writing is beautiful and faith-affirming. I don’t know her, but I love her and have no doubt she will see her Jack again :) Her writing made me believe.