ACCENTUATE THE COMPLICATED. Yes, I know, the phrase does not have the syncopation of the wildly more popular (as well as musical), “Ac-cen-tu-ate the positive,” but as far as I can tell, the complicated makes better memoir. But along the road to writing it, most of my clients and students need to learn that they must look to the small moments of life to write big. How to explore the complicated issues of your marriage, parenting, childhood or school experience? Look to the small stuff — the moments, gestures and words that accentuate life’s great complexities.
This is a constant source of struggle in my memoir classes. Wanting to be heard, students write the details of their lives, and because these details are the stuff of their personal experiences, they mistakenly think that others will find them compelling. As a result, we get a lot of first drafts that say little more, for example, than how very much a woman dislikes her husband’s friends. She doesn’t like one of them in particular. Not at all. She can’t stand him. Not a bit. Nope. And while the phrases of her piece change, they each merely paraphrase the one before, restating the surface issue.
To succeed, a memoir needs to go deeper.
“What is it about your husband’s best friend that disturbs you?” I’ll ask, knowing that for the first go-round or two of such questioning we’ll get responses like, “He’s just so, you know, ugh, he just drives me crazy.” By the way, this is also the way my friends communicate. And no, my friend are no more interesting than yours. This is the way we’ve all learned to communicate, and it tells us little.
And yet the piece that uses not liking the husband’s friend as illustration of something probably has great potential, particularly if the writer can get to the heart of the matter – her heart, in this case. Perhaps her husband’s loyalty to his friend touches off great anxiety in the wife. Can she show that in a gesture? Of course she can. And, when she does, we will all relate. Perhaps this has to do with pondering whether he has bad judgment. After all, whose judgment could be more important to her than his? In a good marriage, he is called upon to share equally in the decisions. How can she convey all that emotion? Let’s watch her head drop when he yet again suggests another hare-brained day with his risk-taking best friend. That’s right: Let’s just watch her drop her head and listen to her sigh. That’s a great place to start.
Oooh, now we’re getting somewhere. Feel that frisson, that little charge of electricity in the air? That’s what happens when memoir gets richer, when you take it deeper, and mine it for the universal instead of restating the same emotion in various non-productive phrases. Now I’m relating to the tale. Why? Because in writing, you are best off to look to the small moments of life to write big.
Where did I learn this trick? Brace yourself. You are going to be surprised by my answer. I learned this from a lifelong habit of reading Dear Abby, the life-advice columnist’s column. Really? Oh yeah. No one goes to the heart of the matter faster than Abby, answering big issues in a paragraph, daily in my newspaper. She makes you drill into what the issue is about, one of the skills that is essential for both helping people with their problems and for writing good memoir. In both, you must size up the problem, define it and illustrate our way toward a broader understanding. Do so in your work and you will save thousands of words and hundreds of pages of blah-blah-blah explanation.
Memoir tips are all around you, folks. Read Dear Abby and then write small. You’ll learn about getting to the universal in the specifics of your life.
Want more tips? I’ve got a million of them. How to get them? Join me for my entry-level, 90-minute Memoirama class and get your memoir writing kick-started. I teach two sections each month. Come along. Your life’s best work awaits you.
