HOW TO RESEARCH A MEMOIR is one of the concepts that plagues many writers in our favorite genre. After all, it’s your life, right? Why should you have to go and look up anything? This is (il)logic I listen to everyday in my role as a memoir coach and writing teacher, and every day I set the record straight by speaking of accuracy as being a first-and-foremost objective of memoir. Yes: Accuracy. This not only requires getting the dates correct and the names spelled right, but also unearthing the backstory of your own vivid tale. Don’t know how? Let’s let Barbara Scoblic, author of a gorgeous, smart, and well-written new memoir inform you. Read on. 

 

Pleasures and Perils of Researching

by

Barbara Scoblic

Was my grandmother’s given name spelled “Theresa or Teresa”?  Family records used both spellings. I tried, but couldn’t locate her birth certificate. It was important to get the spelling right. For me to do this, I’d have to travel by plane for three hours and drive three hundred miles to my grandmother’s hometown. I convinced my brother (who lived much closer) of the importance of the search, and he agreed to drive two hours out of his way to the cemetery where she’s buried. He found the answer: her name was spelled with an “h.” As genealogists like to say, “Tombstones don’t lie.”

Memoirs always require research. A writer may have to verify if an ancestor arrived in the United States by way of New York or San Francisco. To learn what shops lined the main street of a hometown in a long-ago year. To find out if it had been rainy or sunny on the day she was born. But there is a difference between an important detail and a rabbit hole. Before you start researching, be aware that there are many rabbit holes hidden in the fields ahead.

When I began writing Lost Without the River, my goal was to tell how my parents in rural South Dakota had managed to survive the concurrent years of the drought and the Great Depression during the 1930s. It was important to gather the details and report them accurately. My memoir, in part, was to be a homage to that strong couple. I wanted every sentence to be one hundred percent accurate, but in my quest for accuracy I found myself going off on tangents that were more about sating my own curiosity than ensuring the integrity of the book.

It started with the plants. Wildflowers were an integral part of my childhood. Weeds even more so. You can determine whether something is a wildflower or a weed by where it’s growing. If it’s growing in a field of grain, it’s a weed, no matter how lovely it is. The flowers of true weeds also are often beautiful. I began by making a list of the many weeds that had grown on our farm—as many as I could remember. Then I called a brother. He added to my list.

A short time later I came upon a letter my mother had written many years before. She wrote that my father, when there’d been no hay during the years of the drought, had fed his cows skim milk and Russian thistle. Another call to my brother.

“Is Russian thistle the one with the large beautiful purple flower?” I asked.

“No, that’s the bull thistle.”

“Then what does the flower of Russian thistle look like?”

“It’s small and pale lavender. You don’t even notice it.”

True. Russian thistle had never caught my eye during my many forays searching for wildflowers.

That bit of knowledge sent me to my weed book and then to Google. I learned that the seeds of Russian thistle, also known as “tumbleweed,” had been inadvertently imported to the United States in a shipment of grain from an area that is now part of Ukraine (hence the Russian appellation).  It was identified for the first time in 1877 in my home state of South Dakota. As the plant matures, its rounded top breaks off and is blown away by the wind. As it tumbles, it tosses off great quantities of seeds. That reproductive asset, aided by the never-ending winds of the era, allowed the weed to spread rapidly to distant states.

The invasive species sucks up immense quantities of water. During the years of the drought it flourished while field crops withered and failed. Masses of the dried tops clumped together and formed barriers that blocked roads. By the early 1930s the tumbleweed had become an iconic symbol of the West, a silent supporting actor in countless films.

I became lost trying to find a way to add all of these facts to my memoir. When I realized there was no way to do that while retaining the momentum of my story, I determined that an appendix would solve the problem.

About the same time, another of my brothers told me a story about the mishaps, some of them humorous, that ensued when he’d tried to catch gophers as a young boy. This wasn’t meant to be play. The creatures were rapidly proliferating, and the holes they dug in the fields were a serious hazard for work horses, and for human ankles. The huge amounts of grain the small skittering creatures destroyed often meant the difference between profit and loss. Telling about this in my memoir would be meaningful, add a little humor, and enhance my story. Thank goodness I have the appendix, I thought.

And then I stumbled upon Mr. Movius. My goal had been to find who, in the 1870’s, had built the original building that eventually became our farmhouse. I located a report in the archives of the New York Public Library that named individual settlers who’d erected the first structures near my childhood home.  I researched and found other accounts that amplified (and sometimes contradicted) that document. One surname was always mentioned, “Movius.” One of two brothers, W.R., seemed to be the more enterprising of the two. He constructed a building that became both residence and general supply store in the settlement that would become my hometown. A year or so later he constructed another building that housed the clerk of court’s office and the post office. The postmaster? None other than W.R. Movius!

Then I found, in a pile of decades-old notes, where my Uncle Earl confirmed that Movius had nailed the boards for the first small structure that eventually came to be our farmhouse.

As I continued to research, I became enamored of the early settlers who founded my hometown at the foot of Big Stone Lake, and the Native Americans who lived on the small islands in the middle of that body of water. I wrote on. Once more I had many too many words to incorporate into my book. The appendix grew.

A few months later I began to work with an editor. After she read my entire manuscript, she sent a list of necessary revisions. High on the list: “You must kill the appendix!”

I love discovering unexpected details and stitching them together, but I learned that unplanned researching is a waste of time. Yes, the thrills of the serendipitous discovery await you when one amazing bit of information leads to another and then on to another. But question that enthusiasm. Will information that you may find support your book or merely distract the reader?

Here are five ways to recognize a rabbit hole:

  1. Are you accumulating books on a subject that gets only a passing mention in your narrative?
  2. Does the single hour that you’ve scheduled to research the topic expand to an entire day?
  3. Do you feel it necessary to learn everything about the topic before you can write anything about it?
  4. Are you amazed that no other writer has written in depth about this topic, and you begin to think that you are the chosen one to write a book about it?
  5. Have you forgotten that it’s a memoir you’re writing?

Sidestep or leap over those rabbit holes, work on, and you’ll complete your book. Go down the rabbit holes and you’ll wind up with an encyclopedia instead of a memoir.

THE NEXT MORNING

an excerpt

Excerpted from Lost Without the River by Barbara Scoblic

The morning after the flood, everyone was grumbling. The water had gone down, and with it our fear, but there was a deadness in our voices and everyone moved more slowly.

The work to be done weighed all of us down. Two miles of fence in the South Field to be fixed; the corner posts realigned, other posts replaced; wire pulled from piles of debris, untangled, and restrung; forty gunny sacks of gravel that were used to sandbag our house to be emptied and piled for future use; at least three fallen trees in the feedlot to be cut and hauled off; and whole, long, low hills of misplaced earth and sand to be leveled out in the fields where they now rested.

And, of course, there was the house. The first floor, where muddy feet tracked back and forth, to be scrubbed; at least eight loads of laundry to be done, each pair of pants dense with dried mud, the socks turned brown; and the sheets, dreary with dirt tossed off from bodies too tired to wash up, to be soaked and bleached before being laundered.

Even though it was only midmorning, my mother moved slowly as she picked up the coffeepot and went to the table to pour coffee for my father. I didn’t need to be told to pour milk and put out cookies for my brothers. It seemed as though they had just left the house, but now here they were, back again, with their big bodies and loud voices. I liked it when my mother and I were in the house without them, listening to the radio as we worked together.

Bill began, “I’ll go to town and get wire and posts. If we start right after dinner, we should be able to get ten or so in the higher ground before dark.”

I listened. Sometimes it seemed as if Bill really liked to work.

“Okay,” my father said. “I’ll take Bob out to the West Field, see if we can level some of that dirt before it dries out too hard. I wonder what damn weeds the river has given us this year.”

I knew the reason Father said “damn,” not “dang,” was that he hated weeds. He hated them the way some folks hated sin.

Russian thistle, Canadian thistle, sow thistle, bull thistle. Dandelions and false dandelions. Slowpoke and creeping Jenny. Horseweed and lamb’s-quarter. Sandburs, cockleburs, poison ivy, and purslane. Milkweed, wild hemp, wild oats, wild mustard. And, the most hated of all, leafy spurge.

Each time my father said “leafy spurge” he almost spat the “s.” His tone reminded me of the time when a visiting priest gave a sermon on the sixth commandment, the one that said, “Thou shall not commit adultery.”

Weeds. Weeds producing seeds. Seeds with silk wings that floated on breezes. Seeds, rough and barbed, that rode as passengers on the hides of my father’s cows, in the dog’s fur, and on the family’s clothes. Blackbirds, crows, hawks, even robins, meadowlarks, and orioles, carried the seeds in their guts, carried them long distances, from pastures in other townships, other counties, other states.

All came to rest in my father’s fields. And this year the floodwaters had added even more. The next summer, and summers years from then, my father would still be waging war against the weeds that year’s flood brought—persistent, unwelcome memorials to our fear, hard work, and survival.

©2019 Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic. All rights reserved.

HOW TO WIN A COPY OF THE BOOK

I hope you enjoy Writing Lessons. Featuring well-published writers of our favorite genre, each 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 on May 15, 2019.

Good luck!