You are driving behind a car and notice the left-hand turning signal goes on. As a result, you expect that car in front of you to merge or turn. But the car doesn’t turn, though that turning signal keeps you in check, wondering if and when that car will begin to pull into the left lane. Suddenly, all you can do is watch that signal. And wait. And wait, as you miss the scenery going by. Soon, you are muttering under your breath, or out loud, about some people and how they drive. And what does this have to do with writing memoir? Everything, since knowing when to show the reader what the piece is about is an essential skill in writing memoir.
How soon in a piece of memoir should your reader know what the piece is about? Fairly early, though the exact place in which you give them that assurance varies with the length of the piece.
Memoir is Not A Plot-Driven Genre
Memoir is not a plot-driven genre. I get in trouble every time I teach this, say this or write it. But it’s not.
“But what about Wild?” Someone will inevitably counter with this every time I raise the point.
“I was breathless watching her walk that trail,” she’ll say.
I wasn’t. It’s a fine plot, full of great visuals, including her throwing that boot over the precipice, but I would argue that Cheryl Strayed’s mega-hit Wild is no more about a woman’s walk on the Pacific Crest Trail than Moby Dick is about fishing. Me, I was breathless watching her prove her argument, which she did by signaling early what was at stake and then working to her great transcendence.
In terms of pure writing problems, continuing to think that memoir is plot-driven, and that we are reading for what you did next, is your biggest obstacle to knowing when to signal what readers will get out of your piece. Remember your poor reader, back there, staring at that signal — or, worse, never getting a signal from you because you think we are breathlessly reading from scene to scene. We are not.
What are we waiting to witness? In a word, your gap and how you plan to bridge it.
Mind The Gap
In long-form memoir, I always suggest creating what I call, “The Gap.” This refers to the gulf between who you were and who you are that will be thoroughly revealed in the course of the book. The story of you, navigating that gap, is the plot line of the book. What you learned along the way is what you know after what you’ve been through or, simply put, your argument.
Consider the gap between the wildly-driven, Type-A personality that lands you in the ER with what you think is a heart attack, and what the resident doctor assures you is a panic attack, and the person you become after learning to meditate. How you go from one to the other – from here to there – is a story. So is the tale of the child you were in the lovely, gracious home in which you grow up where cocktail hour sometimes overpowered dinner hour and those lovely, gracious adults frequently forgot to feed you. Those adults said things like, “Oh, you had cheese and crackers and some olives. You’re good,” which they think you are. But you’re not. Nope. And when this reverse priority is one you grow up with, and one which contributes to your own alcoholism, we witness the gap between who you were as a child and who you became as an adult.
Memoir is all about the gap – creating it, illustrating its power and then bridging it – though knowing when and how to reveal it is a skill you must master.
When to Tip Your Hat
Everyone who teaches memoir has their own ideas on how it should be written and when to show the reader what the piece is about. The way I write and teach it, every piece of memoir is three acts written from one of your areas of expertise at a time, and is based on an argument. You are done when you have proved that argument. You do so by showing us scenes of your transcendent change all the way through to the end.
That being the case, you want to get that gap in early. In a short personal essay, it should come no later than the fourth graph. This particular paragraph has been known by myriad names, depending on where you learned about it. At The New York Times, where I first encountered it, it’s known as the billboard, though I’ve heard it referred to as the hoo-ha, the cosmic graph and the nut graph. No matter what you call it, it’s your drop-dead deadline by which your reader must know what the piece is about.
For more examples of when to show the reader what the piece is about, see some of the essays I wrote and aired on NPR’s All Things Considered. Notice just when you know what’s at stake, and how soon I begin to signal that to the reader. And notice, please, that memoir is not about you. It’s not, you know. It’s about something, and you are the illustration.
For book-length pieces, that gap can be created with a short opening passages from your worst of times and a jump back to your best of times that is followed by a slow, steady progression back to your worst. In this, you might open with the car crash that you survived but that you caused while drinking and driving. Just give us half a page or so. Then jump back to your otherwise happy childhood, despite the fact that your lovely, witty, smart parents were heavy drinkers who frequently forgot to feed you dinner. This is where you learned to romance alcohol over sustenance which, in turn, leads inevitably to your last scene of Act One being your every own near-death experience. Simple: Gap opened, gap closed.
Alternately, you can open with your best: You, standing on a podium about to make a speech about some area of your hard-won expertise. Again, just give us a taste of it and then jump back to the horror that you endured that got you to that place of awareness. In this case, your end of Act One scene will be when you knew you had to change.
Either way, knowing when to show the reader what the piece is about means hitting that turning signal at the right time. Unlike that clueless driver, you don’t want to tell us too much, too often, and turn on that signal, leaving it on forever. Neither do you want to forget to signal. Instead, you want to signal, turn and let us all move on.
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Photo credit: Photo by Devon Janse van Rensburg on Unsplash
