How to Start a Memoir? Build a Bowl

YOU WANT TO TELL YOUR TALE. You want to write memoir and you think that the key is to get someone else to know you as quickly and efficiently as you can so they will care about what you have been through. So you start your memoir by telling us who you are, thinking that surely those details about you will get the attention of the reader. But they don’t. And your memoir coach or your writing partner, or maybe your editor or your agent, tell you that the piece just doesn’t grab her, or is falling flat for him or is just not quite working. What to do instead? Build a bowl.

As a memoir coach and memoir editor, I have learned many things over the years while reading, editing and coaching people to publish their work. I have learned that the best pieces begin with an audit. I know that the small details are where the big life revelations live. I am absolutely sure that writing with intent is the route for all writers and that memoir is best told in three acts. And while there are a few standard things that I say to many of my the writers I work with, there is one thing I say to everyone, and it’s this: Build a bowl, not a plate.

How to Give Context to a Reader

Building a bowl is about giving context to the reader. Picture it for a moment: A deep, rounded place in which your story can comfortably sit. It has steep curved sides from which things are not meant to escape. It is contained. It has limits and edges. But its round aspect  provides comfortable containment. When you start a memoir, you need to provide context so someone can hold that bowl from below, gaze into it and consider its contents. It’s actually a fairly beautiful thing to envision — someone considering your contents, while lacing their fingers below your story.

Now picture a plate. It is flat and unforgiving. Things tossed onto it skitter off of it as fast as they hit. And that’s what happens when you merely throw your details at us in the beginning of a book. We have no place to consider them as they hit the plate and fly right off again, gone from the reader’s mind and heart.

In the bowl, they mix and stew — that is, we get context as the writer builds for us a place to consider what the story is about. Because memoir is not about you, remember? Memoir is not about what you did. Memoir is about what you did with it. No amount of loading on your dates and places, height and eye color, sibling names, parents’ heritage or second grade teachers is going to build me a bowl when you start your memoir with them.

What You Are Doing When You Start Your Memoir

Memoir comes in all lengths and styles. You might be writing a blog post, personal essay, long-form essay, op-ed or book. You might be telling it in first person, second person or third person. You might be writing in past or present tense. You might be writing from here — looking back at your younger self — or you might, instead, choose to reanimate a younger you and tell the tale from her point of view. In those aspects alone, you have some mighty decisions to make.

But some things about memoir are simply true and need no real decision-making power on your part, and the bowl is one of those.

Of course, there are exceptions. I have seen some mighty book openers where someone’s detail-driven narrative recounts a trauma that results in the author thinking like a second hand on a watch, ticking off the colors, moments and distances between things as reassurance to get through the day. And almost all of us know someone whose life on the spectrum is lived and related to others in exacting details. Those are rare and powerful stories.

Most of us, though, need that bowl.

All Memoir is a Call and Response

Keep in mind that when you start a memoir, you are inviting your reader into a simple experience of call and response. In your first act, you are going to call out to us what it is you cannot do, do not understand, or need to master. Maybe you cannot love the dog your sister wants to leave with you while she goes off on deployment to Afghanistan. Or perhaps, despite a lifetime of attempts, you cannot fathom the concept of forgiveness. Maybe you, like so many millions of us, struggle with the practice of meditation.

In response to that first act call, you are going to spend act two showing us what you tried to learn what you could not do, understand or master. Then, in act three, you will show us the return on that investment.

In no case does your height, weight, eye color, date of birth, town of residence or many of the other things you are tempted to tell us, give us insight into what that call and corresponding response might be. Load us up with those details and what will the reader do? Put down the piece. After all, what else can they do? You have given them nothing to gaze into.

Alternately, let’s build a bowl. Let me show you how.

How to Start a Memoir

I first found my mother while reading the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. While throughout my childhood her anger made her little more than a blur in our household, in my adolescent reading of stories on what becomes of those who only limn the territory of privilege and wealth – close, but not within those ranks – a  clearly-defined person took shape before me.

What does that feel like to you?

Then, try this.

My mother was born in 1928 to Marion and Harold Zillmann, two almost middle-aged people who had moved to New York from Wisconsin and had waited a very long time in their marriage to have their only child.

Both of these openers are true for me. Do you recognize the beginning of a call in the first? And what of a call do you find in the second? Does either one intrigue you more than the other? And why?

It’s not there is nothing of interest in the second opener. It’s just that there is less. And, having chosen to begin like that, you have to pile on more details, don’t you? Because you have not yet grabbed our interest.

Always Write to Your Pitch When Starting a Memoir

You know how when someone asks you what your book is about, and you start telling them your plot and very soon you begin to notice eyes glazing over, or maybe scanning for the nearest bar? Yeah, that moment.

You know what you do next, of course. You start talking faster and faster to “get to the good parts.” But you’ve lost your audience.

Instead, if you build a bowl from what you know the book is about – in the first case, understanding my mother, and the attendant return on investment when I do, too – the reader begins to stow those details in her pocket and carry them into the tale. In the second case? Well, those details skitter across the plate, tossed there without any suggestion of where to go with them.

How to fix? Always write to your pitch. That is another thing I say to every writer I’m honored to work with in my role as memoir coach or memoir editor. What I mean by this is to go back to your algorithm. You remember your algorithm.

It’s about x as illustrated by y to be told in a z.

It’s about something universal (x) as illustrated by something deeply personal (y) to be told in some length of a piece of memoir (z).

Now fill it in with your details. If you need help with figuring out that x factor, give serious consideration to what your story is about. Remember: It’s not about you. It’s about something universal and you are the illustration of that universal. Memoir is a three-legged stool, one of those legs being the answer to the question, “What is this about?”

If my story is about the return on investment of accepting our parents for who they actually are, as illustrated by the hard work I put into identifying, understanding and accepting the limitations of my love of my own mother, well, that first opener above is definitely the way to go. Get a pitch, write to your pitch. Use your algorithm to get you there and you will never again pitch your book to anyone based on your plot and then have to watch them make a fast break for the bar.

What is your algorithm? Write to that. Once you know your x factor, create a bowl and let us gaze into it.

Want more help? I am a memoir coach, memoir teacher and memoir editor. Come see me in any one of my online classes.

Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.

Memoirama 2. Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book.

How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary: Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world.

And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the 2022 Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. It’s live, once a month, and limited to seven writers who are determined to get a first draft of their book-length memoir finished in six months.

Photo credit: arbyreed on Visualhunt.com