Struggling with your memoir?
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Struggling with your memoir?
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My favorite authors never use a single emotion word—happy, sad, angry, confused—you know the rest. So many writers think that packing their memoir with emotion words is what will get a reader to feel that same emotion. However, this is not actually the case.
Let me show you why with an example. The text that follows is full of emotion words. But how much do you really feel when you’re reading this text? Sample 1: Hope dying in her chest, Claray turned her uninterested gaze to see three men on horseback crossing the drawbridge. Guests arrived late to the wedding, she supposed, unhappily, and shifted her attention toward the chapel. The witnesses to her doom were made mostly of MacNaughton soldiers and a very few members of the Kerr Clan. It seemed most did not wish to be part of their laird's betrayal of his own niece. “The Wolf,” her uncle muttered with what sounded like confusion. Claray glanced sharply back at her uncle to see the perplexed expression on his face. *** Using lots of emotion words is what I like to call “shortcut writing.” This is the kind of writing used in pop thrillers and cheap romance novelists, but it doesn’t work for memoir. In fact, the book I took the previous text from is titled The Highlander Takes a Bride. Take a look at this second example and notice how it feels different to read. Sample 2: Laced and silent in his small bed, he tried to tie the loose cords in his mind. He wanted desperately to see his own face and connect it with the word “private”—the word the nurse (and the others who helped bind him) had called him. “Private,” he thought, was something secret, and he wondered why they looked at him and called him a secret. Still, if his hands behaved as they had done, what might he expect from his face? The fear and longing were too much for him, so he began to think of other things. That is, he let his mind slip into whatever cave mouths of memory it chose. *** In sample two, we get a very different kind of writing, the prose of Nobel-prize-wining author Toni Morrison. Notice how Morrison didn’t use words like sad, happy, joyful, or upset. Granted, there are two emotion words in the paragraph—fear and longing—but they’re used as nouns. These words aren’t shortcut writing because they do not take the place of the character’s thoughts, which is what works to affect a reader emotionally. Good memoir writing makes us feel like we are inside your narrator’s head. When we read your narrator’s thoughts on the page, we can’t help but have an emotional experience. (Quick note: In fiction, you can put us inside the head of your narrator and your characters. In memoir, you only want to do this for the first-person narrator.) So who would you rather sound like? The bestselling author of the Highland Brides romance series or a Nobel-prize-winning author? Wishing you lots of happy writing. 😁
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Subjective writing is what transports your reader. But how do you make the writing subjective when telling another person's story? Random House author Wendy Dale gives three tips for accomplishing this effectively in this video. If you want to get me riled up, just mention the phrase, "Show, don't tell." Why? Because I've seen so many writers use this advice to make their writing worse.
It’s not that this advice is wrong. It’s that it is misinterpreted by nearly everyone who espouses it. One example I often hear is “Don’t tell us what a character is feeling. Instead, you need to show us.” But is that really the best way to get emotion across? Is showing a character’s angry expression and aggressive gestures the best way to help put your reader there with you? To help you understand why "show, don't tell," is advice that isn’t very helpful, let me give you three short writing samples. Don't worry about whether the text is showing or telling; simply think about which one you like best: Sample 1: "Maya was angry." Sample 2: "I hate you!" screamed Maya, throwing a jar of grape jam against the wall, which shattered on the floor with a crash. Sample 3: "I could tell Maya was mad. But I also knew that this anger would fade. An hour from now, she would curl up with me on the couch and offer me warm buttered popcorn as an apology. But for now, I had to let her rage. Otherwise, it would seep and fester, and she would wind up giving me the silent treatment for days." If you only got to pick one of these samples to include in your book, I imagine you'd pick number three. What I want you to notice is that there is no showing in this sample. The writing isn't describing Maya’s anger or giving me a visual sense of how her anger manifests itself. Instead, the writer lets us know how she feels about Neeta's anger. In short, the third sample is all telling. Now, let's talk about why sample three works to pull a reader in. It has to do with the difference between subjective writing and objective writing. Objective writing describes what a person sees or hears -- in fact, it's what anyone who happened to be there would describe. It could include what a character is wearing, what the room looks like, or what the narrator is doing. Subjective writing, on the other hand, is what a narrator thinks or feels. I like to think of subjective writing as "putting us inside the narrator's head." And it's this subjective writing that creates an emotional experience for the reader. Why is number three the strongest writing sample? Because it works to affect a reader emotionally. If I had to choose between "showing" and "telling," I'd pick "telling" every time. Telling is pretty much synonymous with subjective writing, which is what works to make your prose rich and engaging, what works to pull your reader in. If you’d like more information on subjective writing and how to use it to make the prose in your book rich and affecting, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuYLebMDJhE Wishing you lots of happy writing. So many of my students ask me: "How long should my chapters be?" See my answer to this question in this short video. Warning: I get a little bit sillier than usual. I also talk about chapter length in memoirs such as In the Dreamhouse, The Tender Bar, The Wave, Wild, and Eat Pray Love. Does present-tense make your memoir feel more immediate? Most people say yes, but I don't think this is always true. Does past-tense allow for more reflection? Usually. But there are some exceptions. This video covers all you need to know about verb tense, one of the critical choices you'll need to make when it comes to writing your memoir. How Truthful Does Your Memoir Really Need to Be? Taking Literary License While Not Getting Sued9/9/2021 How much license can you take in your memoir? Will you get sued for changing the order of events? Where is the line between taking literary license and simply making things up? Wendy Dale answers these questions and helps you solve one of the memoirist's toughest dilemmas: How to ethically include the details that make for a great story even if you don't remember them exactly. How do you go from fourth grade to twelfth grade in a sentence? How can you skip huge chunks of time without making this jarring to your reader? In this video, three tricks for jumping through time seamlessly. Should you tell your story from the point of view of the person you are now? Or is it better to tell the story from the point of view of the younger you who actually lived through events? Can you do both? The answers to these questions in the video below. The way you think of your life and the way you create a story are two different ways of thinking. Here come transitions to the rescue! Transitions can do the heavy lifting when it comes to creating structure. It was hard enough living through traumatic events. And writing about them brings up bad memories all over again. Why am I doing this to myself? Some answers to that question in the video below. |
AuthorA Random House author offers tips on writing your own memoir. Archives
May 2024
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Memoir Writing for Geniuses.
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