Struggling with your memoir?This free class will help.Follow a seven-step path to constructing your memoir. Receive your first video right after entering your e-mail address.
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So much is going on around here, my head is spinning. (Not literally. But it will if I start doing circles in my office chair, which might just happen at this point.) Grammar Girl is such a famous established podcast and I couldn't believe they invited me on! If you go to Apple podcasts, you can also catch the bonus episode where I talk about English words that have made their way into Spanish in strange ways: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/creative-english-in-spanish-with-wendy-dale/id173429229?i=1000685141427
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If you want more information about the announcement in this video, check out Write or Flight, the world's first reality show for writers here: https://www.writeorflightshow.com/ Apply by February 28, 2025. Seven lucky contestants will be flown to Cusco, Peru to compete for a publishing contract, a $10,000 book advance, and a $15,000 coaching program from Memoir Writing for Geniuses. Wendy conducts a one-on-one consultation with writer Bruna Batista, helping her to understand why she has started her book in the wrong place and how to fix it. The video includes tips of turning disconnected events from your life into plot and ideas for how all memoirs need to be structured. Who is actually telling the story in your memoir? Is it the person you are now looking back on your life? Or should you use the point of view of the person who actually lived through these events? In other words, is it the younger version of yourself telling the story? Sound complicated? It's not if you understand what function the narrator serves in your book. So many writers create a scene because there is something they want their reader to understand. They want to show what their relationship was like with their mother or how their father was abusive and cruel. The problem with this? It will get your structure off track. Writing down what you remember isn't a memoir. Instead, you need to understand scenes and transitions, the two main components you'll use to turn memories from your life into plot. Get these components wrong and your memoir won't work. It's fine to include description in your memoir, but too much description can mean sacrificing your plot. I was once guilty of this too! It's easy to fix this common memoir-writing problem. Watch the video to learn how. Struggling to write a literary sex scene? The problem might be that you think you are writing about sex, when this isn't really the case. Hiya Fellow Writer! If you think that a flashback is something you remember, you're probably using flashbacks in the wrong way. What is the right way? Keep reading to find out. Flashbacks in books are different than in movies A flashback in a book is not like a scene in a movie when all of a sudden there's a shot of the character remembering something, and then we get into the flashback.  Flashbacks don't work this way in memoir. For memoir writers, a flashback is a story from your past that is somehow relevant to the main storyline.
In other words, your narrator doesn’t have to pause to remember the past. You don’t have to write things like, “In that moment, I flashed back to being eight years old” or “I suddenly remembered when my mother punished me for arriving late to school.” What you want to do instead is basically tell your reader, “Hey, there’s this related story from a while back that seems relevant to mention here.” So how do you do that? In order to get into a flashback, you need to do two things.
How to create a flashback in your own memoir To help you better understand how to use flashbacks, let’s look at an example from Wild by Cheryl Strayed. First of all, I want you to spot the flashback in this text. At what point does the text veer away from the main storyline and get into the story from the past? The doctor shook his head sadly and pressed on. He had a job to do. They could try to ease the pain in her back with the radiation, he offered. Radiation might reduce the size of the tumors that were growing along the entire length of her spine. I did not cry. I only breathed. Horribly. Intentionally. And then forgot to breathe. I’d fainted once — furious, age three, holding my breath because I didn't want to get out of the bathtub, too young to remember it myself. What did you do? What did you do? I'd asked my mother all through my childhood, making her tell me the story again and again. Amazed and delighted by my own impetuous will. She’d held out her hands and watched me turn blue, my mother had always told me. She’d waited me out until my head fell into her palms and I took a breath and came back to life. Breathe. “Can I ride my horse?” My mother asked the real doctor. She sat with her hands folded tightly together and her ankles hooked one to the other.” So, did you spot the flashback? It appears in the second paragraph starting with “I’d fainted once.” Now let's break down what Strayed is actually doing here. Your first step is make something happen in your main storyline. So what is it that happens in this text? “When I get more bad news from the doctor I forget to breathe.” An event can be as simple as that. Something happens. Strayed forgets to breathe. So what’s the point she makes related to that event to get us into the flashback? “Once I held my breath for so long, I fainted.” Another way to think of this: Your flashback is making the same point as what is happening in your scene. Be sure to make your point at the beginning of your flashback, not the end. That way, your flashback will be relevant in your reader’s mind and they won't ask, “Why is the author telling me this?” Hope this helps make your good writing better! When it comes to writing a memoir, people often do things in the wrong order, which winds up being disastrous. In this video, author Wendy Dale explains one of the first steps you need to take so that you don't spend years writing and then rewriting your book. |
AuthorA Random House author offers tips on writing your own memoir. Archives
May 2025
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