struggling with your memoir?This free class can 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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struggling with your memoir?This free class can 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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I hear this a lot: "Your goal as a writer is to create a rich, visual experience for your reader."
Whenever I hear this, I know that the person giving this advice knows very little about what actually makes writing good. In fact, too many visual details can actually make a reader have to concentrate far too hard, thus making their experience a lot less enjoyable. Don’t believe me? Notice how much you have to really focus in order to get through this text: She was seated cross legged on the velvet couch, her brow furrowed as she leaned forward and placed her chin on her open palms. Sunlight poured through the tall windows and illuminated a locket around Marjorie’s neck. It was gleaming gold with an antique engraving, swirls in an ampersand shape curling across the face of the locket, the thick chain contrasting with Marjorie’s delicate neck. Her father strolled in at an agitated pace, holding a whiskey with three ice cubes in one hand, running his other hand through his carefully trimmed beard with the other, a nervous habit of his. His stern expression was a contrast to his outfit: khaki shorts, a striped T-shirt in navy blue and green and tennis shoes that were still perfectly white. When I read this back, sure, I visualize everything, but here is the thing: Was this fun to read? Did you feel how you had to slow down your reading to concentrate on the images I was describing? I only gave you five sentences there. Now imagine a whole book written this way and how much work that would be to get through! When you read writing that is overly focused on making you see everything, the author has neglected to focus on what books are supposed to do in the first place: make you fee l everything. One of the most incredible tools you are working with in your book is prose, and it’s a tool that isn’t available to screenwriters, who truly do have to write so that a reader visualizes everything. Prose in memoir (and novel writing) allows you to use words to stir up a reader’s emotions, and it might actually be my favorite thing about writing books. Nevertheless, time and time again, I come across advice online about how prose should offer a visual experience, that a writer must show, not tell. But the end result is prose that is cold, flat and uninteresting. In fact, when I read writing like the sample I gave you above, it sounds like the prose I find in cheap romance novels, the kind of books with bare-chested men with six-pack abs on the cover. I get furious when I come across this tip in particular because it seems as if the person who wrote it has never read a memoir or work of literary fiction in their lives. If so, they’d see immediately that this tip doesn’t hold up in real life. To prove my point, let me open up one of the memoirs on my shelf. Here is a sample from Sanctuary, a critically acclaimed memoir by Emily Rapp Black. I’m not going to give you any context or tell you what this book is about. But just feel how this tiny excerpt pulls you in immediately and how it transports you in a way the previous sample didn’t: Feeling like a witness to some great destruction appealed to me. I stretched my arms farther and let them dangle, helped by gravity, until my fingertips began to tingle, and until the noise and chatter of people walking past began to dissipate and then disappear. I was lost in the promise of this emptiness, the sound of it, which was the absence of sound apart from a small rock loosening from the steep bank to tumble into the dry brush, rolling down down down until it disappeared from view. I closed my eyes and heard whomp whomp whomp like an invitation: Yes. Jump. Do it. The space below was hollow, magnetic, literally an opening. A mouth to fall into, as deep as any desire. There are very few visual details there. The narrator stretches her arm. A rock rolls down the bank. The narrator stares at a hollow space below. We need these details to understand the story. But there is no detailed description of what the weather is like, what the narrator is wearing, or even where exactly the narrator is standing. Why? Because we don’t need to visualize everything. Including too many visual details is actually boring. And writers who do include lots of visual details never find their own distinct narrative voice, which is one of the key components in writing a great memoir or novel. Your goal as a writer is not to create a movie in your reader’s head. What are you trying to do? Your goal, first and foremost, is to affect your reader emotionally. I'll get off my soapbox now. I hope you have a wonderful writing day.
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AuthorA Random House author offers tips on writing your own memoir. Archives
October 2024
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Memoir Writing for Geniuses.
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