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The Importance of Memoir and a Prompt

file4041257130846When I first set out to write seriously, I cranked out essay after essay, believing I could never make up an entire story from scratch, much less a novel, but I had plenty of life experience to share. Now, I write mostly fiction, more confident in my imagination and much less so in my own memory (and the amount of intrigue in my oh-so-exciting experiences). But, since I started my once-a-month creative writing class with Seniors, I’ve been diving back into memoir, flash nonfiction to be exact, and I’ve learned a couple of pertinent lessons.

Writing short memoir is damn hard.

Hard, not only because of the compact aspect of the genre, as the story must fit nicely within a small word count, but because every time I sit down to write a bit of my own self onto the page, it comes out clunky, dramatic, or flat. Or, maybe just dramatically flat. When I read my simple stories out loud to the Senior citizens at the table, I wonder what they must think; I can never match the extent of their tales from lives more rich in history. My gut reaction is to fall back on fiction, where I can dress up my experiences with more exciting details. But, here’s the other thing….

Writing memoir, in short or long form, is critical.

One of my favorite quotes right now comes from E. L. Doctorow in a lecture he gave on Historical Fiction at the City University of New York (CUNY) :

What is the past if not the present and the future?

Sure, he’s talking fiction, but this particular message rings true for memoir as well. I don’t need to tell you the importance of listening to the stories from an older generation. We learn much by studying and honoring people and events rooted in our past, more than revelations as to how much we’ve changed (or not, as the case may be). Bruce Feiler, in this New York Times essay, writes about the effects of family narratives on children, pulling from research by psychologists, Marshall Duke and Robin Fivush:

[C]hildren who have the most self-confidence have what [is called] a strong ‘intergenerational self.’ they know they belong to something bigger than themselves.

As humans, we need the stories from our past, from a family member’s struggle with mental health, to the birth of a first child, to the discovery of a father’s short stint in a band when you’ve never know him to be musical. Ever. Those histories belong to us. They teach us how to live life on life’s terms, how to embrace the unknown, and how to see others in new ways.

We, that is I, must take the time to unwind these memories, however difficult, however banal, and turn them into stories to share.

The Prompt

Long car rides. Pit stops. Getting lost.

This prompt comes from Hippocampus Online Literary Magazine and goes on to read:

There are many types of travel, but this wanderlust-filled issue will feature those that have one thing in common about getting from point A to pint B: Four wheels. Five, if you count the steering wheel.

HM-logo-banner-

If, once you write this piece, you’re interested in submitting, the guidelines are here, and the deadline May 31st.

* Photo credit: [Man on beach] Shelling, by veggiegretz on Morguefile.com

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Stories at the Table, Beginnings and Endings, and a Prompt

I love how, in continued practice, techniques naturally unfold and lessons slide into place. 

Stories

Last Saturday at our monthly creative writing class, a few core writers and I sat around the table and read our stories based on the previous month’s prompt, After the storm. We followed along the lines of Barbara Hurd’s essay, “Wordwrack: Openings,” which begins with a beautiful first line:

A nor’easter smacked into Cape Ann last night, and this morning the wrack’s dark line lies tangled and heaped.

Like Hurd, we told our own stories of storms and the debris left behind, markers – some physical, some emotional –  that became signs of relief as much as evidence of our fears.

The amazing part in listening to these stories this month was witnessing how the writing in this group has morphed from a very natural, everyday style of storytelling to a strong use of technique. A few writers made the decision not to begin their stories in a traditional way, with a mini-prologue of sorts, but to open with the moment that carried the most heat, weaving in backstory when necessary. Their stories read like true flash nonfiction: “discrete, sharply focused…[revealing] the secrets of human nature contained therein” (as Dinty Moore says in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction).

And, the way these writer told their stories segued perfectly into this month’s topic: beginnings and endings. 

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.                                          ~ Graham Greene

Because the pieces we write in this group are so short and only a glimpse into our experiences, beginnings and endings are both critical in holding our readers attention or in conveying our message.

Beginnings

“[T]o begin is to commit, to stay, to hold.” ~Jenny Boully

Embryonic moments from an experience – like In the beginning or When I was born – don’t always mark the perfect opening for a story; a great beginning is when a certain energy strikes the page, when the reader tightens her grip on the book or the listener narrows his focus on what he is hearing. 

Endings

“An ending tumbles toward you over and over again; an ending will not stay flat, will not stay put; an ending troubles and taunts; an ending is sleep lost. . . . [An ending] is an emptiness that tugs you to read the ending once more, to read the beginning again.” ~ Jenny Boully

Likewise, endings do not always bring us to a nice, clean close. As in real life, endings can come without warning or they can leave us deep in thought for days, even months afterward. They might even push us to return to the beginning, to search for clues or to simply recover the emotion lost or gained in the experience. 

A wonderful example of all this is Vicky Mlyneic’s essay on BREVITY, “This I Am Allowed.” Read it, see where she begins; consider what she leaves out and where she stops. Then, turn to your own story. The place you begin and end can make all the difference. 

The Prompt

And then it happened.

* Photo credit: taliesin from morguefile.com

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The Importance of Details in Writing & Next Month’s Prompt

Last weekend, as I sat around the table and listened to stories written by my friends at the Retirement Center, we discussed the the power of details. Almost everyone wrote on last month’s prompt, “I look like _____,” and we marveled at how each person approached the exercise differently.

One person wrote about life with his identical twin. Another person told of his wife, how she often made him look good and never took the credit. One man wrote on himself, starting his essay with a punch, “I look like something the cat dragged in.” Then, he took the reader on an introspective journey from that image of what he sees on the outside to what he remembers on the inside: children and grandchildren, success and happiness and, despite one day’s sad musings, memories of a long life gone well.

Though all the essays differed, we witnessed one thing in common, how certain details in images can add texture and richness to a story.

Details reveal more than the setting.

Every month these folks bring tiny memoir pieces to the table, flash nonfiction, so this month I shared with them an essay by Brenda Miller in the ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH NONFICTION. In “Friendship, Intuition, and Trust: On the Importance of Detail,” Miller talks, about the importance of images and detail when crafting a story in such a short space on paper. She writes about her experience, of how one simple image—a piece of wood in the road—led to the unfolding of her own short memoir essay:

The essay came out of me in one piece, in about 30 minutes, one image leading to the next. The first words, I’m sorry…led me along, and become the mantra for the rest of the piece, I’m sorry, I said, and I said it again, and we continued on our way through the desert, in the dark of night…. Flash images arise…I let them come, I don’t censor them, because by now the essay has taken on a life of its own. And since I know this will be a very short piece, I won’t have to inhabit this space very long—in and out, touching the wounded spot and letting it go.

Later, she says of these kinds of pieces:

Because flash nonfiction is so short, I needed to take only a slice of that time, and from this one cross-section…I could unravel the rest. [Flash nonfiction] requires the same attention to language as one would give to a poem: each line needs to carry some weight, and to gradually evolve into more meaning as it goes along.

Then, I read a few paragraphs to those writers at the table from an essay by Barbara Hurd in her book, WALKING THE WRACK LINE: ON TIDAL SHIFTS AND WHAT REMAINS:

A nor’easter smacked into Cape Ann last night, and this morning the wrack’s dark line lies tangled and heaped. Hundreds of shells have settled sideways and tilted on the beach, half in, half out, sand-dribbled, seaweed-draped, partially rinsed. On the outside, they’re a riot of spires and pinpricks, ribbed turbans and knobby cones. Ivory, copper, pinkish, twisted, scalloped, hinged.

. . . .

When I open my eyes, the ocean seems to demand too much. At another time in my life, I might have responded — raised a sail, plied my oars, at least considered the lure of infinity. If the sea, after all, has any constant call that can also sound like taunting, it goes like this: come in, come in. But this is the cold North Atlantic and I’m older and I won’t and besides, if I did, I’d be out there immersed in the lives of these cracked-open things I’d rather look at underfoot. It’s not that I’m tired of desire; I just want to make sure it’s my own.

In Barbara Hurd’s essay, certain details are missing. We don’t know when the storm started, when it stopped, how long it lasted. But with the images Hurd leaves behind, and in each description, she reveals more into her own state of being. And, that’s what makes this piece so powerful.

As Lisa Cron says in her book on writing, “the story is in the specifics.”

This month’s prompt.

After the storm.

Read more from Brenda Miller in “Friendship, Intuition, and Trust: On the Importance of Detail,” in THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH NONFICTION and from Barbara Hurd in “Wordwrack: Openings,” in WALKING THE WRACK LINE: ON TIDAL SHIFTS AND WHAT REMAINS.

* Photo credits: kakisky and greenfinger on Morguefile.com