Eight points for writing a memoir in personal essays

My current work in progress is a memoir in essays, in the vein of Not Quite Lost.

It’s been growing organically. First I had the urge to write A Something. Then another Something, which seemed to belong with the first. Now there’s a sizeable collection that wants to be a book. It’s ready for the real work.  

Here’s the real work.

1 Look for a subject

What themes are singing out of the material? What is my subject and what is worth saying about it? A memoir like this needs direction. (Even if the point is travelling without a sense of direction, as I did the first time.)

A reminder: a memoir is not autobiography. It’s not everything that happened to you. It has a subject – like divorce, or friendship, or chef training or becoming a shepherd. You might contain one autobiography, but many memoirs.

A memoir also, usually, has an argument – so it’s not just how you became a shepherd, it’s what you want to tell us about humanity.  

2 Look for a running order

A memoir – of any type – needs a narrative arc. Even if life isn’t neat, the memoir needs an ordered shape and a sense of development. You’re making art out of life. This also means it doesn’t have to unfold chronologically. In my memoir, some pieces are back story but I might leave them until late. Some are asides that are outside chronology. Everything will be placed to serve the main subject and argument, for resonance or contrast or reinforcement. I’m creating the running order before I do any editing, while the pieces are still rough. Then I’ll know how to shape them.

3 Look for repetition

I’ve built the book by writing whenever the wind was in my sails. To preserve the spontaneity, I didn’t reread anything. It’s highly likely I’ve written some ideas several times over. Now I need to find those accidental repetitions. However, not all repetition is bad. Sometimes a short repetition will enhance, like a refrain. 

4 Anxiety

I’m hoping I haven’t repeated myself too much, or it might be a very short book. (NB All books involve anxiety. Will it work? Is there enough?)

5 Look for a title

Why is it that the shortest pieces of writing take the longest time? Oh, the woe of finding a title. (I’ve written about titles here and there’s a titles workshop in my workbook.)

For this book, I have many near-titles but nothing ideal. They’re in a text file. A long list, riffing on an idea, changing a noun or a verb, stumbling on a new word and doing it all over again.

(Wait! Stumbling on… I never tried that.)

This task travels with me most of the time. When I’m not at my computer, I worry at the title on scraps of paper. They look like the ravings of a person with an obsession. But the perfect title will pull the whole book into place.

6 It’s okay to make a mess

I’ve written the pieces with illiterate abandon. If they are somehow found by someone else before I can edit them, I will die of embarrassment.

I’m a fan of the uninhibited, slapdash first draft. Precision can come later. So can context and other courtesies. What’s more important to me is the spirit in the words, the raw moment that goes wherever and winds up somewhere surprising.

7 Structure will get you out of mess

I often say this when I’m coaching novelists: the words are the skin. The real work of the story is done by the structure – what you emphasise, what you make the reader look at and feel. So it is with this kind of memoir. The structure will tell you how to edit. Once you know a piece’s overall role in the book, you can edit with confidence. (There’s loads more about structure in my plot book.)

8 Read with a pen

Reading is a highly interrupted activity at the moment. Prose is a trigger. I look like a person with no attention span as I put the book down and scramble a note. If a book’s in the same territory as my WIP, it makes me write. If a book isn’t, it still makes me write. That’s how you know you’ve got a book going on.

There’s a lot more about writing in my Nail Your Novel books – find them here. If you’re curious about my own work, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, here’s my latest newsletter. You can subscribe to future updates here.

Masterclass snapshots: why it helps to construct your novel in scenes

Here’s another great discussion from my recent Guardian self-editing masterclass.

What is a scene? And why does it matter to know that?

Those in the know will probably all have their own slightly different way to define a scene, but this is mine. I think of a scene as the smallest unit of a story’s events.

Like a scene in a movie, a scene in a novel will be confined within a location, or a set of characters. But not necessarily. A scene might cover a number of locations, characters and times if it’s a linking sequence, such as a journey or a flashback or a chunk of back story. So I find the most helpful, graspable definition is to think of it as a step in the storyline, or the reader’s understanding.

Why does it help to think about this?

It helps the writer break the book into manageable chunks – if you construct your novel from scenes you can think more easily about finding the optimum order for the emphasis you want. If you use a revision tool like my beat sheet (in Nail Your Novel),  you can easily control the plot.

Writing in scenes helps the reader too. If you indicate the change to a new scene by a line break ,the reader will subconsciously think ‘I’ll just read to the end of this…’ which is your opportunity to build to a nice interesting change so they have to gobble up another. So scenes offer the reader a break… and then reel them right back in. Which is nifty.

Look for change So this leads us to another vital quality of scenes. Each one should move the story on in some way. It might be big or small, but by the end of the scene, something will have changed. Indeed a scene usually has a beginning, a middle and end – like a microcosm of a balanced story. Indeed, change is one of the four Cs of a great plot – curiosity, change, crescendo and coherence (more on that here).

So you should think of your novel as a movie, right?  

Not necessarily. If you’re writing a genre piece, it will usually be like a movie in book form – a sequence of discrete scenes. But this might not suit you if your style is more internal, more of a continuous experience in the mind of a character. After all, real life doesn’t occur in packages; it’s a stream. Even so, for the purposes of using your material effectively and controlling the pace, it helps to build in scenes, even if you have to create artificial breaks in the prose. You can segue them together later on, in the editing stage.

But this is obvious. Why even mention it?

Ho ho. The scenes question is like most fundamentals of writing. Some writers grasp it instinctively and never give it a thought. Others don’t – and find it helpful to have it explained. Which are you? And has it helped to think about what a scene does?

Thanks for the pic seda yildirim

 

2 interviews about teaching and writing – Venice, BBC Radio London

The organisers of my Venice masterclass, Henry and Janys Hyde, have just published this interview about the course. If you’d like to know a little more about my teaching approach, or indeed how I came to be doing this at all, this is the place to go. And if you’d like to come to another, let them know!

Also, I’ve been on BBC Radio London this week, on Jo Good’s afternoon show. The day before I’d listened to Jo interview Candace Bushnell, so I made sure to wear feisty boots. Jo asked me about ghostwriting, tips for writers etc – some of which may be familiar to those of you who have hung around here for a while. Anyway, if you’re curious it’s here for the next 30 days. My section begins at 1 hour 10 minutes.

Oh, and these were my interview boots. Roberto Cavalli. I hope Carrie Bradshaw would approve.

 

 

‘Searching for truth’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, TJ Cooke

My guest this week says he uses music before he sets hands to keyboard, to help conjure the creative mood. Sometimes it works the other way around; he’ll be writing and will realise the mind-jukebox is directing a scene to the structure or lyrics of a song. He trained as a lawyer but quickly found a creative outlet as a legal adviser on TV dramas. From there he began writing some of the UK’s most popular series and is now a crime novelist. Funnily enough, one of his key songs is Jon & Vangelis’s I’ll Find My Way Home, which one of my earliest guests used as a touchstone for his MG novel – isn’t it amazing how one piece of music can inspire such diverse ideas? He is TJ Cooke and he’s on the Red Blog with his Undercover Soundtrack.

Quiet for a while… back soon – and tips to help you hit a writing deadline

If you’ve read this week’s Undercover Soundtrack you might have seen the note that said the next post would be up in two weeks’ time. I’m taking a short break so it’ll be quiet here too.

In the meantime, I’d planned to make a post appear magically from the archives to jolly along NaNoWriMos (and anyone who needs tips to meet a writing deadline). It began ‘Are you finding NaNo easier than you thought, or harder?’ and was supposed to wait until this weekend, but WP gremlins (or butterfingered me) shot it out prematurely. Immediately I got a bemused comment from a subscriber, convinced he’d got his time machine working. Anyway, here’s the post, if you haven’t already seen it – a NaNo routine to help you finish.