Improve your memoirs–fast–using fiction-writing techniques.

My friend, Debra Chaves Norwood, wanted me to share my suggestions about her memoir. So here is my "before" and "after" about "Under the Samán de Guerra," her memoir about  growing up in Venezuela. 

BEFORE: 

I would lean out the window of our Volkswagen and strain to see ahead, excited to feel the wind against my face. It was a cool wind, brought about by the shade of many trees, bearing the smell of cedar, lemon flowers and mangoes. One by one different species of trees start to flank both sides of the carretera, the local definition of an asphalt road considered a state highway. My father quizzed me on the trees and made me single out the soft wood from the hardwood, but it was easy to tell. Only the hardwood trees were tagged with white and blue collars of paint around their trunks, the proud mark that meant: “Thou shall never cut me. I am an important tree!”  These trees were marked as property of the government. But I knew that, however important they looked, they were nonetheless relatively insignificant escorts on the road to the Holy of Holies, the glorious Samán de Guerra. (161 words)

 AFTER:

I strained and leaned out the window of our Volkswagen, excited to see ahead. There was a cool wind from the shade of many trees, bearing cedar, lemon flowers and mangoes. One by one, different species of trees flanked la carretera, the asphalt state highway. My father quizzed me. “Which are the softwood? Which are the hardwood?” It was easy to tell. Only the hardwood had white and blue collars. Those proud paint tags said: “Thou shall never cut me. I am important! I am the property of the Venezuelan government.” But, however important they looked, they were only sentries on the way to the Holy of Holies, the Samán de Guerra. (112 words)

FICTION TECHNIQUES APPLIED:

 1. Dialogue Mode

Debra's father would have quizzed her using dialogue.

2. Action Mode

Action Mode uses strong verbs to show how important events or actions happen: strained, leaned, flank.

3. Viewpoint Writing

Viewpoint Writing technique shows the world through the eyes of the memoirist. Words and phrases which label sensory experiences are deleted: to feel the wind against my face, the smell of, and knew. Debra's present-day opinion, the local definition of,  also also bbbbbbrb   brbreaks the storytelling illusion and is out. Different species of trees stays in because Debra, like her father, knows trees. 

4. Description Mode

Deletions: (1) Qualifiers: nonetheless relatively insignificant, start to, considered. (2) Repetitions which serve no narrative purpose: trees and roads. (3) Unnecessary adjectives: glorious. Strong nouns are great: sentries is better than escorts; Holy of Holies stays in.

The passage is 49 words shorter.

Better?

Image reprinted with permission of Clipart ETC An Online Service of Florida's Educational Technology, University of South Florida

An important building in the Jewett family's Civil War experience still stands. It is a church. Thanks to Vic and Dollie Masters, parents of Civil War historian Vicki Profitt, for providing the current photo. And kudos to Clay Feeter, publisher of Standup Journal, for the old photo. Side-by-side they show the Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee (on the right) and Hospital No. 8 for wounded Union soldiers (on the left). Same building. Different purpose.

My great-great-great aunt, Mary Jewett Telford (1839-1906) , was the only female nurse caring for the 600 Civil War soldiers in Hospital No. 8 for eight months from 1863-1864. When Mary first applied for a nursing position with the U.S. Sanitary Commission, she was turned down. She told no one of that rejection letter, but "throwing it into the grate made of it a 'whole burnt offering to her righteous wrath.' " With her parents' blessing, she set off from her home in Lima, Michigan, to Nashville, Tennessee.  Eventually she was offered a position as a nurse in Hospital No. 8, after proffering letters of recommendation, including one from Michigan Governor Austin Blair, her father's friend. 

After eight months, exhausted and ill, Mary resigned her commission. She returned home and married Jacob Telford. They became adoptive parents of Civil War orphan girls. She was granted an Army pension. She went on to be a founding member of the Woman’s Relief Corps, a post-Civil War veterans support organization, speaker on the temperance circuit, and activist for woman's suffrage in Colorado. 

Check out Vicki Profitt's profile of Mary on page 4 of the latest issue of Historigram, a publication of the Perinton Historical Society. 

Was the building originally a church before it became Hospital No. 8? Was it re-commissioned as a hospital for Union soldiers during the Civil War? Does anyone know? If so, I'd love to hear from you.

Photo of Mary Jewett Telford

Courtesy of Floris A. Lent

Check out Di's blog memoir: He is a statistic. He is also a man. She writes about her grandfather, one of the 850 WWII vets who die every day:  "He was special in the sense that every kind and wonderful person is special. And he deserves to be remembered." In my blog about Frank McCourt, I said that his memoir, Angela's Ashes, taught us that we are all ordinary. But our memoirs can be extraordinary. Do you have an ordinary grandfather? Have you written something extraordinary about him? HHH  H

Bestselling business book author Seth Godin announced in yesterday's Wall Street Journal that in the future, he will bypass his commercial publisher, Portfolio (Pearson PLC's Penguin Group USA, headed by Adrian Zackheim). The author of Purple Cow and other business bestsellers also discussed this decision in a recent blog, which he says is read by 438,000 people. Godin says he knows who his audience is and has a direct customer relationship with that audience through the Internet.

So what?

Here's the quote in the Wall Street Journal piece that got to me: "Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don't know who reads their books." And he continues, "What the Internet has done for me, and a lot of others, is enable me to know my readers."

Do you know your readers? Who are they? Who is your audience? You'll find it easier to write your memoir if you know who your readers are, who you are writing for.

Here are some questions to answer before you begin writing your memoir:

• Who is my audience?
• Who are my readers?
• Who am I writing memoirs for?
• Am I writing memoir topics for the record, for family, or for myself?
• Do I want to share my memoirs? 
• If yes, with whom?
•  If yes, how do I want to share them? 
• If no, what am I going to do with them?

Then when it comes to publishing your memoir, you can have a direct customer relationship with your audience on the Internet.

Go for it!

Want to tell your story, but hate the process of writing? Here's a creative idea: you can talk into your computer using voice recording computer software. That's what inter-network marketing specialist Jerry Clark recommends in his recent blog. He says, "You can get a no cost voice recording app known as 'Audacity,' from  audacity.sourceforge.net."

He has two other helpful suggestions: 

• You can record onto mp3s the significant events in your life.
• Don't be judgmental of your recordings.

I've blogged  about how your stuff  and a bridge can be a memoir. But as I was reading a Family Circle letter to the editor , I thought of something else. 

In "Thanks for the Memories," Terasa Goggins Gipson of East Amherst, New York, writes that as a new wife and mother, she devoured the pages of Family Circle. Flipping through an issue for the first time in years, she wrote, she was overwhelmed by many wonderful memories. "The articles on parenting, the fun recipes, the decorating ideas and wellness advice added up to a wealth of knowledge that has stayed with me."

Family Circle was a memory trigger taking Terasa back to her early days as a wife and mom.

Could you turn any favorite magazine into a memoir? Yes! Here's how. Find old magazine articles or covers (check eBay), and cut and paste them into a scrapbook, frame, or shadow box. Add anything else that's meaning ful to you. Some "memoir items" might be: photos, your children's homework, prize ribbons, school projects, recipes. Add your favorite recollections and memories–handwritten or typed. Decorate with ribbons, stickers, drawings.

If you would like to share your "magazine as memoir," you could give it as a gift to a new mom, perhaps your daughter or daughter-in-law, along with a subscription to Family Circle or one of your other favorite magazines. 

Offer to babysit so she has time to read!

I used to think memoir consists of three things: (1) writing, (2) in the first person, (3) about a thin slice of a person’s life. “The reader doesn’t want the whole iceberg, just the tip,” to paraphrase Russell Baker.

Now I realize memoir is much broader. First of all, you have a lot of other objectives–besides the act of writing itself–when you create memoirs. You want to: 

• record family stories
• research family history
• find lost relatives
• socialize with lost relatives once you've found them
• discover your DNA
• collect and preserve family data
• get over something traumatic
• tell the story behind a family memento
• create personal documents (video, audio, shadow boxes, etc.)
• get rid of something heavy which you've been carrying around (secret, imposition, demand)
• catalogue, organize, and archive family documents, photos, and memorabilia
• take the sting out of something painful
• save and identify family heirlooms
• capture family information that would otherwise be lost.

I now have a working definition of memoir which is much more broad. Memoir is the communication of what you want to remember and what you want to be remembered. Which leads me to two more points. First, you can get really creative and use any of the following as the basis of a memoir:  

• letters you quote
• recipes
• random memories
• your hopes for the future
• a secret you no longer want to keep
• family sayings
• something that always got on your last nerve
• a mystery you never figured out
• funny family anecdotes
• what you want your legacy to be
• describing what’s going on in an iconic family photo
• a list of your favorite things and why
• describing how you got around a long time ago
• how a business used to make money
• your worst vacation
• how you kept the house cool in the summer
• the most expensive thing you ever bought
• a portrait of a relative using your five senses (see, hear, feel, taste, smell).

Second point. You don’t have to write at all. Lots of your "stuff" can be turned into a memoir:    

• Photographs
• Video
• Audio
• What things cost
• Collages
• Political buttons and pins
• Jewelry
• Fabrics
• A telephone bill
• “Shrines” you create
• Scrapbooks
• Songs
• Guns
• Music
• Portraits
• Paintings
• Statues
• Pottery
• Drawings
• Furniture
• Clothing
• Games
• Puzzles
• Tools
• Maps
• Drawings
• Self-portraits

Even a packing list from 50 years ago could be the basis for a great memoir. So, I ask you:

• What do you want to remember?
• What do you want others to remember?

Tell me about the memoir you create. Send me a photo.

Abraham Verghese recommended in yesterday’s Five Best in The Wall Street Journal five of his favorite books by physicians, including two memoirs. Adventures in Two Worlds is A. J. Cronin’s memoir about being a young physician in a Welsh mining town. The Puzzle People by Thomas E. Starzl is the memoir of the pioneer transplantation surgeon.

The same thing is true when you write a memoir about a place that no longer exists. What is the transaction between you and the place? What is its pull? What memories do you bring? What is the real place like now? Who used to live there? Who lives there now? What is still there? What is gone?

Barbara Krasner visited her grandmother’s ancestral home, Ostrów Mazowiecka (Ostrova in Yiddish) in Poland while she was doing research for a young adult novel that takes place in nearby or Zaromb (Yiddish). Her 30-photo exhibit of these Jewish communities which no longer exist, “My Home Is Gone—Remnants of Jewish Poland,” will be shown at the JCC of Metrowest in West Orange, New Jersey September 12-October 31, 2010.

What is the pull of a place that no longer exists? How do you write about it? Let me know.

I once found a photo tucked inside a book at an estate sale. The photo showed a Model T in ruins, destroyed by what looked like a head-on collision. The photo jumped out at me. I took it the man, about my age, who was running the garage sale. His mother had just died and he was selling the contents of her house. I handed him the photo. "This looks important," I said.

He stood transfixed, staring at the photo. "Mother told us about that crash. Both she and Dad survived it. But I never knew if the story was true."

My mother-in-law, Maxine (Shanbar) Marshall, has an iconic memoir photo. Her photo shows an apartment building (not hers) being moved from its location near Poplar Street in Chelsea, Massachusetts. The reason? The construction of The Mystic River Bridge (now the Tobin Memorial Bridge).

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Why not make your memoir writing easier? Why not organize it around an iconic photo?