Ditch chronology. It's making your memoir ponderous.
Decision #1 from Sixteen Superpowers Memoir Writers Need to Have. Over the next 16 days, I help you make pacts with yourself so all will go well for you.
Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash
1. Ditch chronology.
YOUR MANTRA: A memoir is not a parade of events.
Certainly, it would be easier to write if you could just sequence your life events into a pattern and stick them on the page, one after the other after the other.
Chronology is easy, but it’s boring. If someone wanted to be you and live your life at the pace of real life, they would have already time-traveled so they could come back and be reincarnated as you.
Readers want stories that make meaning. The parade of events is a collection of situations, and that’s not a story.
A spectacular craft book to help you make the distinction is The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick, who writes,
“Truth…is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.”
VIVIAN GORNICK
The superpower of a memoir writer is essentially this: the selection of events. All events are not equal. All events are not dramatic. Choose wisely, and you have a story.
A memoirist is skilled in identifying which life events can become scenes that show emotional change and propel the plot.
A fiction writer makes up the dramatic action, driven by characters who want something or don’t want something.
But the memoirist must see something else—something beyond ordinary daily life to moments of extraordinary revelation.
DECISION: Ditch chronology (to a point), and plot your memoir like fiction. Identify an inciting incident and the big moment. Your allegiance is to story, not a complete collection of events.
ABOUT SIXTEEN SUPERPOWERS OF MEMOIR WRITERS
It’s easy to write a memoir! All you need to do is write something with universal resonance that is true and comes from your life.
Let’s get real. To write a memoir, you need a basket of superpowers.
As a memoir writer with a forthcoming book (BOUNDLESS, coming December 2024) [pre-order here Bookshop | Barnes & Noble | Amazon and as a book coach/developmental editor who works with memoir writers, I’ve learned quite a lot about tapping into literary superpowers.
What’s enduring about memoir is that it is real, and it matters. A few decisions you make on the front end will determine whether it will go well.
In this series of posts, I give you 16 decisions to install at the beginning of your journey. Make these pacts with yourself, stick to them and you’ll get there!
Related posts
Why Writing Your Book Will Change You As Much As It Will Change the World
From Lived Experience to a Book: The Path of My Memoir, Boundless
I resonate with the way you talk about playing with time. That's more than inserting flashbacks; done well, it shifts the story (of memoir as much as fiction) from a chronological plot to an emotional one.
Really looking forward to the rest of this series.