Play the present against the past. It will make your memoir come alive.
Decision #2 from Sixteen Superpowers Memoir Writers Need to Have. Over sixteen posts, I help you make pacts with yourself so all will go well for you.
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2. Play the present against the past.
YOUR MANTRA: Have two timelines, not one.
What makes memoir dynamic is a dual timeline. You never have just one timeline in a memoir. The past is always pressing against the present, and that’s what makes meaning. That’s where the juice is. The present is asking questions about the past—hard questions that haven’t been asked before.
To do this you need a dual timeline, and two characters who press against the timeline: The Remembering Self (the now-You) and The Experiencing Self (the then-You).
The Remembering Self lives in the present and has a goal—to make sense of things. The Remembering Self needs a plot in the present moment so she can act it out and make sense of things. She’s doing something more than thinking about this alone in a room.
The Experiencing Self lives in the past and has a goal—to live through it. The Experiencing Self has a plot—maybe it’s a coming of age plot or it’s reinvention.
Both plots n…
