The Art of Montage: How to Take Your Readers on a Wild Ride
It’s the sweet spot between scene and summary, so try it! Here's why only 300 words of the twins’ childhood get on the page of my mom memoir, and other secrets from “Behind the Scenes at Boundless”
Though BOUNDLESS is a mom memoir, only a smidge of my twins’ childhoods lands on the pages. In Chapter Three: Raucous Departures, the reader gets 300 words.
Instead of a parade of events, I give you a montage. I wanted to leave readers with a beautiful burst of breathlessness, feeling like something was missing at the same time they could unmistakably feel the forward momentum of the story.
For my book coaching clients, I often recommend a montage to speed up the action in your story. It’s a great way to mix up the scene-summary-scene pace. If you want to inject a streak of lightning into a story, think about writing a montage.
We know montage from the film world. The pages of the calendar flying off the wall, the sands through the hourglass. Montages are a rapid, compressed series of stirring images sequenced to condense space, time and story.
Two big reasons for my bold choice, one personal as a memoirist who balances the space for my voice/my story with the space for others’ stories. The other is pure literary technique. This choice was what worked for conveying the big idea of my book.
Here is when, and how, to write a montage.
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Theme + Technique = Effect
The art of writing is in selection of technique, I often tell my book coaching clients. But before you go on a hunter-gatherer mission to a writing conference or craft book to load up on technique, remember the rule is:
THEME + TECHNIQUE = EFFECT
Know your theme, or main dramatic question.
Select your technique, informed by your theme. Keep a lot of tools in your literary toolbox. Variety is mastery.
Produce the effect you want.
Use this simple formula, and you’ll feel like you can crack the code of how your favorite author got there. It’s a useful thought experiment that I ask my book coaching clients to cultivate as a habit of mind: How did that author produce that effect on the page? The two questions behind EFFECT are: What is the author’s theme, or main dramatic question? What techniques did the author use here?
Boundless is available for pre-order!
My memoir about how we are always becoming someone new is arriving with perfect timing -- on a day of rebirth, Winter Solstice, which happens to be my birthday. Mark the date -- 12.21.2024! Read about it here. Get on the pre-order list here.
BOOKSHOP - proceeds go to Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque
Honor Your People—and Your Story: Navigating the Hazards of Being a Memoirist
So, reason No. 1 for my choice of montage comes from the “Honor Your People and Your Story” department that every memoirist must grapple with.
Need insight in how to write about yourself and others with integrity? Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature (Meredith Maran), a compilation of interviews with memoirists such as Cheryl Strayed, David Sheff, Jesmyn Ward, Anne Lamott, Dani Shapiro.
It’s one of the recommended story craft books for memoirists on my Bookshop list.
BOUNDLESS is a book about my experience as a mother and not a chronicle of their passage to adulthood. That storyline is present in BOUNDLESS, but it serves as the weather that shapes my emotional landscape as I seek to become someone beyond a single mother of twins.
As a memoirist who once was a columnist, I wrote about the twins aplenty when they were small. (Looking back over my life, I realize my first impulse to write about their adorableness stems from my mother’s avid attention to my baby book. I took that to the next level when I grew up to become a journalist and author.)
When the twins hit the preteen years, I stopped writing about them in my column. I wanted to give them autonomy over their lives and let them take over as narrators. They have had the brilliant or rotten luck to be the child of a memoirist, so we honor good boundaries between what is their story to tell and what is mine.
They are 25 now, and here are their early reviews on how well I’ve done with giving them the latitude to tell their stories while earning their grace to write mine.
My son said, after reading the “jump in an Arizona subalpine lake and drown scene,” that he appreciated my uncanny accuracy, grit and grace in writing about events we shared. He said, “I love everything you write.” Go forward, he said. And to him I said: Onward! Write your own story!
My daughter said, after reading 100 pages in that it felt like I was restoring her childhood to her. At 25, the time is ripe to look back and recollect the events that shaped her. She commented that it inspired her to write about her own life. Yes!
Best of both worlds: Montage is part scene, part summary
Reasons to write montage? Speed up the narrative, suggest what’s missing.
Another? Montage is the best of both worlds. It carries the power of scene because of its mini-bursts of scene. It carries the power of summary because it moves the plotline.
This passage from Chapter Three: Raucous Departures showcases a snippet of montage writing. Montage writing speeds up the story. It’s a refreshing break from the scene-summary-scene-summary pace. It provides a burst of images that add up to more than the sum of parts.
The bread-and-butter of great writing is choosing vivid scenes that drive the emotional change in the story, and the art of the writer is inventing (if fiction) or selecting and crafting (if creative nonfiction) scenes that are emblematic of the story’s Main Dramatic Question, or theme. That’s why you hear the time-honored advice, “show, don’t tell,” early and often.
The key questions to demand of a scene: Does it drive emotional change? It is emblematic of the Main Dramatic Question? Is it set in a time/place with at least two characters?
Montage offers another option that carries the power of both—scene and summary.
What’s missing is just as important as what is there
For me, the montage was a way to make a statement to the larger theme of BOUNDLESS: Childhood is fleeting. Our lives are fleeting. What can we become if we craft our lives armed with the foreknowledge of the fragility of life? Can we be bolder, love more deeply?
One of the boldest choices I made with BOUNDLESS was to open with the twins’ brush with death at 18 months old, then jump-cut to a scene where they are 17 years old and having their senior photos taken. The choice meant cutting out the whole cloth of their childhood. It also meant I would have to write the near-death scene and the nest-jumpers scene in such a way that the reader would feel what was missing, then juxtapose them.
Two brilliant authors I love had pulled this off, and I took cues from them. One is Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Good Squad, who places one event at the center of her ring of stories that is never shown on the page. That event is the 9/11 attack on New York. A.O. Scott called this Pulitzer-winning book a feat of compression. (It made The New York Times’ list of best books so far in the 21st century, and you can read about it here.) (It also makes lists of the most important books that capture 9/11, to which I would add two others: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.)
The other brilliant author who inspired my choice is Robin Lippincott, whose slim, elegant work of fiction, In the Meantime, is craft heaven. Most of the “meantime” is left out -- the book starts with three five-year-olds in the Midwest who form a friendship before World War II begins, and it concludes with 9/11. Robin was my mentor during my second semester working on my MFA in Writing at Spalding University’s Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann School of Writing. (Here is a review of his breakout book, Mr. Dalloway. Here is what he says about Blue Territory: A Meditation on the Life and Art of Joan Mitchell. In addition to writing about the painter Joan Mitchell, he writes about Joni Mitchell, beautifully, here)
For a long time, my first developmental editor wasn’t sure I was pulling off the montage and jump-cut. She wondered if I should go another direction entirely—I did, too! But I held to my vision and decided to sculpt the scenes before and after the jump-cut, and that’s when the montage scene came. I felt determined to make it work, and my aim was to do it in such a way that my second developmental editor would absolutely endorse it—and she did!
[My first and second developmental editors for BOUNDLESS are big deals, and I’m ever grateful for their keen insight on my book. Both are on the faculty at The Lighthouse Book Project—Erika Krouse (Tell Me Everything) and Emily Rapp Black (Sanctuary, Still Point of the Turning World).]
Yes, you belong to this party! You’ve worked hard to create a literary ecosystem around yourself. Now it’s time to give back. Here’s how to relish writing your acknowledgments.
Now, let’s write a montage!
Are you ready to write a montage? I suggest doing it as a timed free-write because this especially will force you into the compression you need to pull off a montage. If you think you want to do a 10-minute free-write, do a seven-minute free-write. If you think you want to do a five-minute free-write, do a three-minute free-write.
What a montage needs:
Absolutely vivid bursts of mini-scenes that move rapidly through time, such as Minecraft handles of Banana Sky and Snowfire, such as free-falling on the Tower of Terror and climbing the spiral of La Sagrada Familia. Each burst suggests a whole narrative behind it, such as the Nerf Gun Wars.
An emotional jumping-off point that is potent. Maybe it’s hot—it burns. You want to drop it. In BOUNDLESS, the twins’ childhood has fleeted. The last days are vanishing before my eyes.
A defined time arc. In this case, it’s the twins’ childhood. Choose your time span. Insert time markers along the ride in a creative way.
An anchor in a place. The more specific the better: The gypsum walls through which I was trying to speak to my twins before they flew the nest.
An overarching idea, almost like its own chapter title, as I do with the “Be Who You Are” house. This holds the montage, which is packed with many disparate parts, in a container. By titling it, I create more meaning for the container.
A voice with more verve. Turn it up a notch.
High-speed time. An abrupt departure, a wild ride and a screeching halt. Think: Hagrid’s wild ride in Harry Potter.
…And we’re back, hair whipping in the wind! A time/place arrival point. Disembark. Catch your breath. Take your readers back into a scene.
This montage is a flashback, so one by-word about flashbacks: They must always move the story forward. Not backward. Forward. And fast-forward!
I hope this helps you take your readers on the wild ride of montage. Be brave, be light, be you!
It’s time to write your story you were meant to write
Want to find out how to get started on your book? Schedule a free 30-minute session with me here.
