Everything I Currently Know About Writing Memoir

by your friendly workshop facilitator, Heather Donahue

1. Start from the body.

My body and your body have had some similar experiences–some of our most basic, potent ones. This is a vivid palette to paint with. It unifies.

2. When in doubt, go back to the body.

A good memoir tracks the evolution of a consciousness. The body is the vehicle of consciousness. The skin is a permeable membrane. The senses mostly filter, theyʼre the doors we open or close, voluntarily and involuntarily. Consider the multiple conversations at a party that we don’t hear because our ears are built to limit our hearing to that on which we direct our attention. Our attention tracks how our consciousness expands and contracts in different situations. Well-chosen sensory details share this shifting with the reader. In this shifting is the story.

3. Anecdotes, like adverbs, are not your friend.

Well, maybe like facebook friends. Nice enough, but you really don’t have time for them. You’re busy with touchable spines.

Events and situations that don’t illuminate the evolution of our consciousness/insight as it relates to the story we are telling, qualify as anecdotes. Anecdotes donʼt belong in a good memoir. As anecdotes are to story, so adverbs are to sentences. They bring the flaccid. Keep everything tight and strong. Keep flaccid at bay. Wait, what was I talking about?

4. The selection of details reveals the consciousness of the narrator.

If you’re about to kiss someone and the crack in the wall behind their head, or the hairs on their face suddenly take on monumental significance–that says a lot. Ideally, something the narrator notices outside the body will be accompanied by something inside the body and these details will amplify each other, allowing the reader to co-experience something awesome.

5. In the beginning, expect to write about 50 pages per one shareable page.

I say this not to defeat you, but to free you up to just get on it and write as poorly and as dangerously and as embarrassingly as you will. Go for shame, go for grief, go for terror, go for bliss, go for humor, go for insight. Go for all of these things and more and miss them often. Miss them most of the time. Miss them for about 49 pages. Fail. There is no substitute for it. You’ll tune your sensor to your emotional hot spots/pink bits and this is probably where your story is. You will probably write around your story for awhile. I find that stories sometimes pop out of the negative space, squatting in what you’re not writing. This negative space can (and should) remain in your stories. But you should be aware of it. And it should vibrate. Like Ikebana.

6. The narrator and the author are two separate entities.

The narrator can lack insight, not realize what is really going on in a scene, but the author needs to know why that scene is there and what it needs to do. The narrator is a product of the author, a persona crafted to tell the story. (See also: Vivian Gornick “The Situation and the Story”)

7. You have time to write.

Try the Pomodoro technique. It helps get my ass in the chair and keep it there for at least 25 minutes. Try Freedom, a simple application that blocks email and internet. Without distraction, it’s amazing what 25 minutes can do. You can get out some kind of first draft of a scene in that time, Iʼm sure of it. You can look at the street view of the neighborhood youʼre writing about when you revise. Later. Donʼt sacrifice momentum for fact checking in first drafts. Stay in the rooms. Both the one youʼre writing in and the one your story is happening in. Unless your story is set outside. Then you should stay in the room, and outside.

8. Get into a scene as late as you can, and get out as early as you can.

This tip is blatantly stolen from Syd Field. He writes screenwriting books that are really helpful with memoirs if you are someone who tends toward the nebulous and rambly. This particular tip can help you clarify the purpose of a scene within your story. It’s also helpful for pacing.

9. Be sparing with essayistic reflection.

In a memoir, I’d rather be alongside the narrator as s/he earns some insight. There are many lovely ways to say “I have become wise” but I find that they are rarely as interesting as allowing the reader to co-experience the “becoming” with you via scene. I’m of the opinion that you have write several scenes to earn your moments of reflection. Possibly this is just me. Feel free to fight me on this.

10. “Generality is the enemy of all art” –Stanislavsky

Be specific. You might think that the flavor and color of the Kool Aid powder that you shouldn’t have been eating with the neighbor boy in the back seat of his Dad’s blue Nissan doesn’t matter, but it does. Especially if it’s cherry. What might matter even more is how it stuck to your sweaty fingers and thighs because it was Independence Day and everybody else was watching fireworks and how those same sticky thighs got poked by and stuck to the torn white vinyl until you moved them closer to the boy who stayed just where he was.

Specific details, particularly those of the body, plunge the reader into the scene so that she can co-experience it. Our bodies have a shared vocabulary that words can almost magically evoke. I find it magical, at least. A bunch of letters can make your heart pound. Nice.

11. When in doubt, be more specific. 

If there are sentences in your memoir that could be in anybody else’s memoir, be suspicious. If there are sentences in your memoir that could be in everybody else’s memoir, cut them.

12. Judicious use of metaphor is your friend.

Metaphor helps dissolve and reassemble things, notions, in unexpected ways. The way you use this device will inform/develop your voice. See also: the effects of sentence length, prosody, the difference between the way words from the punchy Anglo-Saxon branch of the English family tree land versus words from the more formal Latinate side. Split things, let them dangle and run on. Then revise. (See also: #16)

13. Imitation can be a useful practice.

Imitate writers whose voices you love. Imitate writers whose voices sound absolutely nothing like yours and see how these change a scene’s effectiveness. Notice how this imitation changes your relationship to a scene.

14. Vision is the least interesting sense.

In terms of crafting richer prose, please don’t forget about tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, and any sixth sense stuff you’d like to throw in.

15. Memoir is the very subjective rendering of objectively occurring events.

Iʼm paraphrasing this from somewhere on The Rumpus and can’t find who wrote it. I agree. I think you can composite events and characters to serve the story. Some people disagree with this.

16. Scenes are the cells of a story. Verbs are the mitochondria.

Scenes, like cells, contain a world in and of themselves. Their specific accumulation makes bigger wholes. Verbs are engines, the powerhouses of your prose, much like how mitochondria function in a cell. Keep them strong (and specific).

17. Bulimia is bad for people, good for stories.

Your draft will sometimes be bloated. At this point, strip it down to the barest bones. Keep only what excites you. Then build it back up to make sense. Then blow some narration into scene and see what you come up with. Then purge again. Repeat this until your story is lean and agile.

18. It’s not about you. You’re more like a story filtering system.  

If you want to write a memoir, you will excavate your shit. It will be uncomfortable and sometime you won’t want to do it. Maybe you’ll write a lot of impressionistic stuff that’s completely disembodied instead of getting down and dirty and mining the shit for nuggets. Nuggets have value. They can be shared, exchanged. Non-nugget material is for your pals. They care about you, the reader doesn’t. The reader wants to know how youʼre answering the question of how to live. And it should be urgently. You have to go so far, so specifically, and so courageously into you that you dissolve and only the story is left. This might feel self-indulgent at first. If so, go back to the body and be specific with sensory details until what you write breaks your heart, or at the very least, makes you cringe and think your loved ones wonʼt speak to you if they read it. You’ve probably hit a story vein. Keep digging. Get out of your own way. Run on the assumption that there are Dog Star Alien Gods who need to get this story out and you are really pissing them off by being such a clumsy egoic vehicle. You have a responsibility to get out of your own way. For everybody’s benefit, including your own.

19. There can be no douche greater than “I”

Which is to say that your narrator should be the most flawed character in the story unless your narrator is a child. Don’t go tediously easy on a child narrator though, kids do some effed up stuff.

20. Sometimes it helps to work from the insight out.

Often the insight that you have gained (or tried and failed to gain) is at the heart of your story. When you know this, itʼs more straighforward to choose the events/situations that best illustrate that insight. If you are still trying to sort it, all the better. Sort it to its mythic bedrock. Story is conflict! Yay! Now all that conflict doesn’t have to go to waste!

21. Yes, you are probably drinking too much. 

22. Oh, and if you start a sentence with “I feel…” or “I felt…” you should probably revise it.

Or revise the whole scene it’s a part of, to allow the reader to experience that feeling with your narrator. This does not apply to dialogue.

Sundance Star: Pat Healy Commands Compliance

The actress and writer (her memoir, Grow Girl, was released last month) reports from the Sundance Film Festival

I believe the best way to gain access to a party—any party—as a plebe is to imitate a starlet to the best of your ability. There are not so many badges around at night, so just waft a little “do you know who I am?”

Three things you’ll need to pull this off are: youth, a great blow out, and totally impractical shoes, maybe a faux-fur Marilyn coat, because that never gets old. I, being too old for that shit, hitched a ride to Sundance with a one-time co-worker whose film is all abuzz.

Velvet ropes give me hives, even when they’re not velvet. We work through his lack of a plus one to the Bing Bar Cinetic bash by him flashing his badge with his movie’s title on it while I quietly add the penetrating eye contact. Plebe better work!

Once inside we wait in line for the coat check which is attended by a platinum woman that looks like the inverse of one of those eighties Robert Palmer girls. Coat check. Fancy. I’m on a budget, so my jacket stays on. Extra dollars are reserved for tipping bartenders. I have my priorities. I am introduced to what are no doubt an assortment of important people. They seem very nice.

There are a lot of L.A.-grade good-looking people here, but dressed like they live in San Francisco. Way to keep it indie! There is a gentleman’s equivalent of the starlet’s entry kit. It includes: fur lined ear flap hat (worn with a jaunty mix of irony and pragmatism), a shirt with some kind of stripe, and glasses that make you look objectively more attractive. I would add a note of caution about replacing the hat. Eight out of ten times an anachronistic hat (porkpie, fedora) gives a certain assclown-y air, but if you’re one of the twenty percent that can make it work, it really, really works.

Hors d’oeuvre trays are circulated with various organizations of tuna tartare as well as a delightful chorizo thing on toast that I kind of want to hoard. The DJ plays “Sweet Dreams” and a smoke machine billows. But what do you want? It’s the Bing Bar.

Overheard: “Last night I was at a party downstairs, which is a much bigger venue. Then there’s also the basement. You can tell how much money a company spent at a party by what level it’s on.” It’s not so much a party as an anthropological field study. There’s a large poster on one wall that illustrates the “Development of Life.” This party is off that chart.

The first person here that I recognize sees me writing and positions herself in my line of vision. Her hand gestures become more adamant. She looks over at me, performing. Yes, I see you. Yes, I’m writing about you. No, I’m not going to mention your name because your behavior is embarrassing. This is not such an exotic gathering except the drinks are free and the people more self-conscious.

“I wanna feel the heat with somebahdeeee….” I’m wondering if the song choices are deliberately meant to match the early nineties inspired pop art. The place feels like it was put together by a gallery owner who was huge in ‘93 but then ran into some substance abuse problems and after several stints at Promises is now doing things like decorating the Bing Bar for Microsoft.

Really though, a smoke machine? Couldn’t you just trust the effects of the open bar?

There’s a marijuana moment somewhere between midnight and 12:30. Short lived. “Girls just wanna have fuh-hun…” As the musical selections would suggest, this party is largely populated by white people. White people finally drunk enough to dance.
I venture downstairs to the larger venue. I have no idea whose party this is. Some girls are giddily posing for pictures taken by their friends in front of the Bing wall. Posing as celebrities posing. The music is live and the bartender has a handlebar moustache and white-framed glasses. Everything down here feels fresher. The art has an adorable, Portlandian quality. A nebbishy dude is flanked by starlets. “You guys want it straight up?” He asks them.

They nod in unison.

“Can I have a lime?” one asks.

He nods.

“Oh, that’s a very small lime,” she says, with an invisible wink.

Cagey little dreamers take pictures of each other on the sofa under a blue-lit American flag. They have a film they hope will play here nextyear. American something. When I ask how they got in tonight they tell me it was an “inside job.” They won’t elaborate. They slip me a DVD of the trailer for their film, as a security guard approaches and tells us this section is for VIPs only now. It’s promptly roped off and two people sit on the couch. That’s it. Just two people sitting on the couch under the flag. The two big chairs remain empty and a guard with a curly, old school telephone cord shunted down his collar stands before them. It’s like a diorama at the self-important douche museum.

When I tell the American something guys what I would be calling this story they say, “I think we’d rather not be mentioned in that context.” Nobody likes to be thought of as a plebe, especially plebes. But then who’s left to make the world go round while crazy kids are making movies? If everybody was a superstar, who would make lunch? Or teach Pilates? Plebes need parties too. And free drinks, for sure. Cheers!

P.s. A high-altitude hangover feels a little like a grapefruit sized brain tumor has burgeoned overnight, so remember also to drink approximately three times more water than you think you need. At least. See you next year!

Photo: Art at Bing Bar

So many addiction narratives make it easy to say, “That’s not me. I might drink a lot, but it’s not that bad.”Smashed acknowledges why anybody drinks in the first place: because it’s fun. Until it isn’t. Sober is pretty well synonymous with boring and who wants to be boring?

The urge to keep getting up and failing and trying again even if it means failing all the more spectacularly and painfully makes for a good story. The kind that can change you, and your own way of seeing the world.Smashed does this beautifully, aided in large part by a tour-de-force performance full of humor and exquisite vulnerability from Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Kate Hannah, an alcoholic schoolteacher married to music writer Charlie, played with equal parts ache and bravado by Breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul.

Screenwriters James Ponsoldt and Susan Burke put you squarely in Kate’s shoes. You experience her shame and then once again the-fun-that-doesn’t-quite-erase as she bounces down to bottom. It made me look at my own habits and question them in a way that no other addiction story has, mostly because it’s funny, relatable, and sincere. There’s a great scene early on where Kate is teaching a classroom full of kids that starts out funny in that way that being drunk sometimes is. She gets the kids to fill in the blanks on a white board with a boozy exuberance that definitely keeps them engaged. The kids are all the more disturbingly engaged at the scene’s awful climax. This one poignant, potent scene is a better litmus test than any questionnaire in trying to figure out where the boundaries of recreation and addiction are.

Smashed refuses to let you see Kate and Charlie as Other, and this is what makes it so effective. They’re obviously in love with each other, even if alcohol might be dissolving some of the differences between them. I was rooting for them, even as I was cringing. There’s a drunken sex scene that was one of the many moments that the film offered me to say, Oh, hell yes I’ve been there. How have I not seen that in a film before? It was a great example of Ponsoldt’s skilled direction; it brings the funny, then presses until it catches in your throat. Smashed deftly crafts a gently potent mirror into which I had to ask myself: Where can I stop checking off the “been there” boxes? It made me ask myself again, “How to live?” This, to me, is a sign of top-notch storytelling.

The perils of honesty and post-booze social awkwardness are downright charming as portrayed by Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation) as Mr. Davies, the Vice Principal. If he were drunk when he says what he does to her in the car, he would probably have gotten away with it, but sober, it squats there like the socially awkward moment it is. Honesty wins the day when it is laughed about later at the culmination of Kate’s lies, or the worst baby shower ever. This scene and the one following show that honesty is pretty funny too, and has the benefit of being earned.

This is no Leaving Las Vegas. It’s way more pragmatic and certainly brighter than that. There’s no scene where Kate is filling up a shopping cart with a willfully self-destructive pile of bottles. She doesn’t suffer from terminal self-loathing, the good times just got out of hand. At no point does director James Ponsoldt let the viewer off the hook and say, “Oh, I would never do that.” It’s exactly Kate’s good-girlishness that brings her to the bottom of nowhere. And it’s exactly the courage to fail again that gets her out, even if it means losing her loving, if stagnant, husband. There’s no sense that everything is all better sober, but the way the penultimate scene cuts between Kate and Charlie at least suggests that Kate’s sobriety has firmer joys in store than Charlie’s party boy ferment.

At the end of the day, Smashed is every bit as much coming of age story as it is a recovery tale. A call to maturity that manages to transcend the culture’s juvenile siren song. There’s been a lot of that theme here at Sundance: The fear of growing up that many in my generation of Americans seem to fall prey to, and the resulting anomie and urge toward obliteration resulting from that protracted adolescence. Rick Alverson’sThe Comedy comes to mind. There we have unrelenting, unredeemed, unapologetic self-destruction. On the other hand, there are films so unabashed in their innocence, like The First Time, that they’re bringing out the snark in the press tent. I’m wondering if Smashed isn’t in some ways the curated heart of the 2012 program, something of a blueprint toward the middle ground, toward maturity. And not to get all grandiose, but maybe this blueprint can help us toward a better way for our whole country through doing better ourselves. I could be reading too much into the Sundance programming here, but I kind of hope not.

As you might expect from a film co-produced by WBEZ Chicago’s This American Life, Sleepwalk With Me is an autobiographically-inspired film that is intimate, funny and sincere. It offers a take on the New American Manchild archetype that engenders empathy.

Mike Birbiglia plays the lightly fictionalized Matt Pandamiglio, a guy who just wants to follow his dream of being a standup comic. So what if he constantly, if inadvertently, rejects his girlfriend of eight years? The guy wants to make people laugh, and his way to a fresh voice is to talk about how the only way he’ll get married is if he’s sure “nothing else good is going to happen in my life.” While he tells this joke on tour, his fiancee Abby (played with the depth and light that Lauren Ambrose always seems to bring to her projects) is planning their ill-conceived wedding.

Birbiglia is so darn affable, you want him to succeed, and soon, because Abby is also so likable that you hope maybe the whole wedding thing will work out and they’ll be happy. Such casual charm permeates the whole story that even devices like breaking of the fourth wall, which can sometimes feel contrived, feel natural. Of course he’s addressing you, because of course you’re there relating to this story, right?

Well, kind of. If I hadn’t already seen The Comedy, which also features a New American Manchild — though of a much, much harsher sort — I might have not started to wonder about a broader pattern of how this “Dream Big” American ethos gets so ingrained in us. Do we still have the capacity to “Dream Small” and value intimacy and slowness and maybe even settling down? Or are the people who choose that path just different from the people who make independent movies? Can we have sustainable lives, or by extension, a sustainable culture if we stop valuing those humbler things in favor of Living the Dream? The impossible dream, I mean. Not that nice reasonable one our parents sometimes managed.

Sleepwalk with Me addresses the subconscious nudge that something might not be right via the titular sleepwalking. The dream sequences allow the story to travel toward the intersection of honest and embarrassing while still flowing well with the story. No small task for dream sequences. This is where Birbiglia/Pandamiglio’s fears are, and they’re relatable fears, which humanize the New American Manchild and help you understand what drives him (both toward and away). There’s anguish in them, but they’re presented buoyantly. Like he takes them in stride. Until he jumps out of a second story window (true story). In other hands, this would be harrowing, but here it is mixed with humor in a way that makes it altogether more memorable. Dude needs a change. And so he breaks off his engagement with Abby in favor of the road.

In the film’s denoument, he talks about how he visited Abby, now married with children upstate somewhere, and asked her why she stayed with him so long. She tells him she didn’t want to hurt him. He seems both flabbergasted and touched by this, and it’s hard to understand why. Mike/Matt is very aware of what he wants but seems unaware of the effects he has on anyone outside himself who isn’t part of an audience.

But can you blame him? Haven’t we all become narcissists to an extent that the term barely means anything? If you stop wanting families, how do you sustain communities? I really wish I would stop seeing microcosmic metaphors for how we as a country made such a mess of things via some of these personal stories I’m seeing at Sundance; but this is the definitive American film festival, and so it makes sense that it would help us define ourselves. Sleepwalk With Me holds up a clear and shiny mirror, one that truly reflects this American life.

Photo credit: Brian Friedman