| The Narrative Elements of Memoir |
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| Memoir Writing Workshops | |||
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The Narrative Elements of Memoir 1. First, some definitions. Memoir (or autobiography) contains stories about one’s life, usually on a very particular focus—a pivotal year after college; an affair and its aftermath; a relationship between mother and daughter. It’s impossible to write one’s whole life story; instead writers find a focus and then tell stories about people, events, or phases within that focus. Narrative refers to telling a story, the temporal sequence of how events are related to one another in time. Pacing is the technique by which we vary the passage of time, that is how slow or how fast we make the time pass dependent on the particular element of narrative writing we use, page by page. In Autobiography: A Reader for Writers, Robert Lyons says that autobiographers and memoir writers choose from a spectrum of possible ways to represent the passage of time when writing about experience. The spectrum has two poles which are far removed from each other: "narratives that comment extensively on experience and narratives that present experience directly." This is a good definition for our purposes here in discussing memoir and narrative time. It says basically that all memoir writers in order to tell about their experience must use narrative but they can use it in different ways. The poles of the spectrum (shown below) represent two different methods for telling our stories: one pole refers to an author’s direct presentation or showing of experience and the other pole refers to an author’s extensive comments about experience. These extremes will also involve varying speeds of time. Around the first pole we will group the faster elements; around the other pole we will group the slower elements. Try to think of narrative time as a spectrum of rates of flow—from a quick-flowing mountain stream to a lazy and meandering delta river. A good story does not move either fast or slow; it finds ways to vary the movement from fast to slow, from slow to fast, and everywhere in-between, sometimes on one page. ** We oppose the faster elements of showing with the slower elements of telling: Time moves faster:
Time moves slower:
** When narrative moves faster the writer is emphasizing action, drama, immediate experience; the time that passes is more like actual time, not exactly clock time, but an approximate time in which single events occur. When narrative moves slower (or stops altogether), the writer is emphasizing commentary, summary, and observation about people, events or ideas: the time that passes is more like psychological time, in which time is exaggerated. To further refine narrative time, I like the terms scene and summary. Scene is usually rendered with faster-paced narrative techniques and summary is usually rendered with slower-paced narrative techniques. A scene, says Janet Burroway, "deals with a relatively short period of time at length." A summary "covers a relatively long period of time in relatively short compass." Interesting! When you want to show how long a short period of time has taken you need to write a scene. And when you want to show how short a long period of time has taken you need to write summary. Burroway continues. "Summary is a useful and often necessary device: to give information, fill in a character’s background, let us understand a motive, alter pace, create a transition, leap moments or years. Scene is always necessary . . . . A confrontation, a turning point, or a crisis occur at given moments that take on significance as moments and cannot be summarized." Telling the stories of our lives in memoir requires scenes. Summary is also important but too much of it sounds like our lives were more thought about than actually lived. To write a scene we use: specific narrative action, emphasizing the action with verbs and with sentence rhythm, short sentences or parallelism; and dialogue, both between characters and within an individual character. To write summary we use: summarized action and reported thoughts and feelings, which includes the commentary we receive from an author’s critical examination of an idea or analysis of fact and the description we receive from an author’s detailed observation of people, places, and feelings. 2. SCENE: Specific Narrative Action ** Snow fell fast that evening. My mother went into labor. Her weeping and writhing scared the younger children. I was scared, too, but I didn’t cry. My father told me to watch the kids while he went out to see if there was a hospital close (there was no phone in the room, only some kind of buzzer that the office could use if a call was coming in). When he opened the door I glimpsed, in yellow-bulb light through wind-whipped swarms of snow dust, white mounds where cars had been. I told the kids to lie on the floor. I spread a blanket over them to muffle their whimpering. My mother seemed foreign and terrible. I didn’t dare approach the bed. I turned on the TV. She screamed louder, making noises I’d never heard. I turned the volume as loud as it would go, draped a sheet over the cabinet, and squatted under the glowing tent. The noises my mother made were drowned out by a roaring laugh-track, but the screams weren’t. I ran into the bathroom, locked the door, turned out the light, put the seat down on the toilet and pressed my cheek to the seat, mumbling please, please . . . . The Republic of Burma Shave Richard Katrovas ** Verbs: In this example Katrovas uses a cannon-full of verbs and verbals (a verb used as a noun, an adjective, an adverb, or verbs used as infinitives, participles, and gerunds). There are only small bits of information given but a lot of action is rendered. The action runs from the child’s admission of feeling scared to the actual showing of it in the last sentences with verbs like "squatted," "drowned," "roaring," "locked," "pressed," and "mumbling." These verbs identify his actions. Also notice the phrases that are shaped by action words: "when he opened the door I glimpsed"; "wind-whipped swarms"; "to muffle their whimpering." Verbs and verbals give language an immediacy that draws us in and keeps us reading and wanting more. Sentence Rhythm: In the beginning Katrovas creates a series of short sentences to emphasize quickness: the first three are simple sentences, the fourth, compound, or a joining of two simple sentences. This shortness makes us recognize the subject-verb-object pattern and fairly sweep through them as if we are skating on ice. The author also shows parallelism (grammatically equal elements that correspond in a sentence). "Yellow-bulb light" and "wind-whipped swarms" are parallel. So are the verb constructions he uses: "I turned . . . , draped . . . , and squatted. . . ." "Foreign and terrible"; "weeping and writhing." These devices make the sentences flow smoothly and they emphasize the importance of what is being shown, namely the boy’s growing fear. 3. Dialogue Here Maxine Hong Kingston’s mother tells her to go and demand candy as payment from a druggist who wrongly has medicine delivered to their home. The family has just refused the medicine and sent the delivery boy away. ** "Aha!" she yelled. "You! The biggest." She was pointing at me. "You go to the drugstore." "What do you want me to buy, Mother?" I said. "Buy nothing. Don’t bring one cent. Go and make them stop the curse." "I don’t want to go. I don’t know how to do that. There are no such things as curses. They’ll think I’m crazy." "If you don’t go, I’m holding you responsible for bringing a plague on this family." "What am I supposed to do when I get there?" I said, sullen, trapped. "Do I say, ‘Your delivery boy made a wrong delivery’?" "They know he made a wrong delivery. I want you to make them rectify their crime." I felt sick already. She’d make me swing stinky censers around the counter, at the druggist, at the customers. Throw dog blood on the druggist. I couldn’t stand her plans. "You get reparation candy," she said. "You say, ‘You have tainted my house with sick medicine and must remove the curse with sweetness.’ He’ll understand." "He didn’t do it on purpose. And no, he won’t, Mother. They don’t understand stuff like that. I won’t be able to say it right. He’ll call us beggars." "You just translate." She searched me to make sure I wasn’t hiding any money. I was sneaky and bad enough to buy the candy and come back pretending it was a free gift. "Mymotherseztagimmesomecandy," I said to the druggist. Be cute and small. No one hurts the cute and small. "What? Speak up. Speak English," he said, big in his white druggist coat. "Tatatagimme somecandy." The druggist leaned way over the counter and frowned. "Some free candy," I said. "Sample candy." "We don’t give sample candy, young lady," he said. "My mother said you have to give us candy. She said that is the way the Chinese do it." "What?" "That is the way the Chinese do it." "Do what?" "Do things." I felt the weight and immensity of things impossible to explain to the druggist. "Can I give you some money?" he asked. "No, we want candy." He reached into a jar and gave me a handful of lollipops. The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston ** Dialogue Between Characters: There is much to say about Kingston’s skilled dialogue. First, notice that she uses the word "said" to indicate that fact 99% of the time. No need to use adverbs—"he said gleefully": Let the words spoken be gleeful; "Good Golly Miss Molly." Good dialogue is direct; people are speaking to each other. They aren’t giving loads of information or pontificating in some elevated language. You can write poetry; but no one speaks it. When people speak directly to one another, they often struggle a bit with each other. Not life-and-death, but an exchange of differences. Try it. Write a conversation between a child and a parent and I bet you that some conflict ensues. Remember: make a person’s voice sound like his or her unique voice and make your voice (depending on your age) sound like you. By the way, no one expects you to remember what you said "back then," so it is OK to make it up, but make it up authentically. Refrain from writing dialogue in dialect; it draws too much attention to itself and it’s too hard to read. Excellently written dialogue shows us a character’s personality and motives. Emphasize these things. In the above example we know after hearing only a few choice phrases from Mrs. Kingston that she is opinionated, demanding, and unfair to children. 4. Internal Monologue: The internal monologue (words "spoken" to yourself so only you hear them inside) is italicized in this next section but doesn’t have to be. It should be obvious where the writer is thinking (writers often say, "I thought") with words, telling himself how he really feels or, in this example, how he really wants to be seen. ** Big-mouth Tony just swung out, and I swung back. . . . My fist hit Tony smack dead in the mouth. He was so mad he threw a fist at me from about three feet away. I faked and jabbed and did fancy dance steps. Big-mouth put a stop to all that with a punch in my mouth. I heard the home cheers of "Yea, yea, bust that spic wide open!" Then I bloodied Tony’s nose. He blinked and sniffed without putting his hands to his nose, and I remembered Poppa telling me, "Son, if you’re ever fighting somebody an’ you punch him in the nose, and he just blinks an’ sniffs without holding his nose, you can do one of two things: fight like hell or run like hell—’cause that cat’s a fighter." Big-mouth came at me and we grabbed each other and pushed and pulled and shoved. Poppa, I thought, I ain’t gonna cop out. I’m a fighter, too. I pulled away from Tony and blew my fist into his belly. He puffed and butted my nose with his head. I sniffed back. Poppa, I didn’t put my hands to my nose. I hit Tony again in that same weak spot. He bent over in the middle and went down to his knees. Down These Mean Streets Piri Thomas ** Thomas’s use of internal monologue effectively changes the pace of the fast-moving action in this scene. If the writer does not overindulge the technique, internal monologue usually slows the movement just a bit and makes the action pause or breathe because the author is reflecting momentarily on experience. Why do this? To reveal an inner reality, an actual motive, an unvoiced truth. As a slowing device this technique is perhaps closer to the next category, the slower-paced summary. 5. SUMMARY: Summarized Action ** I succeeded in getting a considerable distance on my way to the woods, when Covey discovered me, and called after me to come back, threatening what he would do if I did not come. I disregarded both his calls and his threats, and made my way to the woods as fast as my feeble state would allow; and thinking I might be overhauled by him if I kept the road. I walked through the woods, keeping far enough from the road to avoid detection, and near enough to prevent losing my way. I had not gone far before my little strength again failed me. I could go no farther. I fell down, and lay for a considerable time. The blood was yet oozing from the wound on my head. For a time I thought I should bleed to death; and think now that I should have done so, but that the blood so matted my hair as to stop the wound. After lying there about three quarters of an hour, I nerved myself up again, and started on my way, through bogs and briers, barefooted and bareheaded, tearing my feet sometimes at nearly every step; and after a journey of about seven miles, occupying some five hours to perform it, I arrived at master’s store. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass ** In this paragraph Douglass is summarizing the action of his escape from the slave-breaker, Mr. Covey. (Good summarized action can move along and seem like specific narrative action; it really moves at a medium pace, neither fast nor slow.) Notice that because Douglass is narrating a long period of time "in relatively short compass" the emphasis is on time words that state how long the time passing is. Words and phrases that name time periods are: "a considerable distance on my way," "made my way to the woods as fast as my feeble state would allow," "lay for a considerable time," "for a time," "after lying there about three quarters of an hour," and "a journey of seven miles, occupying some five hours." There is a bit of action, such as when he says his feet were torn by the briers "at nearly every step." But Douglass is not giving us the details of action, the verbs and the verbals. Instead, he is summarizing his flight from Covey so as to build the suspense (that is, to build the fear in us, his readers) that Covey will be even more eager to break him when they meet again. This scene, a few days later in the story, is dynamically narrated and takes several pages to tell. In it Douglass battles Covey for two hours and beats the slave-driver into submission. Though still enslaved, Douglass is never whipped again. 6. Reported Thoughts and Feelings Commentary: ** It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working—bowels, digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned—reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less. "A Hanging" George Orwell ** Commentary, particularly in short essays, is effective only in small doses. No one disapproves of what you want to say about your experience. As Orwell shows us, the difference between life and death is at times as poignant as who is powerful and who is powerless. But the fact that you are commenting on what has happened or about to happen means it is no longer happening or has not yet begun to happen. Such commentary, by its nature, slows the story down. Note that this is the only time in the essay that Orwell comments on the action and thus the only time that it really slows down. (An analysis of this paragraph reveals that Orwell does make the summary move along briskly by emphasizing the man’s activity, both his march to the gallows and the fate which awaits him.) Indeed, we remember his essay not because of the comment but because of the horrific scene that Orwell dramatizes for us: the hanging—from the time the prisoner is marched to the gallows up to an awkward moment among his hangmen afterwards—occurs in about eight minutes, roughly the time it takes to read the essay. 7. Description ** Our Little Store rose right up from the sidewalk; standing in a street of family houses, it alone hadn’t any yard in front, any tree or flowerbed. It was a plain frame building covered over with brick. Above the door, a little railed porch ran across on an upstairs level and four windows with shades were looking out. But I didn’t catch on to those. Running in out of the sun, you met what seemed total obscurity inside. There were almost tangible smells—licorice recently sucked in a child’s cheek, dill-pickle brine that had leaked through a paper sack in a fresh trail across the wooden floor, ammonia-loaded ice that had been hoisted from wet croker sacks and slammed into the icebox with its sweet butter at the door, and perhaps the smell of still-untrapped mice. . . . Shelves climbed to high reach all the way around, set out with not too much of any one thing but a lot of things—lard, molasses, vinegar, starch, matches, kerosene, Octagon soap (about a year’s worth of octagon-shaped coupons cut out and saved brought a signet ring addressed to you in the mail. Furthermore, when the postman arrived at your door, he blew a whistle). It was up to you to remember what you came for, while your eye traveled from cans of sardines to ice cream salt to harmonicas to flypaper. . . . "The Little Store" Eudora Welty ** Three elements are important in writing description: naming, detailing, and an appeal to the senses. Naming: Note the many things that Welty shows us on the shelves. These are not generalized packages of food and kitchen ware; they are real items: "lard, molasses, vinegar, starch, matches, Octagon soap" and so on. Each paragraph is full of specific things named, some common, some uncommon. Things are recognizable when they are specified. Welty even distinguishes the building by that which is not a part of it—no yard, no tree, no flowerbed, i.e. no outer distinction. Detailing: Welty shows us that some things she names have particular characteristics which need further identification. The mice are "still-untrapped"; the porch has "a little railing"; the building is "plain frame"; the smells are "almost tangible"; the obscurity inside is seemingly "total." Welty does not lay on the detail as some writers do, drowning the reader with an old, polyester, leather-strapped, chemically-treated orange life preserver (though such a description is possible in the right context). Here’s some advice. Don’t linger too long on a particular focus unless it is necessary; otherwise we’ll never get to go wherever it is you’re taking us. The old axiom states that details should be significant. Details that matter convey an idea or a judgment or both. Welty’s details for the outside of the building are sparse; for the inside of the store they are vivid. This says—without her telling us so—that she was attracted more by what the store actually stocked and sold than by how the store looked outside. She was especially attracted to the smells. Appeal to the Senses: Details come into us, literally, through our senses; we say they are concrete when they appeal to our senses—not only the eye, but the ear, the tongue, the fingertips, and the nose. Welty is ecstatic about the smells of the store. "Licorice recently sucked," "dill-pickle brine that leaked," "ammonia-loaded ice . . . that slammed into the icebox," "still-untrapped mice"—all appeal to her (and our) sense of smell, smells released and kept inside the store. She tells us the smells are almost tangible then delights in naming and detailing them for us, so we can smell them, too. 8. The most interesting memoirists combine these techniques in creative and unexpected ways. But, much of the time, they also employ a clear and direct prose style with which to tell their stories. All writers should try for originality. But no writer will hold a reader’s interest unless she regularly uses clearly shown action, dialogue, summary, and description—for no other reason than to let us recognize the elements of narrative and, thus, follow the contours of the story. Compose conspicuous scenes with dialogue and specific action; stop the action now and then for a good paragraph of telling description; don’t be afraid to analyze or reflect on what has happened to you from your perspective now. Use these elements clearly and, on occasion, mix them up, and you’ll find your story progressing with liveliness and interest.
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