A matter of pacing

Pacing in a memoir gives readers a chance to recover from emotional events. My memoir deals with sexual and emotional abuse, so without balancing the heavy sections with lighter sections, I’ll lose readers, and may well lose hope of a publishing deal. Last year, a couple of girls at the bookshop read it and described it as ‘dark.’

Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky also deals with the heavy stuff: Witnessing South Africa toward the end of the apartheid era. After a particularly heavy chapter or section, she’ll find a way of lightening the next section. When Sandy goes on a Christmas holiday in London after her roughest year so far, the reader is as grateful for the break as Sandy is.

Yet even when she’s away, she contrasts living in the West with living in South Africa. It’s the use of contrast that keeps the lighter section connected to the main story and is something for me to consider in how I place sections in my memoir.