Contrast the familiar with the unfamiliar

One thing I need to be wary of in my memoir is assuming that the idiosyncrasies of the world I grew up in were the same as other people’s.

At seven, I was forced to move to the Northern Territory, Australia – a world far removed from the southern state I’d come from, not only in distance, but also in environment. Not only was the soil a different colour, the flora strange, and the fauna downright dangerous, people did things in an altogether different way.

While it’s easy for me to describe the different way things were done by others, it’s harder to apply a critical eye to myself and my ways. How arrogant would it be to assume my ways are familiar to readers?

Sandy Blackburn-Wright in Holding Up the Sky describes how women in South Africa don’t ride horses, and contrasts it with the nugget that in Australia, men ride less than women.

This contrast allows us to see the strangeness of another culture regardless of where we’re from.

Blatant foreshadowing: Beware! Beware! Beware!

A danger in blatant foreshadowing is robbing your story of dramatic suspense.

I flagged this the other day, when I first spoke about blatant foreshadowing:

In fiction, you’d weigh up whether the loss of dramatic suspense was a worthy price for such blatant foreshadowing. But with memoir, the reader already knows the writer has survived to tell the tale, and no dramatic suspense is lost. In fiction, blatant foreshadowing stops readers turning the pages. In memoir, it keeps them turning.

While we know the memoirist survives no matter how horrific, challenging, or insurmountable his or her journey seems, we don’t know the outcome for any other character.

In Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky, makes the mistake of giving too much information too soon. When her adopted daughter talks to Sandy’s parents, Sandy foreshadows how important her parents will become in her daughter’s life. This is followed with Sandy’s anguish as her daughter sees her birth mother for the first time since they separated, and then the bureaucratic red tape she has to jump through to organise passports and visas.

Beware! What could have been a chapter where the reader connects to Sandy’s anguish is spoiled because we already know things will work out right.

Foreshadowing through metaphor

Blatant foreshadowing is easy. You spit out what you’re going to say and you can assume your reader will get it. Foreshadowing through metaphor presents more of a challenge for writers, and is more satisfying for readers even if they’re unaware consciously why.

In Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky, at the start of Chapter 23, Sandy explains an apsect of her graduate diploma. She undertook a visual literacy topic because of her background in voter education, studying how different cultures perceive different drawing techniques (trust me, you’d be surprised!). Her niche is so specific she supplies background information so the reader can understand it.

Whether or not she intended it, this explanation of her study becomes a metaphor for the rest of the chapter as she explains an African custom that a Western audience will not comprehend. Indeed, she finds the custom difficult to understand.

Sandy has prepared us at the start of the chapter for what will follow. It’s a subtle move and a challenge to pull off, but she executed it well.

Closing the circle

Blatant foreshadowing puts a writer in a position where they can give future details about minor characters.

When I was a kid, I loved reading Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story (or UK readers). He did the cool thing of starting each chapter with the letter of the alphabet in order. He frustrated me though because something really interesting would happen, and rather than pursue it, he’d say, “And that’s a story for another time” and go on with the main story.

I wondered what happened to those characters he introduced. Those stories started. Unfinished.

Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky doesn’t leave me in the same lurch. Because she’s used blatant foreshadowing, establishing that she’s telling the story from a point after the events of the story, she can finish the stories she starts.

On page 315, Sandy says:

His older girls, twins, shared his affinity [for the bush]: one ultimately became an environmentalist for the national parks and the other an advocate for permaculture.

I think it unlikely we’ll see those characters discussed again, but in finishing their story, Sandy has given these minor characters a sense of completion.

For my memoir, this means I can write from where I sit now and speculate about the futures unknown and the motivations of the people who were part of my life.

Foreshadowing: Nuggets of intrigue

By the end of this post, you’ll know how writers use foreshadowing to keep readers turning the pages and to prepare readers for what is to come.

But first, let me define foreshadowing and give you an example.

Foreshadowing is an aspect of the hook. Writers give readers a heads-up about what’s to come. This means the writer is making an assumption about point-of-view, namely that the story is being relayed to readers from some point in the future after the events of the story.

In fiction, you’d weigh up whether the loss of dramatic suspense was a worthy price for such blatant foreshadowing. But with memoir, the reader already knows the writer has survived to tell the tale, and no dramatic suspense is lost. In fiction, blatant foreshadowing stops readers turning the pages. In memoir, it keeps them turning.

Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky gives an example:

1992 was the Queen of England’s Annus Horribilis. It was also mine. I had hoped that I could leave behind the disappointments of Sizwe and start afresh. But not only did they follow me like a stray dog, other heartbreaks and betrayals were to litter my path. Yet I was unaware of all this as I unpacked my few belongings… (p.302)

The last sentence provides the entry into the narrative of the chapter. This far into the book we care so much for Sandy and the characters in her lives we want to know what’s gone wrong and why.

Another example of foreshadowing is this post itself.

How to treat characters – Part II: Taking a stand

Yesterday I spoke about extending grace to characters. Today let me address the flipside: taking a stand.

Some people, at least when it comes to writing a memoir, don’t deserve grace. My step-mum and uncles fall into this group. While their abuse helped me develop my good character today, and I have forgiven them, when it comes to talking about what they did, I need to stand up for what’s right and make clear their evil against the child I was.

One person in particular needs to be addressed. My beloved uncle. When he began abusing, because of the abuse I was getting from others, I believed the sexual abuse must be normal.

I got even further confused because I enjoyed being around this uncle so much. Unlike the other abusers in my life, he stayed kind outside the abuse. I kept liking being around him.

Over the years, because of this, I’ve taken the view that what he did was less wrong. But my view was wrong. If what he did to me had been done to someone else, I’d be angered. Why do I care so little for myself?

In the next draft of my memoir, I’ll make clear who did wrong. This courage will be balanced with consideration. Some people made honest mistakes and deserve a gentle touch.

A memoir that tells the evils of everyone comes from a bitter core, not that of someone at peace with his or her past.

How to treat characters – Part I: Extending grace

In the 21st century, it’s as easy to find fault as it’s ever been. What makes the difference now is there’s a market for memoirs that find the fault in everybody in the author’s life.

But is this the only way? And if it isn’t, what makes so many want to read and support the work of writers who do nothing but gripe and moan about the people in their shallow lives?

As I began work anew on my memoir, I was clear on this: It’s not a revenge book. Sure I was emotionally abused. Sure I was sexually abused. Sure I came from a broken home. And, I’m sure, readers could understand if I felt ticked off about what happened to me and the adults who let me down.

Most importantly, to tell my story, I do need to talk about things other people have done that aren’t particularly nice (and I’ll talk about taking a stand against wrongdoing in my next post). (Updated 5 April 2008 – “How to treat characters – Part II: Taking a stand” is here.)

So how do I get around this? Follow Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s lead in Holding Up the Sky. Throughout her memoir she says kind things of people, and if there’s anything bad to say, she often says nothing at all.

The only exception: When she’s taking a stand against injustice. Even then she keeps her thoughts short and minimises hurt to the person.

A very different approach to the spill-everything-about-everyone (emotional) gore memoirs.

Giving the bigger picture

How easy is to get lost in a memoir where a reader is given so many details to keep track of?

Sometimes, a short paragraph or section allows you to pull the camera back and give the reader the bigger picture.

Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky does this, after a chapter that’s been a whirl of comings and goings:

So I entered the second half of the year enjoying my new home and the growing community in which it was located, with both work and home groups providing stretch and purpose… All was well in my world as I celebrated my twenty-sixth birthday and I was very, very happy. (p.275)

From Sandy’s memoir, and my manuscript, I can see that this summary to help readers get their bearings is best used when a lot of changes have happened in a chapter or a long section or a lot of new information has been introduced.

People as description rather than characters

When people appear in a memoir, it’s either as main characters or minor characters, right?

Afraid not.

Although this is what I’d always thought, Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky shows how to use a list of people as description.

When describing a new area, Blackburn-Wright provides a list of African names. Though these people don’t appear again, it gives a ring of authenticity to the story. Concrete, specific details.

I thought this guideline would only apply when dealing with exotic people, i.e. those who present an angle different from what your readers would normally encounter.

But then I remembered earlier in the book, Blackburn-Wright did the same thing describing the people who travelled with her on her first trip to Africa, and they had Western plain Jane names.

While using specific details is a given, the lesson here is that lists of people show that your memoir happens in a bigger world than the one your main story takes place in.

The secret of humor

No matter how heavy the topic covered in a memoir, humor needs to be woven into the story to balance the darkness.

In the third draft of my memoir, I didn’t give a thought to this critical balance. The darkness is unrelenting, and while it reads fast, it’s not pleasant. Finding the funny moments – and they did happen no matter how horrible things were – gives readers the chance to surface from the doom and gloom before diving into it again.

Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s Holding Up the Sky shows the whole section doesn’t need to be funny to balance the harsh reality. In this excerpt she describes the aftermath of a run-in with the army:

We filled Robbie in on our way up Sweetwaters Road and he roared with laughter at the thought of us both standing frozen in the driveway. I also found it funny in the retelling, though it took Nat a good week before she could look back on it and laugh.

She also shows that rather than seeking to write it in a funny way, you can illustrate how readers can respond to the situation through how characters react.