Bullets and bracelets insights

Confess I’m a Wonder Woman fan, even at a comics shop, and I feel the need to justify. “I’m a capital-F fan, but you need to understand she’s really, really cool.” But why bother? Why not simply embrace what works for me and gives me pleasure along the way?

George Perez draws Wonder Woman

In 1987, I was 11 and Wonder Woman was relaunched under George Perez’s artistic magic. The relaunch meant I could collect the series from issue one, something I’d never done before. Perez drew heavily from Greek mythology and created characters I still remember better than many childhood friends.

Diana (Wonder Woman) was on a mission: to stop a god gone mad (and later to represent Amazon ideals in man’s world). Then, I was on a mission: escape the abuse of the Northern Territory and return to my faithfully loving Melbourne family. Now, I’m on another mission: tell the story of that escape and the return in my memoir.

A ridiculously simple tool I’ve created to aid my progress forward is the Mission Log. From my sluggish waking moments to my hyped retiring moments, I record the time, and my purpose right now. When completed, I record what I did well and learned lessons.

My first awaress of being on a mission came from Wonder Woman, but now I’m mission-focussed each day. The Log keeps my mind on goals and makes me question how I use my time.

Managing writing demands

As a writing coach, one of the top concerns people bring to me is the lack of time to write. Although I’ve always been able to help people, it wasn’t until I started revising my memoir that I’ve come to appreciate how tough it can be to find the time for my most important work.

So these are my top tips to write the most in whatever time you can carve out for yourself:

• Banish the belief that you need big chunks of time to get anything worthwhile done. A few minutes here and there throughout the day will add up to the big chunks you’re after.
• Do something every day – bar one. Take at least one day off from your customary work each week. You’ll gain freshness and many of your writing dramas will solve themselves.
• Think through your day to foresee pockets of time you can use, and make sure you have your notepad, laptop, and any files you need. You can get a lot done in your commute. On public transport you can work in a notepad. In a car, dictate into a digital voice recorder.
• For speed’s sake, invest in dictation software. It takes a while to train it, but when it’s up to speed, your speed is up.

Another aspect needed is motivation, which comes from setting mini-milestones on a big project and achieving them. This, however, is another blog for another time.

Start at the start

Uncertain of where to begin, many would-be memoirists don’t start at all.

Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia gives an example of the perfect point:

In my grandmother’s dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair…
“What’s that?’
“A piece of brontosaurus.”

It’s this piece of skin, seen as a child, that sparks his interest in Patagonia and sends him there years later to find answers to questions that spiral outward from the riddle of the brontosaurus.

Chatwin’s chronological start is only one technique in a writer’s repertoire. Given Patti Miller’s definition of memoir, we can come up with other places to start: theme (such as Nigel Slater’s Toast, burning toast as a symbol of a mother’s love), place (such as Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris, landing in Paris, the result of an impulsive decision), or topic (such as Kieran Kelly does in the forthcoming Aspiring, as he starts an ascent of New Zealand’s Mt Aspiring).

For my memoir, working title Coming Home, the opening scene will provide a litany of the reasons the six-year-old me hates my stepmother after only a few months of knowing her (actually it only took hours, but you’ll have to read it to see what I mean).

We all have to start somewhere and where we start usually needs to connect to where we finish, but that’s a subject for another article, another time.

Proustian phenomenon

One way you can know your work is ready for print, writing instructors advise, is when you can read another writer’s work and see ways to improve. I experienced this the other day (which I wrote about here). But this writing advice is insufficient.

Over the years, publishers and authors have told me my book is ready to publish; composers and authors have thrust their agents upon me. My memoir, however, has always fallen short of my target. The reason I’ve lagged my feet all these years (which I wrote about here) is because I lacked clarity about the end result.

My best friend, Paul, gave me the picture of the completed work I needed when he introduced me to Proust’s ideas, that my work, rather than being analytical, needed to be evocative.

Life writing instructor Patti Miller expands on this in The Memoir Book:

I believe it is important to write not from topics, but from individual memory. Memories are aroused and connect to one another not by orderly logical progression but, as we have seen, by a complex linking of senses and emotions across the brain…

What it means is that you only need one sensory aspect of the memory to be activated for all the rest to come flooding back. Some researchers call this the “Proustian phenomenon”. It is the key to the memory-based approach to writing memoir rather than the topic-based approach.

And just to make sure I got the message, as if my best friend and my writing instructor weren’t clear enough, God delivered me a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past via my ex’s hands.

I’m excited because this Proustian phenomenom may enable me to write my memoir on my terms.

Sentences can be long

Sentences can be long. My entire professional writing life has been built on the belief short sentences are best. But as I immerse myself in all manner of creative non-fiction and evocative writing, I discover long can be more effective.

In another post I will explore how to know when to write long sentences, but now consider this beauty from Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail:

We spent a wretched night in our bunks, faintly lit by the dancing glow of the stove, which the timid man (unable or reluctant to sleep with the restless mass of Katz bowing the slats just above his head) diligently kept stoked, and wrapped in a breathy, communal symphony of night-time noises – sighs, weary exhalations, dredging snores, a steady dying moan from the man who had eaten the Philly cheese steak sandwich, the monotone hiss of the stove, like the soundtrack of an old movie – and woke, stiff and unrested, to a gloomy dawn of falling snow and the dispiriting prospect of a long, long day with nothing to do but hang out at the camp store or lie on a bunkbed reading old Reader’s Digests which filled a small shelf by the door.

One-hundred and forty magnificent words (my paragraphs average 50), and not one word wasted. No longer will I slice my sentences just because I feel a sentence is too long.

How to learn from bad writing

When I started Sara Wheeler’s Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile, I thought, “This is encouraging. The draft I have is on par with this.” I soon stood corrected; if anyone asked me to given them a definition of “bland,” I’d hand them a copy of this book.

A quote from the book says, “[Chilean poet] Neruda was committed to the idea that a writer should be interested in truth, and that it was more important than style.” Wheeler fails in a search for truth and her writing has as much style as discarded garden cuttings.

She lacks curiosity. Throughout the book she throws out these fascinating single sentences – “The vehicle smelt of turpentine (this turned out to be a woman behind us eating mangoes)” – and then fails to investigate them at all. Is it the woman that smells of turpentine, or the mangoes, or the act of the woman eating the mangoes? She’s aroused our interest; it’s not enough to simply say, as she does repeatedly, “I never did find out what happened.”

The best thing that came from the book was I learned that if I was to die today, my best friend, Paul, could tidy up my manuscript and the executor of my estate could see it published. It’s not at the standard I seek yet – but if I was no longer around to raise it to that level, it would be published and find whatever audience it can.

A bad book can be just as instructive, and as encouraging, as a great work. Having a picture of the things you don’t want to do allows you to focus on their opposite and work on the things you do want to do.

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.