Some people come to memoir writing with a natural facility for storytelling. Don’t despair if you aren’t one of them. To a great extent, this is a facility which can be learned. It’s a matter of acquiring both technical skills and belief in yourself and in your role as storyteller.
You can learn to make effective use of a variety of technical skills to write successful stories.
I will mention only a few here. In other sections of MyMemoirEducation, you will learn more about these and other elements.
Successful stories usually have a recognizable beginning (“It was the year I was nine that my father fell sick”); a middle that tells what happened in the story (“He took to bed; my mother went to work; my grandmother came to stay”); and an end that reveals how the story concludes (“Finally, in the fall, he died, and slowly Mother pieced our lives back together again”).This section suggests features that make stories interesting to hear or read.
“Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.”- Successful stories have characters who are recognizably human. Don’t let your loved ones come off as “stick characters” in your stories. Even if you are writing about people you do not like and would prefer to show only their faults, write about some of their positive qualities or habits. Otherwise, your readers will not feel the humanity of your characters and may dismiss not only what you say about those persons, but also whatever it is you want your story to convey.
- Successful stories have action. Action is often presented as a conflict (the clash of opposing or contradictory desires, or an unfolding of events) that is resolved before the end—see Chapter 3, Section A. (“Afternoons after school, Janie and I would take turns sitting next to my father’s bed, reading aloud, enticing him to drink a little tea or listen to the radio. I willed my father to be distracted from his illness and return to being the dad I used to rough-house with in the backyard.”)
- Successful stories are full of sensory details (colors, shapes, textures, smells, sounds, flavors). When your stories portray a sensory world (“three sweet-scented roses”) rather than a vague one (“some nice flowers”), you make it easier for readers to take the leap of faith into the world of your writing.
If your story has abstract and vague wording like “After a while absence from home made fidelity difficult for him and he committed adultery,” your readers will be less interested in (and less swayed by) what you have to say than if your narration is filled with concrete and sensory details such as “One evening, four months after he left his wife and home to go work at a distant site, he went into a bar. He had worked in the sun all day building houses and he was very tired. Somebody played a love song on the jukebox, and he began to ache with loneliness. A waitress with piercing black eyes asked him how he was doing, and he told her a story. He made it into a funny story because he didn’t want her to know how lonely he really was. When he had finished, she laughed, and her laughter rang in his ears. He had not talked to a woman in this way in a long time and…”
The details above not only make this story more vivid but transform this lonely man into an Everyman.
The Greek myth of the Labyrinth illustrates the need for and material details in stories. The Labyrinth was a maze of passageways at the center of which lived the Minotaur, half man/half bull. In the story, a young man, Theseus, entered the Labyrinth to slay the Minotaur. Many young men had entered the Labyrinth before him only to become lost in the maze and perish. Theseus, however, connected himself to the outside world by a material detail: he used a string. After slaying the Minotaur, he followed his string to retrace his steps out of the Labyrinth and thus re-entered the outside world.
The Labyrinth story provides not only entertainment but guidance and reassurance for us as lifewriters. As lifewriters, we enter a literary maze at the center of which is “the truth” about our lives. If we are not to get lost in the psychological and emotional labyrinth of characters and events, we and our readers must be connected to the world by sensory and material details just as Theseus remained connected to the outside world by a string.
You can acquire the belief in your role as storyteller that is so necessary to transmit your stories effectively.
If you write your stories as honestly and as thoroughly as you can, you will come to believe in the rightness and in the importance of this work. This belief will lend your stories moral authority, and in its own way, your memoir will transport the reader just as the ancient legends and epics did and do.
Storytellers (and modern artists) are at their best when telling a story—not just because they entertain and dazzle us with their virtuosity but because they are aware that stories play an inherent role in guiding us to live life meaningfully and in reassuring us this can be done.I go…to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
—James Joyce
Being a storyteller is a calling. Even if you don’t understand or accept it now, you, too, are responding to this calling as you undertake to tell your story. (See “At the Workshop” below.)
- You will also begin to understand and accept your role as a storyteller as you do more and more lifewriting and become better with the technical skills (telling the how and the what).
At the Workshops
Tom was from the Azores. He sat in the front of the room, a dark man among the paler Franco-American and Yankee faces, and he listened attentively to my presentation on lifewriting.
When I asked for comments, Tom said, “Where I come from, there are older people who tell the stories of our islands. They know all the stories—even the stories that took place before people living there now were born.
“Whenever we get together, the storytellers tell these stories. As they speak, they look around to see who’s listening—especially the children. There’ll be some of the kids—most of them really—who don’t take too long to start fidgeting, you know. They want to be someplace else, anywhere else. ‘Who’s that by the river?’ and ‘What’s that noise over there?’ These kids leave as soon as they can.
“There’s another group of children who are so-so interested and they listen a while longer, but soon they’ve had enough and they wander away, too. The storyteller has more to tell than these kids want to know.
“But, then there are the others who don’t walk away—maybe just a few, one or two even. They listen to the storyteller’s every word. It’s as if they can’t hear enough. It’s not because they’re being polite or someone told them to listen. It’s because they need the stories the way other children need to run and play.
“The storyteller knows there are kids like these—probably he was one himself—and he makes sure he tells them all his stories. He knows these kids will be the storytellers for the island when he is gone.
“Don’t you have this here, too? You should tell people that all their children need to hear some of their stories and that some of their children, the ones who are really listening even if they’re only one or two, these kids need to hear all the stories. Who else will give these children their stories unless you do?”
Tom paused a moment and then he said, “People have to tell their stories. The new generation needs them.”
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