TO OZ? YES, TO OZ!
Editor: In this memoir excerpt which uses fiction technique to emphasize feeling, Sara Etgen Baker writes about a defining moment of her childhood as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded.
It was an autumn day, October 22, 1962—far enough from summer to have lost the heat and not close enough to winter to have that bite of cold. Above me, brilliant shafts of sunlight ignited the color in each falling leaf. Below me, each leaf fell, not knowing that this was its last dance in the sunlight—its last chance to play in the crisp October air. It tumbled with such elegance, but all too soon it was lost in the sea of autumn leaves swirling around my feet. Part of me wanted to find it, pick it up again, and toss it high so that perhaps it would have a second time around. But time was short; and whether I liked it or not, twilight stole away the opportunity and the vibrant colors of the day. So I scurried home crunching the dried leaves under my feet.
“Where have you been, young lady!” Mother peered around her newspaper.
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The First Paragraph Can Make or Break a Memoir for the Reader
Writers sometimes struggle with how to begin a story and will not write the story until they have the beginning—the first paragraph.
This is not a good way to proceed.
The first paragraph of a memoir sets the tone.
The first paragraph creates the tone and often presents imagery that will shape the reader’s appreciation of your story—whether a vignette or a full memoir.
In a short story I wrote many years ago, I did not compose the first paragraph until I had written the whole story. Frankly, I was stumped and did not know how to begin the story, how to launch the reader.
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Memoir Versus Fiction, or Is Memoir Fiction?
I emphatically don’t agree that memoir is fiction. Although a memoir invariably uses fiction techniques—and we will look at one memoir in this post, it must be an as-much-as-possible true accounting of an experience. I must confess to not seeing a problem with the idea of memoir versus fiction. Memoir IS NOT fiction!
A strength of fiction is its ability—when it is done right—to place us in the story, to enable us to get out of our “present” and enter into the time of the story. The memoir writer has to aim for the same level of involvement. In that sense, there is again no conflict of memoir versus fiction.
In many cases, this involves removing the narrator from our field of attention.
An easy mistake to correct
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