Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
Emotion and event
The realities of nonfiction and memoir
Long-form genres
Now that we’ve studied the shorter, self-contained genres of creative writing, it’s time to get a little more ambitious and consider several of those same genres in their longer manifestations, which is most often a book.
That might sound like an intimidating prospect, but when you break it down and think of a memoir or novel as the best parts of a big story, or a poetry or essay collection as your very best poems and essays, suddenly the task is more about assembling and organizing smaller parts than sitting down a typing a book beginning to end.
In Part 5, we consider the best strategies for putting together different genres in their longer forms, whether that’s a novel, a collection, a play, and so on. Likely, the idea of writing your own book is the reason many of you picked up this one.
CHAPTER 15 The realities of nonfiction and memoir
In this chapter
· Background study
· Data and honesty
· Remembering
· Writerly intervention
Nonfiction writers and memoirists often take advantage of novel-writing techniques to enhance their prose and develop their books. They create scenes and characters, use dialogue and description, and as much as possible, they try to show rather than tell.
These are all excellent ways to bring books to life, but in fact, there’s more to glean from fiction than scene, description, and dialogue. The strategies behind good storytelling are numerous, and many additional techniques are available for nonfiction writers and memoirists to borrow.
One important method involves setting up the action that’s to come in your book. To create the momentum that will keep readers turning the page, setting up future action is vital. This means letting us know in Chapter 3 that in Chapter 4, an important dinner will take place. Tell us not only that this dinner will occur, but why it matters, what’s at stake.
I sometimes read manuscripts in which the writer leaps into a high-intensity moment—such as a dinner where she tells her husband she wants a divorce—then inserts a paragraph in the scene to say she’s been thinking of taking this step for months. That paragraph is a tipoff. Instead of interrupting a dramatic encounter with explanation, set up the potent conversation in a previous scene so the reader feels the tension and wonders what will happen.
Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock famously described how to create suspense. In a scene in which a bomb explodes in a football stadium, he said, movie viewers will be frightened for a few moments when the bomb goes off. But if we know the bomb is under a stadium seat and will go off in 10 minutes, we’ll be frightened for 10 minutes. When you let the reader know what’s coming and why it matters, you increase tension and momentum.
Just as important as creating anticipation for a particular scene is to set up the whole plot trajectory. Elizabeth Gilbert begins her popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love with the sentence: “I wish Giovanni would kiss me.” We know immediately what she wants (love), we know what’s at stake (will she find it? can she be happy without it?), and we’re willing to follow her quest. The book, of course, teases us until close to the end.
To get readers to the end of your book, you need to make your scenes have consequences. In real life, after that difficult dinner with your husband, you might have watched the evening news. But if you were writing fiction, there would be a plot consequence to that dinner. The woman initiated divorce. When she did, she flirted with her divorce lawyer, a friend of her husband’s. Complications ensued. In creative nonfiction or memoir, as in fiction, you want to develop the result or consequence of the events you portray. What further action did that dinner propel? How did it complicate or feed the larger story?
Emotion and event
I like to suggest that writers think of the difference between a row of pearls on a string and a row of dominos that can be pushed over with the touch of a finger. The pearls simply sit next to each other, exerting no pressure. The domino, when tipped, will knock over the next, which will knock over the next. Don’t let your scenes rest serenely like a string of pearls on debutante no one wants to dance with. Rather, be sure they ripple with the energy and impact of falling dominos, one scene launching another.
IDEAS AND INSPIRATION
Where you place the plot consequences matters. Sometimes you want to hold off the repercussions for a short time to add tension and keep the reader hanging. But if you drop a particular plot line for too long, tension dissipates.
Limiting the amount of time you cover is one of the most central elements of effective storytelling. Real time progresses in a linear fashion, one day to the next. But dramatic time can leap over inessential events. A skilled storyteller dramatizes only those minutes that have an emotional punch and serve to advance the plot.
In her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi tells the story of a secret reading group of university students who meet weekly at her apartment. She could have easily described the first meeting from beginning to end, described the second meeting, and so on. But Nafisi knew that would be dramatically weak. Instead, she presents only brief slices of the meetings in her book. One day we see the women arriving. In another scene, we see them arguing over a passage in a novel.
These moments reveal crucial conflicts and emotions, and they are so vivid, the reader can easily imagine the whole two years of meetings even though we witness only a scattering of hours. The seasoned creative nonfiction writer or memoirist knows the difference between what the reader needs to witness (what has to be dramatized) and what can be left offstage. Rather than giving a dutiful account of the literary meetings, Nafisi uses the group as an opening to a passionate exploration of oppression, defiance, and identity.
So let emotion and event—not the passage of time—prompt your story. Don’t be bound by the calendar. This is another key element of strong dramatic writing. When you use dramatic time (selected, compressed) as a structuring device, you free yourself from the compulsion to follow linear time: June, July; fall, winter. Instead, you let the significant events and the deep emotions they unleash animate your story.
Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking ostensibly covers one year, from the evening her husband, John Gregory Dunne, succumbed to a sudden heart attack at the dinner table, to the anniversary of his death a year later. Yet her emotionally driven book is only loosely structured around the calendar year. Mostly it surges and swells with memory, association, and persistent anguish over resonant details from her life with her husband. Didion (or at least her nonfiction projection) surfaces from grief (water is a repeated image, and its fluidity is fitting to the movement of grief) from time to time to let us know it’s July or August, but the story immediately veers into another fit of remembered events that rise, like waves, over and over.
Loosening your story from chronological time allows you to follow an emotional logic: a pattern of association and recurring images that goes to the heart of what is significant. In the course of three pages, Didion swerves from a present moment at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, to a trip to Paris she and John took a month before he died, to his last cardiac procedure eight months before he died, to a taxi ride the night before his death in which he expressed despair. “Real” time is discarded in favor of the inner life of emotion, and the story is driven by memory and pain.
However, before you give yourself over to the driving force of emotion, consider the four elements that constitute important infrastructure for any book-length nonfiction: research, fact/truth, memory, and authorial intrusion.