Truth in Story for Memoir or Fiction #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

Life is messy. Very messy. Things don’t make sense. Sometimes we can’t figure out why someone does something. As humans, we want reasons for actions. We want order. And we want resolution to life stories.

Enter - the value of truth in memoir or fiction.  

Our job as writers of memoir or fiction is to find the orderliness in story; the reasons for actions; and of course, the resolutions found at the end of the tale we tell. Make no mistake. This is difficult work. Especially for memoir.

Memoir needs to be true. Absolutely. No question there. If you change the setting [where things happen], you are writing fiction. If you change the timeline of events [what happened first, etc.], you are writing fiction. Dialogue needs to be something that the real person would normally say. Don’t worry about exactly what the person said on October 15, 2004. You will drive yourself crazy.

Memoir is your truth, your belief of what really happened in a scene. I’ve read that it is okay change people’s names, but you need to place a disclaimer in the front matter of the book to say the names have been changed. Has anyone received different advice on using real names of NON-famous people? Please share what you know here at Adventures in Writing.

Fiction, on the other hand, can be based on a true incident or real facts and real people, but the writer doesn’t need to stick to the facts as she would in memoir. Think of historical fiction here or real murders or kidnappings. Many great story ideas come from factual events. A writer begins with fact and then fictionalizes what happens, what the characters think, why they behave the way they do. Sometimes I get tied up in the facts; like the fact that a rip current has never happened in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, that I know of, yet that’s where I placed my most recent story sold to Cricket Magazine where a rip current was the major action in the story.   

But if we get back to that “messy life” and truth that I started the post with, the biggest job of the writer is to write a story that seems truer than life, whether it’s memoir or fiction. People read to discover the reasons for actions. And except for some literary stories, readers want closure at the end of the tale. They want resolution because life doesn’t always offer that resolution.

This is extremely difficult in memoir because, like me, you may not exactly know the reasons—and feelings—for every event you include in the memoir. How many times can I say I felt insecure; felt like an imposter or worried that I’d fail and that would be the end of my college career. Too many, according to my editor. And I agree with her. Of course, that leaves me staring at the computer screen and the scene I’m working on to discover “what else” Victoria could have been feeling at the time. It’s about going deeper into the emotion of the scene and not just relying on the surface emotion – insecure, imposter, worry. This is what writers need to do in memoir as well as fiction.

I hope you’ve found some insight in what I’ve written. Please offer insight of your own. It would be truly appreciated. Please ask any questions about my college memoir in the comments section of Adventures in Writing. Thanks so much!

And thank you for visiting Adventures in Writing. Please follow my blog if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in the comment so I can be sure to do the same for you. To continue hopping through more amazing blogs or to join our Author Toolbox blog hop, click here. 

Imposter Syndrome in Fiction or Memoir #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

Imposter Syndrome. Is it real or not? I’d love to hear your take on this topic. However, for this #AuthorToolboxBlogHop post, I’d like to focus on making it real for your story. An author’s job is to make his or her story world and characters real to the reader, whether fiction or memoir. 

Let’s begin with a definition. Dictionary.com defines Imposter Syndrome as:

anxiety or self-doubt that results from persistently undervaluing one’s competence and active role in achieving success, while falsely attributing one's accomplishments to luck or other external forces. 

I don’t know about you, but in some instances, this defines me. Inferiority grabbed ahold of me and hung on with both hands for most of my college journey—especially at the University of Pennsylvania. I couldn’t get past the fact that I lacked the foundation the other students received to prepare for the Ivy League. I felt I got lucky receiving the Phi Theta Kappa scholarship to attend Penn. This brings on the feeling of being a “fake” IL student; the “oh-my-gosh what if they find out I’m not as smart as the other students” feeling. This is what I’m getting as part of the Imposter Syndrome. 

I’ve talked about Character Arcs and the need for progression of the character in the story before in an Author Toolbox post. You can read it here. 

To make our characters believable with whatever syndrome we want to give them, we need to look closely at the character as a whole person. We need to know what goes on in his life, on the outside, yes, but also what it means to him on the inside, why he feels so strongly about what is happening. Again, it’s the why of the story. Why does what happens on the outside of the character, the plot, matter to the character personally? Story is about how what happens in the plot affects one specific person—our protagonist. 

We can give our protagonist all sorts of disorders and problems. But we need to thoroughly understand both the disorder and the inner problem and how they manifest in this particular character. Many real people feel inferior to other highly accomplished people. I believe Imposter Syndrome is alive and kicking. I am a highly insecure writer; hence my connection to Insecure Writers Support Group, a great group to find support and security by the way. 

I hope these few suggestions help you to understand the need to know your protagonist intimately to create a character the reader will truly care about, whether it's fiction or memoir.

Please ask any questions about my college memoir and share any insight you may have about the use of Imposter Syndrome in writing your story in the comments section of Adventures in Writing. Thanks so much! 

And thank you for visiting Adventures in Writing. Please follow my blog if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in the comment so I can be sure to do the same for you. To continue hopping through more amazing blogs or to join our Author Toolbox blog hop, click here. 

Let the Story Unfold #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

            Writers should not unload all the information about their characters in one place in their stories. Readers do not want to see a who’s who bio for every character lumped together in the story. By the same token, writers should not pile on all the facts of their story world at the beginning of their novels or memoirs either. You know; world history, how devices are used, why things happen, and why it matters to the world at large. Besides being info-dumps, these methods take away the pleasure of reading a story. 

Let the story unfold naturally. Don’t answer all the reader’s questions on the first page or even the first chapter of a novel or memoir. Let the reader care about a person first. The story needs to unfold slowly as Jennie Nash of Author Accelerator tells her coaching clients. Once the reader connects with a character, then the writer can explain how the story world affects this person or family. We are creating a character arc. Characters, especially the protagonist, should change by the end of the story.

But where do you place the important material in the story?

The writer shares the information about his or her characters or the story at large at the time when those characters would be thinking about how things work in their world or thinking about their past because it affects the story present, the forward movement in the story. Many writers know this, but it’s very difficult to do.

At one point in my college memoir, the character of Victoria must face her fear of what opportunity might bring if she wins two prestigious college awards.

In allowing this story section to unfold slowly, Victoria discovers that what she’s afraid of are how her feelings toward her family might change if she is awarded an opportunity to study away from home. This was a dream of Victoria’s when she was younger. Now she feels she might blame her family, as if it could be their fault she can’t study just anywhere. She worries about what regret could do to her psyche. Regret from missed opportunities can be ugly. It makes people bitter. And Victoria does not want to be bitter—especially toward her family.

This forces Victoria to face the fact that she could never leave her family for semesters at a time; never leave her husband with all the work of raising five children and helping their special needs daughter with her education. Realizing her family comes first, Victoria decides to apply for the awards, knowing she would only accept an opportunity that she could use.

This is part of the character arc of Victoria. She will be forever changed from this point in the memoir story. She will not sacrifice her family life to live a college dream of studying away from home. She will find another way to complete her college education with no regret.

Please ask any questions about my college memoir and share any insight you may have in the comments section of Adventures in Writing about how you allow your story to unfold naturally. Thanks so much!

Please note:

I will not be posting on Adventures in Writing in July or August 2020. I am moving and have much to do, especially since I’m still trying to move forward on writing projects. Don’t know if I’ll be able to keep writing during this time, though. Thank you for your understanding.

And thank you for visiting Adventures in Writing. Please follow my blog if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in the comment so I can be sure to do the same for you. To continue hopping through more amazing blogs or to join our Author Toolbox blog hop, click here. 

Tell Me a Story: The Voice of Narrators in Memoir #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

When writing gurus talk about voice in a story, they are referring to the narrator’s voice, the protagonist’s voice, the person telling the story. And many times this has a lot to do with the author voice as well. We tend to infuse our narrators with wit, poignancy, or anything needed to tell our stories, whether fiction or memoir.  

There is so much to know about the different narrators in story; omniscient, limited, first person, etc. For this post, I’d like to concentrate on the voice of the narrator in memoir.

There are two kinds of narrators in memoir and the author needs to decide where she is standing when she is telling her story. The importance in memoir is “what the narrator knows and when she knows it.”

According to Jennie Nash of Author Accelerator, there are two narrators in memoir:

the writer, the person who lived the experience

and

the writer, the person who is telling the experience.

In story, it is who knows what, and when they know it. In memoir, there is the narrator at the beginning of the story arc and narrator at end of the story arc. In most stories, the character needs to grow and change no place more so than in memoir.

In my case, the narrator at the end of the story arc is the Victoria after her experience of attending college and graduating. What did she get out of it? Was it worth taking time away from the family to obtain that diploma?

But to tell this college story, I needed to choose:

Was I going to tell the memoir story as a narrator standing in the present time looking back on my college experience? Was I going to tell my college story as a narrator with the experience of having gone through college?

Or

Was I going to tell the story as an unknowing narrator actually going through the college experience for the first time?

Nash explains that a narrator in memoir who knows what she knows presently, after her experience, looking back is a more powerful narrator for the story.

So as memoir writers, we have to know:  who in the story knows what, and when they know it. In memoir you have:

The Narrator – unknowing before the experience or knowing after the experience

The Character in the memoir story

AND

The real Person who lived the memoir story.

Three different selves the memoir writer has to master. This is the difficult part of memoir story. If you don’t know the roles those three different selves are playing, you’ll struggle. And believe me; I struggled tremendously with this understanding. I still do.

As a writer of fiction, you have:

The narrator and

The character

NOT the person who lived the tale. This doesn’t come into play in fiction. But you still need to decide who in your story knows what information and when do they know it?

This is not an easy concept to understand. I hope I’m making sense here for you. It's ONE narrator then in my college memoir. I needed to choose how to tell the story; whether I was looking at the experience at the time of attending college as an unknowing narrator

or

if I was telling the story in the present time, after attending college with all the knowledge and insight gained since, looking back at my experiences.

            I chose to tell my college story as a knowing narrator after my college experience looking back on my experiences. I still have my character Victoria going through the experiences. I still have the real person Victoria who actually lived the college experiences; how she felt, what she did, how she coped. But my narrator is an experienced narrator who can infuse the manuscript [story] with knowledge gained from college and life experiences.

I’d like to thank Jennie Nash of Author Accelerator for helping me to understand the different narrators and character selves in memoir.

Please ask any questions about my college memoir and share any insight you may have in the comments section of Adventures in Writing about the voice of the narrator in your story. Thanks so much!

And thank you for visiting Adventures in Writing. Please follow my blog if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in the comment so I can be sure to do the same for you. To continue hopping through more amazing blogs or to join our Author Toolbox blog hop, click here. 

How to Get the Reader to Care About Your Protagonist #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

Getting the reader to care about your protagonist is important to the success of your novel or memoir. Yes, the action of the story is important, but if the reader doesn’t care what happens to your protagonist, the story falls flat.  

People care about people or any thinking creature you create. But they need a reason to care. Lots of things can happen in a story. We as writers need to make the story personal by telling the tale of one specific person. The reader needs to see how what happens in the story affects one particular character. Make the story specific to someone the reader cares about.

But how do we do that?  How do we get someone who doesn’t know our characters the way we do, care about what happens to them? Now I’m not saying that I have all the answers. Wouldn’t that be nice? I wouldn’t need to struggle to get my own stories down on paper if this were simple.

Let’s start by asking a few questions.

Who was this protagonist before the inciting incident, before the story present? There’s a broad question. Rein it in and try and think of answers, or scenes, that relate to your story situation or problem, both internal and external. What type of family or friend relationships did she have? Were these relationships important to her? Why?

Think about your protagonist’s profession before the story began. Why did she choose that profession? What were her beliefs at that time? Why did these things matter to her?

Whatever the internal problem is in the story, how did the protagonist come to deal with that problem? What happened in the first place to make her believe in this internal problem?

And most importantly, how did those around the protagonist feed that internal problem?

If we look at my college memoir, how did Victoria go from having trouble in third grade to not going to college?

Think in scenes or summary:

Victoria struggled throughout elementary school.

Victoria did better in middle school and wanted to sign up for college prep in high school.

Victoria’s father didn’t think she was capable of college work just because she was on the honor roll by middle school.

Victoria took secretarial courses in high school to be a secretary like Mom and friends.

Victoria’s siblings did not go to college either.

How did Victoria meet her husband? Where did she work after high school? Did she consider going to college after getting married?

No. She still believed she was that girl her father claimed was “not college material.”

How about after having a few children? Did she consider college then?

Nope! She was knee deep in babies and running the home to consider college.

Didn’t Victoria struggle with her inferiority before attending college as an adult?

All the time. She saw herself in her learning-disabled first born. Victoria struggled to help her daughter with her education and therefore her younger children as well. But she felt totally inferior to those college-educated people in the public education system.

There are more questions to ask to explain to the reader who Victoria was; how she got that way; and why it matters in her life. When I started writing my manuscript, I didn’t believe these questions were pertinent to my college journey, my memoir story. But they are!

As a writer, you are looking for personal information about your character to answer these questions. Readers are inquisitive. They want to know what makes your protagonist tick. Why she believes and acts the way she does in the story present. Good things, bad things. The reader wants to cheer for your protagonist as the story moves forward. We want readers to care what happens to her. Win or lose. Readers want to care about someone specific.

Please ask any questions about my college memoir and share any insight you may have in the comments section of Adventures in Writing about how you get readers to care about your characters. Thanks so much!

And thank you for visiting Adventures in Writing. Please follow my blog if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in the comment so I can be sure to do the same for you. To continue hopping through more amazing blogs or to join our Author Toolbox blog hop, click here.  

Developmental Editors and Beta Readers—the Need for Both #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

            Revising a manuscript can be a nightmare, or it can be a calm reevaluation of your story.

           

I know, I know. To combine the word calm with writer in revision sounds like an oxymoron. Like freezer burn or bittersweet. An oxymoron is a combination of two contradictory terms. Or maybe I’m the only UN-calm writer. I’m usually flustered about something. 

But staying calm during revision doesn’t need to be an oxymoron in terms. A solid revision requires a good reader for your story. Someone who knows story and what makes it work. This could be an editor, a book coach, or a trusted fellow writer or two.

This revision reader looks at your story as a whole. This reader needs to make sure the story holds together and the characters act consistently with the backstory you have created for them. And it’s a good idea to allow this trusted reader in on early versions of your story.

What I’m talking about is Developmental Editing. This should be the first step in the revision process. It can be done by a professional editor or a book coach. And can be helpful near the beginning of your story’s journey. Developmental editors or book coaches are there to be sure your story has no major plot holes. They make sure the characters are well-developed.

Developmental Editing is very important to your story’s success and shouldn’t be left for Beta Readers unless you have a trusted, accomplished story-writer friend who can show you what’s missing in your story.

Beta Readers are a wonderful part of revision AFTER you have your story down. I can’t wait to offer my memoir to Beta Readers. Usually writers want Beta Readers to address specific questions in their manuscripts.

For example:

Is the timeframe and location clear in each scene?

Where do you lose interest? Why, do you think?

What questions remain unanswered about the plot or who’s who?

Is the emotion on the page?

Do you get lost anywhere?

Beta Readers offer their opinions on sections of your story. They are great to give feedback from the point of view of an average reader to the author. This feedback is used by the writer to fix remaining issues with plot, pacing, and consistency.

I prefer an open dialogue with anyone who reads my stories. If they have questions about a passage, I like to have an opportunity to explain what I’m trying to say in the scene. Then I ask the reader what his interpretation of the scene is. Only then can I see what’s missing from the story.

As writers, we are very close to our stories, our characters. What we think is in the story, may not be when someone who does not know the story reads it. And yes—Developmental Editors tell you these things too.

You pay for Developmental Editors. You shouldn’t pay for Beta Readers. You are paying for the Developmental Editor’s expertise in the business of storytelling, of creating viable books for sale. They are the more expensive editors, when preparing a book for publication, as opposed to line editing—which is done at the completion of all other revision work for the story. Another important step to have completed.

I have used a book coach, originally from Author Accelerator, to create a solid version of my college memoir. I took a few months off from my memoir to create more YA short stories for the magazine market, to give myself distance from the memoir story. Now it’s time to pick up with my editor, Michele Orwin, and finish a final version of this memoir story.

Has anyone ever added scenes to their stories or memoir about what the protagonist was like before the inciting incident or before the story present? I’m interested in how you set up the scenes and where you placed them in your story. Please share any insight you may have in the comments section of Adventures in Writing. Thanks so much!

And thank you for visiting Adventures in Writing. Please follow my blog if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in the comment so I can be sure to do the same for you. To continue hopping through more amazing blogs or to join our Author Toolbox blog hop, click here. 

The Importance of Comp Titles for Fiction and Memoir #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

Finding comp titles for the novels or memoirs you are creating is important for a few reasons. First, seeking similar titles helps the writer actually see what has been published recently in their genre, on their topic. It shows the writer what’s selling and perhaps why. 

However, you are not only reading a possible comp title to see how it is like your work-in-progress. You should be reading the title to see how your book fits into the literary landscape on the topic or in the genre. How is your book different from the titles that are already out there? It’s not that we want to write something that is exactly the same as what is already out there. We want to write on the same topic, or in the same genre, but handle the problem—or tension—in a unique way.    

This is what makes writing so difficult. Creating a story with both internal and external tension is not cookie-cutter science. Yes, as writers we realize that certain plot points—I call them movements—need to happen at certain times in the story. I know particular genres need their “specifics” in stories, too.

But as far as I can see, it’s not the same old, same old—even in specific genres. In my YA adventures, I need more than just a different setting, a different national park. I need different external problems, different family situations, different characters who have specific internal troubles they are trying to overcome.

We read comp titles to see how our stories are similar just as much as to see how they are different.

Comp titles are also necessary for preparing a book proposal for traditional presses. Book publishing is a business. Gone are the days in which writers just sat and wrote. 

Nuts! I was born too late. That’s what I like to do.

Now writers need to be marketers as well. That’s a whole other topic I’m just learning about. Please offer any tips you may have. Thanks!

However, I believe comp titles can help even small presses or self-publishers because comp titles show the writer what’s out there in that literary landscape. And knowing what’s out there will help the writer to market his or her books. Writers will know where to place their titles.

I’ve been looking for recent memoir titles to read dealing with education or personal experience in college. I’ve read Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, Educated by Tara Westover, and J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. They all deal with the protagonist realizing he or she needed an education to move forward in life.

I may need to broaden my searches. I should consider inspirational works; the power of choices, of believing in yourself, of finding or beginning a dream and seeing it through with perseverance. I think there are different genres for memoir. I think there is one called “Life Experience.” I should go to Amazon and take a look at life experience memoirs.

*Please offer any recent memoir titles you’ve read that deal with life experiences; trying to better yourself or learning to believe in oneself, so I can add them to my reading list and see if they could be used as comp titles for my college memoir. I truly appreciate all your comments. They help me to move forward with my work.*

So how do you look for comp titles for your books? Please share any insight you may have here at Adventures in Writing.

Thank you for visiting Adventures in Writing. Please follow my blog if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in the comment so I can be sure to do the same for you. To continue hopping through more amazing blogs or to join our Author Toolbox blog hop, click here. 

Loglines and Taglines for Fiction or Memoir #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

First, I’d like to wish you all health and success in 2020. Happy New Year, Everyone! As I continue to crawl forward in revision on my college memoir, I’m thinking about loglines and taglines. When I researched online about these pitching tools for fiction or memoir, I gleaned the following definitions from blogs and webinars at writerly sites:

A Logline gives the gist of your book in a sentence. It tells something about the main character, the conflict, and the stakes. So, the WHO, the WHAT, and the WHY of your story.

A Tagline is a catchphrase that sucks the reader in. It’s the idea behind your book. Also known as the hook. It might be on the front cover of your book.  The tagline’s job is to evoke emotion. 

According to JennieNash of Author Accelerator, a pitch or logline is one line that gives some sense of the character arc of change; who they are, what the plot is, and where the plot goes.

Okay, so how do we do it? I found some questions that are helpful to answer when creating a logline and/or a tagline. So I answered them.

WHO is your main character?   Victoria, a mother of 5 young children

WHERE does the story take place?   South Jersey home and college campuses

WHAT is the situation?   Victoria tries to allow her special needs daughter Marie a chance at living her dream of attending college, but they are told Marie would never succeed.

WHY does it matter?   Victoria was told the same thing when she wanted to attend college.

HOW does the character solve the problem?   By swallowing her own fear of failure and beginning college herself first.

Now that we know who, where, what, why, and how, we condense it into what we as writers hope is a pithy logline.

“A South Jersey mom of five gives her special needs daughter the opportunity of college by swallowing her own fear of failure and beginning college first.”

            Does it work?

I think there’s an arc of change in the protagonist, the mom, from a paralyzing fear of failure to actually beginning college.

We know what happens; she’s going to attempt college.

And we know why it matters to her; she wants to help her daughter.

            Of course the story is much more involved than just these few pieces, but does it make someone want to read the whole book?

The tagline, the idea behind the book, according to our definition, the hook. The tagline is supposed to evoke emotion. I came up with many, but here are two I’ll share for your comment.

Every important journey begins with doubt.

Find permission within yourself to begin a difficult journey.

What are your thoughts on these? Do they evoke emotion? Is doubt even an emotion? Does finding permission within oneself sound more personal? Can other people [readers] relate easier to it than the more general statement about journeys beginning with doubt? Is finding permission more original?

These are necessary questions for all writers to consider as they try to condense their stories into pithy loglines and taglines.

*Please feel free to offer any insight or ask any questions regarding the details of my college memoir logline or taglines. It would be truly appreciated.* 

Has anyone prepared a logline or tagline for their story? I’m interested in how you came to condense your story into a sentence or two. Please share any tips you may have about loglines or taglines in the comments section of Adventures in Writing. Thanks so much!

And thank you for visiting Adventures in Writing. Please follow my blog if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in the comment so I can be sure to do the same for you. To continue hopping through more amazing blogs or to join our Author Toolbox blog hop, click here. 

Boiling the Story Down for a Synopsis #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

            I’ve been trying to condense my college memoir story into two double-spaced pages for a synopsis. Not an easy thing to do, as many of you realize. How could you condense all the tension, the action, the angst, the characters of a 200 page story into two pages? Many writers have longer works of fiction or memoir. The key is you don’t include everything.  

Writer’sDigest defines synopsis like this:

“A synopsis conveys the narrative arc, an explanation of the problem or plot, the characters, and how the book or novel ends. It summarizes what happens and who changes from beginning to end of the story.”

I’d like to add that a synopsis should still read like a story and showcase your voice. But how does a writer do this in a short document? The information I’m sharing here is a combination of what I’ve learned in books and online about synopses.  

Just like in your full-length book, the reader of a synopsis needs to know where we are in space and time and who the main players are in the story. Please notice the words “main players.” You can’t possibly include every character in a synopsis. My suggestion is to include the protagonist, any antagonist, and any character who guides or changes the protagonist in his story journey. Think about the characters who take up the most space in your story, the pivotal characters who help to change your protagonist the most.

If we use Harry Potter as an example, for a synopsis, you would include Harry Potter, Voldemort, Dumbledore, Ron, his first real friend, and Hermione. Many other characters have helped or hurt Potter through his journey to adulthood, but I feel these are the main players. And where are we in the Potter books? Mainly in the wizarding world at Hogwarts, a school for wizardry. As for time, it deals with each school year.

 In a synopsis, we also need to include why the story begins where it begins. If we turn again to Harry Potter, the real story begins when Harry reaches the age to begin wizarding school, his 11^th birthday.

 An important point to include in the synopsis is the protagonist’s internal struggle. What is the internal angst the protagonist is dealing with throughout the story? We need to include emotion and feeling in our synopses. I think the internal angst Harry deals with at the beginning of this series is finding people to love him, to help guide him to find his place in this new wizarding world.

Don’t forget to give the whole ending of the story in your synopsis, whether it is fiction or memoir. Write the entire synopsis in present tense and third person regardless of how you wrote the story, according to Jennie Nash of Author Accelerator.   

            In the synopsis I’m writing for my college memoir, I include myself, my special needs daughter and her situation as the impetus for my beginning college at this time, my father and his powerful words that lock me in feelings of inferiority and my other children and husband in general. By way of emotion I talk about Victoria’s struggles to be a role model for her children and her failures at college, her journey through community college and its awards making the Ivy League on scholarship a possibility. By way of an ending, I include that in Victoria’s ten-year academic journey, she learns that determination and hard work help her overcome her father’s powerful words and graduate cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2009.

*Please feel free to offer any insight or ask any questions regarding the details of my synopsis for my college memoir. It would be truly appreciated.* 

Has anyone prepared a synopsis for their story? I’m interested in how you set it up and what you included from your story. Please share any tips you may have in the comments section of Adventures in Writing. Thanks so much!

And thank you for visiting Adventures in Writing. Please follow my blog if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in the comment so I can be sure to do the same for you. To continue hopping through more amazing blogs or to join our Author Toolbox blog hop, click here. 

Universal Themes in Memoir or Fiction #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

            Universal themes in story can start out as statements. Love conquers all. Order leads to harmony. Heroes are always right. Loyalty to family is absolute. Universal themes are understood in any culture. They are assumed to be straightforward. Correct. Concrete. But in the writer’s hands, themes become human. They become specific. In other words, writers deepen these general themes and give them power by creating compelling stories.  

           

            By building stories around themes, writers personify them. Think of any romance where “love conquers all,” Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, many wonderful present day romance stories, and the ever-present Chicken Soup for the Soul books. What they all contain is the human side of the theme. The writer shows through actions and characters how this theme holds up in the real life of a story.

            But showing the theme to be true or false is only the surface of the story. The difficult job for the writer in creating a memorable story is to add tension. Tension drives the story. Conflict, both internal and external, shows the deeper meaning of theme. Conflict should be specific to one character or a small group of characters in the form of a belief. If we think about the theme of family loyalty, we can see how easily it can become misguided; abused spouses staying with their abuser for family reasons; children believing it is their fault they are being abused. Of course the theme of loyalty can be political or faith-based too.  

            The struggles you show in the story branch off your main theme. They show the inner conflict and why the character behaves as he or she does. Story events show the literal obstacles the character faces in life that are hampered by that internal, often misguided belief of the theme.   

            If I use my college memoir as an example with a main theme of believing in oneself, through backstory, the reader learns that Victoria had struggled through elementary school and finally makes the honor roll [good grades] by eighth grade. But when she comes to her father, a man who has always shown her love, to have him sign off on her choice of college prep courses for high school, he wouldn’t do it. Instead, he told her college wouldn’t work for her. She wasn’t smart enough.

It comes to the power of words from someone you trust and love. Because her father didn’t believe she could survive college, Victoria becomes locked in a vicious cycle of not believing in herself, in what she could accomplish. What Victoria comes to realize in this memoir story is that the power to believe in oneself comes from within. This power to believe in oneself, to obtain it and keep it, is a constant struggle for many people of all cultures.

            Well, what do you think? Please feel free to offer any insight or ask any questions regarding the universal theme of believing in oneself for my college memoir. It would be truly appreciated. 

Thank you for visiting Adventures in Writing. Please follow my blog if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in the comment so I can be sure to do the same for you. To continue hopping through more amazing blogs or to join our Author Toolbox blog hop, click here. 

Characters Look for Acceptance #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

            Just as real people want to be accepted by others, either into various communities or accepted by one special person, so too do our characters wish to be accepted in one way or another. Most people want that sense of belonging. Depending on our genre, as writers, we either make that sense of belonging happen for our characters or show why it does not. Of course, it can never be easy for our protagonists, whichever outcome we choose. The protagonist needs to struggle to make it happen or be forced to accept that it was never meant to be. And the reader wants to see that struggle. 

So how do we show our protagonists longing for acceptance and receiving it or not? It’s all in the specific details we provide through story or memoir, both internally and externally.

Let’s briefly look at two classic characters who long to be included.

Harry Potter wants to belong to a family, to be loved, to have friends. Through the story, the reader [or viewer] comes to realize why he doesn’t have these connections and through thoughts and actions [events] how he comes to gain them.

Luke Skywalker longs to join his friends, to move on with his own life, to be accepted into the rebellion as a person who matters. And as the story unfolds, the viewer comes to understand why and how he obtains what he wants.

            In memoir, remember, you are looking for real life details to tell the story. In my memoir about attending college as a mother of five, Victoria looks for acceptance in the academic conversation at Penn. She yearns for a sense of belonging, not the feeling of being an outsider with nothing intelligent to say. She is a non-traditional, older student attending a school of highly intelligent students. She gets in, but constantly feels the need to prove herself in class. To show this struggle unfolding for the reader, I include thoughts and actions, events that demonstrate how Victoria fails, and how she feels about it, and eventually how she succeeds at her task.

More importantly, Victoria wishes to be accepted by the writers’ community at Kelly Writers House on campus. She wants her writing topics to be important, to make a statement about her experiences. Yet obstacles, both internal and external, hold her back. She has children; she doesn’t have the time the younger students have. For the story to move forward, she needs to take action. Victoria attends lectures and seminars at the House. She submits poetry in a university-wide contest and receives honorable mention for it. But she feels ignored during the celebration. A setback. She submits again to a larger writing community, the West Chester Poetry Contest, and wins second place with a haiku. This community welcomes her into its fold, if only for a short while. 

In memoir the story is told through the lens of the narrator. The reader can only be in the head of Victoria. It is she who interprets the reasons for what other characters do in the memoir. Writers cannot get into the head of other characters in memoir because it is truth—not fiction.  

            Of course, writers can’t dramatize every scene of struggle in a story. However, writers should choose larger scenes that show the most challenge to our protagonist and summarize the lesser scenes or actions. Writers need to remember to show the outcome—good or bad—to any action or scene. These outcomes do not need to be lengthy, but rather precise. I am still learning which scenes to dramatize or summarize and which scenes appear to repeat the same feelings or outcomes and are not necessary in my manuscript.

As writers we need to show progression in our characters. If the story is all struggle with no change in the protagonist, no change in the character’s mindset, readers could feel cheated. I still think that readers are looking to see how our characters handle challenge to perhaps learn how they might handle a particular situation. Readers want to learn something new even while being entertained by your story. At least this is why I read.  

Please feel free to offer any insight or ask any questions regarding Victoria’s struggles in finding acceptance at the University of Pennsylvania. It would be truly appreciated. 

Thank you for visiting Adventures in Writing. Please follow my blog if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in the comment so I can be sure to do the same for you. To continue hopping through more amazing blogs or to join our Author Toolbox blog hop, click here. 

Please note that I will not post in August of 2019. I have many writing projects I desperately need to address. Thanks for always reading my Adventures in Writing blog posts and sharing your insight. It means the world to me. Enjoy your summer!

Endowing Your Characters with Traits to Solve Story Tension #AuthorToolboxBlogHop

            The characters you create need to be given certain knowledge or abilities in order to solve the story tension. Whether characters need to conquer self-fears, solve mysteries, get out of danger, or survive day-to-day traumas, writers need to choose specific qualities that would help their characters accomplish this. 

Knowledge is a big trait in many stories. In one of my short stories, my teen protagonist needs to help her younger brother who’s having an asthma attack in a cave. But as writers, we also need to explain how the protagonist obtains any knowledge. In my character’s case, she learned how to control her brother’s asthma from watching her mother do it. In another story, my young teen needed to understand how to back away from a wild animal on a mountain. Again, the knowledge was explained through story. The teen listened to park ranger talks.

Character abilities are another trait. Think of the superheroes’ abilities to fly, create fire, or shoot webs. Each of these traits helps the hero accomplish something important in the story, whether they are protecting the world, snagging the criminal, or saving their own skin. Everything that happens in a story needs to be there for a specific reason. It needs to move the story forward. Whether we endow our characters with the knowledge of the life cycle of bats in a cave or the ability to become invisible, the traits must be given to help the character solve the story tension. And they need to be specific.

Character traits must also solve the tension in memoir. In memoir, many times the protagonist is finding a way to cope in a particular situation. In my memoir about attending college as a mother of five, Victoria is finding ways to accomplish the foreign language requirement at the Ivy League level. In the pages just submitted to my editor, I’m up to 140 pages now; Victoria takes a twenty-page French placement exam. Believe it or not, she places into French 120 [French II].

In three semesters of French at Penn, two three-hour classes per week, Victoria deals with discussing racism and genocide, social and psychological issues and politics in class, writing weekly essays in French, creating blog posts and oral and video presentations, writing research papers, attempting listening and speaking tests in French. She is grossly out of her comfort zone and desperately searches for ways to cope in French class because she needs at least a B average to keep her scholarship.

To accomplish this she studies French vocabulary constantly, obtains a tutor through the university, seeks the prof before class to be able to explain in English her difficulties with learning the language, [you were not permitted to use English in the classroom]. And when all else failed, Victoria asks the younger students in class what the professor is talking about—when the prof is not looking of course. Tears of frustration are shed. Then Victoria learns about being able to take the language requirement as pass/fail, but she still needs to turn in and pass all the work required. Many times, her husband finds her asleep at her computer five minutes before the midnight deadline to post the work.

So what are Victoria’s traits at this time in the memoir? Perseverance. And when the last professor tells Victoria she does not pass the language requirement because she is not fluent in French, Victoria finds the courage to stand up for herself and speak with the Dean of Romance Languages. In doing so, she passes the language requirement at Penn.   

Our characters are unique. They require specific traits in order to solve the story tension. And as writers, we need to remember to explain how the character came to acquire that knowledge or ability, no matter what genre we are writing in.

So what character traits or abilities do you give your protagonists to be able to solve the tension in the story you are telling?

Please feel free to offer any insight regarding Victoria’s struggles learning French at the Ivy League level. It would be truly appreciated.  

Thank you for visiting Adventures in Writing. Please follow my blog if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in the comment so I can be sure to do the same for you. To continue hopping through more amazing blogs or to join our Author Toolbox blog hop, click here.