Insecure Writers Want to Know: If you could choose one author to be your beta partner, who would it be? Why?

            First, I’d like to thank you, my fellow Insecure Writers, for your patience while we moved. In that short space of time, we moved our oldest daughter in with her sister and her family. My husband and I packed up our home of 36 years, sold it, and moved three hours away. And finally, we moved my 96-year-old mother-in-law into a nursing home. Sheesh! I’ll be going through boxes forever looking for what I need at the moment. You can read a short post with photos about our moving adventure at http://campingwithfivekids.blogspot.com.  

            Now let me think…the perfect beta partner for me, if I could choose anyone, would have to be the writing teacher and author Beth Kephart.  Kephart has the ability to look at themes and characters from many angles. She sees the story beneath the plot. This is a gift for any writer.        

            Kephart is a memoirist as well as a YA writer and poet, and it never ceases to amaze me how she can uncover such deep emotional truths in life through story, in both fiction and memoir. 

            I write both YA fiction and memoir and would love to hear her feedback on whether I have reached the inner core of the story I’m trying to visualize for the reader. However, being that highly insecure writer that I am, I’m not sure if I’m brave enough to hear it. Of course this is why writers need to be brave in order to improve their writing. We must learn from each other. Share ideas and methods. Choose the ones that will work for us to make our stories the best they can be. And then we need to be brave enough to let the stories go and send them out into the world for others to judge whether we have accomplished our goal of creating a great story. 

I’ll be interested to see how you’ve tackled this month’s question. It’s great having a topic to share our thoughts on each month. I am extremely thankful for all of you for being my sounding board and advisors in this writing and publishing journey. 

Thanks so much for visiting! Please follow Adventures in Writing if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in your comment so I can be sure to do the same for you.

This post was written for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. We post on the first Wednesday of every month.  To join us, or learn more about the group, click HERE.   

The Narrative Voice in Writing

The narrator guides readers through 

the story journey just as a trail guide 

leads hikers through the forest. 

The narrative voice is just as important in memoir as it is in fiction, for memoir is a true story. 

Writers need to think who is telling the story. 

What point of view should they use? 

First person; I, me, through the speaker’s mindset only. 

Third person; he, she, Victoria, through his or her mindset only. 

Omniscient; think God here, the narrator knows all and can think and see the action through the minds of more than one character. 

This is just a quick stroke from the point of view narrator palette.  The main point is for the writer to focus in and realize whose eyes the writer is looking through to make the story exciting for the reader. 

A good way to find the narrator of a story is to determine who changes the most in the story.

Most times, memoir is a first person account of a particular time in the writer’s life.  Remember that memoir is only a slice of life story and not the entire life of the writer.  Sometimes the writer can act as an observer of another in a third person account of the time being remembered.  For my memoir about attending college as a mother of five, I am the narrator who is experiencing each of the lessons in the story as they unfold.

Like any important character in the story, the narrator must be well-developed for readers to stay connected.  He or she needs to be the guide in the story, taking the reader along the journey of events.  The reader needs to be immersed in the scenes, feeling what happens.    

To do this, the writer must provide specific details to flesh out the scenes and make the world real to readers, details that encompass the senses—not forgetting taste and touch.  The narrator’s primary job, according to John Gardner in The Art of Fiction, is to convince the reader that the events she recounts really happened. 

                                                                                                       

Beth Kephart says, in her book Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, the narrator needs to remain vulnerable in order to learn, along with the reader, on the journey of the story.  The narrator must discover something new, something surprising—even to her.  This shows the growth and development of the narrator character throughout the manuscript.  The narrator can find the order in the disorder of story life.

This is how good authors write.  We want the readers experiencing the drama right along with the narrator. 

            Is it easy to do?  Hardly!  If it were, writers would have a seamless time of it.

            By the way…my “seams” are in tatters after all the comments made in my synopsis. 

However, instead of revising and getting yet another copy of the same manuscript with the same flaws, I decided to send my 73,099-word, 237-page memoir about attending college as a mother of five for a developmental critique by professionals.  The Author Accelerator group says it will take about a month to get back the critique.  I’ll let you know how it turns out. 

In the meantime, do you have any thoughts on the narrative voice that you’d like to share?  They would be greatly appreciated.

Memoirs: More Than Just What Happened

Memoirs require depth and not merely what transpired during the slice of life being recounted through story.  The writer needs to look up from her reminiscing, and explain the wider experience and the meaning of it to the reader.

College wasn’t for me or my siblings.  We were not encouraged to attend college right out of high school.  There was no money for higher education in my house growing up.  We four children were told we had our education, and it was time to enter the workforce.  My siblings and I accepted it; we had no other choice.  Most of the children in my neighborhood did the same thing in the late 1970’s, especially the females.  My family didn’t know about community college, never went looking for it.  

Through light backstory, intermixed with feelings on this, I could expound upon what it felt like to be left by the roadside on the journey to a formal degree.  I always wondered what it would have been like to live on campus and study.  Of course at that time, I had no idea how extensive a college education was, how expensive.  It looked exciting to me because it was just outside my grasp.  College was for the wealthy, my family had always said. 

On a personal level, I looked for education wherever I could find it, wherever I could afford it.  The law office where I worked talked about sending one of the secretaries to paralegal training offered locally.  I jumped at the chance and told the office manager I would do it.  But then the lawyers decided against it.

To add depth to my memoir about going to college with five children in tow, I could research the history of my local community college or perhaps the birthing of community colleges in general; the two year colleges that possibly helped make higher education more affordable for the masses, and then add snippets of information--not in a solid block, but rather throughout my experiences.  In a later section of the book, I could compare the idea of local community colleges to the 300 plus year history of the University of Pennsylvania, an international university, an Ivy League, part of the ivory tower in education that I thought I could never reach.      

Let's take a look at a few of the memoirs I’ve been reading and see how well-known writers interpret their stories.  I find the writers connecting beyond their own experiences in order to make sense of the larger themes of belonging, of learning from those who struggled before them.  

In Beth Kephart’s Still Love in Strange Places, Kephart describes the very land where her husband grew up and connects the volatility of the land to the political tensions of El Salvador.  The turmoil of the country mirrors Kephart’s trial to understand her husband’s culture, to feel a part of her husband’s culture. 

In Colleen Carroll Campbell’s memoir My Sisters the Saints, Carroll Campbell connects her experiences grappling with her Catholic faith in the context of personal difficulty and tragedy with various saints down through the centuries, demonstrating that Carroll Campbell is not alone in her struggles.   

These thoughts dance across my dreams as I continue to read memoir and hammer away at my revisions.  Your thoughts are always welcome and greatly appreciated.    

What’s at Stake in the Memoir?

What’s at stake for the memoirist at the beginning of her journey?  What’s at stake for the reader?  Why should he or she invest time reading your memoir? 

 

Aside from the humor and occasional reversal of parent/child roles, my college memoir needs to demonstrate the importance for the mother to attend each class and in fact finish her educational journey.  But there needs to be more.  There needs to be risk.

 

The possibility of failure is a part of any worthwhile journey.  If it isn’t, the journey becomes boring.  It’s fine to enjoy a mother’s struggles through college, how she copes, how she discovers ways to succeed.  But to add tension, Failure must be an active player, and in my memoir she is.         

            But is the fear of failure enough to hold the reader’s attention?  How about the possibilities in succeeding?  Could I possess a fear of failure and a fear of success?  I was terrified when my community college put the Ivy League within my reach.  How could I not attend when I had been awarded a scholarship?  Everyone was proud of me and excited for me.  I wanted to hide under my bed until everyone forgot about it.

Right now my memoir is a collection of scenes, a progression through college, but to be a successful memoir, it needs to be something more.  Therein lays the reason for reading memoirs and writing help books.  To discover how to make my college journey more than a sum of its educational parts. 

            One thing I have discovered in writing my college memoir is that I am forever learning.  It’s just where I’m learning that has changed.  I am hip deep in Beth Kephart’s wonderful writing reference book Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir.  I highly recommend it to any budding memoirist. 

Was It Like this for You?



Author Beth Kephart
 

I had the pleasure of attending a mini workshop in memoir on Penn’s campus with Beth Kephart, a memoir teacher at the University of Pennsylvania.  Beth has written five memoirs each answering a different question in her life.  She has also written a new book about memoir writing:  Handling the Truth. 

 

            While I learned about universal theme in my “Write Your Memoir in Six Month” course with Brooke Warner and Linda JoyMyers, Beth added another element to memoir writing.  In order to engage the reader in memoir, whatever the topic (mine being a college journey), the memoirist needs to address the question “Was the experience like this for you?”

 

It’s not that the memoirist needs to state this question literally in the memoir, but the essence of the question and the memoirist’s answer to it should at least be implied through the writing.  Memoir needs to be more than autobiographical, more than the humor of raising a family while raising a mother’s education level in my case. 

 

Where others may have journeyed through college alone, in a sense, I took my family with me.  I need universal questions through which to filter my story.  To build suspense, I need to show the search for the answers to these questions through my writing, in my anecdotes, in my mind in order to offer the reader insight into any journey he or she may be planning. 

 

I need to present my memoir in ways to allow readers to enter upon the college journey.  I need to explore the inner self so that my reader can identify with me.  This sounds like the inner dialogue, which I am carefully attempting to incorporate into my memoir manuscript. 

There are many ways to bring a reader into your story.  Do you have any questions that you or your characters ask the reader of your story?  Feel free to offer any advice to keep the reader involved in the story.