Beginnings: As in Where to Begin My Memoir

            

On a journey to a better
beginning for the memoir

Beginnings are the most important part of books, I feel, be it memoir or fiction.  Writers lose sleep over this. 

*Yawn*  [Excuse me.]

Writers need to pull readers into their stories.  Up till now, I’ve been starting my memoir with the decision to begin college.  With what my life was like before I started college. 

            I understand the in medias res concept, opening the story in the middle of the action.  I open chapter one of my memoir with a crucial scene from a YA short story I had published in Cricket Magazine, but I intersperse it with motherly duties to show my conflicting time:  writer/mother.  Then I [seem to] dump the reader into the reality of picking up the children from two different schools on a rainy day.  I allow the reader to interpret the children’s personalities through dialogue and interaction or offering one line quips that speak volumes about them.  Still, I can’t help but think this is a clumsy way to introduce my children to the reader.

            While I ask what I feel are probing questions about myself in an attempt to convince myself to sign up for courses at the local community college, I wonder if maybe my present first chapter should be a prologue instead, minus the opening writing scene, of course.  What have you found the purpose of prologues to be in books?  Reading memoir, my experience has shown that some memoirs have them and others don’t, and that these prologues tell of the essence of the book.    

            Chapter two starts with my toting the children along with me as I sign up for courses at the community college.  Perhaps I could show the children’s personalities there in that scene.  Maybe this is a better way to show in medias res, the actual beginning of my college journey.  Jump right into the journey instead of thinking about it.  Instead of showing what my life was like before I started college.

            Do you feel there is a need to show the pastoral setting of my life before the decision to attend college?  I do offer glimpses of my life with the family throughout the college journey as it affects my journey.  Thanks for any advice you may offer.

The Voice in Memoir

Be true to your voice in memoir

Restructuring the memoir is fine.  Works in progress go through many revisions.  The first draft is usually…ahem…vomit, anyway.  Okay, at least mine are.  And I need to remember not to compare my “drafts” with the finished, edited work of other writers. 

But as I redraft and restructure my memoir, I keep coming back to the same sticking point.  Every time I grab a new blank document and try to open the memoir pithily, enticingly, I lose my voice.  My memoir is not a philosophical tome.  It’s meant to offer advice and humor to parents contemplating lengthy endeavors, taking time away from the family.  How a parent can cope with this.  How they can succeed.  It’s meant to inspire and show others how to take courage and attempt something they may feel inadequate to accomplish.  And, of course, it is meant to entertain.

Humor helped me get through ten years of attending college part time while raising a family.  It simply has to be part of my memoir.

The thing about my writing style is my voice.  Whether I’m giving presentations or writing memoir, it’s the same.  It’s me.  If you’ve read any of my camping adventures on Camping with Kids you get the idea.  A few critique partners, professors, and writing facilitators noted that they enjoy my dry wit. 

In my memoir, I have the voice of innocence and the voice of understanding or experience.  Memoir needs these two voices.  The narrator must discover something from her journey through memory and share that information with the reader.  I must take the reader into the scenes of my struggles as a parent in college.  I can’t seem to move forward in my memoir any other way.  I can’t babble on in thought.  I’ve condensed scenes dramatically and left others bleeding on the floor and added much, in the first two chapters, by way of insight.  Perhaps this pass through revision will leave me feeling better prepared for beta readers. 

Oh, by the way, my short stories don’t share this humorous voice.  Not everyone, characters or people, can be me.  And this is probably a good thing.  Just ask my family.

The Need for Universal Questions or Themes in Memoir

Darlings everywhere!  Where's the meat?

The necessity to attend college brings to mind the 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, my internal dialogue, in order to offer the reader insight into any journey he or she may be planning. 

Possible Themes: 

Making the right decision.  The idea of seemingly selfish ambitions of a mother at odds with the demands of motherhood. 

Taking the risk.  The tension between being a responsible wife and mother to 5 children and a college student. 

A sense of belonging.  Feelings of being an outsider at college.  It's not just the younger students who suffer from this.  Older students can feel they are starting behind the traditional college students because of a lack of college preparation. 

As my darlings lay, kicking and screaming on the library floor, I contemplate these questions and possibly redrafting my entire memoir.  No one ever said writing was easy.  And if they did, throw them on the floor with my kicking darlings.

Any insight you can offer, please do.  Thanks for reading.

Searching For That Need to Attend College

Kelly Writers House, my favorite place to be
on the University of Pennsylvania's campus

Why did I attend college at the time in my memoir life?  A time when my twins, the youngest, started second grade.  A time when my learning disabled, oldest child needed me more than ever at the dawn of her high school years.  A time when all five of my young children needed me to be the calm, supportive mother they had always known.      

            This reason to go to college should be a necessity and not simply a desire one of my writing friends said.  And I believe she’s right.  But what can that necessity be?

            At the time I was considering college in my memoir, I was knee deep in motherhood.  But I also wanted to publish short stories in children’s magazines.  I wanted to establish a writing career. 

            [I know…who didn’t.]

            This was before social media and blogs.  Before the internet craze.  For me, it was before writers’ groups and organized courses outside the home.  My husband was sole provider of seven and travelled occasionally for business. 

I felt as if I were trapped in that home, sometimes, shackled to motherhood and unable to better myself through formal education.  I adored my children.  Still do.  They are, after all, my life.  My happiness.  I wouldn’t change a thing.  Really!

But after redoing the twins’ baby room with rejection notices—the paper kind, remember those?—I decided that education was key to publication.  At least I felt it would equal the playing field between me and published writers, established writers, the writers I was reading who talked of their college experience in articles they wrote in the baby’s and lady’s magazines I read.  I didn’t have this experience.  College was not an option when I graduated from high school in my blue collar neighborhood.  Only a select few went off to college.  I knew nothing about junior college or college loans.    

It took me seven years to get the courage to enroll in a community college, in classes that met regularly—outside of the home.  I had taken correspondence courses, again before the internet craze, in children’s literature.  These only whet my appetite for that renaissance understanding of the world.

            Little did I know how ill-prepared I was for college.  But that’s what the memoir is about.  My quest for knowledge and how I grappled with feelings of insecurity, feelings of selfishness leaving my family behind to become a college student and gain knowledge.  About finally becoming published.  About someone wanting to read my words.  About someone learning from my words.    

            You beautiful readers have been very kind to me, leaving notes on my blog.  Please offer any opinions as to whether you feel this may be that need to attend college I’m looking for or offer your precious guidance, so necessary to my writing life.  Thank you.