Weeding Distractions: Cultivating the Memoir Trail
A view from Venice, a city so maze-like one can get lost even with a map!
This is the third in a series of posts inspired by Gornick's book, which I reviewed here. Last week we discussed ways to dig in and identify the core "Why" of a memoir. Today we look at how to weed out content that doesn't belong; that is, how to keep readers—and oneself—from going down blind side paths and losing the trail of the true journey. Or as Gornick puts it, "I took it as my task to keep the narrating self subordinated to the idea in hand. I was never to tell an anecdote, fashion a description, indulge in a speculation whose point turned on me" (p. 10, where "me" refers to aimless self-absorption).
We'll explore one tip on achieving the right mindset, then we'll look at two weeding strategies.
Three reminders:
This discussion focuses on memoir. It is not advice on or a judgment of other types of personal writing.
It serves us to know the rules before we decide if we want to break them.
We assume that the first few drafts of a manuscript are out of the way and we are in the editing phase. If you are a writer and not at this point, consider skipping this post, as revision questions are counterproductive to the raw creativity you need to indulge early on.
Tip 1: For courage and motivation to be selective, embrace your Why.
In the first post in this series, when we talked about the benefits of finding the Why, we touched on the danger of fishing stories at a funeral. As you start weeding your memoir, you push past “it matters because it happened to me.” Now you begin to pave a narrative trail that takes you and readers somewhere truly and personally profound.
Sacrificing the slide show version of the story in order to cultivate the guided narrative may seem to present an impossible challenge, so before anything else, the writer needs a compelling reason to start this process.
How does one decide which scenes, characters, and themes to toss aside? To mix metaphors, it can feel like cutting off parts of a living body. Many writers and instructors lean into this ruthless take on editing. Arthur Quiller-Couch and his acolytes shout, "Murder your darlings."
Such advice is given with good intentions, but for the less bloodthirsty, there is a framing problem. Especially for writers of memoir, it can sound like they are being told to butcher their creative offspring. Even if this writer wants to weed and focus their story, they may subconsciously be looking for any reason to keep every part of the original manuscript in place. Isn't the alternative mutilation? The process of removing pieces of a manuscript won’t go well if the writer isn’t truly convinced that it’s good to do so.
Try looking at it this way instead: the fervent, central Why is one of many children the memoirist has. It’s Why’s birthday, and the writer is explaining to the other kids, “We can have a party and presents for you later; today is for celebrating Why.”
If a memoirist adopts this perspective, then removing what doesn’t support Why in the manuscript is less likely to be an unpleasant (and ineffective) task. It instead becomes an inviting challenge to focus resources and energy on giving this creative brainchild a day just for them.
Pulling out distractions from a memoir is not a betrayal. It is a higher form of commitment to oneself and to one's readers. So start weeding!
Tip 2: Take out side trips; cultivate the main adventure.
The impulse to tell all is understandable, especially for people who are writing for the first time and especially for memoirists, for whom it’s natural to start by simply writing down everything that happened. It's easy, having started out in this way, to get into the mindset that this is the only chance to say everything there is to say. Who knows if this book will get picked up by a publisher? Even if it's self-published, who knows if the time and resources will ever come together to be able to tell another? But in fact, yielding to such anxieties typically only damages a story. (And truly, if one is patient and open-minded, there are abundant opportunities to tell the stories one has to tell.)
To continue with the child metaphor, imagine that at this party you try to celebrate their 1st, 10th, 16th, 21st, and 40th birthdays all at once, with theming and gifts appropriate to each of those milestones. Does this seem remotely fun or feasible for the child or any of the guests? Wouldn’t this be the most baffling, unfocused party ever? (There’s a case to be made for a party like this working with the proper theming, but you get the point.)
If this metaphor seems too abstract to apply to the challenge of removing distractions from a draft memoir, I have good news and bad news: whether something is extraneous to Why and needs to be removed or supports Why and needs to stay depends entirely on the Why. This is another one of those moments where I champion the immense value that beta readers and editors can offer to a memoirist.
Indeed, there is no hard and fast rule for whether a particular piece of a particular manuscript must stay or go. The best comparison I can offer is the card game Set (conveniently, this is Why’s favorite game and we are playing it at their birthday party). If the core idea is red, then the writer needs to remove what is green and blue (or rewrite it in such a way as to center red). But if the core idea is diamonds, then red, green, and blue become incidental; now the proper course is to weed out wavy lines and ovals (or, again, reframe parts about wavy lines and ovals to point, subtly or overtly, back to diamonds).
To hop metaphors once again, a memoirist seeking the best form of their story stands back from the detailed topographical survey they have drawn of their personal terrain and identifies one irresistible path that moves confidently toward its destination. What trails off to a dead end must always be judged against whether it serves the prevailing path.
Again: a visit to a swamp or a beach or an amusement park or a church or grandma's house might be part of the path or it might not. But the core Why empowers the writer to constructively judge whether each piece of narrative belongs in this journey. The writer has the power and responsibility to forge that trail so that people are taken on one clear and compelling pilgrimage.
Tip 3: Restrain your inner peanut gallery
Once at a landmark birthday celebration, I had the misfortune of watching a family member of the guest of honor hijack a toast to deliver a thirty-minute soliloquy on a matter of personal conviction. Everyone in attendance was thoroughly tired of it after about ten minutes. But no one had the courage to relieve him of the microphone, so the party ground to a halt until the speaker decided he was done.
I have read multiple manuscripts in which the author repeatedly interrupts themselves—and the reader—and the narrative—to share adjacent thoughts that are only peripherally relevant to the proper subject matter. In first drafts (or in journaling), it is as fair and forgivable as anything else one might choose to write about, and can be quite therapeutic to boot. But in a final draft, such asides give readers the impression that the writer is not in command of their own storytelling.
I am not referring to situations such as when a writer realizes too late that something requires further context, so they backfill it. That and various other issues are better labeled as structural challenges. I refer instead to sheer, unadulterated digressions—the literary equivalent of one person interrupting another in a conversation to say “That reminds me…,” or the old SNL sketch where Kenan Thompson plays a talk show host who interrupts every interview to sing “What’s up with that?”
In a memoir, these intruders may be “by the way” snippets of information inspired by some detail of the story, or jokes the writer believes will add flavor (or alter an uncomfortable mood), or sermonettes on people, politics, or quirks of human behavior that were triggered by the mysterious chemistry of the writer's creative mind.
Once again: during the raw creative process, this is all perfectly appropriate. The writer may have been exorcising their demons. The asides may have felt like they would lead somewhere very important at the time of writing but were then forgotten. Perhaps those asides were parts of a train of thought that led to profoundly rewarding narrative places, but the asides themselves are inert leftovers. Or maybe the author was working on the voice they wanted to use. But once editing begins, the memoirist’s task is to exercise judgment and restraint, and to pull out the asides that only interrupt the Why.
This advice may seem harsh to some writers. It may seem like this is advising writers to strip the flavor and intimacy from their story … robbing it of what makes it theirs. On the contrary: winnowing unwelcome interruptions brings the manuscript closer to a place where style, voice, and content are tightly-braided. The process strengthens and clarifies the author’s voice and style by preserving what is needed for this story and removing what is not. A given interruption might indeed need to remain in the story, but the question must be asked case by case. And if it turns out that an interjection does not serve the overall theme, then it is only blocking the road and must be removed.
If the writer declines to self-edit their own peanut gallery, their story will be littered with the narrative equivalent of bandits who waylay the poor folks trying to get to Canterbury. This disrespects readers and risks spoiling their trust in the memoirist. And that, ironically, ruins future opportunities to share more stories with those readers.
So remember the idea of the day when you are revising your memoir on your own, with beta readers, or with an editor: focus.
Weeding rabbit trails from a memoir is signposting by another name. It’s a chance for the writer to study their life trajectory more narrowly and hopefully achieve greater clarity and self-understanding.
at last, the memoir that has been well-manicured stands a much better chance of leading readers down a memorable path of meaning and connection.
Sources:
Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and the Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.