Do's and Don'ts of Memoir Writing: The FOLLOWING THE WHISPERS Blog Book Tour with Author Karen Walker

            Today I'm happy to have Karen Walker as my guest as she makes a stop on Tossing It Out in her blog tour to get the word out about her memoir Following the Whispers.  I first discovered Karen's blog fairly early on in my blogging career.  I was drawn to her pithy posts that were honest and from the heart, and often very informative.

          Today in this guest post Karen continues in that helpful vein as she provides some useful advice about writing a memoir.  After all, this is one topic that she knows well having written the successful memoir that is the subject of her current virtual book tour.  Whether or not you are planning to ever write your own memoir, the following is some good information to read and remember.
       

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Do’s and Don’t’s of Writing Memoir

Writing memoir is not for the faint-hearted. I think one must have a compelling reason to write and publish their own story. In my case, I’d learned some valuable life lessons I thought might help others struggling with similar issues. Some want to write just for their family--that’s not the kind of memoir-writing I’m talking about. Here are my thoughts on the do’s and don’ts when writing memoir for publication.

•   Do tell the truth. If you don’t remember something clearly, say so. If you are changing names, say so. Whatever you choose to do,it’s okay as long as you let your readers know.

•   Don’t just take whole pages from your personal journal and think that constitutes writing a memoir. Journal writing is a whole different thing than crafting a story from your life events.

•   Do use fiction techniques in your writing such as: scenes, complete with dialogue; lush descriptions, specific details, use of literary devices such as metaphor and simile. Just don’t write fiction.

•   Don’t just put things in chronological order because that’s the way they happened. Craft your story the way it works the best. Here is where you can really utilize fiction techniques like flashbacks.

•   Do make sure you grab your reader’s attention and craft your story to keep that interest throughout.

•   Don’t make anyone in your life out to be totally evil. Make the people in your story rounded characters. Everyone has both good and bad traits. Even if someone did you great harm, they still have some redeeming virtues.

•   Do make sure family members and friends are okay with what you are doing before you go ahead and do it. In my case, I needed to wait until both my parents were gone before publishing my memoir. I just didn’t want to unintentionally hurt them with my perspective on my life.

There is so much more to say on this subject, but this is a good start for anyone thinking about writing memoir.

Thank you, Lee, for hosting me today. I hope you and your readers found this informative and useful.

Blessings,

Karen

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 About the Author:

Karen Walker is a writer who has published essays in newspapers and magazines, as well as an anthology series. After a 30+ year career in marketing and public relations, she went back to college to complete a Bachelor's degree and graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2005 from the University of New Mexico's University Studies program with a major emphasis in Creative Writing. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with her husband, Gary, and their dog, Buddy. When she’s not writing, you can find her doing international folk dancing, singing at retirement communities with her trio, Sugartime, hiking, reading, or hanging out with friends.

The book:

You can find Following the Whispers at:

http://www.amazon.com

http://www.smashwords.com

Be sure to visit Karen's blog at http://www.karenfollowingthewhispers.blogspot.com  and if you haven't been following her yet, then now would be a good time to start. 

My guest for next Wednesday will be Marcus from Writing Investigated.   Marcus is the creative mind behind the popular Blogging from A to Z search buttons or navigation buttons.  I'm sure he'll have some interesting things to say.

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It's Your Story So Tell It Like a Story

          If you ask me, writer's block is just an excuse that is the same as saying, "I'm too damn lazy to write anything right now."  I don't have any problem with a writer not feeling like writing, but I do think we should cough up the truth if we are not writing.  If your life depended on coming up with something don't you think you could?

          Okay, so you're at a standstill with your current work in progress or you have an idea for a story but don't know how to start.  You're having trouble forcing yourself to write.   Well, then force yourself to write something else.  Forget about trying to make something up.   Write about you.  Write the story of your life.  Surely you know that story.

          When faced with the concept of writing memoir some people might balk with the claim that their life is not interesting or they haven't done anything special.  So what the heck, write about it anyway.  I'm not talking about mundane journal entries or Daytimer schedule planner entries; I'm talking about you telling what you did today, or yesterday, or once upon a time on that special day of your life.  Make it creative.  Turn it into a tale.

          Maybe you just went to the grocery store today, bought some groceries, and came home.  Come on--think!  There's so much more to this story.   How did you get there?   What did you see on your way?  What was playing on the radio?  Did someone else go with you?  What did you talk about?  What kind of car do you drive and how's it running anyway?

           Now you're getting somewhere.   What store did you go to?  Did you see any particularly interesting people?  Who did you see there and what did they look like?   What was on sale?  How much did things cost?   What did you buy?   How did you pay for it?   How are your finances?   Will you have enough to get through the month?

           "Bor-r-r-ing!"  You may say.  Make it interesting--you're the writer.  Throw in adjectives and adverbs, metaphors and similes, or whatever else you can grab out of your writer's trick bag.  Add some humor, inject some action, or elicit pathos.   Paint a vivid picture that the reader can see, hear, and sense in every way.  Sometimes everyday experience can be the most interesting because we can all relate to it.

            Think about the stand-up comic's routine.  What makes it all so funny is that we can usually picture it because we've been there.   Next time you're listening to a comedy routine focus on why it's funny.  A great deal of the humor comes from the presentation, but familiar story content makes us nod our heads with the realization that we get it--yeah, we've been in that same situation and know exactly what the comic is talking about.

          Or what about that friend or co-worker who always holds our attention with a riveting story.  Why? Again, presentation is a big part of it, but our ability to connect to what is being said makes a big difference in keeping us interested.   Conversely, think about the person who tells the dull boring story.   Maybe we can also relate to that person's story, but do we care?  The way the story is told can be a big snooze-a-rama without presentational pizzazz tossed into the mix.

         Try it out.  Next time you're bemoaning that you've got writer's block, stop what you're doing and tell your life story.  Not necessarily your whole life story, but maybe what you've done since you woke up that morning or what you did before going to bed the previous night.  It might end up being a better story that the one you wanted to write in the first place.

          Instead of using the esoteric term of writer's block or the artsy complaint of lacking inspiration, just tell it like it is.  I'm too damn lazy to write, too distracted to write, or I just plain don't want to write whatever crap I'm supposed to be writing.   Hmm--maybe you can write a story about why you feel that way.  And please make it an interesting story.

           What's your opinion of writer's block?  Have you ever tried stand-up comedy?   Do you find it easy to write about your life?

            On Wednesday my special guest will be Karen Walker who will be visiting Tossing It Out as part of her Following the Whispers blog book tour.  Karen's someone who can tell about writing a memoir and she'll be here to give us a few tips on the Do's and Don'ts of memoir writing.

         

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The Veil Lifted: Revealing a Peculiar Memoir

The Black Veil: A Memoir  Digressions

          When one is handed a book by someone who states, "I want you to read this book to tell me what you think of it, I thought it was kind of weird--I got it for a dollar at the Dollar Tree store", then a red flag, perhaps combined with an impish chin stroking curiosity, might be one possible reaction.  This was the case when my sister handed The Black Veil by Rick Moody to me during my December holiday vacation to Tennessee.  I am sometimes reluctant to read a book when someone says I should read it because it was a good book, but the reluctance becomes even more cringe worthy when I am told I should read it because it was weird.  Okay, so I do have a tendency toward weird tastes sometimes, but to have another person take it upon themselves to decide what might be weird according to my predilections and hand me a book based on that judgment can be somewhat off-putting.   Nevertheless I took this bargain book with the reminder that it might be a few weeks before I would get to it, and in doing so assured my sister that I would let her know what I thought about the book.  I have now finished reading The Black Veil and am ready to not only provide my honest assessment of this book to my sister, but also to you who are reading this.


          In short, this book is weird.  I won't say that it is a book that I would necessarily recommend to anyone else, or that I liked the book.  There were times when I forced myself to read with a frustration previously reserved for struggling through certain books or articles required for a college class in which the reading was only done for a grade and not for any personal pleasure or even enlightenment.  This is not a positive review of The Black Veil, nor is it absolutely negative.  It is my commentary on a peculiar reading experience with which I had a like/dislike relationship, not having enough of an emotional attachment to consider my feelings toward the book to be as strong as love/hate--my feelings are somewhat ambivalent, yet with enough stirring to exact my pronouncement on Rick Moody's odd little memoir.


         One of the impediments of my absolute enjoyment of this book becomes evident in the complete title of Rick Moody's book:  The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions.  Where the concept of "memoir" in a fairly straight-forward telling of Moody's life story would be reasonable to most readers, the added digressions to the story provide a conundrum of humorous or, at times, interesting historical reflections which sometimes establish a sense of time--past and present--and other times a sense of mind--the authors interpretation of the world around him and his interpolation of his own inner thoughts. In his preface Moody states, ''My book and my life are written in fits, more like epilepsy than like a narrative.''  He goes on to say, "Alas, this account never settles for the orderly where the disorderly and explosive can substitute.."   Egad! This sounds a bit like literary fireworks and an attempt at sensationalism to me.  It seems to me that even Moody recognizes the difficulty of the way he approached the memoir and how it might be accepted by the reader.  


        Rick Moody is a well established and critically acclaimed author who is most known for his novels The Ice Storm and Garden State, both which have been made into feature films.   In his memoir Moody reflects on his early life in what he portrays as a somewhat dysfunctional family, though probably not any more dysfunctional than most average families.   From his New England roots he senses an inherited guilt that has been passed from his Puritan forebears and perhaps further back to his European roots.   The darkness that overshadows his life is further complicated by the familial connection to one Joseph "Handkerchief" Moody who is thought to be the inspiration of a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, "The Minister's Black Veil".  Since I had never heard of this story, let alone read it, I found myself digressing online to read "The Minister's Black Veil"--not the best story I have ever read, but more of a curiosity of the early American short story.   I was to later find that the story is found at the end of Moody's book, but I think the reader would be served better by having the story introduced toward the beginning so that the connection would more clear to the reader of Moody's memoir since so much of the metaphor of the story is the metaphor of Moody's life and the memoir that he has written.


          The memoir follows through Moody's troubled adolescence and into his early adulthood during which he struggles with alcohol dependency and difficulties in relating to others.   His problems lead to a mental breakdown which results in a stay in a mental hospital.  He recounts his period of recovery and some parts of the years that follow.   The aspects that might be of most interest to those who want to know about Moody and his writing career are sadly deficient.   This is not the story of Rick Moody the successful writer, but the story of Moody the moody guy, angst-ridden, searching for self and trying to understand his family.  It is at times dark and troubling, and at others ludicrous and fun.  Some of the ancestral history is interesting and some goes to an extreme that can in stretches be boring.  Moody must be commended in any case for the amount of detailed research that he has put into this book.


            This leads me to the writing style used by Moody in this particular book.  If you thought the style of this, my present commentary, was a bit rambling, with an excessive amount of phrasing set apart by commas, then you might multiply my long sentences by double, triple, or even more, and you will get an idea of the way The Black Veil is written--think in terms of paragraphs that at times go on for several pages.   And if you wonder about my use of italics, then you are in for a great distraction in Moody's book as he uses italics throughout.   The author's explanation for the use italics that is given at the end of the book is rather clever--he uses the italics in lieu of having to resort to footnotes, something which I often find more distracting than italics--but if I had known the reason of the extensive use I might not have been as annoyed with the italics as I was while in the midst of reading The Black Veil.  Moody is a good story-teller when he is telling the story, but he can be pretty perturbing in the digressions, especially with what oftentimes comes across as an artificial and affected style of writing.


         Should you read The Black Veil?  For most I would say no, unless you are interested in reading a challenging and uniquely written memoir.  This is unlike any other memoir I've read.  I often found it tedious reading and was anxious for it to end, however in retrospect the book did stick with me.  Moody's conclusions about what is real and what is not in the way we all portray ourselves and see others makes me wonder about the authenticity of this memoir.  Has Moody truly lifted the veil to show us who he really is, or has he donned a mask of theatricality to provide us with the gimmickry of a skilled writer playing with our heads.   Maybe you'll want to read the book for yourself so you can tell me if you thought it was weird.


         Have you read any of Rick Moody's books, or specifically The Black Veil?   When a memoir receives more of a literary treatment than a straight-forward telling of a life story, do you think it is as trustworthy?   If a writer is breaking the traditional rules of writing and/or formatting would you prefer to have this explained before you start reading, or do you like to approach a book like a mystery and try to figure out the writer's tricks for yourself or be told after the fact?




            Beginning next Wednesday I will be having a series of guest posts.  The first one, on July 13th, will be Tina from Life Is Good.  Many of you have already heard from Tina in the Post Challenge Challenge that she and Shannon from The Warrior Muse have been undertaking.  Tina will be talking about that Challenge and other interesting things.  Stay with Tossing It Out on Wednesdays for all the informative guest posts to come.






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My Mom's a Dancer

           Lois Kay Trevillian was born a year after Shirley Temple.  When Lois was a small child Shirley Temple was the rage of the nation.  Parents of little girls across the country dreamed of their child becoming the next Shirley Temple and little girls idolized her.  Lois was one of those girls.  I've often heard about this because Lois Kay Trevillian is my mother.

          The other day as I was talking on the phone with my mom, she was reminiscing about some of her experiences in her life and happened to mention in passing, "I should write a book!"  This immediately caught my interest and I encouraged her that she should.  She began to back down on the idea.  My mom's not too big on writing these days.  I told her that if she would just write down things in a rough draft, I would write the book for her.  I was fired up about it, but she wasn't.  Maybe I can just start writing things down and maybe come up with a good memoir someday.  It's funny, she's told me stories recently that I'd never heard before and I've known this lady for 59 years.

          Ever since I can remember she has told stories about her childhood aspirations as a Shirley Temple wannabe.  My mom started taking dance lessons at the Virginia Chittum Dance Academy in Morgantown, West Virginia when she was about five years old.  This undoubtedly was a tough sacrifice for her parents as this was during the Great Depression.  Her parents must have seen some special talent in their daughter and believed that she could be a dancer.  My grandmother used to show me pictures of my mother in her dance costumes and she did look a bit like Shirley Temple.  My mother said she even won a few Shirley Temple look-alike contests.

          As the years went on my mother continued studying tap dance and acrobatics. My favorite memory that she would share with me when I was young was how, when she was a teenager, she and some of the other older students accompanied their dance teacher, Virginia Chittum, to New York City.  I recall being fascinated as she described going to Coney Island.  They also attended  a Radio City Music Hall performance of the Rockettes, who had become the aspiration of the young dancers.

          Lois Kay, which was her stage name, began making a name for herself in her hometown of Morgantown as a tap dancer who also incorporated feats of acrobatics into her numbers.  She continued her dance career after she began attending the University of West Virginia. One her fellow students at the university whom she started appearing on the same stage with was Don Knotts, the actor who is most remembered as bumbling sheriff's deputy Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith Show. 

         Another performer with whom she would often work was a juggler by the name of Bob Jackson.  Bob was a very popular player on the West Virginia University Mountaineers basketball team.  Crowds loved Bob's performance on the basketball court as he would incorporate his juggling moves into his playing ala Harlem Globetrotters.  As fate would have it, Lois and Bob fell in love and after college continued pursuing their show biz dreams.

         My mother continued to perform her acrobatic tap dance act and the duo would get booked on shows in night clubs in the Cleveland, Ohio area where they had settled.  As she had her children--first me and then my sister-- she danced less and learned to juggle.  My mom and dad worked up a fast paced juggling team act that was always quite a hit on the shows where they performed.  My mom no longer tap danced, but she continued to perform her perilous balancing act on two folding chairs.  Eventually when my sister got older she took dance lessons and took over the act that my mother had been doing.

         After my siblings and I became adults and left home and no longer worked in the juggling act with my parents, my mom and dad continued to work the duo act they had started with.  My father juggled almost to the day he died of pancreatic cancer at age 67.  Toward the end, in a morphine induced delirium at the hospital, I recall him confusedly talking to my mother about their juggling act as he believed they were getting ready to perform.

       At age 80, my mother no longer dances, but she loves the television dance shows like Dancing With The Stars and So You Think You Can Dance.  And she can still tell a pretty good story when she wants to. Before he died, my father wrote his memoir, which is now in my possession, and which I hope to gather together with photographs so I can do a self-publication in the coming year.  I hope that my mother has many more years ahead of her, but I also hope she might reconsider that memoir idea.  She's got a great story to tell.

        I'm sure that there are many communities like the one where I live where free or nominally priced classes are offered to people who want to learn about or get help with writing their memoirs.  A memoir is a great thing to leave to children, grand-children, and beyond.  I know that several readers have written their memoirs.  If you haven't yet, have you ever thought about writing one?   Do you have any memoirs that your forebears have left you?  Has anyone had any experience with self-publishing a memoir?  Have any of you taken one of the classes in memoir writing and how did it help you?  Let's hear about some of your thoughts and experiences.