Category Archives: ‘Hidden War’

Memoir Writing: No. 7 Shuffling Events

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You’ve got your action outline, which grows every time you look at it.

 

It’s not time to start culling. (That will come, and you will be merciless, more or less, if you want to finish this thing.)

 

Before you start writing – and we are getting very close – you need to escape from the straightjacket of chronology.

 
Your chronology is your chronology. It can grow or shrink, but events always stay in strict chronological order.
 

The action outline is different. It’s the skeleton you will hang your story onto.

 

It will probably remain roughly chronological, but it doesn’t have to.
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Action Outline #3 … It all got moved around.

For most of us, some periods of our lives are busier, and more significant, than others. These periods tend to be more memorable. Nobody wants to read about our routine … until something interrupts it and the extraordinary, or at least unusual, occurs.

 

For instance, my routine of teaching English, studying Lao and doing research in the government archives was interrupted by word that a coup might be taking place. Memorable.

 

I had not written much about the teaching, studying and research even though it occurred very close to the beginning of my chronology. So I moved the timing of some of the events that created the routine, or normalcy, and wrote about them in the coup chapter (which did not survive rewrites).

 

I think you get the point.

 

You can’t move the climax, but you can tinker around with events leading up to or contributing to it.

 

Figure out how long your chapters might be. How much can you cram into one? Then start shuffling events or incidents to plug holes, shorten a complex chapter or improve the flow of the narrative.

 

We are almost ready to start writing. First, we will do a title. But now is the time to rearrange that action outline.

 

Memoir Writing: No. 6 …  Gotta be Your Own Continuity Girl

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Everybody — okay, maybe nobody — understands that movies are not shot in the order we see them on the screen. Otherwise, why would we need editors, right?

Actually, movie directors shoot location by location with no respect for the chronology of the on-screen story. The end of the movie might be shot first, depending on where the scene occurs, which actors and actresses are available at the time, etc.

Given that, how does the movie maker ensure that the actors are wearing the same clothes and jewelry, the window in the set is open, etc., from day to day and week to week?

That’s the job of the film notetaker, the universal memory, the script supervisor. Formerly this person was known as the continuity girl because young women tended to hold this position.

This person is always on set, always taking notes on what everyone is seeing, saying and doing. Where is the actor looking? Which hand does the actress use to slap his face?

You’ve seen the continuity screw-ups. For instance, in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, The Commando, Arnie totally smashes up a yellow Porsche. A few scenes later, he drives it away. That’s a continuity flub, and you want to avoid them.

What do movies have to do with writing fiction? And especially non-fiction?

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Continuity file from my Black Orchid Demon series.

You need a continuity file, too.

What is the protagonist’s dog’s name? How did he get it? (You think you’re going to remember it three months, six months, a year into writing? Huh-uh. Nope. Not going to happen.)

As your characters change, you have to keep track of them. How can the hero pull the trigger in the climax … when the villain cut off his trigger finger during their first encounter? (That’s a little drastic, but it illustrates the point. [Just another terrible pun.])

Ditto for favorite restaurant, wine, sandwich, beer, car, computer game, etc.

Continuity is especially critical for books in a series, obviously.

So, the lesson here is: You gotta be your own continuity girl, because no one else can be.

In short, after you have taken notes and drawn up your outline, keep adding to your notes. You’ll thank yourself later.

Memoir Writing: No. 5 Outline the Action

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All those memories. Those photos. Those notes and boxes of stuff.

How do you turn those into a memoir?

Let’s be honest. It too early – wa-a-ay too early to think of outlining chapters.

So start with the action. Outline the action in your life.

I owe everything I know about action outlines to my high school friend, Erich Hoyt, who has written dozens of authoritative science books about killer whales and creatures of the deep. I think he also did one on ants. (He’s a smart, curious guy adept at whatever he turns his big brain to.)

When I was first trying to pull my HIDDEN WAR: A Memoir of America’s Secret Crusade in Laos together – oh back in 1995 or so – I asked Erich how to arrange all this information I had compiled. (For those who have forgotten or missed earlier blog posts, I have seven — count ‘em, seven — file boxes full of journals, clippings, photos, papers, books and assorted other documents left over from a two-year adventure in Southeast Asia.)
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Page one of a very early draft of the action outline for HIDDEN WAR.

Erich advised me to outline the entire story based on actions I had taken or experienced. You can do a lot in two years, but when you start noting your actions — got a haircut on a street corner with a dozen Lao children staring at me — you realize quickly that some incidents are more important than others.

For instance, the haircut did not make the final cut. (OMG, that’s punishment.) But the scene where a soldier dies at my feet in a helicopter, that action rated a chapter of its own.

And here’s where those lists and your master monster chronology really pay off.

Print those files and  run through them with a highlighter in hand. No action, no highlight. Big action, highlight. (You can add the big introspective periods later, preferably tied to an … action.)

You hang all the flesh and guts of your memoir onto the action outline. This is also your story arc. It starts, and it goes along building to a climax (more later, but any kind of climax) and then it ends and you wrap it up.

If you’re not seeing the story build in the outline, maybe something is wrong with a) the outline or b) the story.

The action outline will force you to focus on the parts of your story. Does chapter one really grab the reader? What about it, i.e., what action does the grabbing? In my case, I was arrested immediately upon arrival in Saigon.

What does the climax look like? My friend’s infant daughter died, and I inherited his job as a result. (Let’s talk about the horrible unfairness of life. I got something I wanted and felt like a total shit about it.)

How are you going to end it? Did you win? Lose? Draw? My world just sort of disintegrated with the war, and I slunk out of town. Sometimes that’s the best you can do. (Slinking was one of the items in my action outline.)

In writing fiction, I fly by the seat of my pants, allowing characters to determine where the action flows. With non-fiction, I think you need a plan. I certainly did. The action outline amounted to the first draft of the plan. (Not the first draft of the memoir.)