Category Archives: Laos

Another Flipboard Citation for Memoir Writing

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On Monday – yes, I’m slow getting around to this – Flipboard selected Memoir Writing: No. 9 It’s Time to Write as one of its cover stories.

Here’s how it looked:

flipboard_memoir-9The photo is a snapshot of two pages from one of my clipping books. It shows other pix of ambush victims in Laos in the early 1970s.

I noted in the post that these and other photos were sufficient inspiration to try to write a memoir of that period. The product, of course, is HIDDEN WAR: A Memoir of America’s Secret Crusade in Laos, an unpublished but still aspiring book.

Memoir Writing: #9 It’s Time to Write

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The research and prep work are done.

You’ve got your outline.

Now you write.

You can start anywhere you like, but I think the beginning is a better place than most. I don’t mean the day you were born. I mean the beginning you chose in your outline. ;INK

This a memoir, not an autobiography. An autobiography covers your entire life and really does start at the very beginning. Your memoir is focusing on part of your life.

 

inside-clip-book

One of my clipping books: Reasons to write.

Use all your senses to tell your story. How you felt. Sure. But what did you see? Hear? Smell?

Keep your eye on the conflict. If this was important enough to write about, identify the conflict and keep it in mind, and on the page.

Wrap it up with a satisfying ending. Doesn’t have to be happy. But it has to address and resolve the conflict somehow.

Along the way, use quotations. Journal entries. Letters. News clippings.

Given my decades as a journalist writing every day and several years of writing 2,000 words of fiction a day, I thought I could knock out a first draft of a 75,000-word manuscript in two months with a little weekend work. Wrong. It took five months.

Be flexible about your deadlines, but by all means set a goal for yourself.

After you finish, go back and revise it. Start to finish. Spellcheck. Grammar check. Does everything make sense? Is everything consistent? Did you have any questions? If you did, you can bet your readers will, too. So answer them.

After your first revision, pass it around to anyone who will read it. Get real reader feedback. You don’t have to take the advice you get, but you should hear it and consider it. Someone cared enough to make suggestions; they deserve a respectful hearing.

I was lucky enough to have more than a dozen people – family, friends and my writers group – review all or parts of the memoir. After the first revised draft, I did two complete rewrites with uncounted numbers of revisions.

So you should plan to rewrite and repeat. Expect it to take a while.

Have fun. Life is short. Good luck.

 

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.
action-outline-1991

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.