Category Archives: Lessons

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.)

Things I Wish I had Known

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Florence Osmund

Florence Osmund wrote a wonderful piece for The Book Designer blog back in July entitled “Four Truths and Four Myths That Every New Novelist Should Know.”

I might still have tried this fiction-writing thing if I had known this, but maybe not.

We’ll never know.

I hope some new writer will.

 

 

Memoir Writing: No. 5 More on Your Chronology

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In this never-ending how-to, I was going to move directly from making lists to building an action outline. As I gathered my thoughts (frolicking like sheep on a hillside), I realized how really, really, really important one of the lists is: It’s your chronology, of course.

 

Literally everything flows from it, no matter how you tell your story. (I’m not lobbying for a chronological telling; I’m just emphasizing how important your chronology is.)

 

When I was writing HIDDEN WAR: A Memoir of America’s Secret Crusade in Laos, I buried myself in stuff — seven boxes of stuff. It paralyzed me. I think this is why several earlier efforts to write about my adventures in Laos failed. Too much stuff. I didn’t know how to start.

 

Journalism, especially working on big projects — I once spent two years investigating corruption in Indiana’s Department of Corrections — taught me the value of starting at the beginning. That means creating a chronology of events.

 

What happened first? What happened second? What’s happening now?

 

So I started the memoir at the beginning, the day I arrived in Saigon, alone, totally unattached to the American war effort in Viet-Nam. September 24, 1970. I was a few months past my 20th birthday.

 

But that’s not where my chronology began.

 

My first entry recorded an event that happened 21 years earlier. It reads: “Oct. 2, 1949 — Mao Zedong proclaims PRC. [Source, page number]”

 

For the record, that’s before I was born. And, it was also not the very first thing I wrote in the chronology. But in the completed 86-page, single-spaced document, it appears first because along the way it became clear I needed to know when the “crusade” I was writing about began. In my mind, it began the day the People’s Republic of China was born.

 

That’s how you build your chronology. Backward, forward, any which way it needs to go. You add and add and add to it. I was adding to it even as I wrote chapters. It kept everything in order. It was the one place I could go back to and expect to find, if not the answer I sought, clues to where I might find what I needed.

 

I extracted shorter chronologies from the master, monster chron as I was writing chapters. This is a draft of a chapter chronology I used to write about what I learned about reporting.

 

Handwritten Chron_Reporting

A mini-chronology pulled from the master monster chronology.

What do you put into your chronology? Absolutely everything that you think might be important.
  • Journal entries. (I think maybe I have to write something about dealing with journals and diaries.)
  • Correspondence excerpts.
  • Source material (books, documents, drafts, memos to yourself) summaries or extracts.
  • Newspaper and magazine clippings.
  • Recollections inserted roughly where they would go if they had been from a letter or a journal.
  • Questions about what was happening or why there are no data for a period.
  • Reminders.
  • Pictures, drawings, artwork.
Do you use all of this stuff?

 

Not in the sense that you include everything in your manuscript, but you do consult it. Just putting material into the chronology can help jog a foggy memory.

 

How long does it take? Almost forever.

 

But it also saves an eternity of searching for material, trying to remember if Event A came before, after or at the same time as Event B. And it can provide insight as you look back and realize that a minor occurrence at the time actually had a much larger impact than you expected.

 

I repeat: Everything flows from the chronology. It forces you to remember events and order them in sequence. When you write, you can jumble them any way you like. But build the chronology first.