Category Archives: Memoirs

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?

screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-8-39-04-pm

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 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.

Memoir Writing: No. 4 Organization by List Making

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All right. By this time, you have wallowed in your boxes of memories, started taking notes, concluded that you need a consistent note-taking software, platform or notebook.

Now what? As in, what do you do with all those notes?

Files Boxes-Stacked

Three of seven boxes of memorabilia that had to be entered into lists for my memoir, “Hidden War.”

Easy. Make lists.

  • Chronology — Your most important list. Everything flows from this. Everything refers back to this. Your memoir does not have to follow this religiously, but you must have it and know that you can rely on it. That is, you know everything on it is true and accurate, to the best of your knowledge and ability.
  • Names — What? Who needs a list of names? You can remember the name of every person you’ve ever met. Fine. Keep the list anyway. And make sure you know that it’s Aunt Ida, not Aunt Ada. Or in my case, Aunt Bernice. Only in my case there were two Aunt Beas, both with the same last name. One was Big Aunt Bea, because my mother’s aunt was older and larger than Little Aunt Bea, my mother’s sister who was also called Ditz. (Don’t go there.)
  • Places, otherwise known as maps.
  • Books, articles, newspaper clippings, AKA Bibliography.

Why all the lists? Because you can’t remember everything, and you don’t want to even try. You want to rely on your lists.

For that reason, anything that goes into a list must be fact-checked and completely accurate … OR LABELED AS UNVERIFIED.

We will add other lists later, but for now, these are the keys to organizing all those memories.

BTW, this process took me about 42 years with many starts, stops and interregna. That’s why ACCURACY IS KEY. (Yes, I know I’m shouting. I’m doing it because you don’t believe me and aren’t paying attention.) You don’t want to have to go back and start over checking every list entry to confirm that it’s accurate.

In the next step, we start writing. Sort of.