Memoirs Need Research, Too

As I work on my memoirs, I keep stopping to check facts. Not my impressions or beliefs at the time—nobody knows those better than I do—but the actual details. My parents are long dead and my older brother’s memory can no longer be relied on, so my first research tool is my other brother. But because Gordon is two years younger, his memories aren’t always any better than mine.

Consider the distance from our first apartment at 6 Fettes Row in Edinburgh, Scotland to the school Gordon and I attended there. In my memory, the walk to Stockbridge School was about a mile, mostly along Dundas Street, which ran north-south. But when I checked with Gordon, he said he had paced it off when he went back several years ago and thought it was between one-half and three-quarters of a mile. So then I got smart and decided to MapQuest it. Turns out, our walk to school was four-tenths of a mile with most of it along an east-west street.

The conversation with Gordon and the MapQuest route sparked more memories. I can see Dundas Street in my minds eye as it rises steeply toward Princes Street with the Castle looming beyond. So research not only gave me the facts, it also prompted more memories.

Two good reasons why memoirs need research, too.

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The image at the head of this post shows our flat at 6 Fettes Row and comes from a slide my father took in 1961.

What Am I Writing?

As I work on my memoirs, I’ve been struggling with the designation. Is it memoir or memoirs? Or is it neither?

Actually, I’ve already answered that last question to my satisfaction. Although my intent is to cover my entire life using a loose chronological structure, the manuscript (or manuscripts, as I explain below) does jump forward and back at times. It is an informal account that keys in on my emotional reactions to those “small” moments that had a significant psychological effect on me. In addition, the first part has a theme based on my identity as a preacher’s kid. So my work in progress is memoir, or memoirs, rather than an autobiography.

But that still leaves the first question unanswered: memoir or memoirs? I hear the two used interchangeably and find myself doing so, too. Even dictionary definitions tell me that they mean the same thing. Researching the issue, however, I came across two blog posts that, while not necessarily authoritative, provide a distinction that works for me.¹ According to them, writing “a memoir” means you are focusing on a particular aspect of your life, while writing “my memoirs” means you are covering your life to date. That doesn’t necessarily make it an autobiography, however, since an autobiography focuses on facts while memoirs look at the author’s memories and highlight the feelings and reactions those memories and experiences produce.

So I’m writing both a memoir and my memoirs. I’m splitting my memories into two parts—one from my growing up years when I was saddled with the unwanted distinction of being a preacher’s kid, and one from college on where I learned to create my own identity. Part I is clearly a memoir, singular, and the two together are my memoirs, plural.

But I still don’t know whether I should tell people I’m writing a memoir or my memoirs.

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¹ See http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2016/09/memoir-vs-memoirs.html and www.albertflynndesilver.com/blog/memoir-as-opposed-to-my-memoirs/ (both accessed 8/4/19).

A Tale of Three Memoirs

I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs lately, and they highlighted something I already knew: reading tastes differ. This is a statement I’ve made before, but my point then was that a writer shouldn’t be discouraged simply because someone doesn’t like that person’s work. This time I have a different point: don’t feel that something is wrong with you simply because you don’t enjoy a book that your friends or the newspaper critics rave about.

I’m going to illustrate this with my recent experience. Although my reading covered a broader selection, I will limit this discussion to three memoirs written by white women, including two from my own generation. All of these books received both popular and critical acclaim, but I enjoyed one, struggled with another, and couldn’t make it through the third. (They are discussed below in the opposite order.)

CAVEAT: All of these books are well-written. Don’t treat my analyses as traditional reviews or assume that you will share my opinion. If you do, you have missed my point.

I’ll begin with The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. It started out well enough with the aftermath of a seemingly dramatic incident and a few hints about the incident itself, but then the author says, “Because it took so long for me to paste together what happened, I will leave that part of the story missing for a while.” Unfortunately, I never got there. Karr may have thought it was a carrot, but she dangled it so far from my eyes that it wasn’t any motivation at all. I don’t understand why she did that, either. Memoirs don’t have to be chronological, and Karr plays with time elsewhere in the book, so why not here?

After the opening, I found The Liars’ Club boring and dull. Yes, I know those are synonyms, but it deserves to be said twice. I heard or read at some point that a reader should give a book fifty pages before giving up, but I quit at page 46. The story was riddled with profanity, but my main problem was boredom. I simply couldn’t get interested. And yet, according to the back cover, The Liars’ Club was “selected as one of the best books of 1995 by People, Time, The New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly.”

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard also started with an intriguing story and then stalled. In many ways, her childhood is the most like mine. Yes, there were some obvious differences: Dillard was a city girl and I a small town one, she was fearless and popular and I was timid and tolerated, and her parents had a substantial income while mine learned to wring the most from their more limited funds. But we both grew up in the same era to loving parents who gave us plenty of freedom, and we both had a privileged childhood, although I didn’t realize how privileged mine was until much later. Even so, the book stalled because of the passages where she describes her growing consciousness of self and the world around her. Unfortunately, I can’t find the right words to describe them. Metaphysical? No. Philosophical? Closer, but still not right. Even abstract doesn’t work because Dillard is masterful at using concrete images to describe her abstract thoughts and perceptions. Whatever you call them, I found those passages tedious because they didn’t match my own thought processes or emotional experiences.

Still, there were two differences between An American Childhood and The Liars’ Club that made me give Dillard’s book a chance. First, she completed her opening story right away rather than leaving me feeling unsatisfied. Second, sprinkled among those problematic passages were events that I understood, such as her fear of the glowing monster that traveled around her bedroom walls at night—a fear that continued but could be controlled after she discovered the monster came from the headlights of a passing car. There were just enough of these latter scenes to keep me reading to the end. I am not sorry I finished it but am unlikely to read more by the same author.

My tepid reaction to An American Childhood doesn’t match the back cover blurb from The Chicago Tribune, which states: “An American Childhood more than takes the reader’s breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that when you have put down this book, you’re a different person, one who has virtually experienced another childhood.” And I wouldn’t have guessed that it was a Pulitzer Prize winner.

My favorite of the three memoirs is Wild by Cheryl Strayed. The book’s subtitle is “From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” and it tells the story of her three-month-plus hike along the rugged trail. As she takes us with her, she weaves in the events that lead her to the mostly solitary journey and the lessons she learned from it. Like The Liars’ Club, Strayed begins—in the Prologue—with a story she doesn’t finish until later, but this time we know what happened and it is only the consequences that are left hanging. That difference made the incident intriguing rather than frustrating.

If you are expecting a hiking manual or a pure wilderness adventure, you won’t get that from Wild, but as a memoir it resonated with me. The Wall Street Journal called it “vivid, touching, and ultimately inspiring,” and this time I can understand why it was voted a best book of the year by NPR, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, and Vogue.

One word of caution for some of my Christian friends: there is some profanity in Wild, although it is far less obtrusive than in The Liars’ Club. There are also references to sex and drugs, but those experiences are necessary to show who Strayed was at the time, and the story would be incomplete without them.

As I noted at the beginning of this post, you may not feel the way I do about one or more of these books, and that’s okay. In Wild, Strayed mentions that James Michener was her mother’s favorite author and Strayed liked him too while she was growing up. Then a college professor called Michener an entertainer for the masses and not worthy reading for a serious writer. Strayed passed that opinion on to her mother at the time but regretted her arrogance after her mother’s death.

Every reader is different. Trust your own taste, and don’t let anyone make you feel inferior because yours differs from theirs.

Chasing Ribbons

I’ve been entering my photographs in the Lake County Fair since 2015. Here is a breakdown.

·       In 2015, I entered four photos in the beginners’ division. I won a red ribbon for a black and white photo in the nature/scenic category. That photo showed a waterfall flowing under a bridge. (To see the image, go to my August 7, 2017 blog post.)

·       In 2016, I entered seven photos in the beginners’ division. I won a white ribbon for a black and white photo in the architecture category. That photo showed an outdoor fire escape and can also be seen in my August 7, 2017 blog post.

·       In 2017, I entered twelve photos in the advanced division. I won a blue ribbon for a color photo in the domestic/farm animals category. That photo showed a ewe and her lamb, and you can see it in my August 14, 2017 blog post.

·       In 2018, I entered seven photos in the advanced division and received no ribbons. I was satisfied with the quality of my entries, however.

Now to 2019. I entered eleven photos in the advanced division and won three ribbons. The picture at the top of this post shows my second-place color entry in the insect category. The next two show my third-place entries in the black and white floral and the black and white architecture categories.

 

Although I’m proud of my accomplishment, I’m not stopping here.

Next year continues my quest for that elusive blue ribbon.

The Saga of a Laptop and a Carry-On Suitcase

This year’s vacation was a Baltic Sea cruise that left from Stockholm, Sweden and ended in Bergan, Norway. We were delayed on the way to Stockholm when our connecting flight got cancelled due to a drone over the Frankfurt airport. Flight delays are always possible, and there wasn’t anything we could have done about it.

But maybe I could have foreseen and prevented the snag we faced on the way home.

Last year I bought a small suitcase and made sure the dimensions complied with the international carry-on restrictions. There was an outside, zippered pocket that was perfect for my laptop and plenty of room inside for my camera bag. So when we packed for our cruise, I used my new suitcase and a messenger bag as my carry-ons.

That worked fine on the trip over, where both legs were on international carriers. Unfortunately, Bergan is a smaller airport and we had to fly from there to Copenhagen to catch the flight to Chicago. The plane we got on at Bergan was a small, domestic one, and my suitcase didn’t fit in the overhead bins, let alone under the seat. The flight attendant checked it at the side of the plane, but I had to take my laptop and my camera bag out first. The camera bag worked as my second carry-on, so that was fine.

But my laptop was a problem.

I had been using a large laptop as my primary and only computer, and I used it both at home and on trips. I had never been entirely comfortable doing so, however. What if something happened to my laptop while on vacation? Although the most important documents are backed up, I tailor my programs to my needs, and Word especially is highly customized. Losing my laptop would mean downloading new programs and spending long hours modifying them. I have considered buying a tablet and taking it instead, but that isn’t a good fit for me. I prefer larger screens and keyboards, and most tablets aren’t well-suited to the work I would want to do on them.

Back to Bergan, Norway. When I tried to fit my laptop into my messenger bag, it was too big. I finally put it in with the short edge down and left the flap of the bag open with the laptop protruding, but I knew I had to find a better solution for the future.

My older brother had purchased a separate, smaller laptop for use when travelling, and I realized that might be my solution, too. In fact, I even thought about using his. Donald has Parkinson’s Disease and some of the complications have made it unlikely that he will ever need his travel laptop again. But when I checked it out, I discovered several issues. First, Donald had customized it for his needs, and they aren’t mine. Second, it has been a while since he undated it, and I’m not sure how much of a problem that is.

The biggest issue, however, is that Donald’s travel laptop has minimal memory and storage space. Even when I cleared out everything I knew I didn’t need, I still couldn’t download and adjust photos efficiently. Donald seems to have solved that problem by storing everything in the cloud, but that wouldn’t work for me. Some of our vacations are to exotic places that might not have WiFi access, and I want to be able to download and adjust photos while I still remember what they are. And there aren’t enough USB ports on Donald’s travel laptop to allow me to use both a card reader and a thumb drive at the same time.

So I gave up on that idea and went out and bought my own. This is a Dell XPS13 with 8GB RAM and a 256 GB harddrive. It wasn’t cheap, but it has what I need and, at 12” wide, it fits into my messenger bag the long way. It has USB-C ports rather than the more traditional USB-2 or 3 ports, but a $10 hub resolves that issue. You can see the difference in size in the photo at the head of this post.

Of course, I will have to copy documents and photos between my home and travel computers, but I can limit the process to the documents I expect to work with while on vacation and the photos I take there. And I won’t worry as much about losing my laptop when my primary computer is safe at home.

I still plan on using my current carry-on suitcase for international travel, but if I run across another small plane as I did in Bergan, it will be much easier to take out the travel laptop and transfer it to my messenger bag. A travel laptop isn’t the perfect solution, but it is the best for me for now.

Because a computer is one of my most important travel accessories.

Experimental Literature

Last week I reprinted an IWC blog post about mixing creativity and formula. As I noted in that post, some people disdain formula and assume that only “different” can be “creative.” Unfortunately, these are often the same people who write bad experimental literature.

Personally, I’m not fond of experimental literature. While some of it is good, I won’t know that until I read it, and I’ve got such a long reading list already that I don’t need to add something I might not enjoy. But my bigger issue is that I have read some experimental literature that was awful. In those cases, the “creativity” that may have existed in the author’s mind didn’t make it onto the written page. Some attempts even sound as if the writer tried experimental literature because he or she was too lazy to figure out how to be creative in a more traditional format.

Not that I haven’t tried experimental literature myself. A few years ago, I decided to write a novel made up of passages taken from a dozen classics. As I planned it, the only aspect that would be original with me would be the choice and arrangement of the passages. Each paragraph would be taken verbatim from a single source, except that the names of the characters and places would be changed to maintain consistency throughout the story. I had chosen the source novels and created a basic plot, but I was unsuccessful in the execution. Bad experimental literature is worse than none, and I wasn’t going to write something I wouldn’t be willing to read.

Maybe I’ll pick that project up again someday, but for now I have too many other ideas competing for my time. These more traditional ideas provide plenty of scope for my creativity, so I’ll stick with what I do best, at least for now. 

If you want to try writing experimental literature, I wish you all the best.

Just make sure it isn't the lazy way out.

Mixing Creativity and Formula

This week I am reprinting another blog post that I wrote for the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog. This one originally appeared on February 21, 2018.

Mixing Creativity and Formula

I’m tired of hearing people run down so-called genre fiction because it follows a formula, as if that means it lacks creativity.  Yes, some genre fiction is only minimally creative, but that’s the fault of the author, not the genre.

Take romance, which is often cited as the archetype of formula fiction. I don’t write romance and rarely read it because I have limited time and generally prefer other types of novels. But I do read it occasionally, and one of my favorite authors fits perfectly into the romance “formula.” More about her later.

Here is the definition of the “Romance Genre” found on the Romance Writers of America’s website at www.rwa.org/romance.

Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.

A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many subplots as he/she wants as long as the love story is the main focus of the novel.

An Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.

This “formula” leaves a lot of room for creativity. As the RWA website goes on to say, “Romance novels may have any tone or style, be set in any place or time, and have varying levels of sensuality—ranging from sweet to extremely hot.” Setting, characterization, plot twists, word choice, and many other elements of romance writing provide as much opportunity for creativity as literary and experimental fiction do.

For illustration, here are summaries of three stories written by my favorite romance novelist. All three books have (1) a central love story developed through a main plot that centers around individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work and (2) an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending where the lovers’ struggles result in emotional justice and unconditional love. See if you can identify the books and/or the author.

1. The two protagonists love each other even before the novel begins, but a well-meaning friend causes her to reject his marriage proposal. When they meet again years later, events, misunderstandings, and the romantic intentions of other parties conspire to keep them from renewing their relationship. Eventually, however, the protagonists realize that they are meant for each other and find happiness together.
2. The female protagonist is brought up by her aunt and uncle but is treated as a poor relation. When she falls in love with one of her cousins, she keeps her attraction secret because she knows his family would never consent to a marriage between them. But when the consequences of the family’s shaky values threaten to ruin their social position, the protagonist’s inner worth shines through and the lovers are united at last.
3. When the protagonists first meet, neither likes the other. They are continually thrown together, and the male protagonist falls in love in spite of himself. He grudgingly proposes, is rejected, and leaves. Soon after, the female protagonist’s sister elopes and threatens to bring disgrace to her family. After the male protagonist spends time and money to secure the marriage, the female protagonist realizes that she loves him after all. But it is too late! No, it isn’t. This is formula romance, and the two lovers end up together after all.

By now, you will have guessed that I’m talking about Jane Austin. Here are the titles that go with the summaries: (1) Persuasion, (2) Mansfield Park, and (3) Pride and Prejudice. I could have used many more examples, since Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey all follow the same formula.

I’m not saying that everyone should write to a formula. On the contrary, the world would be a barren place without any love stories that end in tragedy or authors who dare to try something new.

But I am saying this: don’t condemn genre novels that write to a formula, because creativity and formula CAN mix.