Memoir: Turning Yourself into a Character

Memoir is character-based non-fiction. As obvious as this might sound, what’s often missing in an early draft of memoir is the narrator’s engagement with his or her own story. Observers by nature, writers sometimes tell their story as witness rather than participant.

To write compelling memoir, you need to turn yourself into a character. This requires some of the same techniques fiction writers use to create characters who readers believe in. In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner distinguishes between flat and round characters — predictable stereotypes versus those who are complex, full of contradictions, and revealed in their human frailties.

So how do you become a character in your memoir?

Dramatize Yourself
First, you need to have or cultivate some distance from yourself. Imagine you’re viewing yourself from above. Observe how you come across in the world around you. Revel in your quirks, idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies — those small differences that seem to set you apart from others. Strip away the inessentials and focus on those features in your personality that lead to the most intense contradictions or ambivalence.

Assume a Persona
In the most successful first-person stories, the I takes on a persona that is separate from the author, much like an actor takes on a role. In fiction writing parlance, narrative persona is the personality assumed by the narrator–a personality summoned from some aspect of the writer. But even when you’re writing memoir, you are essentially pulling another part of yourself to tell the story. Assuming a persona helps you achieve the distance you need to become a multi-dimensional, believable character.

Reveal Your Flaws
Often writers of memoir want readers to like them. Nothing wrong with that. But in our desire to be liked we sometimes portray ourselves as good, flawless people to whom bad things happen. In other words, flat and predictable. Readers don’t need to like you, they just need to understand and connect with your humanity. That means disclosing your imperfections.

Self implication is often what’s needed. Kathryn Harrison’s memoir The Kiss recounts the sexual affair she had as a young woman with her long lost father. Harrison never shies away from her complicity in the affair. But because she conveys her mother’s emotional withdrawal throughout the story, she allows us to understand the emotional vacuum that made the affair possible.

What is your own part in your story? Your own self-deceived, desperate or frightened part?

Move Beyond the Literal Story
Avoid writing merely about surface events, i.e. this happened, then this happened, then this…and so on. Vivian Gornick says that every piece of literature has a situation and a story. The situation is what happens. But the story is the emotional journey, the author’s own struggle in making deeper and deeper sense of what that event meant. Your task is to excavate those surface events and move towards clarified meaning or self-knowledge. The Kiss focuses on the author’s obsessive affair with her father. But what accumulates beneath the surface is her struggle to reconcile her complicated relationship with her mother.

Let Your Mind Ramble on the Page
Among the great pleasures of reading memoir is to experience the evolution of the narrator’s thinking, to follow a live, open mind thinking on the page. To access this movement of thought in your memoir, observe your own mind at work. We’re always responding internally. We allow our mind to wander away from the subject at hand through retrospection, introspection, projection, digression, fantasy, speculation and so on. We explore questions and confusions. We ask not only ‘what is?’ but ‘what if?’

The Evolving Question
The anxiety of inquiry is what drives the memoir. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking revolves around her husband’s sudden death from heart attack. The internal impetus driving the story is her attempt to grasp and come to terms with, not only her husband’s absence, but the mystery of death itself.

What’s the essential question your memoir asks? Why are you examining this part of your past? Why now? What were you thinking or feeling, not only during the experience, but while you were writing? Why does this story matter?

Tags: character-based non-fiction, creating persona in non-fiction, Memoir, non-fiction, turning yourself into a character

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Characterization, Non-Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.