Today’s post is by writer and editor Lisa Cooper Ellison. Join her on Wednesday, April 29, for the online class Find & Refine Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc.
Mention that you’re writing a memoir and questions immediately pour in: What’s your book about? How is it organized? When is it coming out?
Most writers fret about these questions throughout the writing process. But there’s one question underneath that most writers never think to ask, and it’s the one that could revolutionize their revision process.
Before we get to the question, let’s explore the two phases of memoir structure development. When most writers talk about structure, they’re focused on how to order the events in their book. But that’s phase two in the process. First, you must understand how you’ve changed and what that process looked like. But sometimes that transformation is hard to pinpoint.
Here are three common manuscript problems I’ve encountered that can make it difficult to identify your memoir’s narrative arc.
- “And Then” Problem: Memoirs in this category consist of a collection of interesting anecdotes that follow “and then this happens, and then this happens” pattern. Like rocks randomly peppering a stream, you might be able to jump from one to another, but the path to the other side is unclear. Readers want to feel that one moment drives the next, and the stakes rise, until they reach a point where change must occur.
- Kitchen Sink Problem: This frequently occurs when someone with a complicated life tries to shoehorn every interesting, incredible, or horrible experience into one book. Think of a coming-of-age career story with an addiction drama driven by your greatest loss, sprinkled with a pinch of research. When numerous events, all with their own arcs, are added into the same story, readers may skim the surface of each one.
- Buried Treasure Problem: In journalism, it’s said that you’re burying the lede when your middle or final paragraphs contain the most important part of your story. Memoirists sometimes bury their lede by starting too early—often in childhood—even when writing an adult story. You know you’re struggling with this issue if you find yourself saying, “The first X pages describe events you need to know to understand my story.”
Addressing these issues can help your improve your structure, but they might not help you identify what your story is truly about. Until last year, I asked writers what kind of journey they were on, then taught them how to apply a memoir-friendly version of the beat sheet to their books. This screenwriting tool, which follows the hero’s journey, can help you overlay your transformation onto story structure. Mapping the changes you’ve made creates a cause-and-effect chain that can lead to insights regarding your memoir’s main point. Beat sheets work well when your story is fundamentally about going somewhere—like a destination, a concrete life goal, or a specific nameable change—things that happen in Wild, Love with a Chance of Drowning, and The Yellow Envelope.
But over the years, I’ve met writers who summarize their books this way: I experienced ABC harrowing experiences, went to therapy, and healed. Now I do XYZ incredible things. From the perspective of a life lived, that healing journey is remarkable, and I personally bow to everyone who undertakes that work. Yet there are two problems writers face when writing about healing journeys.
First, most of the drama that creates a compelling tale occurs before entering therapy. It’s the reason many addiction memoirs wrap up soon after recovery begins. In your therapist’s office or at a recovery meeting, you discuss events that have already occurred. If the focus is on processing the past, little is happening in the present, which diminishes your story’s stakes and flattens the plot.
Second, healing is an amorphous concept that’s difficult to explain, let alone tame into a story that includes the dramatic tension needed to maintain a reader’s interest. It’s not that it can’t be done—there are always exceptions to the rule—but it’s challenging to execute.
These issues have led me to ask writers a different question: Are you going somewhere, or are you reclaiming something?
If you’re reclaiming something you once had but let go of, you might need another tool. This is where The Queen’s Path by Stacey Simmons comes in. Similar to a beat sheet, it relies on turning points that move your story forward. However, unlike the hero’s journey—which is about venturing out into the world to discover the elixir of life and bring your boon back to your people—The Queen’s Path helps you claim your sovereignty or internal power.
To do this, we must examine the parts of ourselves we’ve shunned, how we’ve doubled down on ineffective behaviors or choices, and how we must grapple with not just our experiences with intimate others but also the pressures the world places on us and them. This takes the story of healing beyond the therapist’s office and out into the world, where things happen to us, and most importantly, we make them happen as we progress toward greater wholeness.
While The Queen’s Path is a feminist alternative to the hero’s journey, this path isn’t just for women. When I interviewed Stacey for the Writing Your Resilience podcast, she spoke of the men who’ve told her they’re on The Queen’s Path too.
Answering the journey versus reclamation question has resulted in huge epiphanies for the authors I work with. They now have a clearer picture of what they’re trying to accomplish and approach revision with greater confidence and ease. Best of all, they know which tools to employ and give themselves permission to use the parts that work for their story and leave the rest behind. The clearer they become, the less they fret about the questions that still roll in. They know that having responses for the first two questions will streamline the process of completing their book and answering, “When is your book coming out?”
Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us on Wednesday, April 29, for the online class Find & Refine Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc.
Lisa Cooper Ellison is an author, speaker, trauma-informed writing coach, and host of the Writing Your Resilience podcast. She works and writes at the intersection of storytelling and healing, and uses both her personal experiences and clinical training to help writers turn tough experiences into art. Lisa’s essays and stories have appeared on Risk! and in The New York Times, HuffPost, Hippocampus Literary Magazine, and Kenyon Review Online, among others.
I write fiction, not memoirs, but I read this because I have debated upon someday writing one. I’ve come across many people who write memoirs, and unless they are famous people, or extraordinary things happen to them, I think they are written for their family. No problem with that.
IF I was to write a memoir, it wouldn’t exactly be about me, but about my experience marrying into a family with a hidden secret: my mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law were both hoarders.
Yes, it did impact me, as my husband and I–and our children–had to deal with this mental illness, which until the television series “Hoarders” came out, was shamefully hidden. My husband and his sister escaped home right after hs graduation. It was when his grandmother was elderly and has Alzheimer’s that we got dragged into the situation, which worsened when his mother suffered her first stroke.
I could write about it, and I know it would probably sell as there is a morbid curiosity about this odd mental illness. I searched for books about the condition to know how to deal with it, but there isn’t much out there. I wouldn’t be able to describe how to deal with it, only how we attempted to no success, so what could I offer a reader?
Then why bother? Because after two decades of marriage, I finally thought “it’s not MY shame, it’s hers” and by confiding in others, I discovered several other people who had escaped the same hoarding households as my husband did. It was a huge relief for them to learn that they weren’t alone, and that others didn’t view them as being at fault.
However, it was a really, really difficult decade at the end of both their lives, exacerbated by my mother in law having (at 75) never filed for SS or Medicare, and to do so, we needed to locate her birth certificate. EIGHT large rented storage units, and over three tons of trash removed from her two room apartments, it was only the grace of God that we located it.
I’m not sure I want to relive it all.
This sounds like a fascinating story! I think many people could relate to secrets around mental health and how it affects multiple generations of a family.
Thanks for sharing your story, Ellen. It sounds fascinating and writing it might help others since hoarding is far more common than people realize. Shame keeps us from talking about it, which prevents family members from getting the help they need. Writing about it might also help you better understand what you went through–even if you explore it in one of your fictional worlds. Incidentally, I read Coming Clean by Kimberly Ray Miller a few years back and found it incredibly helpful. Whatever you choose to do, thanks for reading my essay and please keep writing your books.
Love this post, Lisa! I recently read The Queen’s Path because it was recommended to me by one of your clients and it offered such a beautiful feminine-focused angle to the way I had been looking at narrative arc. Thanks for all you do!
Hi Ashleigh! Thanks for reading this essay. I’m so glad you read The Queen’s Path. Stacey Simmons is amazing. I loved her book and I loved talking with her on my podcast. She’s given me so many new ways to see stories and the structures we use to tell them.
Great post, thank you. I am working on a memoir currently, slowly, amidst other writing projects. I appreciate these insights and perspective.
Thanks for reading this post, Brendan. I’m so glad it resonated with you. If you’d like more tips, please consider attending next week’s webinar. And best of luck with your memoir. I hope that the process is deeply fulfilling.
Lisa, you are jut so darned profound and you just keep getting better (read, become an ever more helpful guide). I see the Queen’s Path as my way forward as a late-in-life diagnosed AuDHD man. Thank you, thank you for sharing this. It’s like the final puzzle piece of understand my own story.