by
Mary Karr
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1. Notify subjects way in advance, detailing parts that might make them wince. So far, no one has ever winced.
2. On pain of death, don’t show pages to anybody mid-process. You want them to see your best work, polished.
3. As Hubert Selby told Jerry Stahl, “If you’re writing about somebody you hate, do it with great love.”
4. Related to the above: I never speak with authority about how people feel or what their motives were. I may guess at it, but I always let the reader know that’s speculative. I keep the focus on my own innards.
5. If somebody’s opinion of what happened wholly opposes mine, I mention it in passing without feeling obliged to represent it.
6. Don’t use jargon to describe people. It’s both disrespectful and bad writing. I never called my parents alcoholics; I showed myself pouring vodka down the sink. Give information in the form you received it.
7. Let your friends choose their pseudonyms.
8. Try to consider the whole time you’re working how your views—especially the harsh ones—may be wrong. Correct as needed.
9. With your closest compadres and touchy material, you might sit with them (same house or town, maybe not same room) while they read pages that may be painful for them.
10. I’d cut anything that someone just flat-out denies. Then again, in my family, all the worst stuff was long confessed to before I started writing the first tome.
11. Let the reader know how subjective your point of view is. This is in some way a form of respect to your subjects, who might disagree.
The most skillful writers either package facts so they hold this kind of psychological interest, or the data get palmed off in carnal scenes the reader can imagine and engage with on a physical level. In these books, you often don’t notice you’re being fed a string of facts. They’re sprinkled into other writing like pepper—there when you need them, but otherwise invisible.
My own first drafts start with information, then I try to herd that information out of my head into a remembered or living scene. I often interview myself about how I came to an opinion. Then, rather than present an abstract judgment (“She was a thief”), I try to re-create how I came to that opinion. “She was a thief” becomes “I stared into the computer’s big green eye, inside which sat the web site where my diamond bracelet was being sold, Lydia’s email contact in the corner.”
Some data, you may think you need to blurt out—the year, for instance. But saying, “On the news that summer, I watched the president resign before helicopters on the White House lawn” says “Nixon administration” to the reader in a slightly more fetching way. One cheap way writers try to strap on character is with T-shirt slogans and brand-name clothing. I encourage my students to work a little harder than this. Try to find something singular and dramatic a person does, instead of just gluing on a label that limits meaning to present-day fashion and won’t make sense fifty years hence.
Take data about a speaker’s age and size. “Standing under the orange hoop, I was the only freshman who could lift one ape-long arm and brush net.” This says age and size and basketball prowess while being evocative. “I tried to hunch inside the new letter jacket, but my bony wrists stuck out.” This adds an element of psychology—self-consciousness.
Here’s one excerpt about my old man. It’s better than anything I’d done before. But it still sounded so emotionally bald that I only sent it out to a magazine at my husband’s urging.
I tell the only truth I know:
that I am helpless and sorry you’re dying,
that this planet will weigh no less when you
are ash. . . .
and if, as Buddha says, life and death are illusory
I will be fooled and suffer your absence,
and somewhere you’ll always be
rising from your oxygen tent, a modern Lazarus,
or snapping open a Lone Star beer,
or simply, too tired to talk, scraping mud
from your black work boots onto the porch.
surprisingly moving given how spare & simple it is
It’s a cliché to talk about finding a voice, but it does feel arrived at, fixed and immutable as the angel hidden in Michelangelo’s stone. About nine months into working on the first chapter for a proposal (I’d been told I needed a hundred pages and an outline), I started knowing where the words went. Plus an obvious order rose up—mostly chronological, with one flash forward at the outset.
It didn’t happen in one instant. But over a period of a few days I went through a profound psychological shift. The images in my head suddenly had words representing them on the page. And accompanying the words was a state of consciousness. It almost felt like I’d walked into some inner room where my lived experiences could pass through and come out as language.
Dumb hope is what it hurts most to write, occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades, the blind alleys, the cliffs we stepped off. If you find yourself blocked for a period, maybe goad yourself in the direction of how you hoped at the time. Ask yourself if you aren’t strapping your current self across the past to hide the real story.
Most memoirs fail because of voice. It’s not distinct enough to sound alive and compelling. Or there are staunch limits to emotional tone, so it emits a single register. Being too cool or too shrill can ruin the read. The sentences are boring and predictable, or it’s so inconsistent you don’t know who’s speaking or what place they come from. You don’t believe or trust the voice. You’re not curious about the inner or outer lives of the writer. The author’s dead in the water.
We live in the age of the image, and it’s too easy to learn carnal writing for a memoirist to sketch a foggy physical world sans evocative sensory detail. A lot of instruction manuals beam in on the physical, simply because you can master it. But few textbooks take up how the inner life manifests itself in a memoir’s pages. In the more spectacular visual media like action films, say, the inner life fails to get much airplay—at most a scene in a shrink’s office or a snippet of voiceover here and there. But memoir can compete against the pyrotechnics of visual imagery in film and TV only by excelling where those media fail: writing a deeper moment from inside it.
You’re looking for that inner enemy that’ll help you to structure the book. I always have inklings of it, but tend to find it by writing interior frets and confessions and yearnings as I recall them. Maybe it’s only manifest after a first draft. Once I’ve found it, I’ll revise with it as the spine—how the self evolves to reconcile its inner conflicts over time. Your attendant setbacks and jackpots should lead up to a transformed self at the end.
On the most basic level, bad sentences make bad books. Poet Robert Hass taught me you can rewrite a poem by making every single line better. I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me. Or how I see them now.
In Lit, my rough draft of one chapter started thus:
Mother drove me to college in our yellow station wagon, and every night we stayed at a Holiday Inn, where we got drunk on screwdrivers.
This is information. Getting drunk with your mother suggests an emotional problem, but there’s no inherent drama or conflict. Other than the yellow car, there’s no carnality. The screwdrivers suggest trouble but don’t really capture the emotional tenor of the drive. Mostly, there is no scene—just reportage of data. That’s all I started with.
So how did I get from Draft 1’s dried-up little sound bite to something lusher? Memory—a physical memory of that time, a carnal fact. The car hadn’t come with air conditioning, so Mother installed a cheap one, which hung from the dash. It collected distillation, so when she made a sharp right turn, icy water—faintly redolent of chemical coolant—would slosh out onto my bare feet. Getting doused by that splash of freezing condensation was like a physical baptism miraculously dousing me in that single, living instant. It’s as if memory’s eye suddenly flipped open.
Like many such scenes, it comes to me in florid present tense. I look down and see the giant bamboo-bottom flip-flops I’d bought in California, with their black velvet straps, getting drenched with cold water. And I am in that car again. I can see the derby hat Mother wore—a pimp hat, she called it. She’d bought me one, too, in Houston. And she wears a copper bracelet that turns her wrist green because somebody told her it helps with arthritis in her hand. And another sense memory comes: I smell peaches, which we bought by the bushel in Arkansas. Also vodka from the screwdrivers Mother drank all the way down.
[...]
Mother’s yellow station wagon slid like a Monopoly icon along the gray road that cut between fields of Iowa corn, which was chlorophyll green and punctuated in the distance by gargantuan silver silos and gleaming, unrusted tractors glazed cinnamon red. Mother told me how the wealth of these farmers differed from the West Texas dirt farmers of her Dust Bowl youth, who doled out mortgaged seed from croaker sacks.
But because I was seventeen and had bitten my cuticles raw facing the prospect of fitting in at the private college we’d reach that night—which had accepted me through some mixture of pity and oversight—and because I was split-headed with the hangover Mother and I had incurred the night before sucking down screwdrivers in the unaptly named Holiday Inn in Kansas City, I told Mother something like, Enough already about your shitty youth. You’ve told me about eight million times since we pulled out of the garage.
It has a carnal description—the car like a Monopoly icon—from a point of view I could only have in imagination. Other carnal facts: the girl me has both a hangover and bitten cuticles. In addition to data from the earlier draft that this mother-daughter team get drunk together at night, it gives background info that the first paragraph lacks:
– Mother’s Dust Bowl youth
– The author’s age
– Where she’s from
– That she’s a worrier
– That the college she’s heading to is one above her station
– The blight of her shitty high school record
So there exists a boatload of interior information that helps to create emotional conflicts:
– The mother’s low-rent background adds to the daughter’s angst about going to a fancier college than normal in that family.
– The daughter telling the mother she’s sick of hearing about said mother’s shitty youth shows the somewhat normal conflict between mother and daughter, though for a daughter to call her mother’s youth “shitty” was way outside the mores of that time. The idiom suggests a lack of boundary between the two that gestures to the book’s central conflict.
1. Paint a physical reality that uses all the senses and exists in the time you’re writing about—a singular, fascinating place peopled with objects and characters we believe in. Should include the speaker’s body or some kinesthetic elements.
2. Tell a story that gives the reader some idea of your milieu and exploits your talent. We remember in stories, and for a writer, story is where you start.
3. Package information about your present self or backstory so it has emotional conflict or scene.
All the rest of these are interior:
4. Set emotional stakes—why is the writer passionate about or desperate to deal with the past—the hint of an inner enemy?
5. Think, figure, wonder, guess. Show yourself weighing what’s true, your fantasies, values, schemes, and failures.
6. Change times back and forth—early on, establish the “looking back” voice, and the “being in it” voice.
7. Collude with the reader about your relationship with the truth and memory.
8. Show not so much how you suffer in long passages, but how you survive. Use humor or an interjecting adult voice to help a reader over the dark places.
9. Don’t exaggerate. Trust that what you felt deeply is valid.
10. Watch your blind spots—in revision, if not before, search for reversals. Beware of what you avoid and what you cling to.
11. (Related to all of the above) Love your characters. Ask yourself what underlay their acts and versions of the past. Sometimes I pray to see people I’m angry at or resentful of as God sees them, which heals both page and heart.
There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, I’d lie on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn’t real anymore. For one thing, it was very old. It had been left there years before by another tenant, probably a Frenchman, since the map had been made in Paris. The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the wet Saigon heat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted. Vietnam was divided into its older territories of Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China, and to the west past Laos and Cambodia sat Siam, a kingdom. That’s old, I’d tell visitors, that’s a really old map.
If dead ground could come back to haunt you the way dead people do, they’d have been able to mark my map CURRENT and burn the ones they’d been using since ’64, but count on it, nothing like that was going to happen. It was late ’67 now, even the most detailed maps didn’t reveal much anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind. We knew that the uses of most information were flexible, different pieces of ground told different stories to different people. We also knew that for years now there had been no country but the war.
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Take it a phrase at a time. There was a map of Vietnam. If the current craze for over-the-top drama had affected the writing of Dispatches, Herr might have started with some fiery, guts-spilled war scene. Instead, he starts with a carnal object, and his reflection on it. A “true” thing—maps are meant to convey veracity. We should be able to find our way with them. He starts in a small, almost dull, everyday object that just happens to be left behind in his transient’s apartment.
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too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. Herr doesn’t just tell us he’s tired; he gives us dramatic evidence of the extent. It’s another carnal moment of a type we all understand.
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For one thing, it was very old. It had been left there years before by another tenant, probably a Frenchman, since the map had been made in Paris. Its antiqueness gives the map a kind of special radiance—a spiritual value, if you will. We also see Herr’s mind feeling for the truth, guessing that since it was made in Paris, a Frenchman had probably left it. It’s his first use of the word probably—the qualifier of a more truthful memoirist. He’s showing us his mind in action, his thoughtfulness, and how he tries to deduce the truth based on hard evidence.
- The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the wet Saigon heat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted. This again is carnal evidence, conjuring the tropical feel of Saigon, a place whose soppy atmosphere insidiously seeps in to warp the map, as the war he’ll show us will warp him and those he meets. The physical veil or mist acts as a physical metaphor, embodying the notion of “spookiness” or mystery. Whatever truth exists about the war is “veiled,” as the map is.
from Michael Herr's book Dispatches
So right off, he readies us for voices weaving together and for radical shifts in tone from light to dark. As a writer you can’t just start jamming stuff together, hoping the reader will magically know what’s in your mind. You have to start out slowly, by laying transitions—like leaving breadcrumbs for the reader. Then the transitions get quicker through the book. As you get used to the method, the breadcrumbs grow fewer and eventually vanish. By the end, it’s all sped-up jump cuts with invisible connections the reader’s already mastered.