On Being Vulnerable

The Problems & Rewards of Writing Memoir

Memoir writing presents its own distinct challenges which as I’ve discovered are often very different from those encountered in writing fiction. In particular are the problems of information and of vulnerability.

The problem of information is simply one of overload. There is too much! We already know the story. We know its people, its place, its context, etc. We know the ending before we begin. If we’re writing fiction much of this detail has to be imagined. Knowing our story from the outset is very different. We may have files of information, letters, photographs, all kinds of documents and memories but including it all risks boring our audience. Too many facts, too much detail will detract from our story.

So how to know what to leave out and what to include? We may have an anecdote we want to tell because we think it’s cute or funny, or tragic even, or just because we like the way we’ve written it, but if it’s not part of the main story, if it goes off at a tangent, if it’s not essential, or the characters in it are incidental, then we may well need to discard it.

The William Faulkner quote, ‘In writing, you must kill all your darlings,’ comes to mind. As it happens it’s not one of my favourites. I’m not wholeheartedly in favour. I don’t think we always do have to kill, ‘our darlings’. I think sometimes we write something really good that we love, that has a valid place in our story and we should keep. But there is no doubt that we can get carried away. At times we have to be ruthless and ask ourselves whether a piece of writing, a character, an anecdote, whatever it might be, earns its place.

We do not have to tell everything. We do not have to follow chronology or facts slavishly; though we always owe our readers the truth. We don’t have to begin from the beginning or from the moment of our birth! It’s up to us to use our judgement and be selective. Reading widely in the memoir genre will help us get a feel for this.

But even when we are selective, we can end up with a plethora of information and an abundance of words, particularly if we’re working in fragmentary way as I am. In twenty years of writing I’ve always resisted office and school stationery on the grounds that they smack of work. I’ve now succumbed and bought a mini-filing system in the shape of a concertina file in which to gather all my scraps of memoir writing. These include pieces of work I’ve printed off from the computer as well as others which are handwritten and torn from various notebooks. I’ve filed them under five headings that make sense to me. It’s a relief to have this scattered material in some kind of shape and in a place where it’s easily accessible. I may not use it all but I won’t risk losing it either.

As for the problem of vulnerability, writing memoir can take us to some very difficult places. It can bring back powerful and sometimes painful memories and even if we’ve done the healing such memories remain. Putting them down on the page inevitably means we revisit them. We do not have to tell what we do not want to tell, but we do need to be honest and authentic about what we write and this means being vulnerable. Vulnerability is the place where we will meet our reader. It is where they will engage with our story.

At the outset of my journey into memoir, I underestimated how much telling my story might affect me in a negative way and how I would need to find ways of dealing with this. So far, I’ve found that I need more breaks and more time away from the work. I’ve also found being able to talk to my creative buddy, and to a friend who has had a similar life experience, invaluable in helping me to keep going.

If you find you have a difficult story to tell or you are relatively new to writing then Cathy Rentzenbrink’s, Write All Down might be a good read before you begin..there’s a great review of it here.

Now, to the rewards - do not underestimate how transformative telling your story can be. Transformation can happen on the page and in private but it is particularly powerful when others identify with what you’re writing. This happened to me most recently in the workshop I ran at Collected Books, in Durham. Here, I told the story of a yellow skirt which is part of my memoir. I hadn’t planned on telling it but I’d been making the point about being vulnerable and about reflecting on how our lives have been shaped and I thought it seemed important. It wasn’t an easy story for me to tell. I told it briefly, in just a few sentences but as I did I felt a shift in the atmosphere. The mood became more attentive, serious and empathetic. These writers knew how to honour a story and embrace vulnerability. This in itself was reward enough but when someone said, ‘This makes me think of my mother,’ or as was said to me previously in an early reading from the memoir, ‘I need to read your book,’ the reward is greater still: others are hearing and identifying with our story, it has a universal quality. We are not alone. We are heard and we are visible. Believe me, telling our stories, putting them down on the page, reading them aloud, can be troublesome and challenging but it can be powerful and rewarding in equal measure.

Thanks for reading

Avril x