Post by Vicki Mayk on Mar 17, 2019 2:50:32 GMT
Hi All!
Welcome to week 5 -- the last week in our memoir journey. It has been so great to see everyone's work and to share this memoir journey with you.
This week we talk about one of my favorite topics: How to handle gaps in memory and writing about what we don't know or can't remember. The following is the "lesson" and prompts. It also is attached as a Word document!
Best,
Vicki
Week 5 – How to Handle Writing About What We Don’t Remember
The very act of writing our memories means we are writing something that is not 100 percent factual. Now – I’m not saying what we write in memoir is something that is made up or fabricated. But drawing our material from our memories means that it is material that has been filtered. We, as human beings, are not audio and video recorders. We aren’t court reporters, typing every word and syllable of our lives into a document as our lives are happening. So as memoirists, we are already starting out with a story that is the truth as we remember it, to the best of our knowledge.
And because our memories can be flawed, that means that the stories we tell may not be 100 percent accurate. But the agreement we make with our readers is that the stories we are telling are the truth to the best of our knowledge. It is the truth as we remember it.
People in all my memoir classes ask if it is all right that they make something up because it is something that could happen or was likely to happen, based on everything they know and remember. Actually, that is what we do all the time as memoirists when we write scenes. We are re-creating what happened. So if we write a scene remembering how we helped our grandmother bake cookies or remember a certain holiday with our families or tell about a conversation that happened on a family car trip, we are very likely pulling details, not only from that specific occasion, but from every time we baked cookies with grandma. From every Christmas in our memories. And from every car trip. Because the details are being pulled from all of our remembered experiences – not being completely made up – we are writing true stories.
However, let me give you an example when recreating from things you know to be true is straying from writing the truth. If you have a favorite Uncle who washed his car every Saturday and you wish you could write about helping him (but you never did help him) – you don’t get to write a scene of you helping to wash the car. Yes, you can write about him washing the car. You know it’s true he always washed the car. But you can’t pick up the sponge and hose and help in a scene you are writing if you never did it. Do you see the difference?
But what about when we have gaps in our memories? How do we get around that? It happens to all of us. There are ways to handle that.
Research
If you want to write about something that happened in your family that you weren’t present to observe, are too young to remember, or that happened before you were born, sometimes the best way to do it is by researching. This doesn’t necessarily mean hours of combing the internet – although that can be helpful. Interviewing members of the family who were there can be helpful. If you want to know what the weather was on the day you are writing about or a description of a certain kind of car, internet searches can be useful. If you want to write about the town your grandparents settled in when they first came to Pennsylvania, you can get in the car and drive there. Those are just a few examples. There are ways to find out information that can help to recreate a scene.
The Technique of Stating What You Don’t Know
Some good memoir writers have written great scenes that include outright admission of what they don’t remember. Take this example from Mary Karr’s “The Liar’s Club.”
I don’t remember our family driving across the Orange Bridge to get to the Bridge City café that evening. Nor do I remember eating the barbecued crabs, which is a shame, since I love those crabs for their sweet grease and liquid smoke taste. I don’t remember how much Mother drank in that bayou café, where you could walk to the end of the dock after dinner and toss your leftover hush puppies to hungry alligators. My memory comes back into focus when we’re drawing close to the Orange Bridge on the way home. From my spot in the backseat…I want to see Mother’s face, to see which way her mood is drifting after all the wine. But I’m staring at the back of her head in its short, wild tangle of auburn curls.
Do you see what Mary Karr did? She told us she did not remember the details about the drive or eating the crabs on that particular day. Those memories (including the taste of the crabs) are from OTHER visits to that café. Karr honors her pact with her readers by telling us that she honestly doesn’t remember these details. She’s pulling them from other moments, or maybe from research.
There are other ways to make the statement “I don’t remember.” You can write, “I don’t remember, but according to family stories.” Or you can state, “I don’t remember, but my sister/aunt says….”
The Technique Called Speculation
You can’t write “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” too many times in one essay or even a book-length memoir. It’s likely to become repetitive. But with the help of research and making what some people call an educated guess, you can use a technique called speculation. In speculation, you can invent some details but 1. They must be based on things that you know and 2. You should avoid using the technique to completely make up an event. This is a technique to fill in the blanks.
Ways speculation can be used
¥ To fill in when memory is fuzzy or incomplete.
¥ To raise possibilities or multiple possibilities (Maybe Karen left home because she was tired of the beatings. Maybe it was because she was ready to be on her own.)
¥ To enrich sensory detail that is unknown or not remembered
¥ To express what is sensed rather than observable (I gathered from the silence my mother didn’t want to talk about it)
¥ To provide historical or cultural context in an interesting way
Steps to determine how/when to speculate:
1. List everything that you know about the situation/story/memory.
2. Use the tried-and-true 5 Ws and an H: who, what, when, where, why and how
3. Determine which of the W’s or H has little or no information
4. Identify ways you could go about finding out what you don’t know
¬ The internet can tell you what the weather was that day or can provide newspaper accounts if those are applicable.
¬ You can interview other people who were present.
¬ Books can be consulted if there was an historic event. (9/11, Vietnam War)
5. Assess what you can speculate once you have listed what you know and added to it from research.
Example: Weather reports say that six inches of snow fell that day, so I think it would have taken me longer to walk home from school. Perhaps that’s how I missed the moment when the tree fell on the house.
6. Brainstorm scenarios that have a high probability of being true.
7. Write more than one version of what “might” have happened.
8. Employ language and structure that signals to your reader that you are speculating. The following are words that are used to signal speculating:
The words of speculation
¥ Maybe
¥ Perhaps
¥ Possibly
¥ I like to think
¥ I suppose
¥ We’ll never know
¥ We gather
¥ He/She/I would have….
¥ I might have thought/noticed/gone
Look at how Darin Straus used speculation in his memoir “Half A Life” to fill in what he did not remember about a car accident:
And then it’s too late. My forearm hooks to protect my eyes. The front-seat passenger shouts. I picture my foot disappearing under the dash, kicking down for the brake, straining farther than any real leg can go. Yet the hood of my Oldsmobile met Celine Zilke at forty miles an hour. Her head cracked the windshield. I remember the yellow reflector from her spokes, a useless spark, kicking up the glass incline and over the roof.
My car bumped onto the grassy median. And then I must have done all the normal driver things. Put on the clonking hazards, rolled to a stop, cut the engine; I must have stepped onto the grass in my T-shirt and shorts. I simply have no memory of how I got there.
Straus used speculation, drawing on what he knows about how he typically reacted when he stopped a car on many other occasions, to describe this moment. But he lets the reader know he’s speculating by saying “I must have” instead of “I stepped onto the grass.”
Your prompts this week are to use one of the examples I’ve given you to write about an event that you don’t remember all the details about. I am not going to make research one of the options, but you can do research (talking to family members, looking up facts) to help you with either of these prompts if you want to.
Choose ONE of the following prompts and write a two- to three-page scene, filling in gaps in your memory using one of these techniques:
Prompt #1:
Write about a memory that you know has missing pieces of information or missing details. When you get to the part of the story where you don’t remember certain details or the details are unclear, use Mary Karr’s technique and tell readers that you don’t remember. You can use details you learned from another source and frame them as Mary Karr did (I don’t remember the delicious crabs.) Or you can use one of the options I described (“I don’t remember, but my mother/sister/father told me) to handle this information.
Prompt #2:
Write about a memory in which you remember some but not all of the details. Use speculation to make an educated guess about some missing details and use words from the list (maybe, perhaps, possibly etc.) to signal to the reader that you are speculating about something. Remember: When you speculate about missing details, you have to know enough to make a plausible guess. For instance: you know it was a 90-degree day and that your sister was out sunbathing all day – so you could speculate that she sent you to get her a cold drink. (“I might have gone in the house to get Judy a lemonade and that’s when I saw my mother kissing the milkman.”) Remember: whatever you speculate has to be based on some kind of information you know. You can’t just make things up and say “maybe” it happened. That’s not what speculation means.