Something Ill Never Do Again Memoir
This Is How You Write a Memoir
Rules for the much-maligned form.
Bissabutterfly/Wikimedia Commons.
There has lately been a rise backlash against the ubiquity of personal writing. Hamilton Nolan'southward anti-confessional diatribe in Gawker claims that journalism students are now taught but to write about themselves, which I tin say as a full-time faculty member at a journalism school is plain cool, but he raised some interesting points about the dubious rise of confessional writing over the last two decades and the marketplace pressure, especially on younger writers, to make a splash, or at least publish something somewhere, past turning to their own, possibly limited, life experience. And then, of form, there were recent critiques of Elizabeth Wurtzel babbling incoherently nigh her pure heart in New York Magazine.
All of which leads me to believe information technology may be fourth dimension to think methodically about what separates good confessional writing from bad confessional writing. It's dangerously cartoonish to say all personal writing is bad, and to automatically attack every writer who dares to delve into his own feel, but there are a one thousand thousand different ways to write personally and some of them are undoubtedly better than others. Hither, so, are some basic principles I accept come to over the years as both a professor and a writer (though, of class, I am still puzzling through them and tinkering with them and volition continue to do then probably for the balance of my life):
1. The writer should plough her trigger-happy critical centre on herself. (1 of the keen masters of this is Mary McCarthy, who was terrifying and brilliant in her critiques, even of her own pretentions and snobbisms.) It is always satisfying to read a author who sharply and deftly attacks the hypocrisies and delusions of the world around him, only we trust that author more completely when he likewise attacks himself, when he does not concur himself to a different standard, or protect himself from scrutiny. Accept David Foster Wallace'south famously dazzling essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Practice Again." He obsessively, comically, gorgeously dissects everything around him on the cruise ship, but does not exempt himself from his high level satire:
All week, I've institute myself doing everything I tin to distance myself in the crew'due south optics from the bovine herd I'm part of, to somehow unimplicate myself: I eschew cameras and sunglasses and pastel Caribbean habiliment. … Just of grade all of this ostensibly unimplicating beliefs on my part is itself motivated past a self-witting and somewhat cavalier concern about how I appear to others that is (this concern) 100% upscale American. Office of the overall despair of this luxury cruise is that no matter what I exercise I can not escape my own essential and newly unpleasant Americanness. … I am an American tourist, and am thus ex officio large, fleshy, cerise, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance conscious, aback, despairing and greedy: the world'south only known species of bovine carnivore.
two. Personal writing should seem honest. The reader likes personal writing to feel "honest." (This does not mean that the memoir is "honest"—who knows how the author actually felt nearly something that happened 20 years agone, or yesterday. It only needs to feel honest.) The reader is as adept as Holden Caulfield in detecting phoniness, fakeness, posturing, and is as allergic to them. If the reader senses the writer is lying fifty-fifty to himself, or using the essay as a piece of propaganda, a forwarding of his own personal mythology in too impuissant or transparent a way, she will react confronting it. (This can crusade readers to react confronting the personal writing of even very intelligent and stylish writers like Jonathan Franzen, who will include corking scenes of penetrating self-deprecation but seems to exist doing so in such a self-conscious writerly mode that he may in fact be celebrating himself past way of self-deprecation.)
three. Personal writing should entertain the reader. (And past this I do not mean the voyeuristic train wreck entertainment that ane gets from reading, say, Naomi Wolf'due south business relationship of losing the Technicolor Wizard of Oz–like effects of her orgasms. It should exist deliberately entertaining, not accidentally funny.) Near readers don't care about the author and are distracted instead by small things like their own lives, and then information technology is incumbent upon the writer to brand them care or draw them in by beingness fascinating or funny or unusually observant.
The author does not have to accept on huge dramatic subjects to engage the reader's interest, though there is of course a natural interest in huge of import subjects (See Christopher Hitchens' fantabulous Mortality, or Harold Brodkey's This Wild Darkness.) A brilliant or resourceful writer similar Gary Shteyngart tin can entertain his reader with a subject equally inherently plotless and unexciting as a plane delay, or of class, someone like David Foster Wallace can entertain with a subject as uneventful and unpromising every bit a cruise. The subject, with apologies to hopeful suffering young writers, doesn't accept to be inherently extreme.
4. In fact, fifty-fifty if your subject is farthermost or shocking, it won't be interesting in whatsoever but the almost prurient terms, unless information technology is written well, and surprisingly. For instance, the novelist Darin Strauss' One-half a Life is an excellent reflection on his experience of killing a girl in a car accident in high schoolhouse. But it is excellent considering it is controlled, because the details are as carefully selected, the pacing every bit advisedly moderated as that of any novel. The reason the book is and then good is that he manages to tell the reader something she doesn't know or can't imagine; he gets across the generic, the cliche, which a surprising number of published personal writers never practice. There is one moment when the teenage Darin, on the roadside later the accident, in shock, leans down on the ground, with his caput in his hands, like an Olympic athlete overcome with emotion, to impress some pretty girls who happen to be continuing there likewise. His inclusion of brilliant, unsettling, surprising moments like this lifts the book to its higher airplane of observation, its position every bit art rather than sheer confession.
5.The standards of craft in personal writing should not be lower than in fiction. There is no reason why something truthful should exist sloppily or boringly written. Many writers seem to feel that they are "expressing themselves" if they just get their feelings downwardly on the page, but expressing yourself is not enough. Toward this point, Joan Didion, 1 of the almost admired personal writers in American prose, said this extraordinary thing in a Paris Review interview: "When I am working on a book, I constantly retype my ain sentences. Every day I get back to page one and just retype what I take. It gets me into a rhythm. One time I go over maybe a hundred pages, I won't become back to page one, but I might get back to page fifty-v or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the demand to go to page ane again and start rewriting. At the finish of the mean solar day, I mark up the pages I've done—pages or page—all the way back to page one." She is not, in other words, dashing things off. She is not mistaking writing for therapy—the salient departure between the page and a therapist's office being that not every thought in your head, every tiny moment of heartbreak, every fleeting fantasy or disappointment, is interesting to your reader.
Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/01/bad-memoir-writing-rules-for-doing-it-well.html
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