Mirror or Prism, and Other Questions to Frame Your Memoir

inquiries that make the writing easier

All types of writers practice with Foster, and, lucky for us, some of them happen to also be accomplished writing teachers! Today we’re pleased to present an original craft essay from

Chris @ Submission Sunday

, who’s helped hundreds of people bring their memoirs to life. We hope it gives all you aspiring memoirists out there some inspiration.

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Starting a memoir can be a daunting prospect. You’re taking something as complex and consequential as your life and making it into a narrative that strangers can appreciate. I feel lucky to have accompanied hundreds of writers—both as a workshop instructor and a writing coach—on this journey that can be equal parts challenging and rewarding. While people sometimes refer to memoirs as any personal narrative that uses the work of memory to tell a story, I’m specifically going to talk about book-length memoirs here.

I’ve taught workshops for aspiring memoirists for almost fifteen years—sometimes meeting with different groups of writers three times a week, reading every craft book on memoir that came out—and it says a lot about this genre that it has held my interest for so long. I admire the bravery that writers bring to the room and the vulnerability they are willing to share. I like the drama of memoir. While some writers come to the workshop with just a vague idea that they wanted to write about their lives, most come in with a capital S Story. I like how I can teach the techniques of fiction to make the memoirs that much stronger and more interesting. Even better, the main characters are right there in front of me! I love a compelling first-person voice and that’s one of the selling points of a good memoir. I like demystifying what can be a tricky genre. I like the freedom that memoir offers because, while the questions below will focus on some ways to get memoir right at the start, there are so many different directions from which to grow once you’re planted.

Over the years, I’ve confirmed that there are some initial questions you can ask yourself with the hope that the answers will make the writing easier. I’ll briefly mention some of these questions before diving into the one we’re here to discuss: Mirror or Prism?

Memoir or Autobiography

When working with writers who are brand new to the memoir genre, the first question we need to get out of the way is “Are you thinking about writing a memoir or an autobiography?” If the answer is “I want to write a story about my life,” you’re in autobiography territory. If the answer is “I want to write about the time that I [insert interesting thing that happened and how it changed you],” now we’re in memoir territory. Memoir is the act of chronicling how you remember (and process the memories of) a narrow and specific event or series of events in your life.

Beginning & End

Once you confirm you are writing a memoir, the next helpful question is “When does this memoir begin and when does it end?” The answer to this question may change as you’re drafting, but having some idea of your narrative arc is extremely helpful. You may want to ask yourself “What is the very latest I can begin this story?” and “What is the most satisfying place to end this story?” even if it’s not actually the end. You need to make these decisions as the author of the story, not as the real-life human being who lived the experience.

Time & Place

One of the most challenging aspects of memoir writing is getting out of your own head. It makes sense to spend time there: that’s where the memories live! But to transform your memories into a story that can be universally relatable, you need to get out into the world. The best first step in this shift is thinking about the time and place of your memoir. Were you a young woman working in the early 2000s Silicon Valley tech boom (Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley)? Did you emigrate with your family from Leningrad to the U.S. in the 1970s and find your aspirations unattainable (Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure)? Did you and your husband move into a Kansas City rectory with your father, a married Catholic priest (Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy)? The details of time and place (and the introduction of other characters!) add context and texture to your story, making it more interesting to your readers.

Conflict & Resolution

Once you’ve situated your memoir in time and place, the next important question is “What is the conflict here and how is it resolved?” Hopefully, you’d have given some thought to this question when determining the tentative beginning and end of your memoir, but if not, now is the time. Jessica Abel developed what she calls “The Focus Sentence,” one sentence to structure your memoir that follows this formula:

Someone…
does something…
because…
but…

You might also want to substitute “does” with “wants” for another angle. If you can condense your idea into one focus sentence, you are miles ahead of many aspiring memoirists. Once you get your narrator out of the situation that comes from the “but,” you’ve got your resolution.

Memoir or Essay

At this point, you should have a clear idea of the shape of your narrative. Before we move on, we need to ask the difficult question: “Is this a memoir or is it an essay?” The answer might be painful if you thought you were writing a memoir and it’s just not substantial enough to support a whole book-length manuscript, but the good news is you can write an essay!

Situation or Story

Vivian Gornick gave us one of the most helpful questions to ask yourself at this stage: “Do I have a situation or do I have a story?” I’d highly recommend reading her book The Situation and the Story, which is full of excellent insights and clarifying examples. Here is the TL;DR version in Gornick’s own words: “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”

Say the situation is that someone broke your heart and it took a full year for you to feel right again. Is that an interesting plot? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends entirely on the story you make from it. Did you emerge with specific insight or wisdom that is unexpected or thought-provoking (e.g., I never would have become a paramedic without this loss; I tried an unusual new therapy you’ve maybe never heard of and now I know an important path to healing; I realized I was in love with the commune in which they lived and not them)? What have you come to say?

The good news is all you need is a situation to make countless stories.

Mirror or Prism

Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges—beyond spatial and temporal prisons—a personal vision.

—Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot even remember how I came upon this quote that completely changed how I think about memoir. The only other texts that so radically altered my approach to teaching personal narrative were Gornick’s The Situation & The Story and Chuck Wendig’s “25 Things to Know About Your Story’s Stakes.”

This quote from Borges will make it seem like I’m arguing for the prism aesthetic, and while I will admit a great love for the memoir models I’ll mention, the mirror aesthetic is what you—and agents and publishers—think of when you think of memoir. Let’s put Borges’s passive and active categories aside because they’re not relevant to our work here. However, his description of the mirror aesthetic—art as “a copy of the environment’s objectivity or the individual’s psychic history”—is helpful because I’d argue that many memoirs are an artful blend of the objective environment (situation) and the individual’s psychic history (story). Memoirs like Educated, Heavy, The Glass Castle, The Liars’ Club, Hollywood Park, Men We Reaped, Wild, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Home Baked, and Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? hold a mirror up to the author’s experience and invite the reader to come along for the ride. Does this sound like the memoir you want to write? Great.

Borges gives us another option, though, and we can see this type of memoir in the market as well, if not as often. In these memoirs—think Bluets, The Autobiography of Carson McCullers, In the Dream House, The Crying Book, Swimming Studies, A Ghost in the Throat, Vanishing Twins, The Two Kinds of Decay, etc.—the author chooses some concept, object, or person to serve as the prism that “makes the world into its instrument and forges—beyond spatial and temporal prisms—a personal vision.” There is usually a central question or theme that the author is pursuing through the pages. This aesthetic allows easily for more language play, more use of research, and more tangential narrative adventures. I’ve broken down the two categories below to show the difference between these two styles.

Mirror

•   A copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history

•   Character at forefront

•   Narrative arc drives structure

•   Situations become story

•   Stakes arise from primary conflict and central question

•   Chapters organized around events and plot points

•   More time in scene

•   Helpful tool: Beat sheet

Prism

•   Makes the world into its instrument, and forges a personal vision

•   Narrator at forefront

•   Theme drives structure

•   Situations become evidence

•   Stakes arise from controlling metaphor, central question, and carefully revealed connections

•   Vignettes/sections organized around reflections/commentary

•   More time in research

•   Helpful tool: Scrivener

There are many other questions you’ll encounter while writing the memoir, but these considerations can allow you to identify your project’s central path, from which you can stray and to which you can return.

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Chris Daley is a writer and designer in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Air/Light, The Collagist, Alta Journal, Essay Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, and other venues. She also helps writers to get their work out into the world through coaching, editing, and marketing at chrisdaley.com.

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