Journal With Impact: Memoir Vignette Voices

Workshop: Six Conversations for Writing Creative Journals

“We tend to think of voice as something we hear; it can be squeaky or mellow, loud or soft. But in writing, voice is what we hear in our head: the medium.”    

                                                                                                                             Barbara Drake

These excerpts are a character study to capture voice. Whereas in fiction or memoir we have the luxury of developing characterization over a long period of time, there are sometimes where we only have a brief sentence or paragraph to highlight a particular characteristic, especially in secondary characters or for a moment’s insight into a situation. Also our style of characterization needs to be true to the character. We find our voice—yes—but it is experienced through the character themselves.

As you continue to build your material, working with vignettes will help focus the voice you choose and the key perspective. For example, if sharing from your own personal voice is too raw or complicated to see through, then use a fictional format to give yourself some separation. The main character is still you, but by sharing as a third person narrator you can be more objective alongside sharing your heart.

The following are three different approaches to discovering the significance and value in relationships and experiences: as fiction, as interviews, and as memory. Watch for which words or emotions you respond to, or are curious about.

Fiction

“The Hero and the Crown,” by Robin McKinley

“Katah was not the only one that the passing of time did not heal. Galanna’s hair had gone grey during the first winter, and was white by the time the second spring after the battle came. She was quieter, and slower, and while she looked with no love upon Damar’s new queen, she caused, and wished to cause, no more trouble.

Non-Fiction Memoir

“What She Couldn’t Tell,” by Patricia Hampl

“I took her to Mass now and again. I got in the habit of taking her grocery shopping. She was a wily shopper, her purse bulging with carefully scissored newspaper coupons which she paid out at the checkout counter like a stack of chips at a casino. She was gleeful about her strategic buying, by turns petulant over the price of peaches and contemptuous of what the supermarket thought she would pay for a cut-up chicken. Ha! She’d cut up her own chicken. I drove her all over town, stalking deals, running up mileage on my mother’s car.”

Poetry

poem on my fortieth birthday to my mother who died young

by lucille Clifton

well i have almost come to the place where you fell

tripping over a wire at the forty-fourth lap

and I have decided to keep running,

head up, body attentive, fingers

aimed at darts like first prize, so

I might not even watch out for the thin thing

Grabbing toward my ankles but

i’m trying for the long one mama,

running like hell and if I fall

i fall.

What differences, if any, do you notice between these three genres in the way a character is portrayed? Which one most appeals to you as a voice or style?

Over the next few blogs we’ll look at each style separately so you can choose your narrator’s voice.

Action Steps:

Choose one or two people either from your own experience, or from photos, for a verbal vignette snapshot.

1. Write each of them up in three ways. A) As a brief line description. B) As a non-fiction description memoir style. C) And as a fictional character in a brief scene.

2. Take one of your descriptions and rewrite it as a poem.

3. Examine what differences you discovered in tone of voice between the examples.

Share: Which style connected the most to the voice you identify with in your memories?

Read deep, marcy

Journal With Impact: Memoir Perspective

Workshop: Six Conversations for Writing Creative Journals

“For to remember is to make a pledge: to the indelible experience of personal perception, and to history itself.”                                            Patricia Hampl

Now that you have developed some sensory language, and defined character attributes and physical locations, the next stage is to extend your seedlings to focus on relationships, memories, and communication. Look for specific threads where past history can connect with present history in your personal world.

We want to be able to connect emotionally with our readers—sometimes across barriers of language or age or culture. However, often, we first need to understand how we connect with ourselves. In her study on memoir Patricia Hampl also notes that it is a landscape bordered by memory and imagination.

Art and imagery can become a separate language of communication. One way to begin to explore some aspects applying autobiographical premises and techniques is to use vignettes, a self-contained prose passage, according to Michael J. Bugeja, which then can be developed later into narrative, or poetry, or essays, if so desired.

Consider vignettes as a series of verbal photographs. These mini snapshots can be seen through your own personal autobiography or through a fictional character. Sometimes it helps to lay the groundwork for memoir through a character in order to set up a scene, especially if you are exploring sensitive issues where healing still needs to take place. In this situation a certain emotional distance helps ‘see’ into the truth behind the memory.

One approach that Michael J Bugeja suggests can also become an over-arching thread for perspective and voice and theme.

Poet as a Visionary can be a veteran of an experience—someone who has participated in or been an involved witness or someone who hasn’t—yet gives an overview of events, sometimes by imagining what it would have been like or has an opinion on the whole process.

Poet as an Eyewitness has the experience and gives a first hand account of some aspect. The emphasis is on impact of the experience whereas the visionary’s emphasis in on perspective or opinion.

We’ll examine some examples in the next blog as we discuss voice, but for now look over your maps and see if the words you chose fit either as a visionary or eyewitness voice.

Action Steps:

Begin the shaping process towards an outline and possibly a working table of contents. Choose one perspective to develop a possible theme thread.

1. Make a list of your key words so far.

2. Next to each write a very brief sentence that focuses it’s meaning to you then.

3. Next to each mark whether the key is a location, or a relationship, or a inner revelation. Do any repeat more than others?

4. Take whichever focus repeats and then set up a practice outline using that as the foundation.

Share: Which perspective did you choose and why?

Read deep, marcy

Journal With Impact: Memoir Maps

Workshop: Six Conversations for Writing Creative Journals

“All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera glass.”  Lewis Carroll

The lens through which we view or relive our memories will focus the story we want to share with others. First we take all our brainstorming and look for the connections. The memories begin to form a shape, a map, from which to outline and track the journey we want to relive and then to share. Both figuratively and literally maps can help us go deeper into memoir and give us new insights.

Drawing maps can combine the brainstorming and concrete research at the same time, whether you use an existent map to copy from, or design your own. It is another way to focus on the time, place, and experience that you are exploring. 

Here are some suggestions to experiment with and choose which lens you want to share from—a long distance reminiscence, a day in the life, or an internal life-changing experience. Then once you know the style that captures your voice focus on the action step versions below to fine-tune your story.

Possibilities. Draw your own setting map, or trace one. Take an old atlas and cut and paste to make up your own country or local setting. Mimic a tourist map. Take a map and turn it upside down or backwards. Make a collage of landscapes and buildings.

Research old maps in a library, make copies, and then turn them into your own. Several years ago a friend sent me an historical map of a small town in Holland around the 12^th Century. It has figures on the streets showing where commerce was done. One youth is leading sheep down one path. On another a wagon is loaded with produce. The people in the village are included along with the street names.

Any map can be adapted to your personal visual memories.

Here is a word sample memory map that is a combination of memoir and creative process that author George Ella Lyon suggested for beginning poets in her book “Where I’m From.” 

I am unable to copy, sadly, but she took a piece of a traditional map of a geographic location and then placed the word YOU in the center. Then she scattered words all over—near the highway, along the river, and in the various neighborhoods. Here are some of her words—“Town or Street Names, SMELLS, Central Events, Wild Card, TASTES, Objects, Church Experience, Parent’s Work, and Hiding Place.”

Action Steps:

1.     Choose a literal map, antique or present, or a photograph of a particular landscape, or draw your own version with multi-colored pencils, or in black and white with pens. Or try all three to see which atmosphere most resonates with your memories.

2.     From whichever map shape or style you chose to work with, make at least three different versions. A) Literal objects or site names. B) Emotion words or phrases only. C) Themes or symbols as representatives of your main impressions. Have fun and draw your own personal emojis.

3.      Then from your three approaches mix and match them as in the sample by George Ella Lyon.

Share: What one key word did you post on your map that you didn’t expect?

Read deep, marcy

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Journal With Impact: Memoir Seeds

Workshop: Six Conversations for Writing Creative Journals

“Writers are the custodians of memories.”  William Zinsser

In his book Writing About Your Life Zinsser continues, “Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance…how that situation affected you.”

Sometimes it will be an anecdote shared over a meal with family and friends or a mutual special occasion over many years. Or a life changing experience that you are still exploring the depths of and know others can benefit from your discovery. Once we identify the significance then we will have a better understanding whether it is meant for personal or public communication. The reflection exercises we’ve looked at so far keep us in touch with ourselves now; the memoir exercises enable us to see how our past and present intertwine.

Seeds as Prompts

Begin building a memory journal for yourself. Tie it to specific personal memories—both trauma and joy—and fix the location whenever relevant. Focus the emotional description. Next to each category list the senses incorporated and how the senses responded.

Or, if it feels too emotional to address with a clear perspective, take a step back and examine the memory as if you are a main characters that you are questioning in an interview.

Begin with basic journal entries as before:

·      saddest day

·      happiest day

·      scariest

·      challenging

·      hopeful

·      joyous

·      disappointing

·      despairing

·      successful

Action Steps:

1. Choose two categories to focus on. Focus on one that you have a lot of material for, and one that feels limited so far.

2. Make a list of questions for what is missing from your memory for each category?

Share: What surprised you?

Read deep, marcy

Journal With Impact: Memoir

Workshop: Six Conversations for Writing Creative Journals

“How did I come to believe that what I knew was also what mattered? And, more to the point for the future, is it what matters?” Patricia Hampl

In her book, I Could tell You Stories, Hampl explores the realm of memory in auto-biographical writing connected by the impulse to remember. She pointed out that both Kafka and Rilke saw memory, “not experience”, as holding the sovereign position in imagination.

For herself Hampl discovered: “The recognition of one’s genuine material seems to involve a fall from the phony grace of good intentions and elevated expectations.” If we are unable to infuse our memories, or perhaps our search for our memories into our work then we rob it of honest quest and discovery and an imagination that connects. Each person’s voice is unique and bears witness to life. But in order to share, we first need to identify what really matters to us.

“We store in memory only images of value.”

Action Steps:

1. Choose a first memory of an experience you’ve had twice and write each up as an autobiographical event. For example, the very first day you went to school and then the very first day you went to school in high school, or college, or several years later for graduate work.

2. Or perhaps choose an area in which you became accomplished. The first day you swam in a pool and then first time you swam in a race.

 Share: What emotions rose to the surface? Were there similar ones in both choices?

NOTE: Memoir writing is extremely personal even when you are not preparing to share it publicly. Whether you have mountains of material already at hand and are trying to sort it out, or tumbling about in your heart and soul with no clear direction, it takes time and energy to understand, shape, and mold. Sometimes a seemingly simple exercise will knock you over emotionally for no apparent reason.

So over these next few weeks be kind to yourselves and take a break whenever you need to. The purpose of a memoir journal is to assist you in uncovering and engaging heart, soul, and mind, stories that you want to connect with.

Read deep, marcy

Journal With Impact: Nature Inform

Workshop: Six Conversations for Writing Creative Journals

“Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment. Cares I knew not, and cared naught about them.”                                      John James Audubon

We began this journal section saying, “Art, music, and imagery can become a separate language of communication. So too does nature. It is a language that speaks to us, by personally touching our hearts and souls with meaning, and also by allowing us to share across time and culture with others. Nature as reflection builds a bridge of communication that gives us soul-to-soul threads of understanding.”

           

With whom do you want to share your discoveries? What age? What method: art, writing, music, comic books, maps, photos, or…? What will be your bridge? Sharing builds communication. It’s like the excitement of watching a gift being opened for a special reason.

We may not have every moment to pour ourselves in, as did Audubon, but because of his commitment he still continues to inspire others because of his nature discoveries that have been passed down through information and art.

And the bonus is the memories continue to be fresh with each encounter. Nature is ever present and ever changing. Share both the ordinary and the unexpected.

Action Steps:

1. Ask yourself, ‘What are three parts of nature that I find the most interesting, intriguing, confusing, symbolic?’ Other categories? Make your own lists.

2. Then ask yourself, ‘What could they be springboards to?’ If as a writer perhaps a new setting for a scene or novel, a vocabulary for metaphors, a source of study, or perhaps a preparation for essays, or articles or devotions.

3. Or a hands-on project for yourself or your neighbors or city? What might that look like? With whom might you be able to share insights to fuel creativity and action?

4. Start a reading list to dig deeper into your territory.

Share: What is your dream? What is your first step?

Read deep, marcy