Free Class: Memoir Writing for Geniuses
How to reach Wendy Dale
Intro:
Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas. And this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love.
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Rhonda:
Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm here today with Wendy Dale. Wendy Dale is the author of Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals (Crown). She taught memoir writing for Media Bistro for six years. And she's also the co-writer of the Emmy nominated TV special, The New Adventures of Mother Goose. Her articles and essays have appeared in Utne Reader, Mental Floss, Public Radio International, and the Writer's Digest website. And she currently lives with her husband and two bunnies in Cusco, Peru, which we were just talking about before we hit record and she is also a memoir coach. I'm really excited today to be talking to her about her book, The Memoir Engineering System. So yeah, so really excited about that.
I work with a lot of writers, Wendy, who are considering memoir or have started a memoir. And I think the first thing that happens is trying to decide what's in and what's out. Do you have any kind of method for what's in and what's out? Like, how do you think about if I'm like, okay, I'm going to do a memoir. How do you think about approaching it?
Wendy:
Well, the first thing starts with knowing a little bit what your memoir is about, right? So it's not the entire story of your life. I tell the people I work with that you're taking true things that happen to you and you're turning them into literature, right? So you do want this to read like a novel, you want a story. So I do think the first step is to come up with the premise for your book to not think that you're writing an autobiography.
You know, I was born, you know, on a snowy day in Ottawa, Canada, right? And up till now, but rather there's a story there. So it starts with knowing what your book is about, whether it's a short period in time, a couple of years or whether it's the entirety of your life, but told through the lens of an idea. My relationship with my mother, for instance. So that could be your entire life, but you're not, so that really helps as a filtering process, right? So that's the first step is knowing what your story is about.
Rhonda:
I think of that as like, theme, right? Like your memoir, when you talk about a lens, like I'm talking about the experiences of my life with dating, with my way, with my mother, with, you know, that time I spent traveling the world with a backpack.
Wendy:
Yeah, there's an idea at play, right? And so I usually distinguish premise from theme because when I use the word theme, it's really specific. It's like a universal theme like belonging, right, or coming to a deeper understanding of self, right, these bigger ideas. But right, so, so theme used as idea. Absolutely. There's an idea driving your story and usually a limited time period.
Rhonda:
Yeah. And then I feel like one of the challenges with memoir is how do you get your story with your idea to a place where other people want to read it and it does read like a novel. So how do we get there? Right, that commercial where it has that potentially commercial angle, right?
Wendy:
You know, it's the hardest thing in the world and the easiest thing in the world if you know what you're doing. So the reason that I wrote the memoir engineering system was because I struggled with this. Once upon a time when I started my memoir, I was under the misconception that memoir really was... So I had a concise time period. I was writing about two years of traveling mostly through Latin America, getting into a bunch of trouble in my 20s. That was a long time ago.
But I had this idea, but even so it wasn't at the level of plot. And I didn't understand that. I really thought I was like, oh, I have all these great stories about this two-year time period in my life. And I sent it out to a bunch of agents and got you know, crickets and one agent finally got back to me and said, Hey, you have a really great narrative voice and you know, absolutely nothing about structure. I remember going, Oh.
Rhonda:
Okay. So the secret is structure.
Wendy:
It really is. I mean, my, my first thought when I heard that was what is this structure thing she's talking about? And she was so right. I didn't even know what the structure was. And that was kind of the beginning of this quest to understand what makes memoir work. What is the structure behind it? So I think that's where people, that's certainly where I got confused. And I think it's really hard to do because we confuse what happened to us in a two year time period. It feels like the story, but it's really not. It's not the same thing as plot. So that's what I specialize in is taking stuff that happened to you and turning this into art, turning this into literature, turning it into plot.
Rhonda:
Trying to get into something that somebody else is going to want to like read and not put down.
Wendy:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So the problem I see is that, you know, we, think about a two year period and it's all the stuff that happened to us, but you have to take what are really disconnected events and connect them in some way for the reader to turn this into a story that others want to read. Otherwise it's just like, and I did this. And I did this and I did this and I did this. And there's no suspense there. There's no reason to keep turning the page. We watch a movie because like, what's going to happen? How are they going to get out of this one? Right. And so that's what you need to do with your memoir as well.
Rhonda:
Okay. So talk to me about the role of conflict in a memoir.
Wendy:
Well, I think every memoir needs a base conflict or what I also call a narrative want. And they serve the same purpose. So there's a conflict such as, you know, it could potentially be I have a life threatening illness, which would be a conflict or the narrative want. I want to recover or they serve the same purpose and narrative. As long as the narrator wants something, we'll keep turning the pages to see if the narrator gets that.
Rhonda:
Okay. And how do I think about, how do I think about structure when I'm putting together. You say that structure exists to keep your book from wandering. Like, how do I think about structure when I'm together my memoir?
Wendy:
So I spent 15 years reading over a thousand memoir texts, a little bit obsessive on this quest to discover.
Rhonda:
Wow, okay. That is a lot. Like a thousand is a lot.
Wendy:
To discover the principles that all memoirs have in common. So that's why it's called the Memoir Engineering System because it really is this idea. It's very much like there are these components to your memoir. And if you know how each component works, you can craft a memoir from the ground up that doesn't have structural mistakes.
So I really focus on what does the scene do for your book? What does a transition do for your book? How do you construct this book so that it has plot? So to go back to your initial question, the first thing that people struggle with, I think when it comes to writing a memoir, is that nothing happens. And I've been a memoir writing coach for 17 years now. And what I see, one of the biggest mistakes I see is this description of what a person's life is like.
So, you know, every day that summer we would go to the pool and I was so close to my sister and we loved, you know, picking blueberries and you know, it's a description, but nothing is actually happening there. So, okay, every day you're going to pick blueberries with your sister, but that's not plot. So the first thing I would say is that plot begins with events.
You can't have plot unless something actually happens. So that is the first thing I do when I work with people is we come up with a list of what actually happens in your book, which is I mean, it sounds so obvious when I say it, but it wasn't obvious to me. Right. was my book was full of nothing happening to I so all of the errors I talk about in the book are things are mistakes that I've made myself.
Rhonda:
Okay. All right. So do they have to be like, is there a certain kind of event? Like I feel like, you know, if you're the big Tara Westover memoir Educated, know, was what I loved, which is very voicey and yeah, you know, but it has at its heart basically like a fantastically dysfunctional family and the things that happen are, you know, kind of progressively fairly dramatic and difficult.
Does a memoir have to have you know, does it have to read like a thriller basically of like increasing state, you know, where this tiny little bad thing happened and then this really bad thing happened. Like, do we have to think about it in the same way?
Wendy:
I love this question. I tell my clients that all memoir has more in common with literary fiction than with commercial fiction, right? Because commercial fiction, you really do have tons of plot, right? Twists and turns and people dying and I don't know, not necessarily, right? But commercial fiction is based on plot. Literary fiction, not so much. Not so much happens in a Nobel Prize winning author's novel necessarily.
Personally, I love literary fiction. I love that emotional experience. And so I think all memoir really relies a lot on the prose itself. So I said, I'm an expert in structure, right? So you're like, wait, I'm an expert in structure, but now I'm saying that prose really matters. Prose is what makes someone love your book. So how that is not a contradiction is that I compare structure to structural engineering of a building, right?
No one goes into a building and says, oh, wow, what a great job they did with those pillars. And what a great use of, you know, this, this weight bearing beam. Enjoy her grade. foundation. Good cement on the foundation. No one does that. Someone walks into a house and says, wow, look at that gorgeous view. Love the paintings, beautiful furniture. That's what people noted. That to me is your pros.
Now, the structure is your structural engineering. It's holding that house up. So if you don't have structure, if you don't have plot to your book, there are no walls in the first place and so people don't notice structure but they certainly notice the absence of it. So if you don't have walls, no one's going to notice your beautiful furniture, no one's going to notice your beautiful prose. So I tell people get structure, make sure that you have this plot for your book, but don't look for the best plot. Who cares? Now do give me the best writing possible. But they work together in that way.
Rhonda:
That's interesting, that comparison between you know, memoir and literary fiction, because I do think the best memoir reads like a novel. Like it has to read like a novel. I think if you want to have it. Yeah. And if you want to traditionally publish a memoir.
Wendy:
Absolutely. So there's that emotional experience. Literary fiction doesn't have tons of twists and turns. It is more of an emotional experience. It's more based on the quality of the prose and memoir.
Rhonda:
But it's also written. It's also written in scene. Right?
Wendy:
Absolutely.
Rhonda:
So it's not like a journal or like all of my reflections and feelings about the things that happened to me. It's putting the reader right in the scene where the thing is happening.
Wendy:
Absolutely. It goes back to one of the first things I said, things have to happen. You can't have plot without things happening. Right. And so one of the things that I teach is that you start with what happens. And what happens actually goes into your scenes. A scene exists because something is going to happen in that scene. It's the building block for plot. And so what happens doesn't have to be huge. No one has to die. No, it doesn't have to be, know, this isn't a detective novel. This isn't a John Grisham thriller, right?
Rhonda:
There's no car crash necessarily. I mean, there might be.
Wendy:
There's no car crashes, exactly. No explosions. So in fact, what happens can actually be a realization. You come to some new understanding depending what your memoir is about. You could be having a really interesting dinner conversation and suddenly you realize something about your relationship with your mother, right? That is actually something happening and that can form the basis for plot. So what happens in memoir doesn't have to be huge. It can be really tiny and really impactful. That's what I love about memoir. It's so emotionally affecting and it's full of insights.
Rhonda:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I love about memoir too. I feel like in today's market, there's a lot of room for experimentation with memoir. Do you see this like lots of sort of memoir in fragments?
Wendy:
Yeah. In the dream house. For instance, an example. Yeah. I think there is, but I still think that it comes down to the same basics that there has to be some sense of a story and the prose has to be emotionally affecting. So even in the dream house, which I actually sometimes use as an example of people say, oh, the structure is so different. You know, she's broken all or the author has broken all the rules of structure. I'm like, no, really not. You know, I mean, the breaks are different. The prose is a bit different. There are different voices at play, but in the end, think that it actually justifies the rules. I think it actually proves that the principles of structure are actually at play in that book as well.
So there is experimentation to a point. You still want to a story and you still want to affect your reader emotionally. And within those parameters, if you can do that in a new way, oh, I love that. Yeah.
Rhonda:
Yeah. Yeah, me too. Let's talk a little bit about how we go about making sure that the book that we're writing, the memoir that we're writing has an emotional impact on our readers. How do get there?
Wendy:
Yeah. I call it subjective writing. So one of the things I do in my classes or with clients, one of the exercises we sometimes do is I take excerpts from published memoirs, very different excerpts. Can take David Sedaris and you know, something literary, something funny, something lighthearted, all kinds of different voices. And I say, okay, let's take a highlighter and let's highlight the subjective writing and subjective writing as an easy definition is anything that a video camera would not pick up. Right.
Rhonda:
Would not pick up. Okay.
Wendy:
That's the subjective part. Right. So objective, so we have objective writing and subjective writing. Objective writing, you know, any action, any dialogue, that's something anyone would have noticed had they been in this witnessing the same scene, right? But the subjective writing is what makes it your own. It's the thoughts that go through your head. It's your point of view. It's what transports a reader and makes them feel not that they witnessed what happened, but that they lived through this with you because they're actually reading your thoughts on the page and that is where the emotion lies in fiction and in memoir is in the subjective writing.
Rhonda:
Yeah, that's true you do go to the memoir. I mean you go to it for the story for the ideas, but you also go to it because you there's some understanding that this person has a perspective. Right?
Wendy:
Absolutely. And I think that is so counterintuitive to so many people because they're for the, it's going to be narcissistic. Who cares what I actually thought? Let me tell you what I lived through. But no, when you take that personal perspective out of it, the emotion is drained out of it. And so if you do a good job with your subjective writing, you really put me inside your head, you really transport me. What happens is that eye, that first person eye that you're writing becomes your reader's eye.
You have transported me, you've brought me to that moment in time and I feel like I'm living through what you actually lived through. Of course, it's an illusion, right? But that's what art is supposed to do.
Rhonda:
Yeah, totally. Absolutely. So let me ask you this question because I've, this is a question that's come up working with students lately and I've sort of wrestled with it because in my head I'm like, I guess you could make that work, but it's not intuitive to me. And that is I've had the question of “Can I write parts of my memoir from a third person perspective?” did.
Wendy:
Deep sigh.
Rhonda:
Yeah, deep sigh. That's kind of, that's where I went with it as well. But because I feel like we go to the memoir to get the eye perspective.
Wendy:
Now, so let me, so let me give you a question because I have multiple answers to this. Let me, in your case, are they talking about turning themselves into a third person character or are they talking about writing from the perspective of their mother, for instance?
Rhonda:
Yeah, more the latter. Like there's another character and they want to about that character, you know, that in with a third person perspective. I'm just, I'm on the fence about that.
Wendy:
You're kind of not sure you're fine.
Rhonda:
Yeah.
Wendy:
So. I've seen it work in a few memoirs and let me tell you when it works and when it doesn't. So we just talked about subjective writing, the importance of your point of view. And there can be a real danger in doing someone else's point of view, because it can sound insincere.
So I just talked about the importance of putting me inside your head. So if you're doing your mother's perspective, you know, and there, it's just objective. And my mother did this and did this and did this. she, you know, that day this happened to her. It's really cold. There's no emotion there. If you add the subjective writing and we know that you're not your mother, you run the risk of it being insincere.
People are like, well, this is a memoir. How do you know what your mother was thinking? So I have seen it done well rarely. That it really does read like a novel. There are omniscient novels, third-person novels, which the narrator knows everything, all of the narrator's characters are thinking. So if you can really take it to that level, it can work, but you have to be an exceptional writer to get away with it. Your prose has to be really good so I believe you.
Rhonda:
Yeah, because I think that is, you know, with memoir, that is the basic contract with the reader, that this is accurate insofar as I can, you know, as the nature of memory allows. And so how can you be in somebody else's head? You can't you know you can't you really can't. Yeah.
Wendy:
They're tricks like there if you really want to a little bit of inside your mother's head you can if I went to this a lot but I imagine my mother I know what she's thinking you know you can keep it first person and try and sort of put us inside your mother's head and for short. Bits of text that can work for you I won’t do it for a long period in your book.
Rhonda:
Yeah, and I am the truth, that is I'm reading the book in order to really understand your experience, right? So I'm kind of not interested in one. Yeah.
Wendy:
As a rule, not the best idea, but I have seen it work. There are some exceptions.
Rhonda:
Okay. Tell me a little bit about your book, The Memoir Engineering System. So you got there by reading and analyzing all of these texts. I'm going to put a link to it in the chat, in the show notes. And so tell me a little bit about you know what would I find in the pages of the memoir engineering system.
Wendy:
So what happened over this fifteen year period now this is working as a memoir coach initially I tried to figure out the principles that all memoirs followed by reading memoir and I just couldn't because that you the seams are too well hidden it's like when you watch a bad movie I think you learn more about screenwriting than watching a good movie.
So when I started coaching and I got all of these imperfect manuscripts coming at me over the course of 15 years, and now it's been 17 years, I started to see the same mistakes over and over again.
Rhonda:
Okay, tell me about those. What are the big mistakes that a memoir writer can you know.
Wendy:
There are lots of categories of them. So there are only so many, well, what I realized was there are only so many mistakes that a memoir writer can make. One category of them would be just describing your life. Nothing happens. Another category of them would be telling me about a bunch of stuff you did in a two-year period, but not turning that into a plot. So that would be, you tell me a bunch of stuff, but you haven't connected these things that happened to you in any way.
Lots of different ways. Another one would be no subjective writing in your book. It's just objective. So you haven't transported your readers. So I talk about multiple ways that people can get this wrong. So that's how the book starts. But then I reverse engineered it. And I was like, well, how would you write a memoir right the first way, the first time, without making any structural errors?
Now, it wasn't fast. It took me a long time to do this. But little by little, as I would come up with these categories of errors, I would say, well, how would I fix this? How do I teach my students not to do it? And now, what if they never even thought of making this mistake and they did this right the first time? What would that look like? What would this, and eventually I came up with the seven step process of how to create a plot from the ground up so that you have no structural errors. That's the gist of it.
Rhonda:
Wow. All right. Well, so anybody working on a memoir, I'm going to link out to this book. There are so few books on memoir and there are relatively few craft books. Like there's the Art of Memoir by Mary Carr. Like there were some great books on memoir. And, you know, there are several that I love. But it's rare to find like this is a seven step system.
Wendy:
Well, that's why I wrote it. If it had existed, I would have, I longed for that. When I was trying to figure out the structure, I went to Barnes & Noble, I went everywhere trying to find this back then. It was a long time ago, 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago that I started writing my memoir. It just wasn't out there. And so then I started teaching and I looked again and it just wasn't out there. And so I was like, well, I have to figure this out. I'm a teacher, I'm a coach, I've got to figure this out. And it took me a long time. So yeah, it feels like my life's work. It means a lot to me. I wrote this book because the information is not anywhere else.
Rhonda:
Right, yeah, so good. And I see you have a free class that people can.
Wendy:
I do. Yeah.
Rhonda:
Is it, I think you say it's basically like a seven part video.
Wendy:
So you can actually go to the website, freememoirclass.com, which is easier to remember, or you can go to my website, which is Memoir Writing for Geniuses, either one. So freememoirclass.com will send you to my website. And you can sign up for a free seven part class. It's a video class on how to structure your memoir in seven steps.
Rhonda:
Oh, wow. So perfect. Totally great. Yes. Everybody wants this. So seven steps. This is what we need. Okay, Wendy, I'm going to link out to your book and also to the free class, because I think that it's kind of a summary of the steps that are, that are in the book. Right?
Wendy:
Yeah, absolutely.
Rhonda:
Yeah, I'm that really, really helpful. Any advice you have for someone who's into a draft of a memoir right now and they're listening to this podcast and they're going, oh, oops, you know, like, I think I've I think I've just done the thing that she says I shouldn't be doing. Any advice for the person in that situation?
Wendy:
So, we do take on people, a lot of the clients we take on have been working on a memoir for five, 10, longest was 30 years you know, someone came, someone for 25, 30 years and they just can't get it. And they don't, can't figure out what's going on with it. And so I tell them, applying structure, sometimes they have a thousand pages or let's say you only have 200 pages, right? Still, it's really intimidating to take these principles and apply these principles to texts, to written out scenes.
And so we actually, I suggest the same process to anyone. So what we do in those cases when they're a client of ours is we like, okay, you know, there's some good stuff in this manuscript. You have great writing, some good scenes. The plot isn't working. We need to fix your structure. So let's put this in your desk drawer for a little while. We're not throwing it away. We're putting in your desk drawer and we're gonna, create perfect structure at the outline level.
So we're going to craft this perfect structure, no structural errors, create this outline. That's a very specific type of outline. It's not this kind of let's more or less figure out what happens. It's very specific. And now once we have this outline with perfect structure, now we're going to take that manuscript again and look at what you have and say, so the outline I create has scenes and transitions in the outline.
So now we go back to your book and we say, okay, this scene is salvageable, this scene is salvageable, but now you might move it around a little bit. So we create perfect structure at the outline level and then go back to your manuscript and salvage. Yeah. Okay. Place it in the right order now.
Rhonda:
Okay. Love that. So good. Okay. All right, everyone, well, you've got to get your hands on that free class. So make sure you grab that link in the show notes. And the book is called The Memoir Engineering System. It is by Wendy Dale. And you can get it, well, basically wherever you get your books. Thanks so much for being here with me today, to talk memoir. It was great talking to you.
Wendy:
Great talking to you, Rhonda.
Outro:
Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes.
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