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In the last episode, I explained how you can use timelines and placelines to organize your material and discover what you want to write about. This method is based on the classical concept of Topoi, which orators and writers have used for millennia. It seems kind of strange that we might need to go searching for our own stories.
After all, these are experiences that we’ve lived. But when you think about the sheer number of people you’ve known, events you’ve witnessed, experiences you’ve lived, and even just the number of days you’ve woken up to start your life fresh each morning, well, it can be overwhelming. So, we need tools to whittle that massive experience down to something that we can put on the page.
So if you haven’t listened to that episode yet, you can find that on episode three and it’s called, where do I start my life story? That’s all about the pre-writing activities of getting the topics down on paper so that we have some material to work with. Now today, we’re going to talk about sitting down and doing the actual writing.
When I work with clients to write their life story book for them, I tell them it’s my goal to shape their memories into a compelling narrative. And you know, I think that goal is applicable for just about everybody writing their life story. We want to share our memories in a way that will engage our readers.
But what do we mean by a compelling narrative? At its most basic, “narrative” is just another word for “story.” Now this definition covers a lot of ground, everything from movies to documentaries to novels, even jokes. In most novels and in nearly all films, the fundamental building block of this narrative is the scene.
A scene is an action involving one or more characters that takes place in a specific time and place.
Think of the joke. A joke is a narrative or a little story; it can start off with “a man walks into a bar.” That’s the beginning of a scene. That is setting up a story.
If we were fiction writers or screenplay writers, um, then we know that we have to think of our narrative in terms of scene, right? The scene is the building block for narratives But as life story writers, we want to write a book and we want to share our memories.
Do we need to think equally in terms of scene? Well, I would say yes and no. Again, going back to the term narrative, when you think about a novel or a movie, there’s the overarching narrative, the narrative arc. In a life story, though, we’re not going to have something nearly so tightly structured. Because if we do, by definition, we’re going to have to leave out all kinds of stuff that family members will want to know about.
It’s really all about expectations. Your family is not expecting a thriller or a mystery when they pick up your life story book. What they want, what they’re expecting is to learn more about what your life was like when you were growing up, how the world has changed over the decades. They want to know who and what shaped you into the person you are.
Now, that’s a much broader expectation than the rising action climax resolution that you find in a traditional narrative arc. In other words, I would recommend that you not leave things out that your family and future generations are going to want to know about. At least don’t leave things out just because you’re trying to fit your life story into a tidy narrative.
What does this mean for our writing? Should we be writing in scenes? In other words, should we take specific memories and set them in a time and a place with characters and an action that unfolds? The characters, of course, in this, in this instance, are the real people who are part of our memory. Should we tell memories like a story within our book?
Or should we focus on describing things from our life? Let’s take a step back and see really what the difference is between these two ways of approaching a story. When you write a scene, again, you’re bringing the reader into the action. It’s really easy to see what we mean when we think of a movie. If you’re, if you’re sitting at the movie theater, you’re watching the movie on the big screen, you’re witnessing the action as if you were right there.
Again, a scene is an action unfolding in a specific time and place with one or more characters.
But think about if you’re watching a documentary, the talking head type documentary, you may see a person on the screen being interviewed, somebody who is explaining something, or arguing for something, or even just describing something.
And that’s really the fundamental difference between scene. Which again, is the building blocks of a large, compelling narrative and the other modes of discourse, the story, the scenes pull you in. It’s the difference between showing and telling. So even though you don’t want to shy away from telling in your life story book, and I know this goes, this runs contrary to a lot of writing advice, but I really believe strongly in life story books that there is a, place for telling and describing.
So don’t shy away from that because if you do, then you won’t be describing things like the wonderful meals you had as a child or what your wedding dress looked like or how it felt when the threshers showed up at the farm. You want to include the telling of these things, the description of these things, but you’ll also want to include scenes where you can.
Here’s the good news. Chances are, if you recall something well enough that you can craft it into a scene, you remember the sound of something, the way it looked, how it felt, maybe even the smells of things. That’s all rich material for writing. An episode into a scene, and if you have retained those in your memory, chances are it was a significant event, and so chances are it belongs as a scene in your book because those experiences, those significant experiences are the memories that stick.
Best with us. I’m going to give you a couple of comparisons just to illustrate a little bit more clearly this difference between description or exposition and writing something in a scene. So, I made both of these up, but hopefully, they will give you an idea of the kinds of writing that you can include in your life storybook.
So the first one is this. We used to go sledding on the pond behind the barn after it froze solid during cold winters. We used Now, that’s a wonderful tidbit to include in a book. It’s an activity that might show your readers what your childhood was like, the things that you might have liked to do, how you spent your Saturdays.
And I would absolutely include that if that’s part of your memory or things like that. But what if there was something in particular that happened during one of those outings? So in this case, we’re talking about an outing to go skating on the pond. It could look something like this. One day in December, just after I turned eight, my brother and I were skating on the frozen pond behind the barn when we heard a giant cracking sound.
And then, of course, you go on to tell the rest of the scene, the story that you just set up. So I hope that that gives you an idea of the difference between showing and telling. In a future episode, I’ll talk more about the elements of a scene, Things like dialogue, setting, characters, but for now, what I’d like you to do during your next writing session is pull out your notes, your list of topics or your place line or timeline, whatever you have that you’ve put together as, as the pre writing activity for gathering ideas on what you want to write.
Look it over and see if you can find some topic or some start of a story that lends itself to being written up as a scene. Then sit down and write the scene. Again, to recap, your book does not need to be all scenes and compared to exposition and description, by the time you get it all written, it probably will be lighter on scenes than most books.
But if you start paying attention now to what you can write up as a scene, and then you get yourself into the habit of writing scenes, it will Become easier to recognize what in your notes, in your ideas of topics to write about will make a good scene and the scenes, the stories, these will add drama and interest to your book.
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