| I have long been a Joyce Maynard fan. With nearly 20 books and 50+ years of writing under her belt, she has admirable storytelling chops. Recently, I experienced the joy of meeting Joyce live (by my friend, Melissa Harrison’slaptop). Melissa is embarking on a huge memoir project (I wrote an as-told-to of her story in Marie Claire a decade ago!) and Joyce is one of many memoir masters guiding her on the journey.
Melissa’s story is a tough one, and sharing it in any capacity gives her pause, mostly because she doesn’t want to tarnish her mother’s memory or hurt her surviving family. Joyce put that one to bed right away: “We pay dearly for our life experiences,” she said. “This is what we get in return: We get the right to tell our stories.”
Not many of us are that brave. I’m certainly not. But I have adopted many of Joyce’s tenets for effective storytelling. In fact, during my 2-Sunday Workshop in April, we’ll deconstruct one of Joyce’s essays (along with two others) to learn about what really works in essay. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with 7 of Joyce’s “words of wisdom.”
- Mine your material. If you’ve taken one of my classes, you know that I’ve circled around the same story lines in multiple essays. That’s not an uncommon approach for writers, Joyce included. We tend to revisit many of the same stories, but at different moments in time. For instance, I wrote about my melon-sized adrenal tumor first during my reproductive years. Recently, I revisited the story line as I approach perimenopause.
- Consider your starting point. The opening of the essay is what Joyce calls “the curtain rising moment.” It’s the point of entry where we see the world before everything changes. Your piece is going to be about the world changing, but first we have to know what the world was like before it changed.
- Draw a picture. Before you set out to write about feelings or experiences, ask yourself, can I draw a picture of this? I’m actually going to challenge myself to draw pictures of my experiences before I sit down to write (and I’m a horrible artist). Recently, I began writing a piece about my husband’s absent biological mother. I can’t draw a picture of that absent mother; but I can draw a picture of my husband as a father, despite that absent mother. This rule applies to feelings, too. You can’t draw a picture of venomous rage, but you can draw a picture of yourself creating graffiti on the walls, peeing on the floor (a device my son, Max, used during a stand-off over thumb-sucking) or trashing someone’s car.
- Find the frame. Most of our big life stories are too big for one essay. An essay puts a tight frame around one particular aspect of your life. Joyce calls these frames “containers” and suggests they serve as a vehicle for telling our really big stories. The idea is to focus on a small aspect of the experience, something that’s manageable, and write from there. In one of her essays, Joyce’s container is a jar of chutney. That jar of chutney is a vehicle to tell a story about the loss of her mother. In my own work, I have been writing about the death of my father in recent years. I’ve contained that big story with essays about stalking hummingbirds, writing for healing, even grief as a traumatic brain injury.
- Use new language. Choose words that evoke emotion. So instead of saying “we were a religious family,” you might say, “When I walked into the room, I heard the Hallelujah chorus playing and my mother singing along.” That way the reader understands that The Messiah meant something to your family. Use concrete language with specific details. And yes, draw a picture. You want to put yourself back in that scene so you can relive it.
- “Don’t take the reader to the bathroom.” Resist the urge to report your story chronologically. So … I got in the car, I took out the keys, I turned on the ignition. “That’s something a trauma survivor does. They take the stuff that’s emotionally loaded and bury it,” Joyce says. I particularly love the example she gave: It’s like when you’re 13 years old and you buy tampons for the first time and you put them in the bottom of the cart covered by a hundred other items.” Don’t write that way. Instead, feel it, focus it and make me live it.
- Look for redemption. Redemption is not about finding a happy ending to your story. In Melissa’s case, it’s not about her brother getting out of jail and starting a new virtuous life. Instead, it’s something authentically redemptive about YOU! Joyce uses the catch phrase, “I used to, but now I …”In the process of writing, you can find redemption. You may even lay some demons to rest.
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