I write other peoples’ stories for a living. And often these stories are really painful for my clients to tell, but they still want to tell them, because things that traumatize you are the very things you can’t get out of your head. For most of the people who hire me for ghostwriting a memoir, enough time goes by and they realize if they don’t get this story on paper, it’s going to continue looping through their heads forever, driving them crazy. But if you do write your story down and you do manage to pull whatever insight the experience left you with, and you manage to show how the experience changed you, you’ll be able to see the value in it, in terms of the big picture of the forces that made you who you are (for better or worse). And that’s kind of why a lot of people hire me for memoir ghostwriting. And now, with this current book, I’ve finally hired myself.
I’ve Become My Own Worst Client
I’ve had an incredibly traumatizing experience that I immediately felt compelled to write a book about, which is something I warn my clients not to do. Usually you don’t want to write about something that just happened, but wait until it’s well in the rearview mirror. That way some of the emotion has worn off, making it easier to recall without trauma, and you have more insight into it. But some clients need to write about their experience even while it’s happening, before they even have an ending yet. Those are the worst. As a writer, it’s much better to know the ending before you begin writing, so you can build up to it, foreshadow it, justify it with details, and so forth. So now, bizarrely, I’ve become my own worst client. I’m doing exactly that: writing a story that doesn’t have an ending, yet. In addition, remembering the details is incredibly traumatizing, and yet, perversely, I don’t want to forget them.
Will Writing a Memoir Re-traumatize or Un-traumatize You?
Now, I really know how my clients feel. For instance, sometimes when I do an interview, I write up what the clients told me and give it back to them as written pages, and they freak out. It can be re-traumatizing to see the facts in print. And yet it can also be un-traumatizing to see the facts finally put down in print. You never really know which way it’s going to go for ghostwriting clients. I’m going through that myself.
The main thing to remember about writing your own memoir, though, is that if it’s painful to write, it will also be painful to read, and you don’t want that. You want it to be insightful, not painful, for readers. Even memoir lovers don’t want to actually go through your pain with you. Yuck. For what it’s worth, here’s the technique I’m using for myself that I never really had to use for a client because the buffer of them hiring a ghostwriter made it unnecessary.
Steps to Turn a Traumatic Memoir into Something Enjoyable
Step One: First, I develop a strong stylistic idea—Choose a style you know and like that ISN’T your own style. Copy an author or a genre that’s fun and easy. Could be a bodice-ripper romance, an Agatha Christie mystery, a Mamet play, or any dramatic style whose characteristics can be somewhat exaggerated. Just don’t be yourself. Stay with me. Now, go ahead and read a lot of those type of books, so you get a sense of this style and start to be able to write paragraphs that copy it.
Step two: Now, set that aside, and write the scenes of your story in whatever order you like–not the whole book, just whatever section of the story you feel like writing about: a chapter or a few pages, whatever comes out. Just write them in your own typical style. Because this is traumatic, you’ll probably write about your feelings a lot. That’s okay at this stage. You will probably start with 10% scene and 90% feelings. It’s fine. This is your first draft—not of the whole book, just of a chapter or a portion of a chapter. I’m not talking about story structure here, but rather about how to write passages about emotional events without having an emotional breakdown. I’ll cover structure another day.
Step three: Look at each description of your feelings and thoughts in the moment and think about the events/actions that caused those feelings. Know this: if you describe the event in enough detail, readers will already know your feelings. But the readers will generate the understanding of your feelings themselves, by relating to how they themselves would feel if this happened to them, which is much better. That’s “showing not telling.” You can take this technique to the extreme or just use it to gently inform the work. That depends on the style you want.
This is your second draft—not of the book but of each individual paragraph to which you give this treatment. Don’t think big picture. Treat each paragraph like you’re both the psychiatrist and the patient: you’ve got to get the information out of the subject, not just the feelings, and this is where you start to do that. Change each thought/feeling-oriented paragraph to one that is just about action after action after action, minimizing the thoughts and feelings but enabling readers to imagine what they might be. And you might go through many drafts as you begin to master this.
Step four: Finally (or somewhere in the middle of the above process) try applying that style you chose in step one to each paragraph. Write it like a pulp fiction novel. Write it like a Victorian romance. Write it like an Agatha Christie mystry. This frames the story in an unexpected way and gives you a whole new way to talk about it that is even further removed from your real feelings and your real pain. In fact, if you do it right, you are now having some fun with it. You are beginning to be able to see your story from the outside, not the inside, and even see it from the viewpoint of someone who totally isn’t you. This is meant to give you emotional distance that makes it easier to tell the story, but it also might give you insight into the story that a third party might have that you yourself did not have while writing from inside yourself.
Step five: You don’t need to keep that style as your ultimate book-writing style. This is an exercise designed to distance you from your work enough to make it less painful to write. So, after you’ve done it to your satisfaction, after you feel you can view your own life from the outside to some degree, develop a style that is all your own, but which keeps events/actions front and center, oftentimes implying feelings rather than directly delving into them. Revelations you had during the events are crucial, as those show you changing as a person, but be sure to treat them as events, not feelings, because they spark cause/effect relationships that change the course of your life. Feel free to give it a try and leave your results in the comments!