Carrot Ranch

From Autobiography to Memoir

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 8 Comments

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So, what about that book you were ghostwriting?  I hear that a lot from friends I haven’t seen in a while. After all, it’s been three years. And it’s true that at times I feel like I’ve been sucked into a black, bottomless hole, or tossed upon some steep Sisyphean slope the peak of which I will never reach. Then again, what did I expect? It’s a book not a sandwich. A book doesn’t have a clear blueprint, or at least if it does (an outline), it is one that has the unnerving habit of morphing even while you are adhering to it fanatically.

The Decision to Jump the Genre Track

I punched out the first version of the book in a year. It was a straightforward life story beginning in childhood and ending with the author’s retirement and reflections on his life and career. I had, as William Zinsser put it in his acclaimed guide, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, imposed “narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events.” Several readers responded favorably, but these were mostly swayed by their fondness for either the author or myself. Then something happened to change our trajectory. (Long and complicated story there, one I wrote about in July.) Brakes were applied to the publishing schedule. Acting on the suggestions of a professional publicist and editor, my client and I pulled back to explore a more commercial version of the story in the form of a medical memoir.

Steps to a Genre Metamorphosis

At that time, I think I had some vague notion that I would be able to simply cut and paste my first autobiographical version into a cohesive new memoir. How wrong I was. What was needed was a complete overhaul. I would have to jettison parts of the book I (and more importantly my client) had loved, and if anecdotes or scenes did not support the memoir, out they would have to go. Following are the steps I have taken these last months in the process of transforming a life story to memoir.

  • Book-ending the narrative: A crucial distinction between an autobiography and a memoir is focus. According to Zinsser, a classic memoir recalls “a particular period and place in the writer’s life.” It is “a work of history, catching a distinctive moment in the life of both a person and a society.” Accordingly, I had to identify new starting and ending points to my story. This being a medical memoir, I would focus on the years my client worked at the top of his field, building the new narrative within strict bookends from the time his reputation took off to his retirement. While I didn’t want to completely abandon important events and key experiences that took place in his childhood or training, I had to find a way to incorporate them through flashback within the new truncated time frame.
  • Building a new chapter sequence: With a clear start and end point, I now went back to the original chapter sequence, pulling out the chapters that took place during this span, and using them to anchor the new narrative arc. Scrivener was helpful in this endeavor, allowing me to easily build the new structure by first importing all the chapters from the original manuscript into the binder of a new project, and then selecting from them to build a new sequence. However, since my client’s childhood and training had taken up nearly half the original book, I was left with only a dozen or so chapters that fit in the new time frame revolving around his career.
  • Identifying events in existing chapters from which to build new chapters: Now I had to explore the chapters that dealt with his career and identify material that I had given less importance to that could be the basis of complete new chapters. This has been tough but edifying . An author makes so many choices focusing on one anecdote here, eliminating another there. Guiding my search was of course the strictures of the medical theme. However, I had to be careful not to settle for “fluff,” minor episodes that did not have enough meat to expand into a real chapter but that I was tempted to use out of desperation to replace chapters I had dumped.
  • Integrating earlier key events through flashback:  A real challenge has been how to retain some really dramatic scenes that on the surface did not directly support the new focus. I could integrate key childhood experiences through flashbacks but only when they supported or related to something that was happening in the new present of the story. The flashback must also be triggered by something happening in the present; there had to be a reason the author reflected on his past when he did. While a number of acclaimed memoirs have served as a good model, I found myself dipping time and again into Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, to see how she accomplished such a seamless shift from the present (the hike on the Pacific Crest Trail) to various points in her past that pertained to and illuminated her struggle.
  • Identifying high and low points: This exercise was one of the first tasks the editor gave me, but it has turned out to be the cornerstone of my approach. Scanning the original manuscript (and working from memory) I created a table with two lists, one the high points/successes in my client’s life and the other the low points/failures/challenges. These I put in chronological order, then referred back to them as I built my new chapter sequence. Those that fit in the main narrative became, in many cases, the basis for a chapter. Those from earlier periods of his life could be included as flashbacks interspersed around the main action. The challenges in particular—and how the author dealt with them—reveal character and motivation, while the successes allow for a release from tension and provide variety and movement to the narration.

A Memoir Takes Form

This process has been slow and sometimes frustrating. Working with so much material (97,000 words in the original manuscript, as well as two dozen audio recordings) often feels like wading around in a flood grasping at flotsam as it floats by. And while I did get a good start on transforming the book into a memoir using the steps above, it was when my editor suggested I hold off on actually doing the rewrite and create a book proposal instead that the new book began to emerge in more clarity. I will be blogging about how creating a proposal expedites the actual writing of a book in an upcoming post.

 

 

Flash Fiction: A Rich Little Poor Girl

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 6 Comments

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It’s flash fiction time as I ponder another challenge from Carrot Ranch. Charli’s May 27, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story, using the above photo. You can make it a garden party or an international spy thriller. Who is there and why? Does the backdrop scenery make an impact or is it ignored? The place is on an island, if you wish to make use of that. Go where the photograph leads you this week.

The stunning locale first suggested a tale of romantic suspense, like those so beautifully evoked by mistress of the genre Mary Stewart in The Moonspinners or This Rough Magic. A boat landing on a remote mountain estate seemed a perfect setting for a flash about a chance meeting between a smart, independent (and yes, attractive) young woman and a generic tall, handsome, initially-suspect-but-ultimately-kind-and-sympathetic love interest. After all, it was authors like Stewart and Victoria Holt, whom I read voraciously through my teens, that compelled me to pursue my own foreign and romantic adventures upon reaching the age of burning freedom myself.

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But then, a real-life story came to mind.

I heard the tale last July in Florida during a visit to a long-lost cousin of my husband’s. We’ll call him Billy. Affable, hard-drinking Billy had done very well for himself, not only in his career as an attorney but in his marriage to a wealthy sparrow of a woman with camellia skin and fair wispy curls, whom we shall call Savannah. On the patio of their luxury home, after a dip in the saltwater pool, I listened with deep fascination to Savannah’s story.

She had not been born into wealth. Rather, the youngest of seven children in a hardscrabble West Virginia family headed by a down-and-out alcoholic widower, the trajectory of her life had been radically redirected when a rich, local attorney adopted her as a young child. Overnight penury and hunger and squalor gave way to the privilege and trapping of a lonely, wealthy man’s only child.

Savannah never returned to the shack she’d shared with her rag-tag siblings, only visiting her father a few times before his death two decades later. Still, her wealth had not brought great happiness, or a love deepened by shared struggle, or health. Savannah told me her story in a thin whisper, conserving the breath now imperiled by her lung cancer. And during the six hours we spent there, Billy followed up on the libations he’d clearly imbibed before our arrival, downing beer after beer after beer.

The Lake House

Savannah surfaced and gulped the sweet, heavy air. It’s a dream, she thought. This lake, the blue mountains, the murmurings in the pines and skimming dragonflies.

She bobbed for a moment, then hoisted herself up the metal ladder. No, it was real, these wooden stairs, this path, the big house just ahead.

Clean, sweet-smelling New Papa was waiting there. She didn’t know why Real Papa had let New Papa take her away after Mama died. Or why New Papa hadn’t chosen one of the others.

A prayer beat inside her. Let me stay. Let me stay. Let me stay.

 

Janisha: A Flash in the Vein of “Black Lives Matter”

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 1 Comment
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In managerial stance, 2013

 

A blog I have come to follow during the last year is Charli Mills’s Carrot Ranch. Designed along Charli’s “buckaroo” persona, the site is both a showcase for Charli’s own literary outpourings and a refreshing and inspiring “watering hole” for a small but growing literary community; Charli has branded that community her “Rough Writers.”

Charli hosts a flash fiction challenge on her blog, and each week she posts a writing prompt for her stable of Rough Writers. Triggered by events in the wider world or by the quiet dramas of the natural sphere that surrounds her in Elmira Idaho, the themes selected are always ones that provoke a far-ranging response. The strictures she places on word count–99 words, no more, no less–encourage a tightening of focus and a keen, almost poetic, attention to vocabulary.

This week’s prompt, and the essay that precedes it, brilliantly conflate two recent devastating cataclysms, one natural and one social: the earthquake in Nepal and the racial turmoil in the United States that has seen a violent upswing in recent months in response to the anger unleashed by black communities over the deaths of black men at the hands of the police. Charli captures the fear, frustration, and helplessness many of us feel:

Like geological earthquakes, social ones rock the ground we stand upon. We feel ripped to pieces. We feel buried alive in the rubble of our riot-fueled angst. We feel the whole damn world is against us, no one understands.

What we need is common ground. To reach across the racial chasms we need to toss aside discomfort over “otherness.” Our first step is to recognize one race: human.

To toss aside otherness is a large order, one difficult to achieve even when the heart is willing. That being the case, the prompt this week is perhaps more challenging than most (and thanks to Charli for graciously allowing me to expand the word count.):

April 29, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that tackles racism. Think about common ground, about the things that rip us apart as humans. How we can recover our identities in a way that honors the identities of all individuals? What breaks the barrier of other-ness? Imagine a better tomorrow that doesn’t need expression in riots or taking sides on social media. As writers, think about genres, characters, tension and twists. We can rebuild.

As a member of the “dominant culture” in the States, I have had my own moments of reckoning over the years in regards to race. This flash piece (part memoir, part fiction) comes from one of them.

Janisha

Janisha planted herself before my desk. A bulwark, I thought.

“I want to talk to you,” she said.

Her tone conveyed a reprimand, not a request to a supervisor.

“Alright,” I said. “Have a seat.”

She ignored me. I looked uneasily behind her at the only door to my office and the empty hallway beyond.

“You might close the door,” I said, remembering the discrimination complaint she’d filed against another manager. I’d already gotten her play-by-play account of the incident, despite the dean’s warning not to discuss it.

I suppressed a sigh of defeat. Composed my face to its managerial mask. Wondered again what made this woman so bloody commanding: that throaty voice, those tight cornrows framing heavy brow and full purple lips. Her face belonged to some fierce Asian deity guarding a temple.

I cleared my throat. “You know it’s against policy for me to discuss your grievance,” I began.

Her face glistened like a polished stone. Glowering, I thought.

Then in a beat, she threw her head back, let out a full-throttle laugh.

“That’s not why I came in,” she said. And laid a plastic, motorized fan on my desk.

“Just gets so stinking hot back here.”