When I teach memoir and personal essays, one thing I start with is to ask students to write a list of their key scenes (if they already know what their project is) or if they’re at the beginning of the process, what the key moments in their lives. The idea here is to write no more than a sentence for each key scene or moment.
Why do this? Because the key scenes will be your narrative anchors, your moments of progressive complication, your “redwood trees”, as it were, in your book, around which less important moments will cluster. Doing this gives us a map, and starts us on the road to an outline. Writing a list of key scenes will move us towards discovering our “through-line”, the “deeper story within the story”, the necklace onto which the pearls (scenes) are strung.
What’s a scene? I think you instinctively know, from all the media we all have consumed by the age of X (film, TV, novels, short stories, plays, etc.), but essentially a scene is where the reader feels immersed in the action. It’s where there will be dialogue, or at least characters talking to each other. It’s where we will be shown, not told, how (for example) your mother was angry. Not “my mother was angry” (telling), but “my mother threw the plate against the wall and said, ‘would you ever respect the fact that I’m trying to get some time for myself, here!'” (showing). Scenes have action, they have conflict, they use the five senses. They are where we slow down and immerse ourselves and the reader in the story. There may be little moments of reflection from the adult “you” to give context and explain, but mostly they will capture the experience of the “past you” in describing the action.
Scenes are key, and the good news: you can do them in memoir / personal essays / creative nonfiction (CNF) just as much as you can in fiction. Ever since Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and writers like Michael Herr (Dispatches) pioneered the New Journalism in the 1960s, CNF, the fourth genre, has increasingly become a genre where you can do just as much to bring your story alive as you can in fiction. You can do this by working on having immersive scenes.
This is what I teach in all my memoir / personal essay courses. I am running two memoir boot camps in autumn, one for US students (starting 18th September) and one for Irish / UK / European students starting in early October. See my offerings under Distance Learning on Writing.ie.
I hope this helps you on your journey! Finally, here’s a list of categories for scenes that you might use to trigger your writing.
◦ Giving Birth
◦ Death
◦ Learning (education, positive and negative)
◦ Key childhood experiences
◦ Peak (spiritual) experiences
◦ Drugs
◦ Sex
◦ God
◦ Religion (positive / negative)
◦ Spirituality (positive / negative)
◦ The experience of reading as a place of homecoming or belonging
◦ Community or isolation
◦ Belonging / alienation
◦ Bullying (bullied or bully or neither)
◦ Social shaming
◦ Racism
◦ Social status or lack of it
◦ Coming of age
◦ Mentors
◦ Toxic people
◦ Nourishing people
◦ Family (Mother ◦ Father ◦ Brothers ◦ Sisters ◦ Grandparents)
◦ Consolation
◦ Desolation
(c) David McLoghlin
