Tense in Memoir
By memoirista | August 12, 2008
The following exercise in the invention of a style for my memoir turns out to be “academic.” That is, a professional reader found the switching of tenses a good way to lose the reader almost immediately. That I don’t want to do. I’m sure you don’t want to do it either. I am therefore advising you not to do any of the following.
I am leaving the post up because it may stimulate thought about style in memoir, and theories about style in memoir. This style, again, does not work.
* * *
I have restarted the memoir, titled either Had a Brain, or Thrown. The raw material is available, for a month or two more, on the web site www.hadabrain.net
This past month, I edited the raw material; in doing so I found myself searching for ways to amp up the impact of the accident itself, and the aftermath in the hospital. I found that what made sense to me was to use the historical present, rather than the narrative past, when the material was my own feelings and immediate perceptions at the time. That meant that some of the time, I used a narrative voice, and some of the time, I used my own “first-person” voice. The narrative voice is me, the historical-present is me, just a split between whether I’m telling, as clearly as I can remember, how I feel and what is happening around me, or what happened with other people in the story who were waiting at the hospital. The bit in bold above is the shift to what I call historical-present tense.
I edited it that way, and liked the effect, and then I thought–but it’s completely wrong to shift tenses in the middle, even within the paragraph. I’ve never seen it done, this could kill my book. In my uncertainty I cast around for editors, ask the people at Absolute Write for a critique, and look through the memoirs on my bookshelves. I pick up Angela’s Ashes, flip through the first slow page and half, which are in narrative voice–although McCourt is almost third-person, rather than first-person, in his description of Limerick. Then, when he moves the inner camera to the family, and Angela’s birth, he shifts into historical present mode, clearly first-person as family representative, silent in the corner, taking in the scene–although not yet born. Well, okay, I thought. I must have lucked onto that technique.
Parenthetically, another technique, used in fiction as well as memoir, is rendering thoughts as italics, rather than in quotation marks as internal dialogue. Augusten Burroughs uses it sparsely in Running with Scissors.
The effect of mixing the historical present, for the world of the author at the time of events, and the narrative past, as the more distant evocation of that past world, with descriptions that the author at the time of events would not necessarily need to know, want to know, or care about communicating–the effect of mixing these two modes of time is to give dimension and depth to the memoir.
Another effect is that the mixed tenses relieve the narcissism of the single author, single tense, single POV, by introducing a tense–the narrative past–that moves back from the immediacy of the historical present tense. Too much, and a reader would not care about the central character; too little, and I think that being inside the head of/the POV of the subject would be boring, unreadable, easily put down. All narrative past is slow moving. Jill Ker Conway uses narrative past and remembered dialog, in The Road to Courain, her coming-of-age memoir.
The way that McCourt uses the mix of tenses, as I read further into Angela’s Ashes, is to use historical present (generally) when it is his own memory telling us what happened, and narrative past when the grown man has done some research to be able to describe details that the boy (grown older) doesn’t remember on his own. That makes each paragraph a presentation from two slightly different perspectives–memory of direct experience, and gathered recollections, distilled.
When in my memoir I talk about the mountains, in Salt Lake City, Utah, or the flowering trees in Salt Lake City, in Philadelphia, and in Jerusalem, it is a more general recollection, not a specific moment. When I talk about the red linoleum floor in our apartment’s kitchen, or the 1950s style red-topped kitchen table, it is recollection, not a specific moment. But when I talk about Lucy, the tri-colored cat, catching a mouse, that is a single moment. I watch her play for twenty minutes, thinking the mouse is dead, let her play. I suddenly realize with horror that the mouse is still alive and trying to get away. I grab the cat, and tell Alyssa to get a shoe box. We put the rescued mouse into the shoe box, and put it in the only room that we can close off, so that Lucy cannot get to her prize, the bathroom. Alyssa and I each check a couple of times during the evening, and the mouse rouses a bit, so we have some hope that she’ll survive. In the morning, the mouse is dead. We take her outside and bury her, to keep Lucy from ever, ever, enjoying her catch.
If I needed to describe the Wasatch Mountains as they appear from the flat parts of the city, and I don’t have a good enough memory to do it, it would be possible to go back and describe them — to do research. Apricot trees came into flower in Salt Lake City fifteen years ago, and they came into flower on the corner where I live now in Philadelphia, last spring. Flowering almond came into flower in Jerusalem, the time I was there for the longest, on February 2d, TuBishvat, the Jewish New Year of the Trees. Flowering almond came into flower on Locust Walk at the University of Pennsylvania, in the past couple of years, in late November, in February, and in early April. Well, that mixed three flowerings into two years; the point is that the look of the tree doesn’t vary that much, and can be described either as recollection and scene setting, or as immediate emotional response, to the unexpected weather, and the delightful flowering tree that rejoices, as I do, in this out-of-season weather.
Fortunately, more than half of the memoir takes place in Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania, where eith the settings are still there, or others are around who remember the details of the settings. I discovered this past week that one of the Salt Lake City hospitals–and possibly both–has changed its name from Holy Cross Hospital to ** Regional Medical Center **. The other hospital was Latter Day Saints (LDS) Hospital. I knew before I left Salt Lake that the City Council looked at the the hospitals in the city, and questioned whether they should be tax exempt, LDS Hospital in particular, as a place that did not provide any charity services. Perhaps the solution led to the secularization of all the hospitals within city limits. I’d have to do some research on that.
O r I can stay within the historical present. Those are the names of the hospitals as I know them. The jury is out on this one.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: theory and technique | 2 Comments »
Writer’s Process Blog
By memoirista | August 19, 2007
An excellent example of a writer’s process blog is here, the blogspot blog of Karen Fisher-Alaniz. I have been following her development of her (and her father’s) connected memoir-letters composite, Breaking the Code-A Daughter’s Journey, for several months. She has posted on the Absolute Write forums on the thousand questions a first-time author faces, and I have seen her grow from the process. Her commitment to her work, which is now almost at the stage of submission to agents, has impressed me.
The pictures of her in writing mode are engaging, as well.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: General, theme | No Comments »
Solving a Problem 1
By memoirista | August 3, 2007
I have gone silent on both my Hadabrain blog - the actual writing of the memoir, and this blog, the process of writing the memoir.
Hadabrain refers to the song in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz - “If I Only Had A Brain (A Heart, the Noiv)” sung by The Scarecrow, The Tin Man, and The Cowardly Lion. The Scarecrow gets his brain when he is granted a diploma by the Wizard of Oz. That fits the general “triumph over obstacles” outline of my memoir. And that’s the end of the story (I think) for the Scarecrow.
I was puzzling, though, over Dorothy. What she wants to do, her goal, is to go home, and the conclusion of her story is that she gets back to Kansas - having hit her head and dreamed it all.
Well, the whirlwind that took me from Salt Lake City, Utah (even further out than Kansas) to the University of Pennsylvania Graduate Division of Arts and Sciences also took me away from “home” - actually another displacement of the idea of home. Home to me is diversity, home to me is East Coast, home to me is opportunity. Salt Lake lacked diversity, was in the Mountains instead of on the coast, and had a glass ceiling on opportunity. So perhaps I did click those ruby slippers, say to myself “there’s no place like home!” and wind up in Philadelphia, close to the East Coast, full of diversity, and with far more opportunity–home at last.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: General, theme | 2 Comments »
Solving a Problem 2
By memoirista | August 3, 2007
The problem, again, is whether to link my memoir explicitly to the Wizard of Oz, as in the working title (If I Only) Had A Brain. You can see the simpler solution to the identification with the Scarecrow, who gets his diploma and thus his brain, from the Wizard, and the slightly more complex identification with Dorothy, who only wants to go home, who is carried away by the tornado/whirlwind when she gets hit on the head - suffers traumatic brain injury (TBI).
While percolating away at the problems I saw with this kind of thematic - such as not really wanting to go “home” to Salt Lake City - I came to a deeper insight. At the time I was a child, the women in my world who were working outside the home at jobs were teachers and nurses. I definitely did not want to be either, and I did not want to be what now has its own acronym, a SAHM - Stay-at-home-mom. I did want children, though. That’s another part of the story, not theme-connected, so let’s move on.
These were, I have come to realize, my deepest role models. I did not want to grow up to be my mother. She had a brain she never got to use. I had a brain I was determined to use beyond the home, determined to use in some way out in the world. I’m not sure that the story of the little mermaid has a great deal to do with having a brain, but Dorothy did, and however bewildered she got, so did Alice. Or at least they had adventures.
So when the car driven by Carla Martinez changed the world I perceived and felt, and changed my body, and changed my brain, and changed my eyesight, that car also pushed me back into the society of my childhood role models.
In the world in which I grew up, the female figures who had adventures and who did things were not real people, they were the constructed fictional figures of a genre one might call “whimsical adventure.” They were Dorothy, of The Wizard of Oz, and Alice, of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and “The Little Mermaid” of the story by Hans Christian Anderson (not Disney, who has parts of it very wrong).
There was a tremendous price to pay, in each of these stories. Dorothy’s leadership was achieved at the cost of declaring it all a dream due to traumatic brain injury (which is no dream). Alice simply fell asleep and dreamed it all, and the little mermaid endured tremendous physical pain to lose her mermaid’s tail and become human.
Thus the genre actually fails, as “whimsical” adventure, and approaches real life, a suitable setting after all for role models.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: General, theme | 4 Comments »
Contemplating My Navel II
By memoirista | July 9, 2007
This is turning into a series of “envy” postings, based on reading the super-creative blogs of others. This time the blog is AarghInk
at the post called “Just Show Us What You’re Really Like,” with photos.
My comment was
I would probably submit more, were I able to overcome my great fear of the author photo. You see, I know I’ll be a success–until they see the options for author photo and run screaming–from the editorial board meeting, or if not from there, from the book store.
Thank you for isolating and talking about that which we deny as we write.
It’s good to get those hidden fears out in public, isn’t it?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: General | No Comments »
“Writer’s BlockS” - Writing Software
By memoirista | July 9, 2007
The linear nature of a blog like www.hadabrain.net is linear. As you may know, I have started posting stuff for a memoir there.
Today I was looking at software for writers at this site, mostly wanting to check in for the descriptions of software to track submissions. I’m WAAY ahead of myself there, in so many ways. That is, I’m not really ready to track submissions.
Anyway, I stumbled upon a kind of software that sounds ideal for the non-linear nature of the way my memoir has been developing. For example, the entry “Marty” is about (mostly about) my mother. There is a reasonably logical place for it to go in the structure of memory, but in the story so far told on the blog, it doesn’t fit.
The software that would help solve all that, from the descriptions I’ve read, is WRITER’S BLOCKS 3.0. It takes a 3×5 card approach to organizing your writing. That is, blocks of text (such as “Marty”) are put in relationship to each other, in some order, with some color coding. Then I would be able to shuffle them around to my liking.
Even better, I can use it for my memoir, I can use it for a philological article I need to get ready for submission for publication, I can use it in the future for any project that needs to be changed from deductive reasoning to inductive discovery mode, and many more uses yet to be discovered.
I haven’t quite made the move to ordering it (from Absolute Write Store; I think I’d like to hear/read some user reviews. What I’ve read, of reviews on the web, say that the software is good if that’s how you work. That is, if you don’t need prompting on characters and plot.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: Off-Topic | No Comments »
Blog Changes–Different Ads, More Blogroll
By memoirista | July 6, 2007
In the old ad arrangement, Amazon was supposed to be noting one’s wishes in serving up ads, so that the ads reflect books that wer in the genre memoir. This was not happening in the way I expected, or in the way that a reader (you!) could use. Hence the change.
I know that Amazon has an enormous variety of books that belong in the genre. I used the search term “personal memoir” the other day, and the first 100 listings were all in the genre of memoir, and only one of them was a book I had actually reviewed in The Reviews.
Now I have established a Store served up by Amazon. Memoirista Books is restricted to books (those hundreds of books) in the genre of memoir. There is an adjacent store on Amazon’s choices of books about writing memoir. That store page may be replaced by my personal choices.
Also, I have added an Amazon search box that you can use for other choices.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: Off-Topic | No Comments »
Sharon Maas’s New Web Site is Sharon Maas.co.uk
By memoirista | July 2, 2007
The noted author Sharon Maas has briefly been without a web site. In order to get the new web site going, we want to spread the word: The new site is http://www.SharonMaas.co.uk/
Her web site title had ranked first on searches for ten years; we want to get the word out, that this wonderful author has her new site up and running.
For a more complete account of the issues that affect all writers on the web, see Cath Smith’s post on Sharon Maas.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: General | No Comments »
Contemplating My Navel I
By memoirista | June 29, 2007
Occasionally, something sparks more than usual introspection about how I do things (now). The following was originally added as a comment to another writer’s blog, and I liked it enough to steal my own work! Where does that fall on the plagiarism axis, I wonder.
Here it goes:
If I get a good solid nitpicking critique of anything I’ve written, yes, I learn what to look for in the next thing I write, or how to revise what I’ve written. It’s helpful, too, when I understand the critical distinctions between what I wrote, and the thoroughgoing critique I received. That feeling of not being very good at what I do, that you describe, is often there, but doesn’t bother me much anymore. I’ve separated the world into people who have an agenda that they want me to fit, and those who want the best for me–and the best from me. With the first group, I do my best to meet my own standards. With the second group, I hope, both of us grow.
The other blogger’s personal description included “never being very good at what I do.” The trouble is, I’ve found, once you get very good at what you do, no one will tell you that you are very good at what you do. There’s a long story that goes with this observation, but it’s best saved for that memoir that keeps waiting for wordcount!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: General | No Comments »
Covering Distance
By memoirista | June 26, 2007
I’ve been stuck on “There’s no place like home,” particularly as they reflect the words spoken by Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Certainly the beginning of WOZ is an easy metaphor for catastrophic shifts in one’s life. It’s only in fairy tales that one actually gets to go home; a fairy tale like WOZ offers no metaphor that suits the realization that one’s body will never be the same, one’s home will never be the same, and one may never be at home in the world again.
If you are completely puzzled by this entry, see my memoir-in-progress at (if I only) hadabrain.com
So it’s a difficult task, and a risky one, to pick up and use, thematically, a bunch of familiar tropes that don’t obviously apply, and would need a lot of work to be integrated into a memoir. Do I dare? Are there copyright issues with more than superficial and occasional allusions?
But then, there’s magic. I came back from my daughter’s the week before graduation, and got the shuttle home. The driver, for no apparent reason that I could see or know, got everyone loaded, and took his seat behind the wheel of the supersized van. He began to sing “We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz . . !”
Sometimes there are signs and answers, and do we ever know what to do with them?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Topics: General | No Comments »