Time and your memoir – part 1

We use why, how, and when questions when we write. How do we deal with the “when”, or the time component? You bend, stretch or contract it when you use time in your memoir.

NAVIGATING TIME IN YOUR MEMOIR

In The Art of Time in Memoir, Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about oneself. “Memoir is, for better and often for worse, the genre of our times,” says Birkerts. But what makes one memoir memorable and another self-serving? There is a fine line between graceful disclosure and sensational self-exposure and Birkerts poses that the writer’s strategies for navigating time itself, “reveal the power and resonance of a writer’s life.”

THE BEGINNING, MIDDLE AND END

Your life is set in a particular period of personal and historical time. You get to choose the when, the starting place of your memories, to let it naturally unfold in a series of events.

“When we ask where a story begins, we calculate time. When we merge the act of remembering with the memories themselves, or make our prose stand breathlessly still, or work that much harder to see more artfully, we slow time down. When we rush the days or years, favour the tell over the scene, make the white space speak for the untold things, or let the experiences swirl, we put the wind at time’s back,” says Beth Kephart.

Let’s examine four approaches to consider for your memoir.

APPROACH ONE: CHRONOLOGICAL

Decide where your story starts. It you are unsure of this, refer to your daily journaling. Remember, when you are struggling to write, journal and document instead. A pattern you can recognise will emerge soon enough, which will give you a grip on the starting place of your story. 

“Start at the beginning. End at the end. Don’t ramble around in the telling,” says Kephart. “Of course, you’re still going to have to build a defensible launch pad. You’re still going to have to decide the hour of the day in the year in which you will pin your start… But time as an arrow is the least complicated, most purely autobiographical approach to the true story.”

APPROACH TWO: START NOW, CIRCLE BACK

Another way of writing is to start in the now, and circle back to the past.

Kephart cites writer Mary Karr’s book The Liars’ Club. “Karr chooses to begin with a half-told story about a terrible violence threatened by her own mother. Karr doesn’t yield the entirety of the scene in her opening pages. She isn’t ready, she tells us, to fully divulge. She spends the rest of her memoir zigging and zagging through time, telling family stories, all the while circling back toward that unfinished opening scene. Karr wants to know what drove her mother to set a fire, to wield a knife. She recognizes that understanding takes time and perspective, that we are always, when we remember, circling back, narrowing the gaps, speculating. The Liars’ Club ends where it begins, with that same opening scene. But by the time the scene has been fully told, it has also been far better understood.”

APPROACH THREE: ALTERNATING PAST AND PRESENT

Time can be used like a scale, where then and now, past, and present, is weighed up against each other. We can alternate our chapters, one event happening in our past, the next in the now, where we have the gift of hindsight. This dual timeline is then followed until the past and the present intersect.

To prevent predictability, Kephart suggests mixing the pattern up with irregular rhythms in your chapters – “Present-Present-Past-Present-Past-Past-Past, say – to generate narrative suspense.”

APPROACH FOUR: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS, OR PIECES

We remember not in straight lines but in jumps and starts, and sometimes the same memory has more than one way of being told. A lot of fog or mist surrounds a lot of our memories, and we need time to see through this veil. “We’ll never get it perfectly right; the truth is in the trying,” explains Bekhart.

A memoir in pieces “is a tightly choreographed collection of essays in which stories are told, retold, and reconsidered until personal and universal wisdoms are gained. Silence speaks through the seams of these books… One image planted in one part of the book may reappear elsewhere, then again, and then, perhaps, again, so that time loops and days recur, and hours grow saturated with deep reflection.”

TIME AND YOUR MEMOIR

Consider the approach which appeals the most to your personality and circumstances. As an author coach, I am here to talk you through it and explore the various options.