Matters of the heart in your memoir

A heart is a delicate, cruel thing. It can lead you astray, keep you in the throes of passion or betray the one dearest to you. “No man is an island,” said John Donne, and no memoir exists without matters of the heart.

READERS NEED TO CARE ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER

Of course, you are going to heal your own heart when you start writing your memoir. But how do you engage your readers and make them care about your character?

“Bland feelings and mediocre characters have no place in a novel. They result in the ‘who cares’ response from readers…  strong passions, deep desires, crazy obsessive love,” says Sarah Bullen, is what you should explore.

HOW DO WE WRITE ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS?

The point is to eliminate boring content. Ordinary and mundane exchanges spell boredom and that is not going to captivate your readers. Also remember that your first draft is never going to be perfect. Write it as you remember, then start the rewrite. We elevate our stories from ordinary to extraordinary, by putting in the hard work behind the scenes with rewrites.

LIFE HAPPENS – YOUR HEART IN YOUR MEMOIR

Our life stories are interwoven with our relationships with others. “How” and “why” questions are important. How did a specific love affect/change you? Can you extract a few scenes from the relationship to “show” what happened? And why did certain actions happen? What was the context for the passion, the desire, the obsession? Those are the questions your reader (and you) would like the answers to.

We all know and recognise strong emotions and feelings in ourselves. The secret is to be able to write about love in an engaging way. This implies being ruthless: cutting out cliches and deleting every single unnecessary adjective. Focus on finding brilliant verbs.

The above indicates, action, or events/scenes happening. Below are four excellent tips from Sarah Bullen regarding the writing process:

MORE STRUCTURAL CONFLICT: Give your character (even if it’s YOU) a solid plot and enough external events to make the reader care if they fail. 
Plotting and having enough scenes with enough conflict is critical. You really do need the external conflict to take your hero on a gripping, nail-biting adventure that readers care about.

STRONGER EMOTIONS: Write exaggerated emotions. Rage, envy, jealousy, blind ambition, ruthless, cruelty, lust. These are strong emotions. Cut out anything bland… like concern. 

STRONG STORY GOAL: Give your character a strong story goal (find my sister, save the world, pass Grade 8). Then make it almost impossible for them to succeed. Make them fight for it. Make the cost high if they fail. 

STRONGER DIALOGUE: Strong dialogue comes from strong characters.

GOOD LITERATURE SHOWS US HOW TO WRITE ABOUT LOVE

Read and learn. By observing how good novelists explore love and write about it, we can gain insight into our own stories and consequently produce better writing.

Ian McEwan captures the complexities of love, Douglas Stuart writes about addiction, love, and desire. Afrikaans author Marita van der Vyver writes excellently about relationships and their consequences.

The point is to see how these writers treat the subject and make it their own. Look at the different styles and choose the type of prose you would like to write.  

THE EXPLORATION OF LOVE IN MEMOIR

Mandy Len Catron writes about love in its many forms in a series of candid essays. “[S]he explores what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world. She deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories, going back to when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town, and her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the psychology, biology, history, and literature of love.”

MATTERS OF THE HEART IN YOUR MEMOIR

Are you struggling to convey the love stories in your life in an engaging, wicked, or obsessive way? As an author coach I am available to assist you.