writing hints and tips

At our recent memoir and life writing retreat I came across an article in Womankind magazine about Gloria Anzaldua’s theory of the stages in reconstructing self after trauma. And blow me down if it didn’t also work for structuring trauma memoirs! I’m not saying it’s the only way to heal or that the stages of recovery or stages of a memoir need to follow this order, but for anyone struggling with either trauma or finding a structure for the writing of traumatic events, I hope this will help.

GLORIA ANZALDUA

As with the stages of grieving first put forward by Elisabeth Kubler Ross, there is often a to-ing and fro-ing between stages or phases of emotional growth, sometimes all in one day.

However, a familiarity with how other people have found the experience and stages to identify can be most useful. And for writers having some kind of structure, any kind, is very welcome, especially when grappling with wrestling real-life trauma onto the page.

TRAUMA MEMOIR STRUCTURE IN 7 EASY STEPS!

THE EARTHQUAKE – this is it! The trauma hits and our world is turned upside down. The story we’ve been telling ourselves about ourselves is destroyed and our old beliefs and identity collapses.

Photo by Sanej Prasad Suwal on Pexels.com

LYING IN A HEAP – this is when we’re lying in the debris of our old lives, not knowing who we are anymore. Not knowing which way to turn. We may try to pretend that nothing has changed, we may try to return to who we were before, the lives we used to lead, but find it is no longer possible.

ROCK BOTTOM – we realise the damage has been done and there is no going back to who we were. We are stuck, unable to move, unable to find a way forward. We have fallen to pieces and can see no way to stick ourselves together again.

CALL TO ACTION – you break free from your old ways of coping and reconnect with spirit. We let go of all that no longer serves us and begin to see a way ahead.

RECONSTRUCTING OURSELVES – now is the stage where we collect all those thousands of little pieces we fell into and attempt to put them back together again. Not as the old “us” but a new creation made from the same stuff rearranged, re- membered.

THE BLOW UP – returning to the world and reconnecting with others as our new selves.

EXPRESSION – here we experiment with our new reality and new self, expressing ourselves in creative activities – writing, art, dance music, healing, teaching, spiritual activism.

If you’re writing a trauma memoir you’re in stage 7! YAY! I can certainly relate to all these stages and applaud all of you who, like me and Gloria, have picked up all those mixed up, broken pieces of yourself off the floor and created a brave new you and wonderful new life filled with creative expression.

Creativity is a powerful tool for healing emotional pain. Write it all out, paint it, dance it, play it on a guitar, whichever way works for you. Create beauty from the pain.

Let me know if this structure is helpful to you, in understanding your own trauma journey, or for structuring your trauma memoir. I hope it works for both!

With lots of love

Edwina xxx

Dialogue is an important tool in the writer’s kit, when used correctly.

Great dialogue makes your writing come alive. As the most mimetic of writing forms, it brings the reader and writer together in story time and is the ultimate in SHOWING rather than TELLING. Dialogue breaks up the page and breathes life into scenes, engaging the reader in real time. Good dialogue shows us who our characters are and brings surprising plot turns.

Some people struggle to include any dialogue at all and find writing credible exchanges between characters difficult. However, recently I’ve encountered a few manuscripts where the writers have fallen in love with dialogue, or so it seems, and have tried to write almost whole novels primarily in dialogue, at the expense of world building, action and setting details and readers being able to visualise scenes. So how much dialogue is too much?

Photo by Anna Nekrashevich on Pexels.com

I love dialogue and I’ve written and read a few short stories that are primarily told in dialogue – see Denis Johnson’s “Steady Hands at Seattle General” for a fabulous example. This great story is written almost only in dialogue and yet it still makes sense. How? Johnson makes sure that the reader is grounded in where and when this story takes place in a few simple lines of exposition at the start of the story. As long as we know where we are, who we’re with and what’s going on, you can get away with pretty much anything but GROUNDING THE READER in a concrete setting is essential, especially when writing primarily in dialogue. Otherwise, it feels like voices yelling in a void and the reader is unable to visualise what’s going on. And a short story is a snapshot of a moment in time, not an entire complex story interweaving the experiences of many that demands more explanation and grounding.

Dialogue is great to bring our characters to life but it’s not effective to use dialogue to fill in whole passages of backstory or to fill in world building details. If you find your dialogue running into paragraphs of explanation of who or why something is happening, stop and think. Put the most important information in dialogue – the information that gives us the most clues about the character who is speaking – then take the rest of the dialogue and paraphrase it so the world building details are still there but not in a long-winded monologue.

In screenwriting we tell stories not only in dialogue but in the scene headings and the actions blocks which establish where we are and what’s going on. In screenplays we have the huge advantage of the audience being able to see and hear actors playing our characters within a setting and situation. We don’t have that advantage in prose so we need to fill in those other details so the reader can picture what’s going on and what the characters are doing as they speak.

When writing prose, we need to establish that setting and situation and show our characters acting and interacting with that environment and each other beyond the lines of dialogue. Then the reader is able to visualise what’s playing out – as if on a movie screen. Without enough clues to create that picture, only a whole lot of dialogue floating in space, the reader is left floundering.

Use dialogue to show us the best and worst of your characters. Have them say one thing then do the opposite. Have them lie about something we’ve just seen happen to someone else, or pretend it never happened.

Use dialogue to reveal a sudden plot twist, but don’t tell the whole story in speech.

Take a look at your use of dialogue. A little on every page is a good idea, but if you find you don’t have any, then add some in. Alternatively, if you find whole pages of dialogue without any setting or action details, with characters explaining the plot or telling their life stories, think again. Break up these sections with some straight exposition establishing setting and intersperse characters’ actions and reactions, some introspection and just plain telling to make sure the reader can visualise the scene in their own imaginations.