Memoir Writing: Five Tips for Writing Comprehensive and Concise Stories
Many memoir writers have a hard time distinguishing between what it means to write enough and what it means to write too much. This is a way of writing just enough, but not too much: you write as much as you need to write about a topic (completeness), and then delete as much as you can without changing the meaning of the story (conciseness). What remains is your story.
As you write, keep looking at your prose like a stranger would. Is there enough information to understand everything you are trying to communicate? If not, keep adding details. Unless you are very good, have a lot of experience, don’t edit at this time. Let your text grow.
Yes, it is likely to be repeated and include irrelevant information. You might even babble. But don’t hold back. Your writing needs to flow to be as complete as possible. For everything there is a season… Once you feel that you have said all you have to say, then you need to undertake two tasks:
1) Remove everything that is redundant. Examine your text. Have you said the exact same thing before (or something very similar)? Choose the most effective version and delete the rest. Saying it once is usually enough.
2) Don’t forget the redundancy that arises when your narration repeats the dialogue. Put meaning in dialogue, not in a narrative. “I was very hungry. ‘After not eating for days, I’m starving,’ she said.” Have the dialogue convey the meaning here and remove the narrative sentence. I was very hungry.
3) Linking sentences can also be redundant. “Our house in Des Moines was a two-story brick building. By comparison, our house in Cincinnati was only one story and built of wood.” Here the two sentences are obviously a comparison, and you don’t need the words in comparison.
4) A third form of redundancy occurs when an adjective tries to act as the superlative of a word that is already superlative. Examples of this are: complete silence is not quieter than silence; a corpse is no more dead than a corpse; very sincere is not more sincere than sincere; true facts are not truer than facts.
5) Cut out material (even if it’s interesting) that doesn’t contribute to the overall impact you’re looking for within a story. Writers may come across interesting, well-written material that belongs elsewhere. Sometimes this material can be overdescriptive – remember the tip of the iceberg. Other times, you may have written a story within a story, a separate story with its own beginning, middle, and end, its own set of images and characters. It can even be a charming tale that will move the reader. Get it out though. Archive the story within a story for future use. It will not disappear, it will be waiting for you later. Maybe I can fit into the flow of their life stories, but in a different place. Or maybe you have a beautiful description that you need to expand and turn into a story of your own.
Michelangelo, when sculpting his statue of David, is said to have remarked that he roughed up the block of stone until the statue emerged. He removed as much as he could, and what was left could bear no more removal: at last, Michelangelo had the statue he had been waiting for.
Within the many pages you have written may be your much smaller and better memory. Is the story you want to end up with embedded in excessive prose? Keep cutting your text until you can’t tear any more without detracting from your story. That will be your “David” from a memory.
Good luck writing!