One writes initially to express. But the great hope is that the story will connect with a reader—hopefully many readers who cannot put your book down. So, what do you do if initial beta readers tell you that the draft feels slow? Or the characters are a little two-dimensional.
It’s time to revisit your storyline and see if you can insert a complication or two. Introduce a problem for your protagonist, some unfortunate happening with higher stakes.
Memoir is not immune to this analysis and re-crafting. No, you won’t rewrite your own history or lie to make your life more interesting. Quite the contrary. Instead, revisit the depths of what you are and are not willing to reveal about yourself on the page.
Chances are, there’s a complicating factor that makes you think: “Oh, I could never write about that.”
Chances are, that’s the very thing your work needs to make it thrum with truth and interest.
Many of my coaching clients push back on this issues. “Isn’t this just an obnoxious device?” they ask. “I’m a contemplative writer; I don’t want to write pop suspense.” A device? Yes and no. Making something bad happen to your protagonist is a device only to the extent that it is indeed a tool that fixes a problem. But this tool doesn’t have to be used in a shallow fashion. It can be a knife that cuts straight to the heart of why humans love story, an incision that cuts straight into that I-can’t-put-the-book-down feeling.
The problem we’re fixing is not that the story is inherently boring. The problem is that, at some level, your reader feels you’re not telling the whole truth. That’s why they’ve detached and lost interest. That’s what creates that bored feeling.
This is ancient stuff, deeply wired into our psyches. Early in our development as a complex language-dependent species, we began story-telling with one primary motive: to stay alive. We told stories about the poisonous berry plant that killed a friend, about a relative who survived an attack from a large hungry beast, about an ancestor who buried seeds from a food plant and managed to cultivate a reliable food source. Of course, we told stories about love and sex and deadly conflicts too.
Verbal histories then and now, thrum with themes of risk and survival. Complication. Our early story-telling habit grew alongside our developing logic and planning centers. Today, we are addicted to good story because we’re all a little addicted to trying to predict or influence the future. The surprises (complications) along the way, irritate our longing for resolution and simultaneously keep us hopelessly engaged—both in our own lives, and in the books we love most.
For many readers, their day-to-day real lives hinge on maintaining homeostasis. Keep bills paid; stay sheltered, fed, and healthy; and keep the relational plates spinning smoothly. Readers often escape to fiction and memoir to experience a different life, one presumably more interesting than their own. Reading is a safe place to become a different person, someone more adventurous, heroic… or devious. It’s also a way to discover you have some of those coveted qualities already in yourself. Other readers escape to books when their own lives fall to pieces, and they look to story to perhaps find a fresh pathway through the trouble.
So as writers, our goal on the page is to fracture homeostasis. Introduce complication. Let a plate shatter. Make something bad happen.
Test the main character through those trials.
We writers owe it to our readers to be honest on the page. Narrative writing is inevitably prophetic and instructional, as well as entertaining. As writers, our greatest danger is playing it safe. That’s where lies take root. Life is not safe. Be honest about that.
Questions for your own work:
- For Both Memoir and Fiction: Ask yourself, “What really happened?” That includes all the scenes you never wanted to write. For now, try writing those scenes. Don’t worry about quality or inclusion in the final manuscript. Just write them and see what it stirs up.
- For Fiction: Imagine interviewing your primary characters. What’s the one thing they never want to admit to on the page? Try writing about that.
- For Fiction: What are three things the protagonist would never do? Write scenes where these things happen. Which scenes feel true? What character traits might be revealed through a difficulty of this size? What “helpers” might manifest as a result? (Both helpful people and helpful new beliefs.)
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