"Eat the elephant one bite at a time."
 

          Bite-Size & Nuggetize

Food, entertainment and information more and more come in bite-size portions these days. Chicken nuggets. Sound bites. Extended captions. Colorful little blobs of copy in magazines. People hardly read any more. TV and tweaky kids’ computer games have gutted reading attention spans.

No reason you can’t cash in on this trend: write your personal story in as dramatic, detailed and direct a style as you can. Use flashbacks, snapshots, quick glimpses, close-ups—and give them plenty of white space. I used to tell my communications students: "Before it even begins to be read, every business letter is first and foremost a graphic presentation." White space—"air"—invites readers; an expanse of typescript repels them.

Nuggetizing works the same way.  Nobody eats the elephant all at once, only one bite at a time.  Break your story into finite parts—episodes, vignettes, snapshots—and see how they might fit together or be re-arranged. Use pictures, graphics that fit. Write in columns if it’ll make for easier reading; add mini-headlines (called "decks" in the news business) to nuggetize the copy further. Strip your pieces to bare essentials: if you need more frou-frou, it can always be added later.

Use dialog to make plot wherever you can; it adds drama, is direct, easy to read. Dialog engages; mere description doesn’t do as well. Good dialog creates conflict or generates empathy; it can substitute for "exposition" if handled deftly. Write dialog as it sounds. Use short, declarative (subject, active verb, object) sentences when possible. Don’t bother with any punctuation when "transcribing" dialog; just get the words down on paper. Fix things after.

Punctuation, believe it or not, can add drama. With the right punctuation, you can string together…a burst of heady memories…that seem to demand telling…all in one pass (using tri-dots). Periods, commas, semi-colons regulate cadence, establish rhythms. To convey urgency or drama: a colon. Frequent paragraphs add air, break up blocks of type. Of course, if you’re not writing to be read, none of this applies. It’s limiting, however--not to mention uncharitable--to bring back memoir treasure and hoard it all instead of sharing.

         The Really Big Crunch

When you compress a spring, you load it with pushing power, strength. When you compress gasoline vapor in an engine cylinder, it becomes powerfully explosive. The same is true for writing. Poetry thrives on compression. Screenplays require it. Ad writers understand its strengths. It should be mandatory for political speeches. Writers from ancient myth spinners to modern authors such as Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver depended on the device. The really big crunch helps almost anything written.

If you feel yourself using too many words to say something, stop and rethink it. Compression is not brevity but it means getting rid of whatever clouds your narrative objective: making your story’s characters, real estate, feeling and mood live vividly and immediately on the page.

Compression is much more than mere subtracting, of course. It’s really a matter of shaping and smoothing separate elements so they slip together as if they were made for each other. Edit your material as mercilessly as possible; cut the fat. Test every word and sentence to assure they work towards your goal.

         Editorial Sandpaper

Above all, read your draft aloud when you think it’s ready. Read it to someone else or to yourself in a mirror. Imagine you’re reading to an audience and watch what your voice does; where it falters or slips, get out the editorial sandpaper. Restate sticky points. Talk yourself through the kinks. Your writing and your personal story will gain power and strength.

You likely got introduced to show-and-tell in kindergarten. It still works, but showing is better than telling in memoir or any other writing. Telling is naming; showing is demonstrating, dramatizing. Like children, people love being shown but resist being told. Any time you show us something rather than tell us something, your story picks up power. Dramatizing an episode, scene, setting or clutch of emotions always beats just matter-of-factly relating what happens.

We are label-crazy today. We want to put a name to everything. But naming is not expressing or evoking. Every time you find yourself writing down the name of an emotion—sad, happy, angry, elated—try to evoke it without using its name. No designer emotions, please! Just try it as an exercise. No need to twist your prose into pretzels; just practice. Focus on action rather than mere description. Use the active voice (I hit the ball) rather than the passive (the ball was hit by me) in crafting your sentences. Active voice animates, passive drags.