We all did "show and tell" as kids in school. It's almost the reverse for memoir writers.

You concentrate on the "show" rather than the "tell."  It sounds counter-intuitive, but to make your personal story come alive, you need to dramatize it on paper—to show it instead of just telling it in a narrative voice. Dramatizing means making scenes—"eye pictures"—like movie scenes, using your five senses. Why is that so difficult?

Because we tend to write our thoughts about something rather than paint a picture of it (they don’t say a picture’s worth a thousand words for nothing).

I talk about the "disconnect" which confounds you when you first try to go from your head to paper, to get your thoughts in a stream of narrative.  Many people come into the seminar beaming with the notion of how well they’ve managed to complete an assignment.  As they read what they’ve written, the story sounds like a thought process rather than a dramatic tale.  Why?  They write thoughts, not pictures.

        Get Back the Feelings

When you log a past "experience," you usually write your notion, your "idea" of the experience.  People emphatically say,  " but that's how I remember it!"  And that's likely true--because what you "remember" is only a facsimile you have stored as a "memory."  That recollection, however,  too frequently appears on the written page shorn of most of the feelings and emotions that dramatized the original "experience."

It’s as if you squeeze out the really juicy, human material and freeze-dry what you store as a memory. No wonder what you recall is the "tell" rather than the "show" material. It’s missing all the descriptive emotions and feelings.

We’re trying to get back closer to the real happening—the feelings and emotions, physical and mental reactions that move and shape you as a personality and human being:  the "blood, sweat and tears" we listen for and respond to in music, art, film and theater but often fail to recognize in our own real lives. Time and again, when I challenge people in the workshop to find me the "show" material in what they have written, they keep looking fruitlessly for it on the page—when it’s still in their heads, hidden under their "notion" of what happened.

Why do they do that? Because they haven’t really bothered to take the all-important initial step: to go back to SIM—Stand in the Moment. The result? The episode is sequenced not as the drama actually unfolded in the original feeling and sensing phase. It’s been processed by an adult mind into a running narrative of thoughts—the facsimiles of feelings and senses, the notion-ized version you’ve created to store in your head.  Remember:  we feel before we process.

Example: A woman described (in the past tense) a morning she received a phone call from her sister-in-law telling her that there’d been an accident at the job-site where her husband (not named) and her son (not named) worked as iron workers putting up high steel for a skyscraper. Right away, she misses two chances to draw readers into her story.  Not using the present tense nor not naming the principals in the story keeps them semi-anonymous and distant.

Ditto for the fateful phone call.   "She told me there had been an accident at the jobsite and I asked her how bad it was?" she wrote, only a hair’s breadth away from the actual words.  To dramamtize, she simply went back and used quote marks, logging the dramatic conversation in all its anxiety and confusion.   When you put dialog in your own words, you distance a reader.  That's why playwrights wright plays that way!

Lesson: the past tense distances a reader; the present tense draws readers in: write it as it happened, in the form it happened in: SIM, present tense, dialog, picture/scene. The more we use "facsimiles" of memory, the farther we get from our precious sources of feeling and observation.

The object of the exercise is to:  "make it come out as it went in"--grasping onto the sensory information that went into you through your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, etc.  Let that be your mantra:  make it come out as it went in (or as close as realistically possible).  Remember, we feel before we process what we feel:  that's where were trying to get back to.

These are a few crucial differences between showing and telling. If you close your eyes, SIM and log the scenes, paint the pictures in the order they unfold, you’ll likely get a much more dramatic body of material from which to construct a more moving and instructive personal story.
 

         Some Words Don’t Help

Often a "telling" mind-set leads to "telling" words—that don’t help dramatize stories.

"It was a very pretty butterfly and it flew in a way that was different from other butterflies we saw." That’s pure telling—and pure frustration for a reader. The words paint no picture. Worse, they refer to a picture but leave it blank. Pretty how? Different how? We need descriptions to fire our imagination. These words don’t help. On the other hand, drama overkill can get you nowhere: "The atmosphere was thick with projected power," I read recently. Really? The atmosphere? Or the writer’s fevered imagination?  You need to know the difference between "show" and "tell".

Instead of being told, readers need to use their imaginations to construct interpretations. Instead of "I was scared" try something like "my heart wouldn’t restart" or "my legs worked like aspic". Instead of "I felt sad" or "it was really funny" try showing that "tears fell" or we "howled". Or dramatize trying to fight down visible sadness in a classroom or ribald laughter in church. Use verbs, not nouns.

Sometimes, you need a metaphor. Metaphor suggests one thing by saying another. One of the greatest examples of showing not telling is the title line of a Dylan Thomas poem:

            "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower…"

If you ponder the compressive beauty of this metaphor, you’ll find that the poet has apostrophized nature with all the action and splendor of time-lapse photography. He "shows" us distinctively how he feels about nature’s power. The flower stem becomes a "green fuse" and the blooming flower becomes an explosion, nature’s fireworks, prelude to seduction and seed: the plant’s reason for being. Metaphors, however, are not for everyone.

         Writer’s Talk Therapy

One form of "telling" does work: like reading aloud, talking can help when you’re trying to get essentials of your personal story better organized. Even professional writers have a hard time cramming all their material into a few ordered paragraphs or pages. In this case, again, talk to yourself or another person. Talk out loud and listen to yourself. Check for logical sequence, clarity, brevity. Talk into a tape recorder and tell your story, then listen… Remember: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" Talk out what happened or what you’re trying to say. Just tell the story first; then plan how you’ll write it down. Use telling to inform writing; let speech choose the words.

If you get stuck, these three questions help:

          Find & Feature the Point

Just as you remember by the additive/cumulative process, most people develop their thinking the same way too--as they go writing along. They write until—aha!--their point finally plops off their pen by maybe the third or fourth paragraph. But do they feature the point up front after they find it?  No, they leave the point sit there like a blob instead of bringing it up top, polishing it off and using it as a lead-in, where it’ll get noticed. This is like digging up treasure and then burying it again: wasted effort. Believe me, readers hate to dig.

Depending on your audience, memoir materials also need to be time-stamped…brought up-to-date when they present details from, say, another era, culture or country. If you talk about a Model T, a "washboard" road, Kilroy or Kate Smith today, you had better explain if you expect the grandchildren to understand--because The Mamas & the Papas are now grandmamas and grandpapas. Johnny Ray? Randy Newman? "Midnight at the Oasis"? "Float like a butterfly?" Helloooooo?!

I once called a presidential speech a real "stem-winder" and my young students looked blank. When a speech is so rousing you glance down to wind your watch because you’re sure it must’ve stopped, that’s a stem-winder. Most watches today, however, are battery-powered, no-stem digitals: the kids couldn’t make the connection.  Another example:  I wrote "mental Brownie" some sections back, then realized even "Instamatic" would sound dated.

By the same token (a throwback to the age of streetcars, BTW), just naming sites and sights from your extensive travels flashes a picture to some but a blank to others. Acropolis? Jeu de Paume ? Reichstag ? Devil’s Needle? Spanakopita? The fantastic bouillabaisse you had that night in Marseilles? You need to orient readers. Again: they can’t know what you won’t tell them. You have to cast a scene in the image you want to express or convey. Or simply explain yourself. Surprising how many novice writers forget to.

       A Circle of Light

A third caveat concerns your cast of characters. Outlining complex family relationships in recollections…grandpa Amos, uncle Fred, cousin Clarice, Fred’s third wife, aunt Effie's half-sister…can turn into a cat’s cradle of words that drags down the point of the story telling. Don’t spring the whole gang on us all at once. Concentrate on principals only. Think of a stage and a spotlight: limit yourself to keeping your characters and action inside that circle of light; no more than two or three at first. Let the action unfold before adding lights or characters.  Baby steps.