In the conversation we posted last week between Kaylie Jones and Beverly Donofrio, you read about what these two authors think about the similarities and differences between memoir and fiction.

Kaylie Jones states: “…memoir becomes an exploration of the author’s life choices” and “In memoir, the writer is allowed to draw conclusions for us.” In describing fiction, she calls upon Chekhov, who said, “good fiction calls for ‘total objectivity,’ which is meant to allow the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.”

Beverly Donofrio replies: “…as a memoir writer, I get to say exactly what I think” and “I imagine writing fiction is also a way to process one’s life, and to express one’s obsessions.”

With their thoughts in mind, read the following short excerpts. After each excerpt, I have included a writing idea that I think will help you get started or breathe life into the work you want to do as personal essayists, memoirists or fiction writers.

From Beverly Donofrio’s Riding in Cars with Boys, Penguin, 1992

Good grades, done homework, any effort abruptly ended in the tenth grade, when my mother laid the bad news on me that I would not be going to college. It was a Thursday night. I was doing the dishes, my father was sitting at the table doing a paint-by-num­bers, and we were humming “Theme from Exo­dus” together. My mother was wiping the stove before she left for work at Bradlees, and for some reason she was stinked — maybe she had her pe­riod, or maybe it was because my father and I al­ways hummed while I did the dishes and she was jealous. Neither of us acknowledged that we were basically harmonizing. It was more like it was just an accident that we were humming the same song. Our favorites were “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Sentimental Journey,” “‘Tonight,”‘ and “Exodus.” After Exo­dus, I said, “Hey, Ma. I was thinking I want to go to U Conn instead of Southern or Central. It’s harder to get into, but it’s a better school.”

 “And who’s going to pay for it?”

It’s odd I never thought about the money, especially since my parents were borderline paupers and being poor was my mother’s favorite topic. I just figured, naively, that anybody who was smart enough could go to college.

“I don’t know: Aren’t there loans or something?”

“Your father and I have enough bills. You better stop dreaming. Take typing. Get a good job when you graduate.”

“I’m not going to be a secretary.”

She lifted a burner and swiped under it. “We’ll see,” she said.

“I’m moving to New York.”

“Keep dreaming.” She dropped the burner back down.

So I gritted my teeth and figured I’d have to skip college and go straight to Broadway, but it pissed me off.

That weekend my friends and I went around throwing eggs at passing cars. We drove through Choate, the ritzy prep school in the middle of town, and I had an inspira­tion.
“Stop the car,” I said. “Excuse me,” T called to a little sports-jacketed Choatie crossing Christian Street. “Do you know where Christian Street is?”‘

“I’m not sure,” he said, “but I think it’s that street over there,” He pointed to the next road over,

“You’re standing on it, asshole!” I yelled, flinging an egg at the nametag on his jacket. I got a glimpse of his face as he watched the yolk drool down his chest; and I’11 remember the look of disbelief as it changed to sadness until the day I die. We peeled out, my friends hooting and hollering and slapping me on the back.

Exercise
Think of moments when you or a character you are writing about introduced a want or need to parents, children, a boss, other authority figure, a relative or a friend and the response received was surprising–negatively or positively. Where were you or the character when the idea came up? What were you or the character and others there doing, wearing, playing? Was everyone indoors or outdoors? What was the light like? The ambient sounds? What objects or pets or others were there, too? What actions and perceptions can you include that show the way you or the character’s mood has suddenly changed because of the surprise reaction (Beverly Donofrio’s speaker goes from humming in harmony to gritting her teeth)?

Write the scene in which you or the character brought up the idea and then describe what followed: it may be conversation or physical gestures or people changing the subject or leaving the room. After you have fully evoked the moment when the idea came up along with the surprising response, skip to another scene at a later time that shows how you reacted to the surprise, whether it was a good or a bad surprise. Did you or the character tear something up? Hide something? Make a phone call to someone, go out and get drunk? Run away? Describe the behavior and the setting and then find something haunting or long remembered about it that is telling about character and yearning to change.

For example, I might choose the scene in which my boyfriend and I arrive home from college and are having dinner with his parents in their beautiful suburban home and he reveals that he wants to become a doctor. Disappointed by his decision not to join the family business as an engineer and to transfer out of his Ivy League school to attend my Midwestern state university and take pre-med, my boyfriend’s parents quietly and severely told him and me that he didn’t have what it took to be a doctor, got up from the dinner table, closed all the lights down stairs where my fiancé and I still sat, and climbed the stairs to bed.

After writing the scene with him telling his folks his news, I could write the scene in which we decide to get married and I know I will help him prove his parents wrong.

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From Kaylie Jones’ A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, Akashic Books, September 2003:

He had spent his first three years with a French couple who had only fostered him, not adopted him, and when the foster mother had killed herself by taking sleeping pills, the father, unable to cope, had put the little boy in a children’s home. The couple had been acquaintances of my parents. One day the man called my father and said, ” Bill, remember that little boy your wife thought was so adorable? As I remember, she said there was nothing in the world she wanted more than a boy like that–well, I can’t keep him, Bill. He’s in a children’s home right now and I can’t stand it.”

But it was illegal for Americans to adopt French children, and my parents had bribed and pleaded and paid thousands and thousands of dollars to some official to have my brother’s birth papers disappear. My mother had even had a private audience with Madame de Gaulle (my father’s position as a celebrated American writer living in Paris opened up all sorts of influential doors) and she, the wife of the President of France, had pushed the whole thing through by writing a letter of recommendation. Even with Madame de Gaulle’s recommendation, the deal was tenuous–I did not know this either until many years later: Once a month for the next several years a person from the social service agency came to check on us. One bad word from that person could have sent the little brother back to the children’s home. My parents lived in terror from the moment the little brother walked in the door.

“No two people ever fought harder to have a kid in the world,” my father had told me over and over again, during the year it took them to get through the bureaucracy.

“Didn’t you fight hard to have me?”

“Yes, we sure did. But it was a different kind of fight. Your mommy was sick. She can’t have any more babies and you always say you’re so lonely. Now you’ll have someone to play with all the time.

Exercise
In this excerpt, although we are reading the narrator’s thoughts and recounting, we can imagine that the narrator’s parents have more story to tell. Imagine a difficult undertaking that you or one of your characters have been involved in. Describe the situation and the difficulties from your point of view or the character’s. Now describe the situation from another person’s point of view–a child’s, a parent’, an official’s, or a neighbor’s, for instance, as long as that person knows a lot about the situation.

Begin the story again from the second person’s point of view. Now think of another person involved and tell the story again. When you have three stories, decide which one is the most compelling.

Whether you are writing from a true-life story or a fictional one, when you know which person’s story is the most interesting and compelling, you will have some real meat for your writing. If you are writing fiction, perhaps your character needs to have a conversation with the person who knows more or perhaps you as author have to find a way to have your character suffer for lack of knowledge or seek the knowledge that another has.

If you are writing memoir or personal essay and discover that someone else’s story is more compelling if they tell it, you may want to put dialog in your nonfiction in which that person speaks. For example, I might write a personal essay based on the events of this past year when my mother’s health needs increased and forced us to re-examine her living situation. A little house came up for rent across the street from my husband and me and our home offices. The idea of moving my mother to this rental appealed to us because my mother now needed daily check-ins and we noticed that she seemed to do better the more contact she had with family. Our house and the little rental are two and a half hours from the area where my mother had been living for twenty years. My sister, who lives a twenty-minute freeway ride away from that community, wanted my mother to continue living in her current situation, though my sister was not available to visit her daily. My mother moved and my sister was angry. I think if I give voice to dialog from my sister, I may see that she didn’t want to admit that she didn’t want to change her ways of relating to my mother and her aging.

I believe if I write from what I can relay of my sister’s thinking, I will have material for evoking not only my ideas for helping an aging parent but for exploring the ways we are all sandwiched between our expectations of our parents, our fear of what helping them demands of us and their need for safety and support.

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Whether you write to better understand your own choices and circumstances and relay that understanding to others or you write to evoke stories that will allow readers to draw their own conclusions, writing well calls for scenes in which conflict throws parties into new life situations, new worries and new behavior. Whether the scenes are drawn so we imagine we are there or drawn so we hear information that a narrator recounts because it is formative, catching those moments as Beverly Donofrio and Kaylie Jones have helps guarantee our writing will be strong, keeping us and our readers engaged.