Last week we posted an interview with memoirist Sue William Silverman. This week’s article is an excerpt from her new book, Fearless Confessions: A Writers Guide to Memoir, and  is reprinted here with the permission of the author and University of Georgia Press.

Writing In Style

I love red shoes. Always have, always will. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t own at least one pair–usually more. An early, preschool photograph, taken in Puerto Rico, shows my feet adorned in red strapped sandals. Currently, I count seven pairs in my closet, including red Simple tennis shoes. Another pair, shiny leather huaraches, I ordered from the Sundance catalogue. For my birthday, Marc bought me red Mary Janes with pink polka dots. In winter, I wear red clogs embossed with flowers, or red suede Earth shoes with patent leather toes. For summer, I recently purchased canvas pull-ons featuring a red and pink camouflage design. Years ago I bought fringed red suede boots at Marshalls. I no longer wear them, but I can’t bear to throw them away. I wear red shoes regardless of clothing color; I don’t care whether I’m color coordinated or not. Doesn’t red go with everything, anyway? Red shoes are simply my style.

Your Story, Your Style
As much as we all dress in a style that evinces us, who we are, we also write in individual styles. Style encompasses word choice, sentence structure, phrasing, rhythm. Some writers use a preponderance of sentence fragments, while others wouldn’t dream of writing a sentence with anything less than impeccable traditional punctuation and grammar. Some authors use elevated language, requiring some readers to look up words in the dictionary. Others use straightforward, everyday words. Maybe you could say some writers have a red style of writing, their words hot and tortured, singeing the page, seducing readers with emotion. Here is a line from a Carol Guess piece titled (appropriately) “Red”: “[In beauty school] when I make up my lips I use a pale, creamy base to destroy their actual shape, so that the face in the classroom mirror has no mouth.” Isn’t that stunning?

Others write with icy white words, deliberately forcing an emotional distance. For example, Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking, uses relatively spare sentences to enhance the unblinking, distant eye with which she observes her subject matter. Here, even as she’s describing the moment just after her husband dies, the language and style are razor sharp:

I remember trying to straighten out in my mind what would happen next. Since there was an ambulance crew in the living room, the next logical step would be going to the hospital. It occurred to me that the crew could decide very suddenly to go to the hospital and I would not be ready. I would not have in hand what I needed to take. I would waste time, get left behind.

Virginia Woolf ‘s sentences, on the other hand, project a bluish stream of consciousness, words meandering down the page, more closely mimicking how our thoughts move. Contrast the following two sentences from A Room of One’s Own with Didion’s clipped sentences.

 And when the age of faith was over and the age of reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were founded; lectureships endowed; only the gold and silver flowed now, not from the coffers of the king, but from the chests of merchants and manufacturers, from the purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more chairs, more lectureships, more fellowships in the university where they had learnt their craft. Hence the libraries and laboratories; the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments which now stands on glass shelves, where centuries ago the grasses waved and the swine rootled.

In five sentences Didion uses 73 words, while Woolf uses 123 words in just two.

Select a style and a vocabulary that enhance the emotion or mood of the scene. You might use red hot words to heighten emotion, icy words to distance, or serene blue words to cool and refresh.

Generally speaking, short sentences or fragments communicate a sense of urgency, so you might use clipped sentences, say, if your persona is walking alone at night: “The sky darkened. No moon. Fog swathed the streetlights. Not a car in sight. No people, either. At least I hoped no one followed me.”

Longer sentences convey a more relaxed or contemplative mood: “Sunrays glazed my back as the afternoon sizzled, the waves at Asbury Park fizzing up and down the shore, sandpipers skittering in their wake.”

Hear how discordant the style would sound if the above were written using short, choppy sentences: “Sunrays glazed my back. The afternoon sizzled. The waves at Asbury Park fizzed. Sandpipers skittered.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these short sentences, but they inject an ominous sense of urgency where none, in the moment itself, exists.

To return to my red-shoe fetish: Not only is it true that red is my favorite color of shoe, I even love all styles of red shoes, a variety. Likewise, in my writing, elements of my style vary depending on the piece at hand. For example, my first memoir has long, flowing sentences that portray the confusion of a young, hurt child, whereas Love Sick sounds tougher, using the shorter, harder, edgier sentences of an addict.

Yet both books sound like me.

I rely more on sensory imagery than abstract concepts. I tend to embed myself (my persona on the page) in an atmospheric world. I rely on milieux to convey emotion more than dialogue or physical characteristics. When I write I hear a rhythm in my head, almost as if each syllable is a drum beat. I simply hear when any given sentence should stop — or whether a sentence needs one extra beat.

So as you write, listen carefully to your own cadence and beat. Finding a style that fits might take some practice. But keep at it, as you will discover your own style, your own colors, your own vocabulary and rhythms. You’ll discover your strengths as a writer as well as (alas) one or two weaknesses. At least that’s what happened to me. My weakness is writing dialogue. I’m just not very good at it, so I do everything possible to avoid it! The people, or characters, in my work speak as little as possible. After you discover your strengths, write with them in mind.

Let’s examine two contemporary memoirists, who, in these particular works, push the boundaries of style. It helps to see a range of possibilities, even if you tend to write in a more straightforward manner.

In that chapter “Red” from her memoir Gaslight: One Writer’s Ghosts, Carol Guess uses many sentences that rely on subject-verb-object word order and traditional syntax. The paragraph length, on the other hand, varies. This relatively straightforward syntax, juxtaposed with uneven paragraph length, causes tension in the reader while, at the same time, reflecting the tension within the narrator:

I am fifteen and I have no name, but I am learning how to get into a car without showing my underwear to the men surrounding me.

A woman is teaching me.

. . . There are ten of us in beauty school, ages thirteen to thirty-nine. “Girls, pretend you are surrounded by handsome men. One of them opens the car door for you. How do you enter?”

In her essay “How to Meditate,” from her collection Seasons of the Body, Brenda Miller uses the unusual, second-person “you” point of view (both implied and stated), instead of the memoir’s traditional first-person point of view. It works well in this essay since Miller is, in effect, explaining, or giving directions to the reader as to how you (the reader) should meditate. At the same time, of course, the “you” is Miller, the narrator, instructing herself. This adds an ironic twist since she’s saying, in effect, “Here I am at the meditation center — probably it’s a good thing, but I don’t really want to be here.”

On arrival [at the meditation center] huddle in the Volkswagen with your friends and eat all the chocolate in the car. Chocolate chips, old Kit Kats, the tag-end of a Hershey Bar — do not discriminate. Feel deprived, then light up your last Sherman, pass it around. Watch your fellow retreatants flow into the meditation hall. Note how elegant they look, even in sweatpants and black Wellingtons. Wonder where they get such nice sweatpants. Look down at your baggy jeans, your dim T-shirt and say, I’m not dressed for this, let’s go home.

Most of us typically rely on a more straightforward approach. Straightforward doesn’t mean boring or lifeless, however. As you write, remember why you’re a writer in the first place! And why you love to read. Don’t we love literature because of the beauty of the language — a finely tuned collection of words? Which exact words–which sentence and paragraph length — best convey the emotion, the mood of that particular scene?

The Muscular Sentence
The length of the sentence isn’t as important as the words in it. Be sure that each word is significant, that it fully advances the meaning. As you revise, delete all extraneous words: make your writing muscular. Let’s look at sentences that go astray and consider ways to revise them. We’ll begin with the first two sentences from our own faux memoir in chapter 3.

Original: “According to my parents, there was a terrible blizzard that day in April when I was born, and every day following, too. We lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (what’s known as the UP), where it snowed, or could snow, about seven months of the year.”

Revised: “A blizzard blanketed the Upper Peninsula that April day I entered the world.”

Why are the other words extraneous? It’s assumed that the author learns about the blizzard from her parents. It’s irrelevant, in this memoir about an unwed mother, that it snows seven months of the year. The words “we lived in” are unnecessary because it’s obvious, from the surrounding words. So why use forty-seven words if you can say the same thing, much better, with thirteen?

Here’s another example of how to tighten, and heighten, the impact of your prose style.

Original: “A moment later, after the pregnancy wand turns blue, I open the door to my house, step outside, close the door behind me, and I race down the street, and I see my best friend, Jane, riding her broken-down bicycle, her thick, brown, wavy hair flying around her head, and she waves at me to stop.”

Revised: “After the pregnancy wand turns blue, I flee my house. Jane, on her rusty bicycle, waves at me to stop, her brown hair floating around her head like a halo.”

Here, it isn’t necessary to mention the actual word “see,” since it’s obvious the narrator is doing the seeing. As much as possible, avoid directional details such as “I hear” or “I smell.” Instead, present the sound or smell directly: “A church bell chimed” is better than “I heard a church bell chiming.” You likewise don’t need to write “I opened the door to my house, stepped outside, closed the door behind me.” Instead, simply be outside. If you need to convey that you’ve changed location, write something like: “The cold air blistered my cheeks.” This is more evocative than “closing the door behind me.” There’s a difference between movement and action. An action propels the plot. Movement for the sake of movement (I sat, I stood, I walked) bogs down the plot. It’s also possible, in the above example, to avoid identifying Jane as a “best friend” because the two wave to each other. The word “halo” also connotes a feeling of friendship.

In order to discover new and fresh words, use a dictionary rather than a thesaurus. A thesaurus, while offering a wide selection, isn’t always exact. Or, if you find a word you like in a thesaurus, look it up in a dictionary to ensure it conveys the exact meaning you want. Another way to build your vocabulary is to keep a list of words you discover while reading.

Avoid what I call the “3 As” in writing: adjectives, adverbs, and abstractions. Rely on nouns and active verbs, instead. As much as possible, state the event, the moment, directly. Syntactically, cut to the chase

Oh, dear: the above sentences themselves could be revised. They could read:

Let’s look at a new sentence loaded with the 3 As as well as a way to revise it.

Original: “All I think about are all the lonely, sad, never-ending nights I’ll spend all by myself, all alone in my own small blue bedroom, living with my parents in their small log cabin, in the middle of nowhere Michigan, watching my pregnant stomach get bigger and bigger.”

Revised: “Night wind sweeps the birch and aspen, leaves rustling the windows. The blue walls of my bedroom close in on me as if pressing against my swollen stomach.”

Hopefully, in the revision, the images of “night,” “walls,” and “blue” convey the feeling of loneliness and sadness, so you don’t have to use the abstract words themselves.

More Than Just And
Use the conjunction and sparingly. You can’t avoid it altogether, of course, but after you’ve written a chapter, scan the work to discover every place you use it. Are these sentences more interesting if you substitute another coordinating conjunction, such as but, so, for, or yet? You might also consider a conjunctive adverb, such as however, nevertheless, then, or therefore. Or perhaps the idea will be more dynamic as a simple sentence, as opposed to a compound sentence. In this case, you might consider splitting one loose, stringy sentence into two.

What’s wrong with and? Used as a conjunction, it only connects information in a sentence as if in a list: “this happened to me and then this next thing happened.” It prevents you from establishing a more interesting relationship between ideas. If one thing happens and then another thing happens, all you’re saying is that one event follows the other. Not usually too exciting. If, however, one event happens, therefore another event happens, a relationship is established. Motivation. Cause and effect. Sentence structure itself helps establish causal relationships and motivation when crafting plot and voice as discussed in chapters 4 and 5. Needless to say, everything–plot, voice, metaphor — originates in sentences.

Let’s practice removing the word and from sentences, in order to replace it with something more precise:

Original: “My period is late, and I stop at the drugstore to buy a home pregnancy-test kit.”

Revised: “My period is late, so I stop at the drugstore to buy a home pregnancy-test kit.”

Original: “I don’t want to be pregnant, and I want to be the girl I was last month and still have big plans for my future.”

Revised: “If only I weren’t pregnant. If only I were still that girl with big plans to move to New York City.”

Play around with your sentences. Try revising them first one way then another. Which way sounds smoothest? Which way best articulates the feeling in the sentence? Which sentence energizes the mood, deepens the atmosphere?

Not To Be
The verb to be is important in the English language, of course. For example, in the above revised sentences about identity (“If only I weren’t pregnant. If only I were still that girl with big plans to move to New York City”), the verb to be establishes the meaning. That said, we want to avoid it as much as possible. Active verbs provide more energy and vigor: “I cried” is more forceful than “I was crying.” See how the revised sentences, below, use a more direct approach by casting verbs in the active voice.

Original: “Finally, I’m on my way to see the baby’s father, Adam, to tell him I’m pregnant. I want him to know I’m scared and I’m angry at him, too. I don’t know if I’m even in my right mind at this moment. I’m beside myself, more likely.”

Revised: “I race to the auto-repair shop where Adam, the baby’s father, works. He glances up from a chassis. I open my mouth to speak, but no sound. Nothing. My breath feels icy, the backs of my knees weak.”

Original: “How can I tell him that my dreams to move to New York City will always be more important to me than having a baby or getting married? But standing before him, I find myself with my hands resting on my stomach, as if I’m protecting it.”

Revised: “Adam knows about my dreams to move to New York City, dreams that don’t include marriage or motherhood. Yet, standing before him, I clutch my stomach, protecting it.”

Even though the revised passages are shorter, they convey more dynamic, active images.

As you write, always be aware of sentence flow, of punctuation and grammar. To help you, I highly recommend The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White. Another book that shows how to achieve simple elegance in sentences is Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, by Virginia Tufte. How do authors you admire craft sentences that draw you into their world, a world in which you might remain even after you read the last lyrical sentence in the book?

Dialogue in Memoir
Students worried about accuracy in memoir (see chapter 9 for more about truth in memoir) frequently ask me, How do writers remember what people said? How can I factually represent an encounter with, say, my mother when I was eight years old? Sometimes we’re writing about events that happened ten or twenty years ago.

Well, we can’t remember dialogue exactly. I can’t even remember the exact words I used ten minutes ago, let alone ten years ago. And no one’s going to walk around recording every potentially important conversation in case we might one day write about it. But not to worry. To write an exact line of dialogue, word for word, isn’t the goal of memoir, anyway.

Don’t you have a sense — if not a factual transcript — as to how various people speak, people important to you such as friends, relatives, your partner, your spouse? Don’t you have a sense as to what your mother said that moment she caught you, scissors in hand, whacking off your hair? Don’t you have a strong sense of the conversation when you told your boyfriend you were pregnant, or when you told your girlfriend you wanted to marry her?

Let’s examine what might have been an “actual” conversation between our unwed pregnant teen and her boyfriend. Then, we’ll revise it to better represent the event artfully. Here, I’ll omit most gestures and actions, focusing mainly on speech.

Original: “Adam, hi, how are you?”

“Okay, how are you?” He wipes his greasy hands on a rag.

“Fine, I guess, you know.”

“You don’t look fine,” he says.

“Well, maybe I’m not so fine.”

“I’m working now.” He points his chin toward the chassis. “What’s up?”

“I guess I have a problem.”

“What kind of problem?” he asks.

“Can we go someplace?” I ask. “I walked all the way over here, and I have something to say, and I think you should listen.”

“Maybe later. Like I said, I’m working.”

“But it can’t wait.”

“What can’t wait?” he asks.

“Everything. Nothing. It can’t wait.”

He sighs and walks toward the door of the garage. “Okay, maybe a second.”

“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”

“So,” he says, “what is it?”

“Well, I have a problem.”

“What is it?”

“I guess I’m kind of pregnant.”

Revised: “What’re you doing here?” Adam asks, wiping his greasy hands
on a rag.

“I guess I have a problem.”

“I’m working.” He nods his chin toward the chassis. “What is it?”

“Everything. Nothing. It can’t wait.”

He sighs and walks toward the door of the garage.

“I guess I’m kind of pregnant,” I say.

In all prose, fiction and nonfiction, dialogue works best when it reflects a hint of speech — a suggestion as to how we speak — as opposed to allowing the characters (real or fictional) to give speeches. As with sentences, keep each line of dialogue as tight as possible. Don’t spend a lot of time allowing characters to say “Hello,” “Good bye,” “How are you?” and generally shooting the breeze. As with sentence length, avoid loose, baggy lines of dialogue. Cut to the chase.

If, in reality, it took our narrator in the above scenario a lot of time to “spit it out,” as it were, then consider lengthening the time frame by gestures or actions. Maybe she’d manifest her nervousness by picking up Adam’s greasy rag. Maybe she gets grease on her hands. Maybe she tries to rub it off. A tangible gesture can sometimes more effectively convey emotion or meaning than several lines of dialogue.

Past or Present Tense?
I’m frequently asked why I decided to write both my memoirs in present tense, rather than past. After all, the events happened in the past. Wouldn’t that make more sense? Perhaps, but writing choices aren’t strictly logical; they’re emotional and intuitive. When I first began to write memoir (and didn’t really know what I was doing), I didn’t consciously choose present tense. The words simply started flowing — and there I was — the past was the present.

Now, thinking back on the process, I have to say that it felt natural to write both books in present tense — as if the experience is ongoing. In many ways, after all, the past does always stay with us, even as we change and grow. It’s not as if I feel stuck or trapped in the past. Yet, while writing, I am in that moment, back then, at that time. The Voice of Innocence conveys scenes as if we’re living them now. It represents the emotion of those moments.

The Voice of Experience likewise feels more immediate in present tense. After all, this voice is the author-me, sitting at my desk now, trying to figure out what the past meant. Our discoveries and insights about events are imparted by the author writing in the present. We’re writing about memory (the act of remembering), the continuous present.

Having said this, though, I don’t think there are any inherent disadvantages to past tense. The feeling of omniscience that the past tense allows is appealing, while the emotional immediacy of the present tense helps draw a reader into the action. What feels most comfortable to you, the writer, in any given piece? How does this essay or memoir need to be told? When you begin to write, how do the words flow? In the past? In the present? If you’re not sure which sounds best, try a couple of pages in one tense, then switch all the verbs to the other. Which feels more dynamic?

These Boots Are Made for Writing
What’s your favorite color shoe? What’s your favorite pair of shoes? Are you ready to slip them on and walk to your desk, ready to write?

Or maybe, like me, you write better barefoot. How best do you think, write? Don your most comfortable sweats and T-shirt. Brew a cup of tea. And off you go.

Or, if you need motivation to start writing a memoir (or to revise it, or to send it out to an agent or editor), chapter 9 discusses, among other things, how to overcome fear of writing, the fear of setting that first word down on paper.

What’s the fear about? Maybe it’s about disclosing family secrets, knowing that our families will finally hear our truths. Maybe the fear is about going public, exposing our emotional souls to the world. Maybe we worry that people close to us might get angry or upset. Or, maybe we’re scared of rejection. You’re not alone with your fears. They can be daunting. But we must write anyway. As we’ll discuss in chapter 9, it’s important to confront fear directly — in order to subdue it.

Why even write memoir? Why divulge our secrets in public? Why reveal the most private things that happen to us? Because if we don’t, we live a poorer, less examined life, one in which our voices will be lost.

Writing Exercise
Now, sadly, it’s almost time to leave our invented narrator — pregnant and alone. I’ve spent so much time with her, I feel as if she’s a friend. I worry about her. What will happen? What will she decide to do? If she were writing her memoir, I wonder how she would define her narrative. What metaphors would she discover? If she’s much older now, how would she reflect back on this time?

Well, I must remind myself this is a make-believe memoir! Which means we can choose any ending for her we like. What do you hope happens to her? How about if I provide several options for an ending, but you decide?

For this chapter’s exercise, here are several poorly written sentences; you try revising them by tightening, rephrasing, seeking a more exact word. As you revise, also select slanted details to enhance metaphor and theme. Let’s see which ending best fits our unwed narrator.

• After I tell Adam about the pregnancy, and I notice his initial reaction, I think that my choice is clear, that there’s no way I can have a baby with a sullen, dull, uninteresting man, and be stuck with him — and it — that’s how I see the baby, for the rest of what will be a wretched life, just like my mother.

• But later that night I hear a knock on my door and, wouldn’t you know it, Adam shows up on my doorstep carrying a bouquet of flowers — not that they’re a dozen red roses — but flowers, nevertheless. And after he leaves, I’m confused again and I don’t know what to do.

• But really, truly, I know he doesn’t love me and I don’t love him. I mean, flowers or no flowers. And at least I can decide not to marry him, and the only thing (only!), I have to decide now is whether or not I should have the baby and raise it as a single mom and I’m scared and don’t know what to do.

• I surf the Web and look at all the photos of New York City, all the places to visit, all the activities and things to see and I even check out some real estate listings, which are exorbitant, of course. And then I think that maybe I won’t have to actually go all the way to New York City, that I can maybe go to Chicago, which of course is also a terrific city with lots to do, and before I can chicken out, I pick up the phone and call Planned Parenthood, which is the first place I can think of that might give me information about how to, well, get rid of it since I can’t see bringing a baby into this world what with me still a kid myself. I’m still a teenager and I know I don’t know how to raise a baby, and I’d hate to wreck a kid’s life. That’s just the way it is.

• Just for the heck of it, I walk through JC Penney and happen to end up in the baby department and I get so scared, at first, seeing all these cute, little, tiny booties in blue, pink, and yellow and then I pick up a pair and slide my finger inside and get, well, a warm, fuzzy feeling and so maybe I can do it? And then, for a moment, I begin to think of it as a girl, a little, tiny, cute baby girl.

After you revise the sentences in each section, decide which paragraph best fits the ending for our unwed mother.

For Your Reading Pleasure
Even though I suggest, in this chapter, that you vary sentence length and structure, and that contemporary writers usually don’t write long sentences like Virginia Woolfe’s, all rules are meant to be broken, if they’re broken well. Here, in “The Man behind the Shower Curtain,” Julie Mullany beautifully crafts a one-sentence-long essay that grips the reader’s attention with the title, holding our attention through to the end. She does this without extraneous words.

The Man behind the Shower Curtain

He’s our devil in decaying armor, the modern day cannibal, the suspect neighbor, the psycho Santa, the prank caller, the bad cop, the slow-passing car, the 4:00 am phone call, the disguised cableman, the shadow at the end of the hall, the man on the corner, the man in the alley, the man behind you, the too-friendly landlord, the noise you can’t trace, the armed intruder, the unarmed intruder, the gut feeling, the unrecognizable knock, the unashamed eye contact, the uncomfortable silence, the lone swinger in the park, the suit-and-tie man watching on the beach, the touchy priest, the slow-working house painter, the all too-regular customer, the pushy date, the dark shaded flasher, the soft-spoken child molester, the eyes at the window, the man lying in the back seat of your car, the Boogie man, the one walking in your attic, the unlocked door, the ransacked apartment, the disconnected phone, the fear in your own home, the unfunny clown, the chummy drunk, the coach you couldn’t trust, the two-faced stepfather, the jogger following your path, the stranger who knows your name.