Memoir Craft Essay: A Simple Writing Exercise for Finding Story

Going through my notebooks I stumbled upon an interesting writing exercise that Prashad and I dreamed up in one of our creative discussions.

This past week I looked at final proofs for INTO BEING, which means we are almost at the stage of sending it off to the printers! I have also just been told that we have proof copies coming in, which is beyond exciting. (I will be posting soon about a competition to win a proof copy of my book, so watch this space!). As Into Being is about writing and what comes into that is my personal relationship with writing, my editor wanted to include images of my scribblings - not just in notebooks, but also on scraps of paper, envelopes, and on napkins… So it was also really nice to see those images laid out on the pages.

I was struck by one of them, which was a writing exercise, which I had taken from one of my notebooks. I don’t remember dreaming up the exercise, but it is made up of both my and Prashad’s writing so it must have been something we conjured in one of our writing conversations. I am going to share the exercise with you below, as it is a really really simple way into thinking about story, whether writing fiction or nonfiction.

To start with, let’s define what I mean when by ‘story’. In all good works, fiction and nonfiction, there is the plot, and there is the story. The plot generally, is made up of the happenings - the action - this leads to this, leads to this, and the story is what drifts up from those happenings, the deeper meaning, the motivation for action, in many cases, and particularly in fiction -and in memoir? It is often the emotional quest that draws the writer back to the page every day. The ‘story’ is the bit that is most personal, most illuminating. The story is not something you can manufacture, because it evolves from a deep part of the self, from knowing your characters inside out, or - in the case of memoir - knowing yourself.

Vivian Gornick, in her slight but fierce book, The Situation and the Story, defines it as this:

‘Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.’