How to write an essay or memoir : Curation

Part 1

I’m teaching a memoir generator class. It’s one of my favorite classes to teach. It’s completely immersive for the students and for me (thus the slowing of posts here). But that means I’m reading book manuscripts and analyzing and troubleshooting and molding craft lessons from the manuscripts we workshop, in addition to customized generative prompts.

As a writing instructor, my writing coexists with students’ writing. I, too, am writing a book and smaller pieces like Substack posts. To that end, I’ve been working on a particular post for a while and trying to find my way through it, just as the students are mid-memoir and seeking structure and thematic links for the scenes they’ve submitted.

I’ve been struggling with it for a while; for longer than I usually struggle with what are essentially blog posts. So I thought I’d “flip the script” and maybe write it in “real time” here in a blog post, and lay bare my process a bit.

The story: I want to write about finding my father’s gun and discuss my father’s narcissism, which he disguised as existentialism. Maybe bring in the effects of this mythical gun and his narcissism on my family.

I have scenes. I’m trying to figure out how the scenes connect in a narrative arc. How do I tell this story?

There is more than one right way to tell a story: there are myriad ways to go about storytelling and with different frameworks. There are metaphor-centric memoirs (The White Book by Han Kang and Bluets by Maggie Nelson are two examples). They can be theme-centric and thus, braided (The Dead Don’t Need Reminding by Julian Randall and Cracked Concrete: A Memoir of Crackheads, Cousins & Crime by Nicole Shawan Junior). They can adhere to time and be straight chronological. They can be reverse chronological. They can go reverse chronological. They can even be free of chronology (Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar).

Curation of scenes and characters

So this is kind of how I come up with an essay or a post. I write scenes, and then I figure out how they fit together.

The trick to making any of the prior frameworks effective and meaningful? That each element of your story or book has three reasons to exist (credit to Marilynne Robinson and Yiyun Li, who taught me this tenet as a way to “write a book without plot”).

Those reasons (or purposes) should fall under the umbrella of literary elements, such as “character development,” “theme,” “metaphor,” “landscape/setting,” “tone / emotional resonance,” “philosophy,” “language,” “cultural context,” “concept,” “intent/meaning,” “point of view,” etc.

Let’s walk through my scenes as an example.

These are the scenes:

1. My father is dead. My last parent is gone. And I have to take inventory of what must happen to their house and everything within it.

2. My brother is troubled. My brother is deeply troubled because of my father. I empathize. I attempted suicide twice in my life. I decided to change my life or die. Is this unrealistic for me to expect others to do the work? At what point are we responsible for ourselves?

3. The house smells like home, and I don’t like it.

4. My father used to talk to me about philosophy. The first time he tried to teach me about existentialism, he introduced me to “When a tree falls in a forest…” as an example. It did not make sense to me. Over time, I began to understand “When a tree falls in a forest” as a guise for narcissism and the philosophy he relied upon to navigate the aftermath of the Korean War was really a psychic shift toward narcissism and thus his survival.

5. In Teju Cole’s OPEN CITY, the narrator, Julius, says, “Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.” Imagine feeling so normal that you think you can calibrate the world to yourself.

6. Beekeeping on the day my father died. Beekeeping is my therapy. A friend was supposed to come over to visit my apiary on the day my father died. She asked if we should cancel. But I told her of all the things I needed to do that day, I needed to visit the bees.

7. I’ve learned a lot from bees, one of which is that they see the world differently. They see the world via UV light; they can literally see UV light. Thus, blue and green can be seen but not red. The UV patterns on petals lead them to nectar, for example. Which led me to wonder about everything. That I have been calibrating everything to human sight. But there is more than one way to perceive. And one perception is not more accurate than the others. “The tree falls in a forest” took on a different meaning for me. It isn’t even about hearing or seeing. Even if you were there, it might not have fallen. Because the tree doesn’t see itself as falling; falling is a concept foreign to the tree.

8. I found a gun in the house while taking inventory of my parents’ home. It was a mythical gun. And it was now real. It was the thing that we were told would always come out if we didn’t behave. It was the threat that loomed large when my father got drunk and angry. We weren’t sure it existed. But we were scared of it.

9. I also found letters I wrote friends while in high school. They were photocopies of letters I sent in the mail. Somehow, my father intercepted them and photocopied them. In one of the letters, I literally wrote, “I think my father is reading my letters to you.”

These are more scenes than I likely need for an essay. But these are the scenes rattling around in my mind and the draft.

The theme of this essay, in my mind, is about the mythology created by my father. (If you’re writing your own essay, you will either go in with a theme in mind or find one that connects scenes; in this case, I went in thinking the theme would be about secrets but found a different theme).

Keep in mind that the theme is NOT the same as the story. Reminder that the story is about finding my father’s gun and my father’s narcissism, which he disguised as existentialism.

So if I were to curate scenes that are relevant to the theme about my father’s mythology, this is the new list:

1. My father is dead. My last parent is gone. And I have to take inventory of what must happen to their house and everything within it.

2. My father used to talk to me about philosophy. The first time he tried to teach me about existentialism, he introduced me to “When a tree falls in a forest…” as an example. It did not make sense to me. Over time, I began to understand “When a tree falls in a forest” as a guise for narcissism and the philosophy he relied upon to navigate the aftermath of the Korean War was really a psychic shift toward narcissism and thus his survival.

3. In Teju Cole’s Open City, the narrator, Julius, says, “Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.” Imagine feeling so normal that you think you can calibrate the world to yourself.

4. Beekeeping on the day my father died. Beekeeping is my therapy. A friend was supposed to come over to visit my apiary on the day my father died. She asked if we should cancel. But I told her of all the things I needed to do that day, I needed to visit the bees.

5. I’ve learned a lot from bees, one of which is that they see the world differently. They see the world via UV light; they can literally see UV light. Thus, blue and green can be seen but not red. The UV patterns on petals lead them to nectar, for example. Which led me to wonder about everything. That I have been calibrating everything to human sight. But there is more than one way to perceive. And one perception is not more accurate than the others. “The tree falls in a forest” took on a different meaning for me. It isn’t even about hearing or seeing. Even if you were there, it might not have fallen. Because the tree doesn’t see itself as falling; falling is a concept foreign to the tree.

6. I found a gun in the house while taking inventory of my parents’ home. It was a mythical gun. And it was now real. It was the thing that we were told would always come out if we didn’t behave. It was the threat that loomed large when my father got drunk and angry. We weren’t sure it existed. But we were scared of it.

I may pare them down more. And I may change them. Or add last minute. But these are what I’ve decided to work with.

Let’s take a look at three of them (I’m choosing the three biggest impact ones), with their relevance to literary elements in parentheses:

• My father used to talk to me about philosophy. The first time he tried to teach me about existentialism, he introduced me to “When a tree falls in a forest…” as an example. It did not make sense to me. Over time, I began to understand “When a tree falls in a forest” as a guise for narcissism and the philosophy he relied upon to navigate the aftermath of the Korean War was really a psychic shift toward narcissism and thus his survival. (reasons to exist: theme, tone / emotional resonance, setting, philosophy, cultural context, point of view)

• I’ve learned a lot from bees, one of which is that they see the world differently. They see the world via UV light; they can literally see UV light. Thus, blue and green can be seen but not red. The UV patterns on petals lead them to nectar, for example. Which led me to wonder about everything. That I have been calibrating everything to human sight. But there is more than one way to perceive. And one perception is not more accurate than the others. “The tree falls in a forest” took on a different meaning for me. It isn’t even about hearing or seeing. Even if you were there, it might not have fallen. Because the tree doesn’t see itself as falling; falling is a concept foreign to the tree.

• I found a gun in the house while taking inventory of my parents’ home. It was a mythical gun. And it was now real. It was the thing that we were told would always come out if we didn’t behave. It was the threat that loomed large when my father got drunk and angry. We weren’t sure it existed. But we were scared of it.

But how do I put them in order? This is when I try on different hats. Do I want to braid the timeline of looking through my parents’ artifacts and beekeeping? Do I want to tell it chronologically? Do I want to do something more abstract and conceptual, using an emotional memory or object to tie these scenes together?

What I will do here is plug it into two storytelling formats. First, I’ll try the 5-Act Structure of the West in part 2 before investigating Eastern storytelling structure in part 3.

(A segue)

This is technically a Substack post, but for this exercise, let’s say I am trying to write a personal essay.

To get on the same page, here are the working definitions of each format:

A Substack post doesn’t have to make meaning for the reader. Can be whatever you want it to be! Yay!

A personal essay has to at least attempt to find meaning for the reader about a single event, theme, or idea. It can go further in defining meaning, but it should at least ask, “What is happening?”

A memoir articulates hindsight wisdom and meaning about specific experiences or themes in the author’s life. They explore these items and provide reflections and lessons learned.

An autobiography spans an entire life from birth to present with the purpose of providing a factual accounting. You’re probably a celebrity or have an audience who wants to know about your life. That audience can even be grandchildren for whom you’re writing.

This is part 1 of 3 in a series. Next up: Trying on different hats, starting with the Western 5-Act Structure.