Writing Alchemy: See Where This Exercise Takes You

Post #66 – Memoir and Fiction, Writing Alchemy – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler

Writing a Collection

A couple of weeks ago, Kendra and I met at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. That sentence probably seems like a stretch as I live in Oregon and Kendra in Maine. Besides, it’s winter in the East and I don’t like the cold. Well, I was on the East Coast visiting family. Kendra said it seemed that if I could get that far, the least she could do was drive down to meet up. So I went to Salem from Boston and Kendra from Downeast Maine. It wasn’t exactly a fair deal as my drive was only about 45 minutes and her’s was five plus hours.

Of course, we had a glorious time. After a delicious lunch (rutabaga and wilted spinach with cranberry-rhubarb compote topped with fresh chives for me and a warm chicken sandwich on ciabatta with caramelized onions and dijon mustard for Kendra), we took on the exhibits, knowing we couldn’t finish seeing all of them in the limited time we had before we each got back on the freeway.

One special exhibit, “Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones,” made me think about memoirs. More precisely, memoir writing. Almost 300 hats had been brought together by Stephen Jones, a British milliner-to-the-stars. He organized them into four sections — Inspiration, Creation, The Salon and The Clients. So like a memoirist, he had a focus — hats– and a structure — four organizing categories. Let me give you an exercise to try and see if it helps you with your memoir writing.

Try This Memoir Exercise

1. Bring together a number of family photos — perhaps 20 or 30. Let them be from different times in your life rather than a single family trip. Obviously, include ones with family members rather than only scenery.

2. Lay the photos on a table and study them. Find something in common in a large number of them. Let’s make this simple–perhaps shoes–perhaps shirts–perhaps sunglasses. Remove the photos that don’t fit within your focus. Let’s assume you’ll have 15 photos left on the table. Maybe you’ll be lucky and see something quite unusual that is common across them. That would be great. The main thing is to find something you can work with.

3. Now consider your structure. How will you organize these photos? Will you organize them by color? (Three of the shirts are red, five are green, and seven are black.) By age of the person? By decade? By pattern? (Five are plaid, two are stripped, eight are solid.) Choose an organizing concept that lets you have three or four categories. Then group your photos into the three or four categories of your structure. If you have 15 photos in your final set (all showing at least one person wearing sunglasses, for example) and a concept with three categories (1960s, 1980s, 2000s), then you’ll have about five photos in each set to begin working with. [It is unlikely that you will have equal numbers. You might even have just 1 photo in one of the categories. That is just fine.]

4. Now assume you are putting together an exhibit about the sunglasses worn in your family over three decades. What do they reveal? I’ll assume that you are wearing sunglasses in most of the photos. What did each pair represent to you? Are they colorful or plain, fun or sensible, expensive or drug-store specials? What caused you to buy each pair?

5. Now take the photos in the first category. Write:
—What do they look like? (Consider the different shapes or the different types of frames.) Focus just on this aspect.
—Do you have any feelings about any of them? (Purchased while in Hawaii because you forgot yours on the dressing table. Maybe bought in an outlet store while shopping with your sister — just because she dared you to. Or bought when you went home for your mother’s funeral and the day was much brighter than you had expected.) Focus just on any emotional feelings you have.
—Pretend you have to tell someone close to you why you purchased the sunglasses. Write the dialogue. Just the dialogue between you and another person.
—Imagine yourself in the store where you bought the sunglasses. What are the sounds around you? Is there background music? Are there other customers that distract you? Does the sales clerk try to talk with you?
—Where were you when you bought the sunglasses? And when did you buy them?

6. Now write a brief description of each photo that highlights the strongest points about each photo focused, obviously, on the sunglasses. For example, when you bought the sunglasses on a dare from your sister, you couldn’t imagine that you two would get into such a terrible fight just one year later than you both would refuse to talk for almost a decade.

7. If you have found something in the photos that really inspires you, something that tickles your creative bone, then finish the collection, refine your writing and share it with family members. You can scan the photos and add your description of each in a word processing document. Not every toss of the photographs may result in something that strongly interests you. You can either look deeper into your set of family photographs for one that will give you a richer set for memoir writing, or you can simply use this idea as an exercise that gets you looking at stories with greater depth.

Tagged as: memoir focus, memoir structure, memoir writing exercise