Post #33 – Memoir and Fiction, Writing Alchemy – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Learning to Look: A Lesson for Memoir Writers
I never read a newspaper at home, but often read when I travel. Hotels sometimes provide both a local paper and a national one. During my recent stay in Oceanside, California, I found myself regularly reading The Wall Street Journal. Bits and pieces jump out at me, depending on what work I’m doing.
As you know from previous posts, Kendra and I are doing the final writing and editing of our new book Writing Alchemy. One of the chapters focuses on how to create well-etched people in our memoirs. Therefore, it’s not surprising that when I started reading an interview with Mikhail Baryshnikov, I was immediately taken with his statement:
“When I see people on the street, I look at how they walk. It’s like a signature, a fingerprint.” Mikhail Baryshnikov quoted in The Wall Street Journal, February 25-26, 2012
Of course, as one of the most accomplished dancers, it is quite reasonable that he would notice how people carry themselves. But at the same time, I realized how I almost never notice how someone walks. Do you? Probably not. And although Baryshnikov thinks a person’s walk is like a fingerprint, I imagine that we all have a couple of ways that we walk. I might call that our public and our private ways of walking.
Here’s a Memoir Writing Prompt
1. See what kinds of details you can find about the way two people walk. Watch two people you know and note how they carry themselves. Whether they walk fast or slow. How they swing their arms. How they carry their head. Every detail you write down will help you to pay attention. Since this part of the exercise involves people you know, write down how paying attention to this detail helped to find a way to describe them to others. Are their walks similar?
2. Now watch someone you do not know. How does that person walk? How does he or she carry herself? In what ways does this person walk that are similar or dissimilar to the other two people you have watched.
As always, the most you pay attention the better able you are to use words to convey situation, people, and behavior
