'1) Grab the reader's attention from the off. You can't hit us with everything at once. You don't even need to start with a major episode from the central narrative. But you have to draw us in - and hint at what lies ahead.
2) Put us there. Make us see hear, smell, taste and touch. In general use dialogue rather than reported speech. Whatever the episode, it's vivid to you (or you wouldn't have chosen to write about it), so make it vivid to us.
3) Dramatise yourself as the narrator. This is your story (or a story to do with your family, or a story about someone you think important), and as our guide you can neither be a blank sheet or too prim or perfect (if you are we'll hate you for it). Don't go missing at intense emotional moments of the narrative. It's not compulsory to be confessional (some of us are shy) but you should let us get to know you a little. You're a character too.
4) Be strict about point of view. If you're writing from the vantage point of a child, create a voice that sounds like a child (at least partly). When dealing with moments of pain, panic or crisis, use an idiom that conveys that. You can't afford to be too calm, impersonal or retrospectively all-knowing or we won't be engaged or convinced.
5) Choose your tense and stick with it. The use of the present tense will create immediacy - but can also inhibit measured reflection. The past tense is the more obvious choice for memoirs - but can seem too sedate and tidy. There may be a case for using both in the course of a book, but through any single episode or sequence you should be consistent.
6) Remember God is in the detail. For your story to speak to others, it has to be specific. The details that mark an episode as unique (and which you may fear are too personal and idiosyncratic) will be the ones that make it universal. The stronger our impression of something happening to a particular person at a particular time in a particular place, the greater our sense of recognition.
7) Use the same storytelling devices that novelists use - not least in terms of plot, character, voice, motif and structure. You're telling a story with a beginning. middle and end (though not necessarily in that order). Just because it's non-fiction doesn't mean you can't be 'literary'.
8) Give signposts. Find ways to help the reader along, especially if you have complex plot and/or large cast list. You're writing non-fiction so it's important that we believe you - and trust in your literary skills. If you don't feel like a reliable narrator, because you're recalling events of decades ago or incidents you weren't present at, you can always signal that to the reader - to do so will make you seem doubly reliable.
9) Be surprising. Work against the material. The reader will bring his or her own experience to it, so you should allow for that and avoid the expected response - to find humour round a death-bed, say, or tenderness amid misery and abuse. Vary the tone. Avoid cosiness and hagiography when describing happier times or loved relations. And if you're dealing with traumatic material, be careful to stop it from becoming relentlessly grim.
10) Pace the story. It can't be all showing and no telling. You may need to spend 30 pages on the events of an hour - then speed through 25 years in two pages. Be clear and bold with chronology. We're in your hands.'
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