In this essay I discuss ways to create rhythm--specifically via the repetition of consonants and vowels, the use of rhyme, the insertion or deletion of punctuation, and the adherence to a metrical pattern.
Some people consider poetry difficult to comprehend and compose by reason of its condensation of language, its rhythmic nature, its dense imagery, and its formalism. Those are the inherent characteristics of poetry that set it apart from other literary genres.
In "Poetry: Diction, Imagery, Rhythm and Form" I focus on the importance of diction (word choice). Poets choose words to create or extend figures of speech, for their sounds, to create or maintain rhythm, to create or extend images, and for formal reasons.
Poets use figurative language to achieve special meanings or effects. Although they are primarily poetic, figures (tropes and schemes) are integral to the functioning of language and indispensable to all modes of discourse.
In contrast with other genres, poetry depends on sound to convey images and emotions. One of your goals as a poet is to discover what sounds your words will make and what effect those sounds will have on the listener/reader. Your diction will either contribute to or detract from the sonic texture of your poem. Poetry is as much an oral tradition as it is a written tradition, and information in a poetic form that has regular rhyme and rhythm will be easier to remember and will aurally affect your audience.
One difference between poetry and music is melody. The melodies that accompany the words enhance the sounds of the words and are essential in the creation of mood. Poetry, however, solely depends on voice--that is, depends on the utterance of a sequence of speech-sounds. How you utter the speech-sounds will determine the poem's meaning. For example, consider the difference in meaning between the following statements.
Why are you complaining? I married you, didn't I?
Why are you complaining? I married you, didn't I?
Obviously, emphasizing different words can change the entire meaning of a poem. As you create a poem, you need to use your ears.
Poets create music by way of rhyme, rhythm and form. I will discuss form later, but at least consider the structure of the first two stanzas of Langston Hughes' "Young Gal's Blues."
I'm gonna walk to the graveyard
'Hind ma friend Miss Cora Lee.
Gonna walk to the graveyard
'Hind ma dear friend Cora Lee
Cause when I'm dead some
Body'll have to walk behind me.
I'm goin' to the po' house
To see ma old Aunt Clew.
Goin' to the po' house
To see ma old Aunt Clew.
When I'm old an' ugly
I'll want to see somebody, too.*
Although the blues began exclusively as a musical form, poets have been using the structure as a poetic form. Melodies do not accompany Hughes' poem, but the content and form imply blues. One can recite or sing his poem. The first two lines of each stanza state the situation; the third and fourth lines repeat the situation; the last two lines either comment on the first two lines or conclude the first two lines.
How is it possible to create music simply from words? Poets are sensitive to the words they hear, to the sounds words make. The combination of consonants and vowels in certain ways--alliteration, consonance, assonance, repetition--can communicate emotions that are distinct from the words' denotations and/or connotations. However, sound does not necessarily exist separate from meaning. Sometimes sound is equivalent to meaning. Words that suggest their meanings via the sounds they make--chunk and sleazy, for examples--are mimetic, and words that imitate their meanings via the sounds they make--swish and zip, for examples--are onomatopoetic. Too much alliteration, consonance, et cetera either will irritate or amuse your audience, so be aware of the effects your techniques will have on your audience. In other words, try to infuse your techniques naturally into your poem in ways that do not bring undue attention to them.
Another element of sound poets utilize is rhyme, two or more words with the same sound. Although end rhyme (at the end of lines) is the most well-known pattern, anaphora (at the beginning of lines) and internal rhyme (within a line or lines) are important techniques to consider when creating a poem. A poet does not make a word rhyme for rhyme alone. Rather, similar to other poetic devices, rhyme is a technique that a poet uses to create an effect, such as altering the tone of a poem.
Rather than true rhyme--wood and good, for example--you may want to experiment with eye rhyme--cough and though--or slant rhyme--body and bloody. You also may want to experiment with punctuation. End-stops (punctuation at the end of lines) cause the reader to pause and to stress the words at the end of such lines. The technique can create a sing-song rhythm, a rhythm many nursery rhymes have. Remember, you want to guide your audience to meaning not only through content but also through technique, so be certain of the rhetorical effect(s) you want to accomplish as you manipulate sound.
Punctuation marks--and lack of them--influence a poem's cadence, or pace. A general rule is that the more punctuation, the slower your audience will read the poem. Enjambment occurs where there is no punctuation at the end of a line or when the idea in one line continues in the next. Because enjambment encourages a reader to move to the next line without pausing, using it will lessen a regular end-rhyme pattern or a sing-song effect. Caesuras (punctuation within lines) cause a reader to pause or to stop in the middle of lines, slowing the pace of the poem or providing clear breaks in thought.
Rhythm is a result of cadence, of the natural pattern of sounds of words. An analogy is that the rhythm or meter of a poem is similar to the drumbeat of a song. Think also about instruments that establish sound and rhythm at the same time. A rhythm guitarist creates sound with one hand as he/she fingers the chords and strokes the strings with the other hand in a rhythmical pattern, fast or slow, in time with the music. In that way he/she creates sound and rhythm simultaneously, not separately. When you write a poem, you create sound and rhythm simultaneously. I introduced sound first because, if you are learning to play guitar, you need to study the configurations of chords before you experiment with strokes, until you are able to play a song as a whole.
Everyday conversation also has a cadence. Some poets use the cadence of natural patterns of speech as the rhythm of their poetry. Walt Whitman, the originator of free verse in the United States, utilized such patterns in his poems. Poets who write in free verse do not use strict metrical patterns to determine units of measure. One way they measure rhythm is through lines and stanzas. They unify the ideas they present by employing a wide range of figures of speech.
Some forms of poetry, however, have a specific rhythmic pattern. Contemporary verse is accentual-syllabic because the metrical units contain a set number of accents (stresses) as well as a set number of syllables in each line. When you examine a poem for meter, mark the accented and unaccented syllables and words, looking for patterns and breaks in those patterns. That process is scansion. You want to train your ear just as a musician trains his/her ear. After you sensitize yourself to rhythm and meter, you will become more adept, and you will be able to analyze your poems better.
The basic unit of measure is the foot: iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl and spondee. A line of two feet is dimeter; three feet, trimeter; four feet, tetrameter; five feet, pentameter; six feet, hexameter; seven feet, heptameter; and eight feet, octameter. Scansion is an inexact science, and different scholars have different methods of scanning a poem. Your scan of a poem may differ from another reader's scan. Scansion is a tool for measuring rhythm and cadence, not an end to itself. Another step you may want to complete is to read the poem for meaning, perhaps underlining or bracketing the words you naturally stress. Actors do such as they read a script because emphasizing different words can change the entire meaning of a work.
Deviations from the prevalent meter call attention to themselves and alter the pace at which the poem is read, either quickening or slowing the metrical pattern. For example, the more accented syllables, in or out of sequence, a poem has, the slower the reader will proceed. As you explore rhythm in your poetry, you may want to consider music as a resource. Although many songs you hear utilize regular rhythms, many poets use blues and jazz rhythms as patterns for poems. Jazz and poetry have many similarities, but different rules govern each.
(For more information on the aforementioned techniques, you may want to peruse this post.)
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*Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, eds., The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
(New York: Knopf, 1996) 123.
Purpose
The purposes of the exam are multifold. First, it will engage you in the process of writing. Second, it will involve you in the construction of an in-class essay, an important element of many courses. Third, it will allow you to evaluate my method of teaching, helping me improve my pedagogy for future students. Finally, it will help you achieve a sense of closure.
Rationale
A trend among psychologists is to help their clients achieve a sense of closure after they have experienced a traumatic event. That sense of closure is healthy, for it allows the clients to proceed with living. The first year in an academic community is a traumatic period in many young adults' lives, especially when one considers the amount and kind of reading, thinking and communication colleges and universities require their students to accomplish. [In 2008, the American College Health Association asked 23,863 students if they ever had felt overwhelmed (87.4%), mentally exhausted (81.9%), sad (63.7%), lonely (59.7%), anxious (49.1%), hopeless (47%), angry (38.6%), depressed (30.6%), or suicidal (6.4%).]1 You need to reach a similar sense of closure to encourage you to continue with you pursuit of knowledge.
Some time ago I too was a freshman, enrolled in a large public institution. It was an exhaustive experience, an experience seemingly separate from daily life beyond the college's grounds. Although I am now on the other side of the desk, I empathize with you, and I hope my pedagogic methodology reflected such. I designed the course to be practical, in the sense that it will enhance--I hope--your performances in your academic and professional careers and in your private life. Although numerous contemporary practitioners and theorists have influenced my teaching practices, Patricia Bizzell best summarizes my goal for the exam when she states, "Tests should allow students 'to demonstrate their writing ability in work aimed at various purposes' and should encourage the development of students' self-critical abilities."2
This essay is, of course, a test, an examination of me and you. I consider my classrooms as areas of continual inquiry and adjustment. Rather than faulting only you for your possible inability to comprehend something such as the process of writing or Toulmin's scheme for argumentation, I think it is important that you and I engage in a conversation, albeit a silent one, about the efficacy and usefulness of particular exercises, assignments, discussions, et cetera. According to George Hillocks, "the assumptions [teachers] make and the theories [teachers] hold have a powerful effect on what and how we teach."3 Our conversation will lead to reflection and improvement.
Content
As you contemplate my method of teaching, I want you to consider the following objectives I state in "Overview of Course": (1) to help you develop a clear, concise, functional style of writing; (2) to involve you in the process of writing; (3) to engage you in rhetoric, the art of persuasion; (4) to involve you in argumentation; (5) to give you experience in collaboration; (6) to make you an effective critic and editor of your own writing and the writing of others; (7) to familiarize you with the various literary techniques writers employ; (8) to introduce you to different forms of literature; (9) to engage you in creative writing; (10) to help you learn to read literature critically, using different methods; (11) and to help you learn to write about literature, using different critical methods.
You must address the following issues in your essay. (1) Which objectives did you accomplish, and which objectives did you not accomplish? (2) Which elements--exercises, assignments, discussions, et cetera--helped and/or hindered your ability to achieve the aforementioned objectives of the course? (3) Do you have any specific suggestions on how I may improve my pedagogy? (4) Appraise your strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and establish new long-range goals for yourself. (5) What grade do you think you deserve for the quality of work you did?
Particulars
You must give me a freewrite, a rough draft, and a final draft. The rough draft may be in the form of an outline. You may organize you essay in any way you wish. You must use Toulmin's scheme for argumentation. In other words, you must provide reasons for every claim you make, and you must explain the logical connections between the reasons and claims--that is, provide backing. I will not consider infractions of rules--punctuation, grammar, mechanics--in my evaluation of your essay, unless your work is incomprehensible. Rather, my interest will be in the cohesion and correlation of your thoughts.
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1American College Health Association, "Reference Group Executive Summary, Fall 2008," American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment (ACHA-NCHA), 17 Dec. 2009 www.acha-ncha.org
2Patricia Bizzell, "An Overview of Research on the Composing Process," The Teaching of Writing: 85th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Vol. II, Eds. Anthony Petrosky and David Bartholomae (New York: National Society for the Study
of Education, 1986) 124.
3George Hillocks Jr., Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice (New York: Teachers College P, 1995) 6.
What is biographical criticism? Can you differentiate between historical criticism and New Historicism? Read this post to learn more about the three criticisms.
Biographical Criticism
A biographical critic analyzes a literary work with reference to the author's life, drawing clues for the interpretation and appreciation of what he/she wrote. That is different from the procedure during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when critics such as Samuel Johnson wrote biographies of each poet before proceeding to criticize their works. It is important to remember that a work may contain biographical elements, but those elements will lose their specificity in the work as a whole. The view that art is simply a form of self-expression--the transcription of personal feelings and experiences--is demonstrably false. Even when there is a close relationship between a work and the author's life, one must never construe the work as a mere copy of his/her life. That does not mean biographical criticism is not illuminative; it can make a work more meaningful. But we must be aware of its shortcomings. According to Steven Lynn:
For some writers, biographical information is sparse or suspect:
for J. D. Salinger (fiercely reclusive) or Homer (perhaps not even
a single person), we'd like to know a whole lot more. For other
writers, there is a wealth of information, sometimes contradictory
and confusing: to understand Samuel Johnson for instance, you'd
need to study Boswell's magnificent and massive Life of Johnson
(five volumes in the standard edition), as well as at least a dozen
other biographies and memoirs, not to mention the life and works
of those around Johnson (not to mention Boswell's drafts and
notebooks, which have some surprising differences with what he
published), and so on.
Second, once we think we have biographical information, there's
the problem of how to use it to illuminate creative work. We
know Hemingway was wounded in World War I, and
"A Very
Short Story" features a soldier who was wounded, so can we
conclude that the soldier is Hemingway? No, we can't. What if
the soldier in the story is recovering in the same town in which
Hemingway recovered, and is involved with a nurse who sounds
a bit like a nurse Hemingway was involved with? We would still
diminish the literary work, rather than enhance it, if we assume
that Hemingway's story is simply covert autobiography. By
insisting on a distinction between the author and his creations,
we're in a better position to appreciate the literary work and the
artistic choices the author made in crafting it.1
Historical Criticism
Does historical criticism have any shortcomings? Language is not a stable and objective phenomenon, so it is often necessary to study the language of an age to properly understand an early literary work. For example, if homely means "domestic" in England and "ugly" in the United States, then English readers who read the word in an American literary work will misunderstand the character completely. Some may argue, however, that linguistic knowledge is not historical knowledge, for language is not merely the dictionary meaning of words. Words gain meaning through associations, systems of thought, and rhetorical traditions.
Historical critics attempt to make readers aware of the nature of a work written in a different tradition from that to which the readers are accustomed. Critics often use it when they want to analyze and interpret a seventeenth-century work, for example. However, historical criticism has deficiencies. If the critic's purpose is to assess a work as an example of literature, then one may argue that any historical consideration is irrelevant (New Criticism). A work of art is either good or bad, and though historical information may account for its goodness or badness, such information cannot alter the evaluation. That does not mean historical criticism is useless. According to Steven Lynn, "A larger historical perspective sees the work of an author within the context of his time and place. Hemingway and his work can be illuminated by a better understanding of World War I, of its battles, its hospitals and medical practices, and of the values and ideas at work in Hemingway's culture."2
New Historicism
Rather than analyzing a text in isolation from its historical context, new historicists attend primarily to the historical and cultural conditions of its production, its meanings, its effects, its interpretations, and its evaluations. It is not a return to an earlier kind of literary scholarship, for the views and practices of new historicists differ from those of former scholars who had referred to social and intellectual history as a background against which to set a work of literature as an independent entity or had viewed literature as a reflection of the worldview characteristic of a period. Instead, new historicists conceive of a literary text as situated within the institutions, social practices, and discourses that constituted the culture of a particular time and place and with which the literary text interacted as both a product and producer of cultural energies and codes.
What is most distinctive in this mode of historical study is mainly the result of concepts and practices of literary analysis and interpretation that have been assimilated from various recent poststructural theorists: Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Although there is considerable diversity and disagreements among individual exponents of new historicism, the following proposals occur frequently in their writings.
- Literature does not occupy a trans-historical aesthetic realm that is independent of the economic, political and social conditions specific to an era, nor is literature subject to timeless criteria of artistic value. Instead, a literary text is simply one of many kinds of texts, all of which are formed and structured by the particular conditions of a time and place and among which the literary text has neither unique status nor special privilege. A related fallacy of mainstream criticism, according to new historicists, is to view a literary text as an autonomous body of fixed meanings that cohere to form an organic whole in which conflicts are artistically resolved (New Criticism).
- History is not a homogeneous, stable pattern of facts and events which literature reflects or which a critic uses as the background to the literature of an era. Rather, a literary text is embedded in a specific historical context.
- The humanistic concept of an essential human nature common to the author, the characters, and the audience is an ideological illusion. Furthermore, the view that a literary work is the imaginative creation of a free or autonomous author who possesses a unitary, unique and enduring personal identity is also fallacious.
- Similar to the authors who produce literary texts, readers are subject to the conditions and ideological formations of their times. All claims, therefore, for the possibility of a disinterested and objective interpretation and evaluation of a literary text are among the illusions of humanistic idealism.
Treating each text equally, a new historicist reads multiple literary and nonliterary texts from a particular period in an attempt to understand that period more fully. New historicists question the traditional objective view of history; they reject the supposition that historical texts contain facts. Such facts are actually the subjective creations of the authors, the historians themselves. In other words, history is an amalgamation of people's personal experiences and views. For that reason a literary text is only one of many equally important accounts of a particular period.
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1Steven Lynn
, Literature: Reading and Writing with Critical Strategies (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004) 205-206.
2Ibidem, 206.
If the exploration of your ideas, your experiences, yourself through writing interests you, then to some extent you are a writer, whether you have been published or not. To be a writer is to love the things with which you are working: words, sounds, sentences and images, to list a few. It is probably too early to decide who your audience will be--children, Latin Americans, upper class, for examples--but it is necessary that you think about such as you write. The fundamental dichotomy in writing is public/private or universal/personal. Your goal as a writer is to make universal thoughts and feelings personal and personal thoughts and feelings universal. A balance is difficult to achieve. If your writing is too universal, then your thoughts and feelings are grandiose, your expression of them is trite, and your work is boring. If your writing is too personal, then your thoughts and feelings are narrow, your expression of them is incoherent, and your work is boring.
The only way to learn how to write is to write, and the more you write, the more you have to say. Ideally you want to have spaces--physical, temporal, emotional--in which you are able to engage in the process of writing. Such spaces will have an affect on your ability to write, on the kind of writing you do, and on your attitude toward your writing. Thus, the components of one's environment are important. Most writers agree that they work better without the intrusion of other people. Writing is a solitary business, and there is less a set formula or approach than with any other profession.
Some writers have specific techniques to initiate the process of writing and to overcome any blocks to the process. When you are not sure of what to write, reading can be an excellent stimulus. Although you may not write on the subject of the work, reading will help you generate ideas. Brainstorming is a technique by which you can generate ideas. Write a thought at the top of a sheet of paper, and list any word or phrase that comes to your mind. Set a time limit, and list the items as quickly as you can. All items are legitimate for your list because an allegedly bad idea can lead to a good one. Journal writing provides an opportunity to converse with yourself in your own language about what you have been experiencing. You pose questions, develop ideas, reflect on experiences, speculate and explore, and try to pinpoint confusions. Another method for generating ideas is to list the attributes a thing possesses. Number the items of your list. Then, ask what the uses or consequences of each attribute are. After you respond to your questions, you may want to expound the most promising response(s) in a focused freewrite. If you enjoy thinking visually, try mapping your thoughts. Begin by writing your thoughts as briefly as possible; a single word is best. Circle each thought, and draw three, four or five short lines from each circle. At the end of each line, place one of the journalistic questions (who, what, when, where, why and how), making a longer line for every answer to a question. Freewriting is a technique you may want to try when you have no ideas. According to Peter Elbow:
The idea is simply to write for ten minutes (later on, perhaps
fifteen or twenty). Don't stop for anything. Go quickly without
rushing. Never stop to look back, to cross something out, to
wonder what word or thought to use, or to think of a word or a
spelling, just use a squiggle or else write, "I can't think of it." Just
put down something. The easiest thing is just to put down
whatever is in your mind. If you get stuck [sic] it's fine to write
[sic] "I can't think of what to say, [sic] I can't think of what to say
[sic]" as many times as you want; or repeat the last word you
wrote over and over again; or anything else. The only
requirement is that you never stop.*
Focused freewriting provides the benefits of freewriting but with regard to a specific idea. Freely write for ten minutes; reread your work; and mark any words, phrases or sentences that seem important or useful. Then, freely write for ten more minutes--focusing on the words, phrases or sentences that you marked. To generate more specific information, repeat the technique.
The following list may help stimulate your creativity.
- Develop a character who never goes outside.
- Describe a scent that evokes a memory.
- Listen to instrumental music, and write about the images the music evokes.
- Write a dialogue between you and someone you want to date.
- Write about a physical movement.
- Have you ever been someplace where you felt you did not belong?
- Write about leaving a place you did not want to leave.
- You are eighty-eight years old. What occurred during your life?
- Write about the scent of someone you love.
- Tell a secret.
- Write about a color.
- Imitate another writer's style.
- Remember a dream you recently had, and record it as vividly as possible.
- Describe the most beautiful part of the human body.
- Write about a kitchen utensil.
- Create a complete wardrobe for a character.
- Write the opening visual directions for a film.
- Feel four different fabrics, and describe their textures.
- You are on an exploratory mission to another planet. Describe the planet to the mother ship.
- You drive a truck. Using stream-of-consciousness, describe a night of driving.
- Use water as a symbol in five different ways.
- Describe someone's yard.
- Describe a funeral from the point of view of the dead person.
- Using each sense, describe flat.
- Write about a reunion.
- Describe the inside of your car as it is now.
- Find duality in five things.
- Describe the worst way to die.
- List five oxymorons, and write about one of them.
- Describe the perfect meal.
- Write a poem with no fewer than ten a and m sounds.
- Write from the point of view of a character who is blind.
- Describe a first kiss.
- Define nausea.
- Is it better to be single or married?
- Explore the differences between men and women.
- Record everything you see, hear, smell, taste and feel for ten minutes.
- Describe the smiles of five different people.
- Write a poem that contains a paradox.
- Write about your worst haircut.
- Describe someone's medicine cabinet, and explain what it suggests about him or her.
- Create an immoral character.
- Write about flannel and silk.
- Use jewelry to describe a character.
One of the most important tasks a writer has is to capture details. There are two ways to describe something: generally and specifically. It is nearly impossible to write about something without making some general observations. However, you want to include both types of description. Specific information may be sensory details and/or objective details such as size, shape and color. Such details make one's writing more powerful, grounding the work in particular physical and emotional contexts. Specificity can emerge from your memories, experiences and imagination, and with respect to those, writers use sensory details not simply to record an event, place and time, but to make a scene real for the reader. Unfortunately your emotional connection to an experience may hinder your writing, preventing your imagination from allowing a scene to emerge. I suggest that, as you write, you pretend you are someone or something else or change the actual details to fit the subject you are imaginatively exploring.
Ultimately creative writing is a blend of memory, experience and imagination. One of your tasks is to choose details--sensory and objective, real and imaginary--that help you create a new reality. You want to present powerful, personal experiences and emotions that correspond to universal human experiences and emotions. Good writing is authentic--that is, true. When a work is true, it honestly reflects the thoughts and emotions of the writer. That does not mean the events are exactly as you experienced them; rather, the work contains truthful depictions of your experiences.
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*Peter Elbow, Writing without Teachers, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1998) 1.
In this essay I categorize literary nonfiction, define memoir, and discuss the essential components of a memoir: theme, conflict, setting, structure and voice.
We categorize literary works via their form--for example, poetry versus drama. We categorize literary works via their audience--for example, children's literature versus adolescent literature. We categorize literary works via their imaginativeness--for example, fiction versus nonfiction. One category of literature (genre) that appeals to almost every audience and concerns almost every subject is nonfiction. A work of nonfiction is such because the author did not imagine or invent the experiences, events and facts. Nonfiction is about real people, real events, and real things in the past, present and/or future. It is a broad category that includes newspaper and magazine articles, essays, philosophical meditations, how-to books, biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs.
Literary nonfiction expresses and explores aspects of the human condition. Its specific subject is that which actually occurred or that which exists in reality, and its aim is to examine that which occurred or exists, allowing the reader to realize the writer's understanding of that experience. Although literary nonfiction, especially biography and autobiography, is popular, its roots go back thousands of years to the Greek writers. Some of the relatively recent, well-known writers to compose literary nonfiction include Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon
, Jonathan Swift
, Frederick Douglass
, Mark Twain
, Virginia Woolf
, Ernest Hemingway
, and George Orwell
.
An important kind of literary nonfiction is memoir. The word memoir is kin to the word memory. When you write a memoir, you are remembering and telling a story of your life. You must realize that your recollections will not be exact replicas of your experiences. The primary issue to consider when you write a memoir is what to include. It is impossible to write every experience and every detail in your life; thus, you need to examine one detail at a time in order to tell a story as well as to explore the themes relative to that story. As you write your memoir, you will discover your subject--that is, your purpose for writing it. A memoir is not a list of experiences and details; rather, a memoir explores themes--patterns, ideas and issues to which you return and re-examine. The themes are the subject of your memoir as much as the actual details of your story. As you render your life, you will be communicating what you understand about the story. In other words, the experiences and details you choose to include will reveal the purpose of the memoir to your audience.
Many people have similar experiences--addictions, adventures, illnesses, romances--but no two people will recall those experiences the same way, even though two people may have shared an experience. Your goal as a memoirist is not to relate what occurred, but to explore the ideas about your experience(s), using the details of your memories to put flesh on the bones and voices in the mouths of the figures you recall. Often important to us as we recall our lives are the conflicts we have experienced and the relationships that have given our lives meaning. With respect to your memoir, conflict will occur when oppositional forces or feelings merge with an experience--for examples, the sadness you felt when someone, whom you loved, had died suddenly or the frustration you experienced when someone or something had quelled your hopes. As you work through such conflicts, you will discover the patterns, ideas and issues that have been informing your life. That process of realization is crucial to the construction of a memoir.
As you determine which experiences and details to include in your memoir, you may want to think in terms of islands of experience and time. Consider each major event in your life as an island and your life as a journey from island to island. Write about each island separately; then, combine the events that have common themes. To combine the events, you will want to introduce information that is important to the progression of the journey, but not to the comprehension of the experiences. Time will move quickly in those short sections, which may be only a sentence, but your audience will be able to connect logically the moments when you focus on a particular island. Regard each island as a scene, a place where you want the reader to linger and to experience. Such scenes will be the bulk of your memoir.
The structure of your memoir will depend on the arrangement of the scenes. You may want to present the events in continuous time from the beginning to the end (chronologically). You may want to move back and forth in time (flashback). If your memoir is a recollection of childhood experiences, you may want to use flashback to recall an event when you were a child, moving to the present to describe its impact on you as an adult and progressing through the experiences in such a manner until you finish. If you logically connect the temporal shifts, then your audience will be able to follow your progression. But you may want to begin in the middle of a significant event (in media res)--that is, begin with a representative incident that relates to and closely precedes the conflict.
As a writer of literary nonfiction, you will need to create a voice (a persona or style) that best communicates your ideas and feelings. Voice is the personality or mood of the speaker of a work. We associate voice with diction--formal or colloquial, for examples--with the style of sentences--complex or simple--with images--precise or general--and with what the speaker thinks and feels. Different subjects require different voices and forms. In one scene the speaker's voice may be emotional, and in another scene it may be distant. Voice allows a sense of the writer and his/her attitude toward the subject to come through. As your audience reads your memoir, they will be thinking about your subject, and they will be imagining you. The voice you adopt will inform that picture. Try to discover your voice as well as to construct your style deliberately. Experiment with different styles to see how they fit different subjects and forms.
Sometimes readers look for a definitive conclusion to a story. However, a memoirist may examine an experience without arriving at a conclusion. The purpose of a memoir is to re-experience a memory--to examine, validate and celebrate it, although it may be a painful memory. If you do not have the time or energy to write a complete memoir, do not expect to resolve the conflict in an essay. Your goal is to explore an idea, a feeling, or an opinion in such a way that you share your exploration with your audience. The word essay comes from the French word assai, meaning attempt. The essayist writing a memoir may be attempting to explain an idea, to experience something again and to understand it better, or to argue for or against something. My point: which do you want to assai? Whichever it may be, enjoy the process of discovery.
