Focus in on Details

Throughout our memoir you’re going to want to show our readers scenes that have an emotional impact, and even if we only have a few sentences to convey a back story of a foreshadowing event, it doesn’t mean we have to tell it quick and move on. For these short elements within a scene, our goal is to add as much emotional drama as possible to make our readers care.

The way to achieve this is to focus in on a specific detail. Rather than focusing on broad strokes of an event and telling our reader’s about it, we need to zero in on specifics and humanize the event, and then show the experience to our readers.

For example:

• TELL: I watched the horrors of the Twin Towers attack, and tried to imagine how scared and desperate the people trapped in the building, must have felt.
• SHOW: I squinted and crouched closer to the TV screen trying to make sense of the Twin Towers devastation. I gasped—the debris leaping out of the windows, were people.

We’re writing a big important story. It’s a memoir and it’s full of opportunities to tug at our reader’s emotions. But if we tell them rather than show them the action within a scene, it’s not going to help them connect to us or any of our other characters.

When we narrow a scene down to a single moment or event, it creates something very real and tangible for readers to grab hold of and internalize. It allows them to connect to our words, and become vested in the story.

At the end of the day, even though our memoir is about a series of events tied together with the theme, at the core of it is a story about people. It’s about an emotional or intellectual transition from before to after. There’s only a handful of story plots available to us, so what makes our memoirs unique are the tiny details that we include.

How to spot a Tell

Once we’ve written our scenes, we should review it for words like is, are, was were, have, and had. These are identifiers for spotlighting content that is telling and not showing. We’re not going to eliminate all of our telling content, because some are unavoidable, but we should check them all to see if we can replace the occurrences with a stronger showing

What’s Next?

• After I’ve finished the first draft of my memoir, one my key editing tasks will be to review the manuscript and check that I’ve made the most of all the opportunities to zoom in on key moments. I’ll also look for areas where I told the reader what was happening, and rewrite the content to show them instead. This stage is obviously a long way off!

If you’re on the same path, and want to write your memoir and are looking for some inspiration (or can provide some inspiration), please join in the conversation in the comments section below and lets get our memoirs written.

Theme	Characters	Plot