More memoir inspiration

When my stack of books-to-be-read shrank to dangerously low levels, I took to the attic stacks to see what I'd overlooked. I found Modern American Memoirs, a collection of 35 excerpts from writers ranging from Malcolm X, Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin, to Harry Crews, Wallace Stegner and Margaret Mead.

While reading it, I've alternated between being inspired and getting depressed.

As regular readers (reader?) know, I've been working on a memoir about a road trip I took in 1988 (see November 13, 2013, "Drafting"). I started writing it in earnest in April 2012. Last year I had a handful of friends and family read it, while I took a nice long break from the process. I got back several useful comments about the manuscript, and in the early fall started in on another draft.

My buddy Jim, who curated the Movable Feasts short story collection that I contributed to, told me that I needed to "punch up" my prose. I took his comment to heart, and have been trying to do that, while simultaneously editing my copy down to tight sentences.

Those may seem to be opposite goals, but they're not. I'm trying to make the story come to life, to make it less "newsy," which is a common problem of mine in writing anything from songs to emails to short stories. I blame my journalism degree. Using more vivid language, however, doesn't mean wasting words and extending sentences. I want everything I write to be bright and useful.

I find it too easy sometimes to edit my manuscript without making the complementary changes in tone. I've looked over the chapters so many times that the whole process becomes rote. There is a big challenge in this process, but I'm equal to it.

Making the challenge even greater is reading some of the fantastic stories in Modern American Memoirs.

Take, for instance, this passage from Stegner's Wolf Willow, which mixes memoir, history and, evidently, fiction:

What we did on the homestead was written in wind. It began as it ended -- empty space, grass and sky. I remember it as it originally was, for my brother and I, aged eight and six, accompanied my father when he went out to make the first "improvements." Except for the four-foot iron post jutting from the prairie just where our wagon track met the trail to Hydro, Montana, and for the three shallow holes with the survey stake at their apex that marked the near corner of our land, there was nothing to distinguish or divide our land from all other, to show which 320 acres of that wind and grass were ours.

I'm trying my best to make my book purely nonfiction. I've done a good job putting the narrative arc together, and filling in details culled from audio tapes, journal notes, newspaper articles I wrote and conversations with my fellow road trippers. And I've got a primary theme: my struggle to break out of my comfort zone and just have a good time during our adventure.

But I worry that the story is too boring at times. My buddy Jim suggested that if I opted not to punch up the story as is, I should fictionalize the tale in order to make it go in all sorts of crazy directions.

I fictionalized some of the stories from the road in my collection, (C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity (BUY IT!!), so I'm not interested in taking that road (pun intended).

So I'm hoping to get some ideas from Modern American Memoirs about how to make my story pop without sacrificing the truth. Stay tuned....

(For more writing that's inspired me, see May 25, 2012, "Inspiration.")