Over five years in, I’ve begun a major revision on my family memoir, Matilda’s Silence: The Search For My Armenian Family’s Story. In preparation, I created a Revision Roadmap Outline. The outline contains one sentence answers to each of these four questions for each of the fifty-five chapters.
(The first two questions came from my writing mentor, Wendy Call. The third question was inspired by my writer friend, Lauren O’Malley.)
1) What is the most important thing that happens?
2) What does this most-important thing mean to the narrator?
3) How does this chapter advance the story?
4) What is the priority for big-picture revision?
I’m starting this revision in the middle-ish of the manuscript because the Revision Roadmap Outline revealed that that is where the story lost its momentum. The answers to question one were lackluster. Some of the scenes and ideas felt shoehorned in with a lack of connection within and between chapters. A logjam instead of a narrative flow. I printed out the twenty-seven pages in question, spread them across the dining room table, and began to cut and rearrange the chapters.
After spending time sifting through the content, an idea for structuring this section became clear. Clear in that it is something to try, not that it will definitely work. So I’m trying that. It is taking time. There’s a lot of pondering in between moving things on the page. New transitions must be written. I’m trying to resist too much revision until I get a better sense if this new structure will work out. I’m enjoying this work. It’s how I’m spending my days.
During this revision I’m consulting various craft books, considering, yet again, the structure, narrative arc, and narrator/character arcs for this family memoir. I skim through the table of contents and the index to see what draws me in, what feels like needed guidance in this moment:
“Writing into a Structure” – The Writer’s Portable Mentor, Priscilla Long
“Constructing a Structure” – Telling True Stories, ed. by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call
“On Book Structure and the Order of Information” – The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr
“Collages” – Tell It Slant, Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola
“Discovering Themes as You Write: Planning Your Revision” – Writing a Book That Makes a Difference, Philip Gerard
“The Family Story” – Memory into Memoir, Laura Kalpakian
The story part of The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick
“The Story Draft” – Seven Drafts, Allison K Williams
Have any of these craft books been helpful to you? Any others you would recommend?
Thank you for reading! Writing is a lonely endeavor and your presence here brightens my day!
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