Lauren Winner - Notes
Jenell asked about Lauren Winner’s tips on writing a spiritual autobiography. Here’s the few that I remember:
-Before writting Girl Meets God, Lauren outlined her favorite memoirs from several perspectives . She went through each one and outlined the flow of the story, how the characters were developed, what overarching metaphors were used, etc. This helped her get a sense of what goes into a good memoir.
-So what is truth in a memoir? Who’s truth? If I tell a story about my Mother and I’m telling her truth or my truth? What if I take a bunch of memories about my mother and create a composite scene? Is that okay? What if I just plain make something up because I feel like it captures what a moment felt like emotionally? Kosher? Lauren indicated that the lines around these things are fuzzy. She seemed comfortable with the composite, but gave a thumbs down to the making things up. Memoirists are all over the map on this one.
-There was a lot of discussion about confidentiality and your responsibility as a writer to the folks you are writing about. It seems like she asks first before telling a story, and then lets people read what she’s written before she includes it. If someone needs anonymity, and you take so much out of the story that the heart of the story is gone, find another story. She also ran into a situation where the story she was telling about Friend A was a lot like the story of what happened to Friend B, so she had to ask both people if it was okay to include the story b/c it could have been attributed to either one of them.
-Lauren talked about character development a couple of times. I hadn’t really thought about then neccesity of character development in regards to memoirs. It makes sense though, that you can’t just drop a person into a story, even a memoir, or they will be too 2D. Lauren also mentioned that she’s improved her technique for doing this — which was a helpful reminder to be kind to yourself — your book will have room for improvement no matter how hard you try.
Thanks! I was recently at a publishing conference at which one publisher said, “Please, please, leave your memoir unwritten! I never want to review another one!” This was disappointing, because though I’m not writing a memoir, I love reading them. Hopefully that was just her idiosyncratic opinion.
I have an experienced writer friend who is writing a memoir, and she is comfortable ‘making things up’ when she doesn’t know the story - filling in details about extended family or deceased relatives from three generations ago. She’s trying to explore how her nuclear family dynamics came to be, and says it’s more important to be truthful than factual. I actually don’t like this approach. I think because I have an ethnographic research background, I appreciate as much literalness as possible, even if that leaves some gaps.
Most helpful, Rachelle…thanks!
Interesting….Lauren feels like memoirs are still a growing trend — at least among Christian publishers. (We’re always a bit behind the times, aren’t we?) I think memoirs are easier than fiction, for beginning writers.
Lauren told a story about cleaning out her mothers house. She told her sister not to throw away medical records because she might need them for her next memoir. Her sister sighed and said that she would be glad when Lauren moved onto fiction. Lauren told her she should be glad she wasn’t writting fiction, because with fiction everyone _assumes_ it’s autobiographical when in fact you could be making up completely wild family tales! I thought that was a good (and funny) point.
Thanks for your posts.
R
Rachelle, you have been tagged! If you accept, that is… Have a look at http://anothercountry.blogspot.com
Hey Rachelle,
Just read this (rather scathing) review of Lauren Winner’s new book, and now your much nicer review of her in person. Which just goes to show, I think, that you cant tell EVERYTHING about a person from their writing (and thank goodness for that!)
:) Jennifer