Equal Moments

Sometimes, particularly in memoir, the hardest pieces to write are the most dramatic. This is partly due to how the author suffered during these moments. If we’re telling a story, then there has to be a problem; and if it’s a story about our life, then we are likely the one who experienced that problem. The more dramatic the story, the more acute the problem, and, invariably, the greater the suffering. How then do we capture these moments accurately without plunging ourselves back into the very same pain we have no desire to relive?

To begin with, as the author, you can’t agree with your character, the one on the page suffering and rejoicing. That character may wish they weren’t homeless, or that their husband hadn’t left them, but as the author you need these moments in order to tell your story. It’s the story the author loves, all of the story, and so the author must love even those moments their character hates.

This perspective requires a certain authorial distance, which is also what is necessary to accurately capture your story’s most excruciating, most unbelievable moments. How do you make sure the audience understands just how shocked you were, how afraid or unhappy you were? The answer, oddly, is to treat those moments the same as every other in the story, as if you were describing what it’s like to catch a football or eat ice cream on a boardwalk in summer.

This will, firstly, prevent you from over-writing, from piling on fraught metaphors and adjectives that actually keep the reader from feeling the moment for themselves. Sometimes as writers we simply don’t trust our audience to get just how big a deal something is. We must know that if we’re accurate, that if we just tell the truth, the reader will see the pain or the joy or the grief clearly.

Lastly, in treating these big moments like small moments, we are seeing life as it actually is. I know life seems divided into parts of unequal value, that there are long dull empty times, cataclysmic and tragic times, and then the joyous periods of relief and friendship and success and peace. Yet I can’t write something if I don’t treat it equally, bring my full attention to it, be equally interested and equally curious about it. And I have learned that every single thing I have lived conceivably deserves that full, loving attention, for all of it happened, and all of it was real, and all of it contributed equally to the unfolding that led me to where I am at this very moment, which has to matter matter just as much any other time.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com