5 Tips to Write the Stories that Scare You
A few years ago, I wanted to write a short memoir essay about a short stint of living and working in a London pub during the late 1980s.
That job included room and board. On my first night there, I woke to find an Alsatian (German Shepherd) dog lying outside my bedroom door. It growled. It wouldn’t budge. I really needed to go to the bathroom.
OK. So I wrote that scene. But after that? The writing turned messy, and the pre-London backstory kept wanting to nudge in.
I couldn’t see it at the time, but now that the piece, “London A-Z: A Memoir” is finished and published, I think I understand why this piece was as stubborn and scary as that dog outside my bedroom door.
First, it’s hard to write and cringe over your young, impetuous and dangerously naïve self.
Second, nobody wants to read a memoir full of, “I did this. And then I did that.” So how to balance lively, engaging scenes with a narrative voice that invites the reader in?
Finally–and you may have already guessed this—it was hard to write about a really sad and lonely time in my life.
As well as writing, I work in healthcare and I lead expressive and creative writing workshops. In my classes or patient interviews, I have been really bossy about not writing or telling our way into a place of pain.
Now, why couldn’t I take my own bossy advice here? While this little memoir wouldn’t move forward, it still yowled and growled and demanded to be written.
Five Tips for Writing About Scary Memories
Write yourself a letter or a journal entry: In her book, “Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within,” Natalie Goldberg urges us to “Write what disturbs you, what your fear, what you have not been able to speak about.” But when you write a letter to yourself about your writing fears, you may discover why or what about this piece “disturbs you.” Then, you have honest information to guide you as you move forward (or not).
Write in the second (or third) person: I’ve used the “you” voice when I’m writing about feeling and being “other.” Or when there’s a dichotomy between the writer now and the protagonist (me!) back then. Go on. Try one or two scenes in the “you” voice.
Use a non-literary “shell” or container: After tinkering with this bloody essay for way too long, I woke up in the middle of the night to this question: “If I used the London A-Z Guide, a pocket-sized street atlas of the city of London, could I contain and structure the story and get it told? Next morning, I started with the letter “A,” and on it went from there. Later, after the piece got published, I discovered that I’d written a hermit crab essay, which The Writing Addict defines as “ … a style where a writer will adopt an existing form (recipes, field guides, resumes) to contain their writing.
Give yourself editorial and emotional distance: Here, I had the benefit of time or years passed. But how about emotional distance? Creating a shell around the work and writing it in the second person really helped.
Exploit the contradictions: A well-known travel guide (London A -Z) and a tale about youthful fears. As it turned out, these two were a match. The alpha ordinariness of one (travel guide) served as a foil for the emotional depth and heartache of the other (youthful fears). This form and structure also flirted with the dichotomy between what many or most tourists assume about, or have experienced in, London and my personal, 1980s experiences. It also let me write about social class—a topic that, both in writing and real life, we often shy away from, but that I find myself writing about.
In this A-Z essay, I wrote: “Big cities look different when a hotel room key sits snug in your pocket.”
In many ways, the same is true of our big stories about tough topics. Scary as they first seem, they can look and feel differently when we’ve taken the time to step back, self-reflect and then find the key–or keys–to unlock your story and its power.