How to Break Writer's Block as a Memoirist
Block is the bane of many beginning writers. But instead of “writer’s block” I think we really mean “writer’s doubt.”
When my students complained of feeling stuck, I’d often find after a little probing that they had plenty of ideas, they just didn’t think any of them were worthy. If you’ve tried to be like everyone else your whole life, why would anyone else want to hear about it? Even imagining someone else reading your life story seems, to many of us, like getting a little too big for our britches.
One of my friends, whom I’ll call Matt, panicked when he took his first nonfiction seminar. Matt was widely published in fiction, but he could invent everything a story needed to enrapture a reader. His own life seemed much less interesting by comparison. So he wrote his first essay about his difficulty getting started in memoir.
“I’m just John,” he wrote. “What story does an Average Joe like me have that’s worth passing on?”
If that sounds like you, I have a tool to quiet your inner skeptic. Meet the timeline.
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Everyone’s life has memorable moments
Even if you wonder whether anyone else cares about your story, you carry a highlight reel within yourself. If you’re having a hard time getting started with a personal essay, it can be useful to draw a simple line from your birth to the present and begin mapping some of the memorable moments along the way.
These could be common events like birthdays, graduation ceremonies, or funerals. Maybe you had a favorite swimming hole in the summer. Maybe you had jobs like de-tasseling corn or mowing lawns or babysitting. Maybe you moved multiple times. There are stories in all of these memories. Sometimes listing them in a straight line unlocks other images, other scenes. Pretty soon you’ll have trouble fitting all your snapshots and reels onto a single page.
As you populate your timeline, ask yourself whether any of these moments remain mysterious to you. Are there gaps in your memory that you’d like to fill? Are there competing interpretations of any of these moments within your family? Do you sometimes debate with yourself about what actually happened in a particular scene? Some essays are driven by nothing more than the tension between the voice of innocence (how a moment seemed at the time) and the voice of experience (how the older self sees it differently).
One of my new friends just returned home for his 50th high school reunion. He was the captain of the football team his senior year. He’s a retired art professor now. As Montaigne says, “There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.” Essays can explain that difference.
Curiosity is the cure for writer’s block. If you’re trying to explain something to yourself, you won’t have much trouble writing forward into a memory. A reader will share your enthusiasm, especially if you truly don’t know what conclusions you’ll reach when you set out.
This was one reason I often counseled students against writing about familiar topics, like the state championship or the prom or the death of a loved one. It’s not that such moments aren’t powerful, it’s that most young writers think they know how those stories end. A sports story either ends in victory and all the meritocratic platitudes, or it ends in defeat and the consolation prize of character building. Death typically yields well-worn insights like take nothing for granted.
My students knew those endings weren’t interesting because they’d heard them (and sometimes written them) a dozen times before. But it seemed like safe territory. And that combination — the predictability of familiar topics and the knowledge that cliché strips them of meaning — has stopped many a writer before they’ve begun.
I watched a young man’s face fall while I gave this speech one day. He approached me after class, anguished. “I can’t write about the state championship? But that’s been my go-to topic for years!” Exactly. So we talked for a few minutes and did an impromptu timeline, and it turned out that he had recently driven a beer delivery truck in rural Wisconsin. His father was a banker, and he didn’t need the money. But he was tired of his classmates ribbing him for being rich, so he got a CDL and took the job. He spent that summer exploring the world outside his suburb and became close friends with a forklift driver named Ace who wore hoop earrings and coveralls.
Wouldn’t you rather read that story than the one he’d rehearsed for an “A” many times over?
The remaining two sections show how to use the timeline to craft individual scenes and how to move from the timeline to your first draft. Please upgrade your subscription to access the full post.