The Mountaineer’s Method for Book Mapping

A few of the Dawn Wall’s 31 pitches. From Mountain Project

There is a section in The Dawn Wall, a documentary about two record-breaking climbers, where Tommy Caldwell has completed a portion of the route, but his partner, Kevin Jorgeson, keeps failing repeatedly. This goes on for twelve agonizing days.

The two are attempting a historic free ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, and it seems like an uplifting story until they hit Pitch 15, a portion of the climb where the rock is nearly sheer and the climbers must inch along sideways.

A pitch, in mountaineering, is a section that can be cleared with one rope length. If you want to scale a summit, you have to research the route first, measuring those sections of rope and sinking anchors along the way. Caldwell mapped out 31 pitches from base camp to the top of El Capitan.

Pitch 15 is roughly halfway up and turns out to be beastly difficult. Jorgeson keeps falling at a certain point where his wingspan doesn’t seem quite long enough. Just as he nearly reaches the next hold, his fingers slip off his anchor point and he swings out over the void yet again, screaming in frustration.

But on the twelfth day, despite fingers that have split in five places, Jorgeson finally nails Pitch 15. Before long, the two climbers are celebrating at the summit, having made history.

Writing a book is like climbing the Dawn Wall. Not only must a writer scale a route that no one else has ever completed, but they must first break the climb into sections, or pitches, that act as markers along the path to completion.

No one remembers this part of the story, but it took Caldwell SEVEN YEARS to figure out how to string those 31 pitches together in a way that could work. For much of that time he wasn’t even climbing — he was swinging back and forth across what seemed like an impassable sheet of granite, imagining the route as a whole, trying to find the line that could get him from the bottom to the top.

It’s really no different with a book. To write purposefully and with hope of completion, you need a reliable map. Just like Caldwell, you must research the route, really think it through, before you start to climb. Mapping doesn’t diminish the challenge in the slightest, as Jorgeson discovers at Pitch 15. You still have to find your way from one paragraph to the next, from one toehold to the next finger grip.

E.L. Doctorow claims that you don’t need a map to write a book, you just need to see as far as your headlights to go the distance. OK, but who paved the road you’re driving on? Take away the road, and the car and headlights are useless.

The value of a map is that it charts a viable path forward and defines containers for a writer’s jumbled scenes and memories.

Mapping is easier said than done, and I’m learning that each book requires learning how to do it all over again. I thought, when I launched this new project last month, that I had enough of a plan.

I advise writers to begin with the big turning point of their story, usually at roughly the 3/4 mark of a manuscript, and then to decide how many sections it will take to get there. Will this story need to be told in three, four, or five parts? And then how many chapters will each of those sections need?

I’ve been thinking that my story will follow three major sections: the period before I became a father (which shaped much of my thinking about what a father might be), my twelve years parenting in a single household (building toward my divorce), and the period I now inhabit as a single dad. These feel like natural breaks: Part I, Part II, and Part III.

But following a simple chronology has tradeoffs. For one thing, I cannot see my past entirely as it was. I can do my best to reconstruct and interpret each memory fairly, but the man I am now inescapably shapes how I see what came before (and, sometimes, vice versa). If the underlying purpose of writing a memoir is to explain the past to myself, it is impossible to conjure moments from forty years ago without linking them to more recent experiences. My truth telling would suffer without those synergies.

A memoir-in-essays offers one solution. In that case, there is no need for the entire narrative to function as a single waking dream. Each chapter stands alone, with considerable license in each for moving forward and backward in time as necessary. The idea is to shift the emphasis gradually from childhood to young adulthood, moving through each child’s birth toward the family split, steadily centering more recent memories.

That is one map, but as I’ve been writing my way through it, I’ve wondered if it allows enough elements of surprise. There are more experimental models to follow, and since I am no fatherhood guru, just an imperfect man learning as he goes, feeling confident one moment and anxious the next, maybe a riskier structure would bring out those truths.

For instance, what would the book look like if I mapped it out with the four seasons, mingling memories from all three periods in my fatherhood journey within winter, spring, summer, and fall? Ted Kooser does this beautifully in Local Wonders, his meditation on life in rural Nebraska. What if I thought of fatherhood as a place evolving through natural cycles, rather than as a single arc in time? Or as a love song to my children rather than a steep climb up to my divorce, with all the angst of that transition shadowing the happier aftermath?

Patricia Hampl’s “The Florist’s Daughter” and Mark Slouka’s “Nobody’s Son” manage to cohere many fragments while following a less predictable narrative arc. I’m not sure if Mark would agree with this, but I see his book as following a progression from hurt to forgiveness. It’s not just catharsis that propels the story, it’s more of a mindful release, an attempt to make something beautiful from years of pent-up pain, to give up the ghosts, as Hilary Mantel says. Which is why a beautiful scene in which the teenage Mark catches a glimpse of his mother leaning her head against her lover’s shoulder, at a distance down a country lane in Moravia, comes near the very end of the book even though it happened earlier in the timeline.

Hampl’s gorgeous memoir follows a vigil in her dying mother’s hospital room, where Hampl jots notes in a legal pad while her mother sleeps, layering snippets of her mother’s voice over distant scenes like a palimpsest. Hampl’s attentive companionship to her mother is what ties the whole together, and mortality brings urgency to the tapestry. To capture the design I’ll quote the final paragraphs. Hampl’s mother asks if the thing she’s working on, all the notes on the pad, are about her.

Sort of, I said, not knowing what venom this might draw. Not, until this moment, hearing the avidity in the question. And Dad. And St. Paul. The greenhouse. And you—of course you’re in it.

“Good,” she said, tough as Eddie Hadro in his green visor, the crusty Pioneer Press night editor casting his eye over my copy on my first newspaper job. “Good. It’s about time.”

She dropped my hand to reach for her glass. I like it here, she said. The view.

We settled back in our deck chairs. Just sat there, side by side, taking in the bracing salt air, and faced without dismay the gauzy hinge between sea and sky, the limitless horizon dividing the elements, the disappearing point where we were headed.

What a finish. The whole design is there, the sense of how our final moments with a loved one conjure Eddie Hadro just as much as the horizon out the window. They can’t be broken apart by chronology without doing violence to their simultaneity within Hampl’s love and dutifulness and understated grief.

But there’s something fundamentally different about eulogizing a parent in this way than there is about telling a fatherhood story. Hampl’s mother is set to depart, but my children will soon take my place. I want to tell them the whole truth about myself as their father if they pick up this book someday. But I also know that they’ll be sitting in Hampl’s chair someday, and I’ll have taken her mother’s place. This is not a question of karma or hedging my bets. It’s a question of audience: who I imagine holding my book in their hands and how well it will serve them. What is the whole truth of our life together so far?

Charlie Croker has such a moment near the end of A Man in Full, when he’s about to trade a political favor with the incumbent mayor of Atlanta — exposing a college teammate for a decades-old sexual assault — in exchange for leniency on his billion-dollar debts. But at the crucial moment, the gaggle of journalists and guests disappears and all Charlie can see is his son listening intently to his every word. Charlie wants his son to be proud of him, but he also wants to convey what it means to be a reputable man. So he spins his support for the mayor in a different way.

When I imagine my children in that chair, there are plenty of questions about what to leave out, but the fundamental one at this stage of my process is how to choose a suitable shape for the whole, how to preserve the integrity of our life together with the right map. The three-part chronology I started with is beginning to feel like a lecture, a long monologue that my kids might just as easily tune out, no matter how lyrically it lands. There is a story about how it all felt to me, but is that the essential one? I wonder if that’s what has made me feel like I’m dragging my feet each week.

It’s not what you did, it’s how you made a child feel that they’ll remember. Those feelings are a landscape unto themselves, complete with weather, like a microclimate. The four-part sequence of seasons is beginning to feel like the map I need, perhaps following the arc of my first year as a single father making a home for myself and my kids, with the past woven in — or no linear arc at all, just vignettes like Kooser’s snapshots of the Bohemian Alps in Nebraska, woven together by love and blood, held within the perfect circle of a year.

What are some of your favorite memoirs, and what kind of narrative map do they follow?

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Have you started a book that you couldn’t finish? Do you have an idea for a book, but don’t know how to bring it to life? That’s what I do as a book coach.