Photoessay #1254 - Murdering your darlings

Last night at my class, Claire Dederer, author of "Poser", a recent best selling memoir came to our class. Very impressive. She talked about the challenge of writing a memoir of an ordinary life. The author must create a character to be the narrator. It's not yourself because you are making it up. But it could be 'like you' all depends on the story you tell. In the book, the narrator was a bit scattered, the author who spoke to us definitely wasn't. She was focused and intentional. About her book. About her work.

An important lesson is to move yoour story along. Which means you have to have a story. To move along. My first piece was a UCSC story, the Priscilla story. Though I did have a personal story there, it just didn't seem to hold up. And since it was too vague and too long ago, I couldn't move it along. Because I just didn't know what the story was.

You've got to have that Arc of the story. The beginning, middle, end, the conflict, the resolution. Every event you write must move the story along. If it doesn't, you have to leave it out. That's known in writer-talk as "Murdering Your Darlings". You've got a scene or an incident or a clever description that's just so good. But if it doesn't move the story, it's gone. You can have lots of interesting events but the events of your life are not interesting per se. You have to have the story. And transformation. If you don't write a memoir of transformation, you will lose your audience.

Long ago at UCSC I took a writing class called Daily Fiction based on a similar class at Yale called Daily Themes. You had to write a page of fiction every day and turn it in. In those days, you had to walk to the professor's office and put it in the box. These days, you would email it. Very soon, the only thing you can think of to write about is your own story. "That's how it happened!" you might cry in frustration in regards to criticism. "Just because it happened that way, doesn't make it good fiction", the professor declared. Wow. I never had thought of it like that.

So here I am nearly 40 years later, writing again. I've decided to write about parent group issues. Always a lot of story there. We have lots of assignments right now, I am so busy with this class. So much work!

One thing that is becoming clear with almost all our author stories. Everybody has a book they've written previously that's in the drawer. Unpublished. Probably unpublishable. But you use what you learned in the first book in the new more successful book. This is not the first time that you've worked this material, you've been working on it for years, I sort of fell that way about the story I've written about my mother's death. I've reworked it several times already.

Our guest also gave us the advice of making your narrator character the most flawed. Don't psychologize your other characters (get out of their head). And always have dialogue on every page.

Very inspiring and impressive but intimidating too. But my choice is to continue to write. Every day. Just do it.

And undoubtedly I will murder my darlings.

Publicity shot of Claire Dederer, author of Poser. Interesting picture, no?