The Art of Memoir

(1) Writing is painful—it’s “fun” only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality.

Poet Robert Hass taught me you can rewrite a poem by making every single line better. I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me. Or how I see them now.

Young writers often ask me to help them order information in a story. But there’s a proven method you can try. Imagine sitting down to tell it to a pal at lunch. You’d have no problem figuring out what goes where.

Carnality may determine whether a memoir’s any good, but interiority—that kingdom the camera never captures—makes a book rereadable. By rereadable, translate: great. Your connection to most authors usually rests (Nabokov and a few others aside) in how you may identify with them.

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.

James Wood, How Fiction Works

Getting sophisticated about carnal writing means selecting sensual data—items, odors, sounds—to recount details based on their psychological effects on a reader. A great detail feels particular in a way that argues for its truth. A reader can take it in. The best have extra poetic meaning. In some magic way, the detail from its singular position in a room can help to evoke the rest of the whole scene

Carnality sits at the root of the show-don’t-tell edict that every writing teacher harps on all the time, because it works. By carnal, I mean, Can you apprehend it through the five senses? In writing a scene, you must help the reader employ smell and taste and touch as well as image and noise. The more carnal a writer’s nature, the better she’ll be at this, and there are subcategories according to the senses. A great glutton can evoke the salty bite of pastrami on black rye; the sex addict will excel at smooth flesh; the one with a painterly eye visual beauty, etc.

He’ll somehow smoosh ideas into unforgettable images. Instead of saying, as I might, dully enough, “The whole universe is small compared to a single memory,” Nabokov injects feeling into the idea—and makes it syntactically memorable as hell—by conjuring his own wonder with an image we’ll find wonderful ourselves.

In this way, developing his aesthetic sensibility becomes a life-or-death matter, not a peacock’s vain preening.

“The whole universe is small compared to a single memory,” Nabokov injects feeling into the idea—and makes it syntactically memorable as hell—by conjuring his own wonder with an image we’ll find wonderful ourselves.