One of the participants on the Micro-Memoir course doesn’t know how to find structure with material that still confuses even her.
She is aware that the confusion might be transmitted to readers.
So I came up with an idea that I think can give the appearance of coherence and structure, and therefore reassure a reader before they venture into the work.
I wrote to her about it, and I’m sharing it here because I think it could be useful to others in the group, now and in future.
I suggested creating a kind of framework or signposting that gives a sense of direction and focus for the overall work.
What I mean is:
- You could create a contents page, listing the different sections inside. They could be as simple as the questions you want the book to answer, as you first wrote them, with no additional explanation.
- You could add some kind of index, or a “references and further reading” page, at the back.
- You could list at the back the different artistic mediums you used, and / or the dates you made the various pictures.
- You could list some of the practices and techniques you have attempted over the years.
- You could include a map showing very broadly the location of the place you are writing about. A dot on a map of the UK would do.
Any or all of these things will give the appearance of a shape and structure – impose a welcome sense that the author is in fact in control of what seems a little chaotic.
Other writers have done something like this. Their frameworks don’t only lend an air of proper structure but can be playful and entertaining in their own right.
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is one long digression. The narrator takes until the third volume to get himself born. But Sterne drops in a black page, a marbled page, and even squiggly diagrams of the path his story has taken.
Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a poem with a foreword, a line-by-line commentary and an index. I rather like the idea that Nabokov’s framework operates almost at odds with the main poem.
Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual is set in a single Paris apartment building at a single moment, just before eight in the evening on 23 June 1975. It moves from room to room, telling dozens of interlocking stories, and it’s easy to lose track. At the back, Perec adds a plan of the building with the residents’ names in their flats, an index, a chronology, and a checklist of some of the stories. They tell you that everything you’ve read belongs to one building and one timeline, and you can use them to find a character again many chapters later. He also opens the book with a short preamble about jigsaw puzzles: the pieces only make sense as a whole. So before you start, you’ve been told to trust that it fits together.
W. G. Sebald’s The Rings Of Saturn wanders further: Thomas Browne’s skull, the herring, Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement, the Empress Dowager of China. What holds it together is a walk along the Suffolk coast, which Sebald set out on in August 1992 and recalled a year later from a hospital bed in Norwich. His photographs work differently. They’re grainy and uncaptioned, and they make the book feel documented, but you’re often not sure exactly what you’re looking at. They add authority more than order.
Your micro-memoir can do something like this.
Within these formal structural elements, I think you can afford to write something unstructured and confusing, and allow the reader to make sense of it.