Flying Lesson #7 ~ Pt. 4
Exclusive Writing Lab post on the literary secret sauce applied to a memoir
In this post we tear apart my first memoir and find the secret sauce (or not) with a W chart, value chart, and a rework of a better W chart. Plus five steps for doing this with your own work.
Welcome back:
In this post, I put my own memoir on the chopping block to drill in the literary secret sauce teaching. This is not fun, but it’s good and healthy and humbling. Who get’s their first book right? Plus, who is going to write me a nasty note of disagreement??? It’s my book.
Just saying. ;-)
Let’s go.
Literary Secret Sauce Ingredients:
1. Structure
2. Plot
3. Core value
Instructions (for me): Study each independently with examples, pull the three together, and apply them to your memoir.
Hopefully, you have read this book ^, but if not, the Publisher’s Weekly synopsis which does a nice job (and points out, indirectly, some of the book’s challenges):
Prefaced by a medical report summarizing her mother's various hospitalizations, this heartbreaking memoir reconstructs the sad and turbulent events of Lauck's childhood, which was overshadowed by the illness and early death of her mother. In 1969, five-year-old Lauck stayed with her mother at their home in Carson City, Nev., preparing her mother's breakfast, helping her get dressed on good days, and basking in the warmth of her mother's undivided attention while her older brother was at school and her father at work. When her mother's health continued to decline (among other things, she suffered from a duodenal ulcer and tumors), Lauck's father was advised to seek better care in California. The move was traumatic, for it separated Lauck from the only home she knew and from her caring, extended family. At her mother's urging, Lauck told no one at her school of her mother's illness, fearing the interference of social welfare authorities. After her mother died in 1971, when Lauck was seven, her father quickly remarried, bestowing on his children a classically evil stepmother, and leaving Lauck feeling powerless to complain about her new misery to her often absent father. Lauck's writing is utterly convincing, although the child narrator's innocent voice sometimes leaves the reader wondering how her father could have been so blind to his children's welfare or why their extended family did not step in sooner to help these unhappy children. Lauck, who is now in her 30s, remains true to her child's eye and keeps the reader sympathetic and engaged. Fans of emotionally powerful books--or anyone who has lost a parent--will find this memoir very satisfying.
The first step in any book diagnosis is to figure out the protagonist or that character who has been in the story from beginning to end and undergone the most significant change. Yes, all characters go through change throughout a story (you hope), but those are “subplots," not the core plot. You want to keep your eye on the primary character or the protagonist.
In Blackbird, it is Jenny who, in the beginning, has a home, mother, father, and brother, and at the end, is orphaned and homeless.
Value
Based on the setup from the first few chapters, which I’ve written into the W chart above, it’s not a stretch to find the core value of loyalty. It’s right there in her motivation (and you’ll note the reviewer says the same, though indirectly, by pointing out that Jenny is taking care of her mother diligently, which equals loyalty, agrees to remain silent to protect her mother, which again equals loyalty, and finally doesn’t complain about her misery to her father, which is yet another form of loyalty).
Because I want to be sure about all this, I next look at the chart below and add the following to my search: split allegiance, betrayal, and self-betrayal, which are shades and dimensions of loyalty.
Now, looking at the whole of the book and all the chapters, I check it out for myself. Is this a story about loyalty?
If loyalty is the value, it will drive the story, meaning that Jenny’s value of loyalty will be either be her downfall or her uprising. And that seems to be the case.
Again and again, the child is forced to make choices about where to align her loyalties. At first, it is to care for her sick and dying mother. Then it is the care for her mother’s memories and the objects left behind…jewelry and a photo album. Jenny will hold stubbornly to these objects and the stories she tells herself about the victim nature of her mother, the well-intended but misguided goodness of her father, and the evilness of her stepmother. It’s a black-and-white world for Jenny, one where she cannot understand betrayal yet, or the nature of her abandonment, but she gets very close at one point near the end when witnessing the birth of twins. At this point in the story, Jenny has lost everything: Family, home, safety, and security, and has an insight that everything is connected—everyone is family—all of life is a miracle beyond her personal losses and confusions.
This was the critical moment for me as a writer (had I seen it) where I could have sliced the story open, just a bit, to allow for an adult voice that could have put that moment into context for the reader and worked the value line to its fullest effect and impact, also known as going the distance, but as the reviewer notes above: Lauck…remains true to her child's eye.
I ended Blackbird in total alignment with the loyalty value, self-betrayal, because she’s lying to herself. In the final scene, where Jenny has been put on a Greyhound bus by the stepmother and shipped to an unknown future, it’s confirmed. The driver calls, “All aboard,” and Jenny fantasizes about her dead father—alive and well—seeing her situation, getting on the bus, taking her by the hand and walking her into the sunset. It’s right there. She’s doggedly loyal to this father and his memory despite his betraying her again and again through his own ignorance and selfishness.
So…based on my writing of the book…the value is loyalty. Great.
But the waters get a little muddied because the publisher decided that wasn’t a good enough end, and I was tasked with writing a chapter about getting Jenny off the bus in Reno and being met by her grandfather. “Yay! She’s going to be all right,” the publisher wanted you, the reader, to think.
But hold on a second. Jenny doesn’t know her grandfather; he has done zero to help her out of her misery over the years—including holding his son accountable for a mountain of bad decisions. Even if you didn’t understand the Literary Secret Sauce, you would have felt this ending was slightly off-center because it was. It doesn’t work because nothing else in this book matches that moment. It’s a forced upturn, and it misses the value line completely.
Structure
Now, I can plot my structure and see a few other problems.
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