F. Lesson #7, P. 4: Tearing Down Blackbird
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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The above chart shows how Blackbird should have been laid out to fulfill its promise and follow its value. At plot point one, it’s cut off, but I wrote that the child picks her memory of her mother over the stepmother. And thus, the journey is set for her.
B.J., Jenny’s brother, gets it and makes himself fit in with the stepmother, but Jenny remains doggedly loyal to her mother’s memory and hides behind her dad for safety (though he’s not around much to protect her). “That’s okay,” she tells herself, the blind loyalist. “I’ll deal because he’s a great guy. He’s tired, overworked…” but then he dies of a heart attack. Now, Jenny is in the open and exposed to the powers and vengeance of the stepmother. All hell breaks loose. The stepmother ditches Jenny in a cult commune to fend for herself.
Structurally, the biggest problem is that I don’t have the inciting incident in the right place. The mother’s death needs to happen by pg. 100, but I don’t get there until pg. 173.
The mid-point, or the father’s death, needed to be on pg. 200, but because I’ve dragged past the inciting incident and first plot point, I don’t get there until pg. 287. On pg. 321, the stepmother ditches Jenny in the commune, but that needed to happen between pgs. 200-250.
Interestingly, despite these problems, the climax occurs right on time on pg. 370 with that birth scene. Had I understood that the seeds of her awakening had been planted in the inciting incident, I could have blown that moment wide open and brought the story home. But again…I missed it!
Plot
Initially, I felt sure that the plot of Blackbird was Voyage and Return with Jenny falling down the rabbit hole when the family moves from Nevada to California, but while writing this post and double checking, I realized it was closer to Rebirth, where the protagonist, immature and with limited awareness, falls under the shadow of a dark power: misguided and blind loyalty (Negation of Negation).
Rebirth Basic Plot Structure
1. The vulnerable young Heroine, immature and with limited awareness, falls under the shadow of a dark power. The power may be an external figure, or it may spring from her own personality and enthrall her.
Blackbird: The dark power is whatever force has her placed in the position of nurse and caregiver to a dying woman…the father and other members of her family….and how Jenny falls under the shadow of this requirement by making it her mission in life to care for her mother as best she can.
2. Things go reasonably well for a while. Maybe the threat has receded? But slowly, the poison gets the upper hand.
Blackbird: The mother lives for a long while and seems to be getting better…but then dies…and the father makes light of it “she’s in heaven now,” and breezes right past grieving and pulls his kids into a shiny new world of his church and this new, healthy stepmother. The message is “Everything is going to be great!”
3. Darkness emerges in full force. The Heroine is plunged into total isolation – imprisoned.
Blackbird: Things aren’t great. The child is sent to a camp where bad things happen, the stepmother is mentally abusive, then the father dies, and the stepmother is entirely in control of their future which looks bleak.
4. Nightmare/Crisis – the Heroine seems doomed to a living death.
Blackbird: The stepmother abandons Jenny in a cult commune in central LA, leaving her to fend for herself in the world without money, resources, and family. She gets sick, hears voices, feels she is losing her mind and is robbed of what few personal items she has.
5. The Heroine miraculously wakes, liberated through the power of love. The rescuer is often a child representing goodness and light (Tiny Tim), or a figure of the opposite sex, representing the “complete Self.”
Blackbird: The birth of the twins (the child representing goodness and light) awakens her to a truth about being human that transcends her most profound misery and loss.
Only one problem, as I wrote above, I missed this last moment—the awakening. Little Jenny, on the bus, has gone back to sleep.
Drat!!!
There you have it: Literary Secret Sauce's explanation and application. Please note how I’ve used the last ingredient (value) to back my way into the second and the first (plot and structure). That’s fine. You don’t need to follow the order as much as you understand the ingredients.
First, figure out who the protagonist is.
Second, study the structure, or as I did above, clarify the set-up in the first few chapters and look for the overarching value.
Third, with the value in hand, check the McKee progressions chart, find the contrary, contradictory, and Negation of Negation line, and look through the whole book.
Fourth, work out the whole structure and hit the major turning points.
Fifth, go through the plots and figure out which fits by cross-checking what’s already on the pages and ticking down the list like you are ticking through the structure chart.
Yes, it’s hard work to pick a story apart this way which is why many people do not do it. And why the story, overall, suffers. We feel like we get close enough, despite that niggling feeling, and drop it. We tell ourselves, I’ll do better on my next book, but how can we improve if we don't know structure, plot, and core value?
Whew. This has been a huge teaching. I’d love to hear from you and see if you understand this process.
Thanks for being with me, and see you next week.
🍎, Jennifer
Okay. I read Blackbird earlier this year right before I took the Bones Of Storytelling class (you know, a little bit of background research on my professor 😉). After finishing it, I felt... confused. I didn’t want to admit this because it would’ve, a) exposed my insecurities about my reading comprehension, and/or 2) make me look or feel like an arrogant/conceited ass. Haha! I just thought, after putting the book down, what just happened and why did she leave me hanging like that? I wanted to know so much more about the grandfather and that whole situation. Anyway, this is all to say that I feel validated now that I don’t have a reading comprehension issue and it wasn’t just me feeling something was a little ‘off’ about the ending. I would’ve never been able to articulate it, though, and I am beyond grateful for this series! Wow! How incredibly helpful it is to read this example and have my hand held through the process of the secret sauce making. Thank you, Jennifer, for sharing this! (I know, ultimate brown-noser over here, but it’s true- this is invaluable information and I am beyond grateful to receive it). 😇🙏
Well, I'm a bit behind ... have taken a short'ish respite, mowed the lawn for the last time, cleaned the flower beds for winter, washed windows and did some deep cleaning. All the while ... thinking about writing but not actually writing. I'm committed to get back to my regular writing routine next week and will begin with a review of the 'Secret Sauce' and a serious reading of 'Story'.
Thanks again for your continued effort to bring what you've learned to share with us.