Slayed and Saved
On the transformative power of memoir writing
An Open Mic Prompt 🎙️ and Behind the Scenes post on a ten year devotion to vision, an intimate look at process, and how one writer told two life stories in one memoir
Welcome:
I have a couple questions for you: When did you find yourself persevering through a challenge? What did it take to get the job done?
While thinking about your own experiences, let me tell you about a Portland writer named Becky Ellis who I met back in 2014. At the time, I was new to teaching at The Attic Institute, having just graduated with my MFA. Becky, a powerhouse of focus, was one of those writers you don’t forget; Strong minded. Hard working. Utterly committed to making her dream a reality. She religiously attended classes, hired me for one-on-one work, and followed me when I created my own program called The Blackbird Studio in 2015.
Becky’s plan was to write a book about her childhood and her father’s service in WWII. The biggest issue for me was continuity. How could she merge these two disparate timelines in a seamless way?
For a long time, we worked at the level of scene and while I couldn’t see a way to bring her and her father’s story together, Becky refused to surrender and eventually found a way. Her book cover is proof.
In this guest post, I’m honored to give Becky space to share a portion of her process. We’ll talk more, in a taped interview, and then she will appear—live— in our next Flight School meet up on March 6 for a discussion on process, scene, publishing today and more. Save the date. That’s March 6, 11:00-12:00 p.m PST
Look for a prompt at the end, inviting you to share your own story of perseverance, and as you keep thinking about your our journey, read Becky’s in her own words.
Enjoy. 🐦⬛
Slayed and Saved
by Becky Ellis
In 2014, I started writing about my traumatic childhood shaped by my unpredictable and volatile father, completely unaware that my ten-year journey would slay me and save me.
I considered myself a confident, smart woman who understood life and most of its expectations and complications. I also felt confident as a writer. After all, how hard could writing a memoir be? A few lessons, and I would whip out my book in a couple of years. Simple.
The first big lesson was that I was telling my story, but not showing it. This meant I had to learn and practice writing scenes—the most basic element of effective storytelling for reader engagement and experience.
Writing in this new way forced my story to get bigger and far more complex than I imagined possible. Telling was fast. Showing was slow. Showing also required me to dig into and expand the details of my past. One childhood memory led to another and another, and for a long time, pages upon pages added up on my computer. I had a basic idea about where I wanted to end, but with so much content, I had no idea how to shape what I was creating into a coherent whole.
That same year I began my own writing journey, 2014, a long locked vault opened in my aging father, a decorated veteran. Almost as if he knew, intuitively, about my own quest for understanding via writing, he started to share stories about his time in World War II. While listening and asking him questions I had not been able to ask as a girl, I began writing his story next to my own.
Five hundred pages grew to fifteen hundred, and I became that much more confused.
A crisis point came when I realized that none of the words on the page felt like mine. Read aloud, my sentences sounded stiff and clunky, intellectualized rather than embodied.
“You’re still looking for your voice,” Jennifer would say when I’d bring my writing to her Blackbird workshop in Portland. “Don’t worry. It’s coming.”
Another year passed in confusion.
One morning, I wrote a scene about a custody battle between my parents and the day I had to go to court to speak to the judge. Rather than get bogged down in the details of that situation, I decided to write about a pair of patent leather Mary Janes my mother bought for me to wear to court. I started with a blank page and wrote about the excitement of getting those shiny new shoes. The click-click sound they made on the sidewalk, the way the raindrops gathered and slid across the black patent leather.
“There she is!” Jennifer said in our workshop when I read the scene aloud. “This is your voice.”
While I was, albeit slowly, finally learning to craft scenes and stabilizing my voice, I was also struggling through the other half of the memoir writing challenge, which was emotional and psychological.
After excavating and writing yet another painful childhood scene, or rewriting some aspect of my father’s war, I’d curl in a ball on the floor and nap by the fire. Or, cry in the shower. Or, take solitary walks in the woods, searching for the deeper meaning of so much suffering. His and mine.
Also, I was forced to see my father in a new way—not just as the tyrant of my memory but as a young sharpshooter who had been pulled into a complex international conflict that damaged him deeply and changed him forever. While it was excruciating to learn about his war and what he went through, it put my own difficult childhood as his daughter into a larger perspective.
It took eight long years of study and hard work for the complex story of my father’s war and my childhood to finally come together in the form of a map I created with index cards that I then hung on a dramatic structure chart.
I wasn’t taking a nap now, or a shower, or a walk. I was standing back and marveling at how the story and the shape finally fit together; I had a hook, an inciting incident, all the plot points and pinch points, and the climatic action. Best of all, those sprawling fifteen hundred pages were distilled to an efficient and tight 236 pages.
There’s a term I learned from teacher, editor and now literary agent, Barbara Jones called being a “just god” on the page. Jones explained that this term means that everyone has reasons for doing what they do, and as the writer, it was my job to show those reasons, not to judge them. Showing, not judging became another big lesson. Judging was fast. Showing (like scene writing) was slow and required a complete shift in perspective. Becoming a “just god,” taught me to see people for who they were, not who I wanted or needed them to be, or who I thought they could be. In seeing others this way, I saw myself and realized that the person I used to be was gone. In her place was a tenderized woman who knew that life’s complexities were beyond her comprehension. This new version was capable of being a just god at the grocery store, at my children’s school, and in my own home. My voice didn’t just come alive on the page; it was also alive in my life, helping me to restructure the way I lived.
In those last few months of refining the final book, our book, my father died. I was with him until the end and realized that had I not started writing, and had he not started talking, I would have never known him, or myself, as I did on that last day of his life. Because of all our hard work, his end wasn’t about unfinished business between us but rather became a quiet dance of breath. His and mine. Until it was just me.
It took ten years to get from idea to a published book—ten of the hardest years of my life. Watching my father die, I felt slayed all over again, but all the lessons of writing, talking to him, crafting, learning, and letting go also saved me in a way I could not have known when this journey began. When I finally learned to trust it, writing took me right where I needed to go.
🎙️Your turn:
From Becky: “The journey is long and it’s important to celebrate wins, no matter how big or small. What are some of your biggest triumphs in writing thus far?”
Please post your story in the chat box.
From Becky: “The journey is long and it’s important to celebrate wins, no matter how big or small. What are some of your biggest triumphs in writing thus far?”
Please post your story in the chat box.
Becky, First, Congratulations! on your book launch. Your memoir sounds beautifully written. I look forward to reading it.
Like yours, my triumph was a 10-year journey. I had a story I needed to tell. I joined a writing group where I learned about craft. There were only a few things I knew about my mother: she was a rodeo performer and earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology in 1931. She was most likely a closeted lesbian since we mostly lived with her woman companion. She did not divulge anything to me about my father, and died when I was nine, leaving me with no known relatives. I had a few documents and a scrapbook of her college days that I kept as my childhood treasures. I put these bits together and wrote a novel inspired by her life. The triumph of writing her story is that I finally understood, through my research of being lesbian in the 1930s and 40s, how few choices she had. I am a great believer in the healing power of story. When the talking stick was passed to me, I told the story of a mother I hardly knew and found healing in the process. Quite a triumph.