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Tracy Burger's avatar

Thanks for this, Jennifer! Having written first "shitty draft" of my memoir, my first editor noted that I must go deeper into my emotions on a lot of the chapters. I "tell the story" but don't tell the inner arc very well in some pieces of it.

Why can it be difficult? I think it's because it's the "being vulnerable" part of writing your story. Yes, we can go back in time and describe the events that we remember, but why do we remember them? Maybe (probably?) because there is an emotion behind the memory. We have to dig around a bit for that emotion to come back to us--what were we feeling, really feeling, about that memory that makes it worth sharing? THIS is, I think, why I was compelled to write my story: to dig around, loosen those emotional pieces, bring them to light, and make sense of them.

I've written in terms of The Heroine's Journey, but I love thinking of writing with the inner and outer arcs, bringing them together in the end.

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Shannon Luders-Manuel's avatar

You make something so difficult so much clearer. My agent had to really push me to dig deeper in my proposal, in the sample chapter and chapter summaries. It's so hard not only to share the vulnerability but to even get to a place where you uncover it. Your explanation of the inner arc and outer arc make for a really tangible "formula."

As I was reading Tracy's comment about why we remember certain things, I thought about a scene in my book where my dad said he almost got carried off his front porch during a flood. I mention it in my book but I don't do an inner arc, and I've never really gotten to a point where I know what that inner arc would be. But reading Tracy's comment, I realized it aligns with a main theme in my book... that my dad was always about to slip away. The flood was one of the first times it felt like my dad could just vanish. I'm so going to add this realization to the scene!

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