So You Want to Write Good Scenes? (Memoir Primer Part I of II)

On staying grounded in place and time and resisting the urge to drift out of scene

Memoir is going through a moment right now—of change and being stretched and pulled in exciting directions. I’m here for the experimentation, breaking form, and the current trend of moving away from linear storytelling. But still, I read a lot of pages, and scene-writing will always be an integral part of this genre that you must must must grasp and master. When a writer is not in control of scene, the reading experience is like an uncomfortable drive down an eight-lane freeway with the driver refusing to pick a lane. Thus, today’s scene primer is part of my ongoing effort to help memoirists learn how to drive.

Scene-writing requires the writer to follow two simple steps: choose a time and a location, then put your body there. It’s June 1976, and you’re at your college graduation ceremony. It’s Christmas 1989. You’re twelve years old and you got a puppy for Christmas; it’s also the first Christmas your parents are separated. In these moments, you are eighteen years old. You are twelve years old. There is no existence of your experience past graduation of 1976, or past Christmas of 1989. As such, anything that has happened in your actual life the intervening years, between those moments and now, must be written about either as something you didn’t yet know at the time, or as something that will happen in the future.

For instance:

That afternoon, I met Jerry. I couldn’t have known the impact he would have on me. For now, he was just another face in the crowd.

By the time the puppy is a year old, Mom and Dad will be back together.

Too often I’m reading scenes when the writer (adult human, placed at the location of his or her computer circa fall/winter 2024) interjects into the scene to share unnecessary information about the now. It’s true that narration in memoir is so so hard to grasp. You are here, you are there, you are everywhere. You have freedom to roam, to time travel, and then of course you’re sitting at your computer with your thoughts and understandings. You of today/now are the equivalent of an omniscient narrator who knows all—but that doesn’t mean you should feel free to break the third wall of your carefully constructed scene every time you have a moment of insight. Or worse, when you just have a random aside to offer up.

Your ”I” narrator who’s narrating (and therefore re-experiencing) “what happened” can only be one age, located in a particular time and place. That narrator can of course summarize what happened over the course of a whole summer. That narrator can move us through time and space at a fast or a slow clip. And she can skip over time, too. She can decide that several years of time aren’t worth including in the memoir. But being in control of time, in memoir, is everything.

There are two anchors to a given scene: where you are and how old you are.

If you know these two facts, you can stay anchored in the location (place) and body (age) where the scene took place, and start to notice when you have the impulse to drift. Let’s take a look at some examples of drifting:

Narrator is 25:

The necklace my best friend gifted me for my twentieth-first birthday is a symbol, really, of our connection and decades-long friendship. We are more like sisters than best friends, since we’ve known each other our whole lives. Now, thankfully, I can wear the necklace again, but I don’t wear it for years because my husband doesn’t like what it suggests—that my friendship with Jennifer is more cemented, more entrenched, and deeper than my relationship with him ever will be. He doesn’t ask me to do it, I just do. I put it in a drawer, where it stays for twelve long years.

The problem with this scene is that the narrator is 25, but she’s telling us about things that happen beyond the experience of her 25 years. When she writes, “Now, thankfully, I can wear the necklace again,” the reader wonders, When is “now”? The writer has lost control of the timeline, and we have questions—like why twelve years? We’re not anchored in a particular place or time.

Narrator is 19:

One of our first stops was the Musée Rodin. As I approached The Thinker, I remember wondering about Auguste Rodin and his tumultuous relationship with Camille Claudel. Their collaboration blurred boundaries in a way that intrigued me back then. I circled the sculpture several times, taking in every angle.

When the writer writes, “I remember wondering,” she pulls us out of her 19-year-old body and into the head of the woman at the computer, remembering. When she writes “back then” she is in the head of the writer at the computer remembering rather than in the body of the 19-year-old experiencing. It’s not necessary to remember in the middle of a scene, as you’re already—inherently and by definition of what memoir is—conveying a memory to your reader.

Narrator is 45:

Pulled over for a short water break, I marveled at my son’s features, so similar to mine: full lips, almond-shaped eyes, ears a bit too small for his face. Today his face is more filled out, and he looks less like me than he did when he was nine. Back on our bikes, he let go of the handlebars, arms out as if he might really take flight. He threw back his head in laughter, experiencing the kind of pure joy that seemed to come to him so easily.

When the writer writes, “Today his face is more filled out,” it pushes us to the future, to an unknown time when this boy is no longer nine, but instead probably a teenager or in his twenties. If this sentence exists to show us that the boy is nine, then an easy fix would be to include that information elsewhere. It’s also inconsequential to this scene that the boy will look different when he grows up.

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In the memoir classes I teach, I have two images I like to turn to as visuals writers can use to stay in scene:

First, imagine yourself a videographer. You, as a single cameraperson, can only have one camera. So when you take us into a given moment, pretend you have one of those old camcorders and it’s strapped to your shoulder. This is the perspective you must show the reader. Your “I” narrator has the camera. It’s this narrator who’s reliving/retelling/showing an experience to the reader. If you are talking about things that are happening “today” or “now” or “still,” the camera has flown off your shoulder and into the future. Don’t let this happen. Keep it strapped on. Stay in control of your narrative.

Second, I love to recall what Mary Karr says in The Art of Memoir. Zip the reader into your skin. This advice is about making the reader feel what you feel, but it’s also a good way to stay anchored in your scene. If the reader is zipped into your 19-year-old body, it’s very discomfiting when you start talking about things that “still” happy to you now, or if you write about things you “don’t remember.” The version of you that doesn’t remember is not the 19-year-old, but rather you, the writer, considering your past. If the reader is zipped up into your skin, they don’t want to hear about what you do or don’t remember. They just want to be experiencing. Keep that in mind, and don’t bog your writing down with qualifiers and statements that force the reader out of your skin.

It takes time to get it right, there’s no question. And this post isn’t going into reflection, which is a narrative technique all its own that I’ll post about next week. Also, it’s not easy when published memoirs do exactly the kinds of things I’m saying not to do. I understand. But we need to be critical readers, and to start to see when even wonderful writers are breaking the third wall. One of my favorite recent books is Carvell Wallace’s Another Word for Love. He’s a gorgeous writer, and I take so little issue with this book. But there’s this one moment when Carvell is eight years old and he writes:

It was nice to have a bedroom to sleep in and food to eat and furniture and lots and lots of orange juice, which to this day is my favorite beverage. My aunt made it in a plastic pitcher from Minute Maid frozen concentrate. I could not control myself. I drank it like it was the stuff of life. I did everything like it was the stuff of life.

If I’d been Carvell’s editor, I would have deleted “which to this day is my favorite beverage.” That is all. Zipped into Carvell’s eight-year-old body, I’m feeling it. That it’s still his favorite drink is inconsequential information. (And look, that said, I’m only critiquing this partial line given today’s topic, and I love this book, so do read it.)

You don’t have an easy task, dear memoirists, I know that well. Keep writing. Keep reading. Hold onto your camera. Pay attention to your skin. If your now/omniscient voice is wanting to weigh in all the time, consider what it wants to say, whether there’s space for those insights in reflection (again, coming next week), and importantly whether what wants to be said is consequential to the scene you’re writing. Be rigorous, stay grounded, and pay close attention to which you is telling your story.