Difficulty writing sad and triggering sections of memoir

I have motivated myself to write portions of my memoir by posting some of the chapters (or bits of chapters) in my blog. Most of the time I post the chapters in three or four parts, each part maybe 1,200 to 1,500 words. I had a very easy time posting the chapters about fun/lovely parts of my life. I even surprised myself by easily writing about a very stressful four year period.

Recently I wrote two of the three parts for a chapter I might call "My very first love". The first two parts were easy, but for the life of me I feel like writing the third part will be like dragging me into a fiery furnace. Many of my blog followers have read the first two parts. I don't want too much time to pass before finishing this story series. Oddly, I have the last three paragraphs of the ending written. How do I get myself started on the rest?

I know this same problem will plague me when starting another chapter I have in mind.

 

I am doing an anthology of autobiographies, including my own, on how we built a Naval aviation community from scratch. I included a number of critical things that happened to me that were quite painful at the time, as did several others, mostly divorces
a. I started out in the Training command as a pilot, but washed out of formation flying, the first time I ever failed at anything. I became a Naval Flight Officer (NFO) instead, flying but not a stick and rudder guy. That took me to the love of my life, TACAMO aviation, where I remain almost a half-century later.
b. A disastrous first marriage ending in 1973, that, combined with my getting fired for cause from a position of great responsibility on my first squadron tour after a very good start, for a while laid me very low. I was reassigned as the Navigation officer, the lowest of the low jobs. But I became a navigation instructor, set up a navigation training program, wrote a navigation standardization pub, sucked it up and remained cheerful, though dying inside, every time I got on the Herc to man the nav station instead of going to communications central back aft. After a year in hell and exile, the skipper reinstated me, then gave me a fitness report enormously better than I expected to see, no mention of his firing me.
c. Recovery and rising trajectory, I made commander ten years later, but then, immediately after, failed to screen for squadron command. Like Moses, I could look into the Promised Land, but never go there myself.

What I did was not dwell to deeply on how bad I felt at the time, just acknowledge that I certainly did, and how I found alternative paths that ultimately led me to where I ended up. The emphasis was how these setbacks ultimately made me much stronger and better.

 

Thanks for the advice, Seven Crowns and Lews. big soft moose, I'll try to look at it as fiction to a degree, but if I don't pull enough emotion from within me, I fear it will be stale and won't fully engage the reader. If they think it's boring, like you say they might, then obviously I will have failed miserably. You don't know me or my writing or my story well enough to assume that will be the case.

 

I'm in the same boat as you. I have this off-and-on project about how the disintegration of a household I was in led to my nervous breakdown, and how other people's attempts to guide me out of it resulted in it getting worse. (A few of these people are still alive, and I'm not sure how they'll react to it.)

Seven Crowns made the suggestion that you write it as fiction. That's not a bad idea. Or you could write it in the third person, which might lend some distance to the situation. For me, and possibly for you, the real story is not how I got into the situation, or how the situation affected me, but how I got out of it and began a healing process that restored me. (What was the healing process? Hang gliding, believe it or not.)

Don't worry about reader reaction at first. Your first duty is to tell the story as best and as honestly as you can. Only then will you know whether the story has "legs" as a publishable work. Cross that bridge (or burn it) when you come to it.

But perhaps you will have found out how to navigate through it. Here's hoping.

 

I'd really have to think long and hard about fictionalizing my story. It might be difficult, though, because I am a person with bipolar disorder and my story would likely look a lot different from someone else's perspective than from my own, unless the third person would somehow know what was going on my head.

That's wonderful, JLT, that you are at a point where you can write about your recovery in full (or mostly in full). I want to write about my recovery, but there is no "ending" to that chapter as of yet.

I'll start working on that Part 3 I mentioned this week. Maybe it will be easier than I think once I really delve into writing it. I just need to start it and stop putting it off.

 

I think you may have something going here, but it might be hard to capture.

If you write about your first love in an objective manner or try to make it sound important in general, it will indeed be boring or at least of no interest to most readers. Because we have all had them, and only those of famous people or with very odd outcomes are worth reading.

But if you write about it in a subjective manner, it's possible that you can trigger some universal feelings and interest for the same reason, that is, we have all had them. The fact that it is painful to you suggests there are some deep issues in there, maybe you can unpack and share them. Not to say that people should be impressed that you found it hard, but rather that they will identify with some of those issues. It won't be easy, but you won't know until you really explore what it is you are feeling and remembering -- memoirs of "ordinary" people that draw readers are those that are genuine, and that can often be painful. Good luck.

 

I appreciate your response, GrahamLewis.

I finished my part 3 and posted it on my blog. My regular blog readers seemed to like it, despite its generally sad ending. When I revisit the chapter I will add in more details, even if some are fictionalized or a bit exaggerated.

I realize most people's "first loves" are trite predictable stories, but mine has mental illness, alcohol abuse, isolation, home sickness, confusion, and more mixed in. Plus, I'm usually a damned good story teller who can often make some simple things shine bright or include a unique type of humor. But if the chapter still seems too dull, it can always be eliminated. I can always just briefly write about the experience prior to (at the beginning of) a chapter I call "Mental chaos half across the world". I guarantee that that chapter is neither boring nor trite. Frankly, I think it is just as interesting (if not more interesting) than anything Kay Redfield Jamison wrote in her book "An Unquiet Mind", a long-time best seller.

There have been a few reasonable and helpful suggestions offered here, but a lot of discouragement. Based on what? The name of the chapter? This is the only thread I've posted here other than an introduction post. No one has seen any samples of my writing. Nobody knows me. I would never be so discouraging to any of you based on so little information.

 

Cthebird,

I did not mean to be discouraging and sorry if it came across that way. What I meant was simply that it is very hard to draw someone into one's own life story; i meant to be cautionary not critical, since, as you say, I have not seen your writing. And i have been guilty myself of presuming others are interested in my story simply because it is interesting to me.

 

Our forum ascribes to honest engagement of questions, concerns and critique. We discourage disingenuous and/or vapid engagement. It is for you to filter the engagement you receive and temper it to the process in which you are engaged, which is a thing that only you can know. You are writing a memoir. By its nature it's going to be personal to you. You need to acknowledge that and adjust your engagement accordingly. You may also need to learn how to translate certain advice or commentary to fit the need in which you are involved. A while back I posted a piece of a story that was in a very early stage of development. Barely more than an initial idea for a story rather than the actual story itself. One critic said to me, "I don't like wish fulfillment stories." Not very constructive when taken at face value until you translate it into the correct words for a story at the particular stage in which my story was. The translation is: "I'm having difficulty finding what's at stake in this story." See how much more constructive that is? But I'm the only person who knew the stage of development of my story, so the onus falls to me to make that translation.

 

I agree with @JLT here that a good way to approach it might be to write in third person. That will give you the distance to maybe tell the story in a slightly less painful fashion. Just pretend you're telling about the situation as if it happened to somebody else. Once you've got it all out there, then you can switch it back to first person without too much bother and re-personalise it for your blog.

It's getting the emotion into the piece without bringing you down that's the problem, isn't it? That might be a way forward.

I am also a big fan of fictionalising painful experiences ...because you can change ANYTHING you want in fiction. You can play the 'what if' game. What if this particular thing hadn't happened? What would have changed? And etc. However, if you're writing a directly autobiographical blog, you can't really write it as fiction. So I'd suggest trying the trick of using third person to write about it, then switch to first person when you're ready to publish it in your blog. The worst that can happen is it won't work.

 

I write a lot of memoir. But each subsequent draft takes the write away from source. I find even, I am afraid to say, that one of the consequences or side-effects of writing it down, polishing, changing the ending to 'close the circle' - is that I, the writer, lose the memory of the original events, [see your painful memory], replaced by the fiction piece, the account, the story.

So, consider

Is this the same for other writers?

 

Well, my situation is a little different, because I'll be working directly from the diary I kept during the years that I wanted to revisit. But even there, I find myself barely able to relate to the person who wrote that stuff, even thought it was me. The pain is on the page, but I'm not responding to the situation the way I did then. One the one hand, I'm kind of glad that I'm past that scene, but on the other hand, I wonder how much of me has died in the process.

 

I know it is for me --to be honest, I doubt there are any "pure" memoirs out there; besides the fact that memory is imperfect, one simply cannot write everything one remembers, so you must pick and choose. And if the memoir is to sell, it has to read well, which does mean polishing. So it's not total, even if it is complete. I think it was Mark Twain who wrote about "changing the facts to fit the probabilities." Others talk about finding the "deeper" truth, even if it means refining and reordering some of the "facts". Again, I put that in quotes because there are no remembered facts, only imperfect and changing memories. But there are many good life stories to be told. Some are even interesting to others.

 

I agree with this. I also am a huge fan of fictionalizing painful experiences. Most of the darkest parts in my writing come from real life experiences. I actually don't change them, I just find that people find them far easier to accept when it's happening to a 'character' instead of a real person. Also, you don't get all the pity looks and mumbles, which is helpful because I really hate that.

I can't tell you how much I wish it worked that way for me. Sadly, it just gives me a fictional version while the original reality is still very much intact.

 

I will have to work toward this [ambition], very interesting.

 

I found it an incredibly healing experience to take a sad event in my life and change it, in fiction. In other words, I did the 'what if' thing, and instead of having people block me from getting what I really wanted—as really did happen to me—my fictional character's friends and family actually enabled her to get what she really wanted.

Granting my dearest wish to my character was a starting point for the story, and not the end of it. My story problem and conflict came from an entirely different set of events, all imaginary. By approaching the situation like this, I was able to play with what my life might have been like if I HAD got what I really wanted, back when I lost it. Certainly not trouble-free, but a different set of troubles! Writing this fictional turnaround was an excellent way to 'change' the way I looked at my situation, and it was incredibly cathartic to write it.

I think sometimes it might be a mistake to just write a miserable situation as it happened, without changing it, because where is the healing? You're just rehashing old hurts. I'm not saying you can't learn from doing that, but I think you can also get stuck 'back there' ...which is what seems to be happening to the OP. I think it's a good idea for you, as a writer, to think about what you wish had happened in your life—instead of what actually did—then create a character and give her what you wish had happened to you. And then move on to what happened next...