I have this series of titles called: So, You Want to …
Except for one part of a chapter, I don’t intend to to use the title. I do have characters who represent real people in my memoir. There are ways to do it and ways not to.
1.If it Bleeds, it Leads
Random Reader: But, Becca, your stuff won’t sell if it doesn’t.
Look, I’ve worked in that business. I wrote a story about a step-father who’d allegedly physically abused his nine-month-old step-daughter. I found it in arrest documents. The alleged abuser came from a family important in the community and Christian business. When the paper printed the next morning, we’d sold out.
This isn’t 1991 where selling out news stands might still be possible for a small town paper. This sold out in small town, USA. Just as I was praised for breaking the story and selling out stands, we were on to the next day’s press. Everything has a deadline.
Random Reader: Becca, what does that mean?
Sometimes writers early in their skill bleed on the page. This means every emotion drives the story. As more experienced writers, we know emotion or passion drives a fair amount of a story or poem. There’s a difference between bleeding on paper and writing with an emotional edge.
When I write in my regular journal, I usually bleed there.
2. If We Won’t Bleed Our Emotions, We Won’t Bleed Our Characters
Raw, thirteen-year-old style emotion rarely creates a good story. You don’t want to write your characters this way either. You want characters to be three-dimensional. This is more challenging with a memoir because you overly admire or still hold on to anger at a person.
When I’ve written scenes, or earlier prose poems, about a person in my life as a character; I write with some form of love, but distance and realism. Like the paintings meant to resemble the effect of a camera in the nineteenth century, the work never captures the full story no matter how beautifully painted or written.
When my friend of twenty-something years asked me to step down as Maid of Honor, please see The Bridesmaid Reject, I had to stop writing my chapter 3 in my memoir. I was about to introduce of her character when she texted. Then the course of the narrative for her character changed.
Even though her character’s narrative changed, I should not treat the character with it bleeds, it leads style. There is a love for this character, at some point admiration, astonishment, anger, and hurt. Since the character causes a wide array of emotions, she must inspire more than one-dimensional understanding.
3. Examples
Example from a piece called Rapunzel’s Understanding:
When I met you, I thought we could rework our interpretation of a fairy tale. You never learned to cook, so you came to my flat. You brought carrots. I saw you from a small window from my ally of a kitchen. Most days were cloudy, and I spotted your bright orange shirt with gray swirls as you came up the walk. You held up the bag before you reached my door. I taught you how to peel and chop carrots.
I write the above portion about an early time in my relationship with my first husband. I won’t keep it in its current prose form, but turn it more into the straight memoir/ nonfiction paragraph. Things were not always bad. He was–and is–an amazing writer. Faults lay with both of us, but if I wrote his character with absolute hatred–bleeding on paper–there wouldn’t be a character worthy of complicated feelings.
or from Party at Colton’s Place:
Depending on his mood, Colton might sit on the floor in front of the hookah with a drink in the other hand.
I switched from meeting my long-time friend to college when I met a guy I call Colton in my book. He was a friend, and he was a complicated person. It has made him one of my favorite people to recreate.
From So, You Want to Write a Love Story, Episode II: Hey, Girl:
When I first met Colton, he dressed all in black with logos on his shirt. He had piercings in his ear, and usually kept his brown hair cut close to his scalp. He loved to hunt, supported guns’ rights, played computer games, and supported the rights of homosexual couples to have the same right as heterosexual people to marry.
To be clear on the rights of everyone to marry, I met Colton before every person was granted the right in United States to share in happiness of marriage and joy or anger of divorce.
I liked writing about Colton because you could not place him as a person, or character, into a single category. He did eHarmony to find love, and eHarmony told him no one matched him well after he did the survey. True story.
When we live in a time when people are cast so far right or left, it was refreshing to know someone who had an eraser in his ear, reminded you of a combination skater and a 1960’s San Francisco visitor, and loved deer hunting in Carolina in the autumn.
I named his character Colton because he loved carrying around his gun and showing it off whenever he could.
4. Characters Have Rights, Too
At the end of day, it’s my memoir of going through life without a social GPS and depression, and how as a parent, I must help my son. I hope he does not make my mistakes. Every parent’s wish for their child.
My character is not a heroine. She is imperfect, makes poor judgement, and is difficult to live with, but she also has her moments where she soars. Well-crafted characters, rather inspired by reality or fantasy, deserve full creation. They deserve a three dimensional sculpting. If not, then how is your character worth reading about?
By Rebecca T. Dickinson, Writer of The Bridesmaid Reject
Corrie's Season 