Memoir: It's MY story, right? (Part 1)
Reflecting on who owns a story, who gets to tell it, and for whom.
Over the last year, as I’ve worked on finalizing my manuscript, I have begun to feel the power I am wielding over it more readily now. I can see its shape. I am no longer whacking away at chunks of early drafts trying to see what shape may come out of it; rather, I have a vision, an idea of what I am trying to manifest into the world, what intentional efforts I must make to sculpt it with precision into the story I want to tell.
My aim: to demonstrate a personal view, my lived experience, an important perspective unique to me but applicable to many.
My limitation: the knowledge that I the holder of a lineage that implicates a diverse group of people and places. I am but one representative of a larger whole.
I am but a fleck.
This has given me more humility, an awareness of a responsibility I have. It has made me reflect on the role I have as not only the storyteller, but also as the story keeper.
As a memoirist at a later stage in my project, I see now the creative choices I must make in deciding which parts to keep back or pull out, and which parts to share—and why. What serves my vision for the book and what is extraneous? And how do I decide?
For whom am I writing my memoir? This has shifted throughout my process.
When I began writing my memoir four years ago, the writing was for me. Perhaps it’s what first best motivates us memoirists to the blank page—a need to get something out of ourselves, for ourselves alone. We require an emotional processing, an integrating of event—and early drafts are an essential step in this.
For me, my early drafts were overwhelmed by scenes of early childhood and adolescence, details long-forgotten, now excavated gently to the surface. I danced with my inner child as she led the way. Memories flooded forward, stories recognizing her as she had once been, her struggles and accomplishments, many of which had never been recognized let alone articulated before.
What emerged from these writings was a new perspective of little Višnja, one that saw her from the outside with more spaciousness and discernment, with a deeper interest and knowledge of her and her internal self. This made the draft change, as well as my motivations for writing it. I began to imagine a reader beyond myself, someone who needed a story, who wanted to know why I was writing this. What was the point? If this draft were ever to become a published work, it was not enough for the story to serve only me, the writer.
I have a responsibility to not only relate or tell, but to shape, the story, with the aim of a grander, more universal vision.
At first, my imagined readers were my parents. I wanted to share with them my inner world, a world they might have missed as it developed while I was growing up having been so inundated by their own difficult, adult circumstances. I saw my story as a means for building compassion for the people we were as we lived side-by-side all those early years in Canada. And I saw it as a pathway to understanding, something that this narrator might use to explain how we acted and why we became the people we had (or she’d thought) we’d become.
But as I continued to write—draft, edit and refine—a stronger voice took hold: A more mature voice with a worldview of her own—not just one who was seeking explanations but one who had developed a broader perspective: that of an author.
This writer had perspective and vision, not just eager and sincere observation skills. The story was no longer merely cultivated by earnestness and honesty, but by wisdom, a kind of intelligence that requires discipline, a keen awareness of not just story but the consequences of story.
To be continued…