Windows and Doors: Build Your Story Series #4

8/9/2019 Windows and Doors: Build Your Story Series #4

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Windows & DoorsYouve got three exercises wrapped in one in this module. Look for the in theleft margin to find them. Write for you. Right now.

The BIG pictureTheme for a writer can be likened to the seasonings a cook uses. Themes can be

spicy or sweet, pungent or mellow. Tied closely with the tone or voice of the work,

theme helps others look deeper into who you are. The right theme can propel the

reader into your world.

Take a few moments and think. In your writings will you be the hero or the martyr,

the sinner or the saint? Will your memoir say, I made it despite all odds! or I justdid the best I could.

On a sheet of paper, list at least five possible titles for your memoir, the story of your

life. Examine them to see what youre saying about yourself. Are you happy about

your accomplishments? Or are you more than a little disappointed? Your tone and

theme should reflect your feelings. Be honest with yourself. Dont just spin it how

you think others want you to.

Take this exercise a little further and list our possible chapter titles. These titles can

reflect the sub-themes of each chapter. These sub-themes should work in harmony

with your overall theme.

For example: Lets say youre going to name you memoir Shuckin and Jivin. Youplan to write it with a lively, no-nonsense street tone on the 1970s. Chapters might

then be titled Good Times, Moving on Up, Papa was a Rollin Stone. An effective

theme for a work like this would be happy but not sugar-coated. Put in sentence

form it would look something like this: My lifes been hard but its been good.

Good startsYour goal as a writer is to hook your reader right at the beginning. Your objective is to

stir up curiosity, set up drama, or create conflict with your first few sentences. That is

2006 Linda Leigh Hargrove | LLHargrove.com

From the author ofThe Making of Isaac Huntand Loving Cee Cee Johnson1


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your hook, that powerful little something that grabs and teases your reader into

wanting more. Your hook should open the windows and door wide for your reader.

Study the hooks from the published memoir excerpts below and write out what you

think the hook works. Examine each piece and write what you think the conflict,

tone, theme, voice, and setting are.

Cane Riverby Lalita Tademy

CANE RIVER, LOUISIANA1834

On the morning of her ninth birthday, the day after Madame Franoise

Derbanne slapped her, Suzette peed on the rosebushes. Before the

plantation bell sounded she had startled awake, tuned her ears to the

careless breathing of Mam'zelle above her in the four-poster bed, listened for

movement from the rest of the sleeping household, and quietly pushed

herself up from her straw pallet on the floor.

Suzette made her way quickly down the narrow hall, beyond the wall altar,

and past the polished mahogany grandfather clock in the front room, careful

to sidestep the squeaky board by the front door. Outside on the gallery, her

heart thudded so wildly that the curiosity of the sound helped soften the fear.

Her breath felt too big for her chest as she inched past the separate entrance

to the stranger's room and around to the side of the big house where the

prized bushes waited.

Barefoot into the darkness, aided only by the slightest remnant of the

Louisiana summer moon, she chose Madame's favorite, a sprawling

rosebush with delicate pale yellow flowers and visible roots as long as her

father's fiddling bow.

The task didn't take long, going and coming back, and Oreline's breathing

was still soft and regular when Suzette slipped back onto her makeshift

mattress at the foot of the bed. The only evidence that Suzette had been

gone at all was a thin, jagged scratch on her bare arm from a thorn she

hadn't seen in the darkness.

The Color of Waterby James McBride

Im dead.

You want to talk about my family and here I been dead to them for fifty years.

Leave me alone. Dont bother me. They want no parts of me and me I dont

want no parts of them. Hurry up and get this interview over with. I want to

watch Dallas. See, my family, if you have been a part of them, you wouldnt

have time for this foolishness, your roots, so to speak. Youd be better off




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watching the Three Stooges than to interview them, like to go interview my

father, forget it. Hed have a heart attack if he saw you. Hes dead now

anyway, or if not hes 150 years old.

I was born an Orthodox Jew on April 1, 1921. April Fools Day, in Poland. I

dont remember the name of the town where I was born, but I don remember

my Jewish name: Ruchel Dwajra Zylska. My parents got rid of that name when

we came to America and changed it to Rachel Deborah Shilsky, and I got rid ofthat name when I was nineteen and never used it again after I left Virginia for

good in 1941. Rachel Shilsky is dead as far as Im concerned. She had to die

in order for me, the rest of me, to live.

My family mourned me when I married your father. They said kaddish and sat

shiva. Thats how Orthodox Jews mourn their dead. They say prayers, turn

their mirrors down, sit on boxes for seven days, and cover their heads. Its a

real workout, which is maybe why Im not a Jew now. There were too many

rules to follow, too many forbiddens and you cant and you mustnts but

does anybody say they love you? Not in my family, we didnt. We didnt talk

that way. We said things like, Theres a box in there for the nails, or myfather would say, Be quiet while I sleep.

Angelas Ashes by Frank McCourt

My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and

married and where I was born. Instead they returned to Ireland when I was

four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and

my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It

was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth

your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish

childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

People everywhere brag and whimber about the woes of their early years, but

nothing can compare to the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious

alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; the pompous

priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to

us for eight hundred long years.

Above all we were wet.

Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the

River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick. The rain dampened the city from

the Feast of the Circumcision to New Years Eve. It created a cacophony of

hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It

turned noses into fountains




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Windows and Doors: Build Your Story Series #4