Writing Your Resilience: Building Resilience, Embracing Trauma and Healing Through Writing

Memoir Writing Mistakes: Why “This Happened, Then This Happened” Isn’t a Memoir with Wendy Dale

• Lisa Cooper Ellison

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This week, I’m joined by Wendy Dale, the author of The Memoir Engineering System, for a conversation that will change the way you think about structure, scenes, and what actually makes a memoir work. We talk about why “this happened, then this happened” isn’t a story, how connected events create momentum, and why your job as a memoirist isn’t just to show—but to transport your reader. If you’ve ever felt stuck in the messy middle, overwhelmed by pages, or unsure how to shape your lived experience into a compelling narrative, this episode is for you.

Episode Highlights

  • 03:04 Wendy's Background
  • 05:50 The "This Happened Then This Happened Problem
  • 09:37 What Makes a Good Memoir
  • 12:07 The Secret to Becoming a Great Writer
  • 16:26 The Most Important Elements a Writer Must Consider
  • 26:03 What Readers Really Want 
  • 33:15 The Real Work Scenes Must Do


Resources for this Episode: 


Wendy’s Bio: Wendy Dale is the founder of Memoir Writing for Geniuses. She offers coaching and classes for newbies and professionals to write their memoirs using principles instead of a process of trial and error. Her memoir Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals was published by Three Rivers Press, a division of Penguin Random House. She is also the author of the book The Memoir Engineering System, the result of 15 years of research, which details a six-step process that allows writers to craft their memoirs from the ground up with no structural errors. Her motto is “Make your first draft your final draft.”


Connect with Wendy:

Website: www.geniusmemoirwriting.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@memoirwritingforgeniuses



Sign up for Revise Your Memoir series: https://bit.ly/4ooLTDi



Sign up for Revise Your Memoir series: https://bit.ly/4ooLTDi

Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/
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Transcript for Writing Your Resilience Episode 

Memoir Writing Mistakes: Why “This Happened, Then This Happened” Isn’t a Memoir with Wendy Dale


Welcome back to Writing Your Resilience. I’m Lisa Cooper Ellison, your resident story alchemist and trauma-informed writing coach.

Today’s episode is a true craft deep dive—and a total delight.

I’m joined by Wendy Dale, the author of The Memoir Engineering System, for a conversation that will change the way you think about structure, scenes, and what actually makes a memoir work. We talk about why “this happened, then this happened” isn’t a story, how connected events create momentum, and why your job as a memoirist isn’t just to show—but to transport your reader. If you’ve ever felt stuck in the messy middle, overwhelmed by pages, or unsure how to shape your lived experience into a compelling narrative, this episode is for you.

Let’s dive in.

 

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:01]
 Well, hello, Wendy. Welcome to the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I’m so excited to have you on today.

Wendy Dale [0:07]
 I’m so thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:12]
 Well, I know that my listeners are going to be in for a real treat, because we are going to dive deeply into your book, The Memoir Engineering System—which I’m holding up for anyone who is seeing this on YouTube—and we’re going to explore a lot of the concepts you talk about in this book.

However, I always start out in the same way, by giving my guests a chance to let us know what you would like us to know about your book and about you.

Wendy Dale [0:39]
 Ah, if I had to tell you, I guess, two things about my book, they would be that it took me two months to write it and fiffteen years to research it. So, I guess it took me fiffteen years to complete—I’m not sure how you want to look at that.

About me: I’ve been a memoir writing coach for eighteen years. My own memoir was published by Crown, part of Penguin Random House. And I love doing this. So, yeah.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:10]
 Okay, so you said something that I have to follow up on, and that is that you wrote it in two months, and it took you fiffteen years to research. Please tell us a little more.

Wendy Dale [1:27]
 So I wrote the book that I always wanted as a memoirist. Years ago, when I started working on my own memoir, what happened was that I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was a professional writer. I’d been a screenwriter, an ad copywriter, and a journalist. And I thought, well, how hard can it be to write about your life, right?

And you’re nodding, because it seems like the easiest thing in the world. I thought, well, you don’t need plot, because I have the plot. It’s my life.

Well, that was really misguided.

So, I eventually got an agent, and she said she wouldn’t be my agent until I promised to completely rewrite my book and learn about structure. This really was my introduction to the word structure, which I hadn’t even heard before. This was, you know, a little over twenty years ago.

So, I wrote this book by a process of trial and error, really, because I didn’t understand structure and I didn’t find the information anywhere. I really didn’t understand what makes for a good memoir. I think it can actually be easier to write fiction, because you do it intuitively and you get to make stuff up.

The challenge with memoir is that you have to make it feel like a novel, but you can’t make stuff up. And so, it’s this odd process, which is incredibly difficult.

So, I had this problem of not understanding structure. And a few years later, I started teaching memoir, and that’s when this came back at me. I thought, well, you know, I have all of these people with the exact same problem I had.

I solved it really by trial and error, by writing draft after draft—and that’s not a great way to approach this when you’re a teacher.

So little by little, I started this process of understanding how story works, or how written story works. And it took me—it really did take me—fifteen years. Little by little, I pieced it together. I started understanding what makes a written story work. And it’s true for novels as well as memoir, but it’s so much more important in memoir, because a lot of novel writing you do intuitively.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [3:53]
 Yeah. And I think an area where I see a lot of memoirists get stuck is what I call the “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened” dilemma. It’s like, okay, yes, that is how life works. Life is a little chaotic, right? We’re not curating life—but we are curating a story.

So how do you put all of this together? We’re going to talk about some of the decision points that writers come to as they’re putting their story together in a moment. But I want to start this conversation by talking about structure, since you mentioned it—and it’s this enigma. Everybody wants to know how to do it. Everyone wants to feel like there’s a structured way to write their book, and yet people often struggle to understand what structure actually is.

So, when you think about the word structure, how do you define it?

Wendy Dale [5:00]
 A lot of people, when they’re talking about structure, are actually referring to what I call global structure. So, we’re talking three acts. You’re talking the hero’s journey. You’re talking big-picture structure—which is great. That’s how I suggest people start out, with this global idea: where your book starts in time, where it ends in time, taking this bird’s-eye view. I definitely suggest that.

But where I find people struggle is actually what exactly you said: This happened. This happened. This happened. This happened.

That is chapter structure, and that is where I feel people get off track. How do you actually tell a story in your chapter without it being a bunch of random things you lived through?

I think it’s really easy to see this in a travel narrative, in a travel memoir. Someone will move to Paris and it’s like, well, this is what I did my first day in Paris, and this is what I did my second day, and this is what I did my third day.

That’s a diary. That’s not a memoir. And nobody really cares. I mean—you know what I’m saying, right?

Lisa Cooper Ellison
 Yeah.

Wendy Dale
 It’s a harsh truth that I say to people: no one cares about your life. What do they care about? They care about a good story. The same way you care about a novel. We care about a good story.

So, the challenge really is taking these true stories from your life and finding structure in them. And for me, the biggest challenge is solving the this happened, then this happened problem.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [6:34]
 Yeah. And I’m a very visual person, so I’m going to add my visual layer to this. When I think about structure, I often use the metaphor of a house. A house can be a mansion, it can be a bungalow—it can be all of these different things—but within the house, there are different rooms that serve different functions.

We don’t do the same thing in the bathroom that we do in the kitchen—unless you’re on Seinfeld, and then, you know, that can happen, right?

So, each room has a function, and we need to understand what that is and how they all work together to create a house.

Another way to think about it is that your story lives in a neighborhood. All of the houses on that street are linked together by a road, which is similar to the metaphor Dinty Moore uses when he talks about the magnetic river of your story and how it all needs to flow together.

So, finding that structure is really important.

We’re going to talk about what you need to do to create that structure at the chapter level, so there’s flow within each chapter—and that that flow leads to flow within your book.

But before we get there, you also said something else that I know listeners are going to be like, “Wait a second. I need to know the answer to this.” And that is: What makes a good memoir?

Wendy Dale [8:11]
 What makes a good memoir? I think a good memoir reads much like a novel. I really do.

Using your house metaphor—which I love—I’m going to tweak it just a little bit. In response to your question, I tell my clients that structure is like the structural engineering in a house. No one notices it. You don’t walk into a beautiful home and say, “Wow, who’s your structural engineer?”

You notice the beautiful furniture, the color of the walls, the paintings—that is your prose.

So, what makes a good memoir? People notice the prose. But if you don’t have structure, you don’t have four walls. No one’s going to walk into that house in the first place.

So, to me, having structure that works and emotionally affecting prose—that combination creates a great memoir.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [9:19]
 Yes. You have to have both.

I took a class at Kenyon Review Online this summer, because I like to do continuing education all the time. I was studying with Mitchell Jackson, who wrote the memoir Survival Math. One of the things he talked about was how important it is to pay attention to language and sentence structure—that this is something that gives writers a real leg up.

But I agree: if you don’t have that other piece, that structural engineering, that schematic in the background that makes it all come together, your story is going to fall apart. People are going to get lost in what you’re trying to say.

In your book, you talk about something early on that I want to get to, because it’s something I’m constantly trying to get people to do—and I always love it when someone else is saying the same thing.

If you have clients and they’re not listening to you, they can listen to my voice, right? We can help each other out that way.

And that is the benefit of reading books in progress—reading manuscripts that are not yet published.

I see so many writers—and I’ve done this myself—try to reverse-engineer what a published author has done. Sometimes that’s easy. Sometimes it’s not. But when something isn’t working, and you see it on the page—when someone is in the middle of a draft, in that messy middle—you can learn so much.

Why do you feel like that’s so essential?

Wendy Dale [11:12]
 This really speaks to how The Memoir Engineering System came to be. In the early chapters, I talk about when this agent said to me, “I’ll take you on, but you have to completely rewrite your book, because you know nothing about structure.”

I ran to Barnes & Noble and didn’t find much about structure. So, my next step was to go to published memoirs and think, what are they doing? How do you construct a story? Because obviously I didn’t know what I was doing.

My manuscript wasn’t working, and I couldn’t find the seams. When things are working, you don’t notice them—just like you don’t notice the structural engineering of a house. You notice when the wall is lopsided, right?

So, this is how I learned structure: working with students and getting imperfect manuscripts and saying, Hmm, there’s a problem here. What is that problem? And how would I fix it?

I reverse-engineered this over the course of fifteen years until I had a set of principles—not just what you shouldn’t do, but what you should do.

So, oh, you are speaking to the choir, Lisa.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [12:36]
 And so here’s what I want all the listeners to hear. This is why it’s so important to be a beta reader, right? Read books on craft so that you understand these fundamental principles—so you understand how things work—and then serve as beta readers.

Because when you are reading works in progress, you have an opportunity to mentally apply these skills to work that is not your own, where you don’t have skin in the game, where you can say, okay, how could I potentially serve this author by sharing this insight or this information?

And then, of course, if someone gives you that feedback—or if you’re giving this to the author—they don’t have to do it, right? But you can begin to understand how all this works in a different way.

And I say that because there are some people who just want to have an editor walk that process with them, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You know, I do have people that I work with—and I’ve worked with for a long time—but even the people I work with for a long time, I’m like, Okay, you need to read other people’s manuscripts that are in progress so that you can see how these flaws work.

Because when they’re just reading, you know, the best memoirs—the New York Times bestsellers—they’re not getting that view, right? And it’s humbling when you see it and then go, oh, and I’ve made that same error.

Wendy Dale [14:08]
 I tell my clients, you’ll never know what it’s like to read your book for the first time, right? And so, look—this other person, they’re doing the exact same thing as you. I want you to read this version that you can be objective about and just feel how it’s affecting you, feel what’s bothering you, and understand that you’re doing the exact same thing. And let’s fix that.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [14:34]
 So it can be a huge learning tool to be able to do that, especially when you’ve also studied some of these principles, so you can go, aha—that’s what it is, rather than just, I don’t like it.

Liking something is important, right? Especially if you’re a reader—you’re always going to have things you like and things you don’t. But if you’re going to be a writer, understanding why—Okay, I don’t like it. Why?—that’s the piece that will really serve you.

So, when we think about structure, and you think specifically about structure at the chapter level, what are the ingredients or elements that you think are most important for writers to consider so that they can follow your Memoir Engineering System—so they’re working through your schematic?

Wendy Dale [15:23]
 Okay, this might be a little bit of a long answer, so interrupt me at any point, Lisa.

What it took me fiffteen years to understand is that I can now define structure in two words, and it really is connected events. Now, it took me fiffteen years to get to that simplicity, right? And there’s a lot in those two words. There’s a whole book on what those two words mean and how to use them in the right way.

So: connected events.

The real issue we were talking about is the this happened, then this happened problem. And I sometimes call this the why is the author telling me this? problem. Because from a reader’s point of view, it’s like, okay, you’re just telling me a bunch of stuff you did. But why? What’s the point?

So, what happens with the this happened, then this happened problem is that the reader doesn’t understand the relationship between events.

The way to solve this is to let a reader know what this has to do with that. What’s happening here? What does it have to do with what happened there?

I’m holding up my fingers here, and what I’m trying to represent is that you have one scene here and another scene here. Something happens in one scene, and something is going to happen in the next scene. Now, in between those scenes, if it’s not clear to your reader what these two scenes have in common, you need a chunk of transition writing. That is your connecting material.

Let me go back to connected events. Told you it was going to be a long answer.

You have two components in your book: scenes and transitions. Using them in the right way gets you to connected events.

That transition lets your reader know why what happened in this scene is related to what’s going to happen in the next scene. Your reader doesn’t say, wait—why is the author telling me this? Because you’ve let them know what they’re about to read and how it connects to what they just read.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [17:33]
 Yeah, I love that. I often call it the cause-and-effect chain, right? You have to maintain the cause-and-effect chain, and when it gets broken, that’s often where confusion exists.

So, when we’re thinking about scenes—because you talk in your book about how show, don’t tell gets people into a lot of trouble, especially in memoir—I want to talk about that with you.

What is a scene supposed to do? Is it a moment of showing? If it’s not just showing, help us understand what we need to do there, because you say something really important about this in your book.

Wendy Dale [18:16]
 I think there are a lot of books on craft that tell people their book needs to be a visual experience. And yes, it does—but it’s so easy to do.

If I say striped cat, don’t you have an image? Didn’t that come into your brain? Striped cat.

So, people take this overboard. They try to describe absolutely everything: the striped cat on the red velvet sofa in the ornately decorated room with the— and I just don’t need it, right?

People get hung up on this show, show, show—it has to be a visual experience. Well, absolutely, we need a few visuals. But just saying a striped cat is pretty much enough.

So, what do you do with the rest of your prose in that paragraph?

I tell people to fill it with subjective writing. And subjective writing is basically putting us inside your head.

So, this striped cat walks up to you. Now interpret this moment. What are you feeling when this striped cat comes up to you?

Your goal as a writer in your scene is to transport your reader—to make them forget they’re reading a book, to make them become you, to make them feel like they’re living through this with you.

And the way to do this is through subjective writing. That’s what transports. That’s what your reader wants.

There are a lot of books that say, your reader wants a visual experience. Yes—but they want to be transported. Having an image in your head isn’t the same as feeling like you’ve become the narrator.

The way to become the narrator is to think the narrator’s thoughts.

It’s incredible what that does for your book.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [20:12]
 I love geeking out with people on this. 

Wendy Dale [20:16]
 We need to talk more often, Lisa. I don’t have a lot of people who love to geek out on this stuff.

So, you have this subjective writing in your scene that transports your reader. And what’s really important is that something always needs to happen in your scene.

You’ve seen this with so many of the people you work with—it’s so easy to fall into this trap. As a memoirist, it’s so easy to describe the day you lived through, right?

You really need to understand that in novel writing and good memoir writing, a scene exists because something is going to happen at the end. That’s why we’re living through it.

If you understand that, you won’t start in the wrong place. You won’t end in the wrong place. If you understand what a scene is doing for your story, you’ll write a good one—instead of what you and I have seen thousands of times: a scene that’s like, let me just tell you what it was like that day at the park. Let me tell you everything that happened at the park that day.

That’s not what a scene is supposed to do.

You need a main event in your scene that you’re writing toward, and you need subjective writing—

Lisa Cooper Ellison [21:31]
 Yeah—something happens that affects change, especially related to your story, and you’re writing it through that lens. You’re telling it slant, right through the lens that only the narrator has.

An exercise I often give people to help them understand subjective writing is this: get your journal and look out the window. Imagine the very best day of your life and describe what you see through that window. Then do the same thing, but imagine the worst day of your life.

When you write, you’re going to choose different details.

So, when we’re thinking about the striped cat and subjective writing, you’re going to have an experience of striped cats. You’re either going to love them, and you’ll write about how it’s scampering toward you, some little detail that lets us know you love this cat—or this cat is going to be hideous and dirty or something else, because you hate cats.

Understanding what your perspective is so you can write in that subjective way is so important. Because you’re right—we want to feel like we’re getting everything through the eyes of the only person who could tell this specific story.

Wendy Dale [22:47]
 It’s so counterintuitive, isn’t it? And I think memoirists are a little afraid of this. Partly because I say to them, “No one cares about your life,” so many times, right? And so, they’re a little terrified of writing in first person.

But the interesting thing is, the more personal this becomes, the more universal it becomes. Haven’t you found that?

Lisa Cooper Ellison [23:10]
 Oh, one hundred percent. That’s why, when I’m working with someone on their audience—who this book is for—the more specific you are, the broader your audience can actually be. Because you’ve spoken to one specific group so well.

I think that happens with a lot of memoirs. Obviously, there are niche memoirs that are only for a small number of people, but many times, when you’re very clear about who your audience is, there is broader appeal.

What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo is a great example. She is very clear about who her audience is, what she’s talking about, what her essential question is—what I often call the essential question, and what you call the premise.

She takes us on the journey she went through to answer that question: What is CPTSD, and how do I heal from it? She was very clear. And that book was a New York Times bestseller.

There are lots of people who’ve read that book who do not have complex PTSD and who are simply interested in how she was able to tell that story.

Wendy Dale [24:32]
 Yeah. And I also think that if you’re incredibly personal, it will resonate with a lot of people. What I tell the people I work with is that there are only so many emotions a human being can feel.

So, if you are really sincere on the page and you give me that subjective writing, I may not know what it’s like to be a little girl with Korean parents suffering physical abuse—but I absolutely know what it’s like to feel fear, to feel pain, to feel like nobody cares.

Being really personal does make it universal. It gives it broader appeal, absolutely.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [25:23]
 One of the things you talk about in your book—and one of the questions you love to answer—is how to affect your reader with your scene writing. Because that is an art form.

I think that speaks directly to what we’re talking about in terms of appeal: how do you write in a subjective way that is so effective that I feel your feelings?

That’s different from the writer feeling a lot while they’re writing. Those two things are not always the same. Sometimes they are—but not always.

Wendy Dale [26:02]
 That is so true. I will often get someone who says, “I cried when I wrote this,” and I’ll read it and think, well, I’m not crying.

A lot of the difficulty in memoir writing is that you’re recalling incredibly painful events—sometimes from childhood, from earlier in your life. The memory is what makes this difficult for you. But that emotion is not necessarily on the page.

And then there’s the opposite problem—it can be too much. It can be overwhelming.

One of the things I really love about Stephanie Foo’s book is that she found that balance. There’s no self-pity. It’s hard to write a book about physical abuse as a child.

Lisa Cooper Ellison
 Yeah.

Wendy Dale
 She did an incredible job. She found that balance where it’s not overwhelming, it’s not depressing. One of the things I tell people is: it’s okay to make your reader sad, but you don’t want to depress them.

Finding that balance is really delicate, because it’s easy to bleed on the page.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [27:07]
 Yes. And I think that leads to the idea of scenic writing versus a scene, right?

A scene is where something happens that creates transformation, that moves the story forward. Details are important, but we don’t need that many—we need the right ones.

When we’re thinking about trauma in particular, that’s where people can bleed all over the page by sharing too many details of whatever the gruesome thing is.

There are lots of awful things that happen to people—categorically awful—and readers can connect with them. But if you give them all the details, they’re going to relive it in a way that’s overwhelming and not useful.

So how do you find the right details that move the story forward without overwhelming people with a kind of trauma-porn info dump?

Wendy Dale [28:06]
 I’m glad you brought up What My Bones Know, because I often use that memoir as an example of how to open up a difficult story.

You’ve worked with people whose memoirs are way too open—everything they did from age six to age fifty. It becomes a mishmash of a whole life, and that’s really challenging.

But the opposite can also be true: abuse scene, abuse scene, abuse scene. We’re at the other end of the continuum.

What Stephanie Foo does is open up the story. She uses a time period in her life. I don’t know how she arrived at that, but when I work with people, I’ll ask: What is the time period you’re writing about?

Her first chapter is about camp, right? She tells the story of camp.

Now, she absolutely has to bring in her relationship with her mother or the abuse in some way, or a reader would think, you’re just telling me some random story from your childhood. And in her book, there is always some connection to her parents and some physical abuse.

But the story is bigger than abuse. It’s camp. Then it’s living with her dad. It’s been a while since I read the book, but there’s this larger narrative frame.

So, it becomes a book about childhood abuse that is actually very easy to read, because I’m reading a story about camp. Her mother shows up and makes things difficult—but I still have the camp story.

That’s very different from what I call an “example memoir,” where it’s example after example after example of being bullied or abused. That’s hard to read.

Open up those difficult stories, and your reader will stay with you.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [30:18]
 And I think the more you can zoom in and zoom out, the better. That’s something she does beautifully.

I suspect working at This American Life helped. She’s excellent at shaping narrative. She zooms into her personal experience and then zooms out to talk about the diaspora in Southeast Asia, intergenerational trauma, the model minority myth—how children from specific Asian communities are often not seen as having trauma because of stereotypes.

She’s able to weave those layers together. She gives us frames that are about more than abuse. That creates levity and lightness that isn’t inauthentic.

And I think that’s important, because when writers—especially those working with traumatic material—hear the word levity, they think they have to make something nice happen. They try to manufacture it on the page, and it falls flat. It feels inauthentic—because it is.

And sometimes they feel resentful, like they’re being asked to make something unfairly palatable.

I don’t know if you’ve experienced that with—

Wendy Dale [32:09]
 I just nodded at everything you said. This is so much fun for me to talk to you, Lisa —genuinely.

What I see a lot is people writing about their childhood—people who had a difficult childhood—writing about their parents and feeling this need to say, well, my dad wasn’t all bad. And it can feel somewhat forced, right?

Lisa Cooper Ellison
 Yes.

Wendy Dale
 They’re feeling guilty, and they’re like, well, he wasn’t all bad. So, I see that a lot, and it often comes across as insincere.

And I think a better solution—because they’re worried about something genuine: that it’s too dark, it’s too heavy—you know, my dad wasn’t all bad—a better option is to open up the story. Then, instead of mentioning some good and then keeping it focused on all these things your dad did to you—like including one good one among the five bad ones—a better option is to just open up the story.

Write about summer camp. Write about all the things you did at summer camp, and then that time your dad came and embarrassed you. Obviously, I’m borrowing from Stephanie Foo—and it wasn’t her father, it was her mother—but you know what I mean. It’s a better option.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [33:16]
 Yeah. So, opening up the story is an option.

What do you think about transitional material—the role of transitional material in dealing with issues like this? When we’re dealing with a story that’s too heavy, or helping to guide people in a specific direction, versus just giving them all kinds of examples.

Because I feel like I’ve read a lot of manuscripts, and there are two ways they tend to have issues. One is having all of these scenes that are really vivid, but I can’t see how they’re going together. It’s the this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened issue.

But there are other times when there’s so much transitional material that I feel like I’m being lectured to, and I lose interest in the book because there’s too much exposition.

So, when I think of transitional material, I think of the telling—like the exposition—which is absolutely needed. But how do we balance that?

And when you’re talking about transitional material, can you tell us a little more about it so writers can wrap their minds around it?

Wendy Dale [34:34]
 So for me, it’s not a percentage, right? It’s not about finding the perfect balance.

The problem I see is that people use these two components in the wrong way. That’s when your reader gets frustrated.

I’ve seen books that have little, tiny scenes and long bits of transition writing, and they work. An example is Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett—well-respected, active novelist. I think her memoir is great. She has long chunks of transitions and little, tiny scenes—mini scenes—that are half a page long.

And then I’ve seen the opposite: people have almost no transition writing, and it’s almost exclusively scene. Both of these can work.

When I see the problem happen, it’s when people put the wrong information in either their transitions or their scenes. They mix up these two components, which are doing very different things for their book—and which have to sound different.

Now, the reader doesn’t notice that they sound different, so they shouldn’t sound dramatically different. Though I will say—since we’re talking about What My Bones Know—Stephanie Foo has a really distinct voice between the transitions and the scenes. She uses her older, wiser narrator, and it sounds very different.

Most books, you don’t have such a difference between the transitions and the scenes.

So, I know exactly what you’re talking about—when it feels like the writer is lecturing. I call it describing their lives. They go on and on and tell us all this stuff they did and all this stuff about their life. But they’re describing and telling—they’re not putting us there with you.

So, the problem is not transition writing. It’s what’s going in the transition, right?

Lisa Cooper Ellison [36:10]
 Yes.

Wendy Dale [36:12]
 What needs to go in your transition writing are ideas. Ideas—a point you’re making. Transition writing can be beautiful. It can be really rich. You can get these bigger ideas into your book—bigger themes, bigger ideas. I actually love transition writing.

The problem is when you start telling me about things you did or things that happened to you in your transitions. Things that happen belong in your scene.

There’s something really fascinating—I use this example with clients: So last Thursday, I went to Target… Don’t you want to say, okay—what happened? Right? You want me to tell you the story.

So, what I see in transition writing a lot is people say, well, that summer I went to Europe, and then we went— and they go on and on. And it’s like, wait—last summer you went to Europe. Stop.

Anytime something happens in your book, your reader expects to live through it in the form of a scene.

So, the problem I see is that people start telling me all this stuff that happened to them, all this stuff they did, and they put it in their transitions—and it creates that effect you’re talking about. It feels like someone is just describing their life, and you lose interest so quickly.

This is why it’s so important to understand what your transitions do for your book and what your scenes do. I don’t care how long your transitions are or how long your scenes are, as long as you’re using them in the right way, you won’t drive your reader crazy.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [38:04]
 Yes. So, what I want all of you listeners to do is write these things down.

And of course, you know these are simple answers, but there’s always more to it. That’s why reading books like The Memoir Engineering System is so important—because that’s how you internalize this information: by reading the book and really thinking, okay, what was it that Wendy said? How does that work in a book?

Then go look for it in published memoirs—but also look for it in your own writing and in your peers’ writing.

Have critique partners you’re working with where you can read some of their work—even if you decide you don’t want a formal feedback session—but you’re getting a chance to read through things and hear what works and what doesn’t.

And then ask yourself the question: Why? Why does this work? Why doesn’t this work for me? And how is this showing up in my own writing?

Wendy Dale [39:13]
 Great. Absolutely. I couldn’t have said it better, Lisa. Absolutely.

I do try to make the process faster. I really do believe in concepts that I had to learn by trial and error. So, my enemy is writing by trial and error. And the way to avoid that is understanding how story works—understanding what a scene is doing for your book, understanding how to write to the main event, understanding what kind of transition you actually need.

That speeds up this process by so many years. So, I really do believe in concepts—

Lisa Cooper Ellison [39:53]
 Yes. And I love that you’re about speeding up the process.

Because I do think there are some stories that take a long time to tell—because it takes a long time for the person to have the insights to be able to write the story. That can certainly happen.

In the same way that it took you fiffteen years to write the book, even though you said once you did all the work, the writing happened.

But if you understand the streamlined process, if it can go faster, it will go faster. And nine times out of ten, it can go faster.

And the thing you don’t want is to spend your entire life on one book and feel like you still don’t have it done.

Wendy Dale [40:42]
 Yeah. Speaking to that, I find it’s less about the insights. Now, it does take some time to get to the insight—I think that’s almost more of an age thing, or the number of years since the events have happened. You need to be ready to actually write this book.

But the problems I see—because I’ve had people working on their books for twenty, even twenty-five years—and they come to me struggling less with what they want to say and more with how to say it.

The problem is they’ve come up with more and more pages. Now they have 2,000 pages, and now they have a new problem: they don’t know what’s good and what isn’t good, and they don’t know what to cut down.

So, I find a bigger problem is people not knowing what’s good—not knowing what makes a memoir good.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [41:34]
 One of the differences between fiction writing and memoir writing is that most memoirists come to the process with something powerful that has happened to them—a personal story they want to tell—and not a lot of writing experience.

Whereas fiction writers are like, okay, I’m going to be a writer, so I’m going to learn the storytelling process. It’s just a different mindset, I find.

Wendy Dale [42:06]
 That’s a really interesting point. Yes.

A lot of people reach a certain point in their life, and they want to chronicle their life—and you have a lot of non-writers with this noble goal—and they don’t quite realize what they’re in for, right?

I sometimes say it’s a little bit like not knowing how to play the flute and expecting to put it up to your mouth and play a Beethoven symphony. You need to learn how to play the flute. You need to learn how to write. You need to learn what makes for a good story.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [42:40]
 Yes. And what I often tell people, to give themselves a little grace, is that it’s like hearing the flute and knowing what a flute sounds like but never having picked one up—and then suddenly expecting yourself to be able to emulate that sound.

So, many people have been highly productive, highly successful in their lives. They’re smart. They’re dedicated. They want to do the work. They’ve been writing sentences and speaking language their whole life—and they don’t recognize there’s a difference between writing beautiful emails or communicating through language in other ways and telling a story.

Those are two totally different things. You have to learn the mechanics and the schematics of how stories work so that you can do that.

Wendy Dale [43:33]
 Well, absolutely. Even writing a blog—a blog is not the same as writing a memoir.

There is this attitude—it’s unlike any other art form, right? There’s this idea that, oh, well, I’ve been writing. I’ve been speaking sentences my whole life. I’ve been writing letters. How hard could it possibly be to write?

Well, it’s the same—how hard—

I compare it to people going to a ballet class for the first time. The teacher doesn’t say, you know, just jump around the room. You’ll figure it out eventually. You are taught skills. And the same is true with writing.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [44:12]
 Well, if people want to connect with you, learn more about The Memoir Engineering System—and, most importantly, read it so they can really internalize these concepts—what are the best ways for people to connect with you?

Wendy Dale [44:27]
 So I coach people—my company is called Memoir Writing for Geniuses. You can find me at GeniusMemoirWriting.com. You can also find me at FreeMemoirClass.com, where you can sign up for a free seven-part memoir class.

Googling my book is probably the easiest way to find it: The Memoir Engineering System.

And I also have a YouTube channel, and I try to put out a new video once a week. The YouTube channel is also called Memoir Writing for Geniuses.

It’s tongue-in-cheek, by the way. Some people think it’s serious. I created this name a long time ago when the “For Dummies” books were all the rage, so Memoir Writing for Geniuses is really tongue-in-cheek.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [45:14]
 Well, it’s also memorable. So, kudos to you for finding something that works—and plays on the “For Dummies” series, which, I don’t know, can be surprisingly good. I was shocked by that. My dad swears by them. I’m like, All right, Dad.

Wendy Dale [45:31]
 Yeah, they’re not bad. They’re very simple, easy to understand—absolutely.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [45:37]
 It has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show and to talk with you about this. It’s so exciting to talk with someone who speaks the language and wants to talk about this with the same level of enthusiasm as I bring to it.

I’m going to give you the last word, but before I do, I’m just going to say thank you so much for being here today. So, what would you like to say to wrap up?

Wendy Dale [46:10]
 The last word I would say: thank you so much for having me. Keep in mind: write your memoir but remember that it’s not the story of your life. You want your book to read like a novel.

 

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Lisa Cooper Ellison

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