Let Me Tell You a Story…

Posted on August 13, 2019 Updated on August 15, 2019

Writing a Memoir? Apply the essentials of fiction-writing to bring your story to life.
If you’re writing a memoir, make sure your story takes readers on a journey they won’t forget. Remember, to your readers your memoir is just a story, and YOU are just a character. A great memoir invites a reader into its story world just like fiction does. Readers will (or not) emotionally engage with the unique quest, struggle, ups and downs, and the wonderment of it all. Don’t embellish, don’t lie or mess with the facts, just tell your story honestly and in a way that only you can. Remember, the facts in the story are as you remember them, they may not, and usually don’t, encompass the entire truth, just your truth, and that’s what you’re writing.
One way to create your unique story world perspective is to introduce captivating setting details and develop an intriguing plot for your memoir. In the details is where even the most mundane can come to life. Remember, ‘show don’t tell’ your readers the places you describe and arouse emotions within them. They need to experience your story, almost as if it was their own. Pretend you are sitting at your kitchen table and you say to your readers, let me tell you a story…

For example, I’m working on a memory of mine;

When I was seventeen, my dad took me to a dirt-floored nightclub in a barn on Division Street in Portland Oregon. It was called the ‘D Street Corral’. I remember staring at the entrance, an actual barn with barn-red doors and stacks of hay outside where people stood in line to get in. “Are we goin’ to a rodeo?” I asked. “Cause I don’t like rodeos.”
“You’ll like this one.” Dad said. He lit a filter-less Camel cigarette and we got out of the

car.
Inside it was dark, it looked like a rodeo place with all the stuffed deer, and huge bull horns hanging over the stage.
Hundreds of people gathered at the long bar, small round tables clustered near the stage where a man, a large black man was tuning his guitar, unmindful of the congregating crowd. Dad stepped over to the busy bar and got two bottles of Coke, because they didn’t’ sell alcohol. I remember the waitress, a pretty black-haired girl no more than twenty-three or four, flirting with him. He winked and returned to where I stood. Women and girls, flirted with dad all the time. It rolled off him like water. He’d give that wink, they’d smile, and in that innocent exchange both parties got what they desired, a blameless flirtation. I knew it then, I know it now, though my green-eyed mother never understood that he didn’t invite these flirtations: he was as oblivious to them as that man on stage tuning his guitar.
I wore my jeans, strappy platform shoes, my fringy-suede vest, and a flower-power blouse like I’d seen Julie (Peggy Lipton) on Mod Squad wearing – at seventeen, she was my fashion idol. And of course, my sunglasses stayed on top my head, holding my long hair back, just like Julie’s. On Fridays, I worked for Dad at our downtown Portland shoe shop. Sometimes after work, we stopped somewhere so he could have a quiet drink, me a coke, and maybe have something to eat before going home to a bucket of Kentucky fried chicken, my rambunctious three younger brothers and my mother’s impossible to anticipate, shifting, diet-pill induced moods.
Dad went up to a table right next to the stage where two guys were seated, he leaned down and said something to them, then took out his money clip and handed them a crisp ten-dollar-bill. They stood. At first, I thought they looked angry and that maybe dad was gonna get into a fight.
But then one said, “Your daughter, well…” they looked at me and smiled, “Happy twenty-first birthday.” And they left. We sat at the table right at the edge of the stage. Those peanut shells on the floor kept getting into my cool platform shoes and cutting at my feet. It hurt. I thought, what would Julie do? Yes, I was that corny and tragically trying to be cool at seventeen. Well, Julie would act like nothing was wrong, even if her foot was bleeding. So, I kicked off my shoes and propped my feet on the chair next to me. Dad smiled, we toasted, clinking our bottles together as the lights went down. The crowd hushed, and that large man on stage stepped up to the microphone and didn’t say a word, but the next few seconds I quickly recognized the beginning guitar notes of ‘The Thrill is Gone’. I leaned across the table to my dad who was nodding his head and had a smile on his face like I’d never seen on him before. I almost didn’t’ want to intrude, but then said, “Is that…?”
“Yep.” He said, still nodding, still smiling. “BB King.”
That was the night, the place, the song and the surprising blues-loving man I was with, when I was introduced to the blues.
Later, in my twenties I returned to ‘D Street’ on many Saturday nights to hear bands like Vegas and Paul Revere and the Raiders, because no matter how ‘Julie’ cool I tried to be, my favorites songs were ‘Kicks’ and ‘Indian Reservation.’ We danced our butts off. But there was never a night there more special than the one I spent with dad, sipping a beer and listening to BB King.

TELL your readers a story, don’t leave out the details like rocks in your shoes, smells, sights, sounds and sacred memories.

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