I found that writing my memoir during National Novel Writing Month was surprisingly similar to my experience of writing novel first drafts. Even though I knew what would happen in my life, there was still the anxiety of wondering whether or not it would work as a story. I also didn’t know exactly which incidents would make it into the memoir. And for many that did, my feelings about them or their meaning for me changed in the process of writing about them.  I should have expected this and should also have found it exciting, since exploration is part of the fun of writing, but exploring so close to home was uncomfortable.

This, for me, was a difference between writing fiction and memoir. Even when my fictional characters undergo worse things than I did, I’m only sharing their experience vicarously. Re-living the worst year of my life wasn’t fun, which made NaNoWriMo useful as a device to propel me through the draft and for providing a short term deadline — I knew I’d be done with it in a few weeks.

The obvious difference between memoir and fiction is that memoir is true, while fiction is made up.  These had pluses and minuses for the two genres.

Since I don’t write novels from an outline, the memoir facts felt like a safety net. I didn’t have to tax my brain to come up with the next event and be concerned about events being believable. The memoir includes coincidences that novel readers might question and doesn’t fully show why certain unexplanable things happened. If the reader trusts me as a writer, he or she will have to accept the memoir events as as true.

The downside of memoir, of course, is that I can’t make it up. This is where I ran into the biggest problem with the book. The first part went fine and progressed to a mid-point climax, after which the story’s narrative drive plummetted as my real life moved less grippingly. I don’t know how to fix this. One solution would be to make it a much shorter story, ending with that first climax followed by brief denoument. But that isn’t the whole story. It’s only true as far as it goes and would leave out a lot of what I want to say. The alternate approach is to insert drive to the second part to maintain reader interest. In a novel, this is no problem – my imagination is the limit. I could have a flood strike (believably) and in the course of my further struggles I’ll learn part 2 of my life lesson.

Another limiting factor for memoir is concern about hurting other people. While I anticipated this being an issue for the larger memoir events, I found it also applied to some less significant ones. The problem is that altering or omitting facts to protect others can harm the story’s truth, reduce its narrative impact, and lose readers’ trust if they feel you’re keeping things from them.

Both novels and memoir deal with theme; what the story means, its main message, what it’s striving to say. While theme is important to a novel, from my brief experience, I would say that theme matters more in a memoir since it’s really what the story is about. Unless you’re famous or your prose is outstanding, what the memoir says that’s a new or different will be what makes it sell. In a novel, the message has been said before.  Freshness comes from the colour — characters, plot, original settings.

An advantage I appreciate for memoirs is that they tend to be shorter than novels. This was certainly so for me. With my novel drafts, it’s been an effort to get them down to 100,000 words. My memoir draft came in at 31, 327 words. Reasons for this included such things as (1) the memoir is only about me. In a novel, I’d be exploring other characters, perhaps with alternating points of view, or throw in a murder I would have to solve and, in the process, come to terms with my problem (which might work better than a flood to give my memoir’s second half a narrative drive). (2) Shorter scenes also contributed to my memoir’s brevity. In a novel, I can easily imagine long dialogue exchanges between my characters. My memories contain, at most, a few lines of what people said.

Both genres have their challenges. I still prefer writing fiction, but feel a tug to make this memoir work. I’m reading more memoirs and looking at them with writerly interest to see how they’re put together and might show me a way out of the problems with my NaNoWriMo first draft.

Who knew that Graham Greene, a writer I admired when I was younter, wrote a Christmas short story set in Calgary? It sounds creepy, too. Makes me think I should revisit Greene.

Before starting my memoir, I was pretty clear on the difference between memoir and autobiography, mainly thanks to information I’ve absorbed from writer friends working in the genre. But these reminder images don’t hurt, especially since I found that, while writing my memoir, I had a tendency to ‘tell’ (vs. show) more than I do in fiction. In places, I felt like a post-modern narrator commenting from outside the story. I’m not sure this is always wrong for this particular book, but ‘showing’ is usually more powerful.

That I can learn from these image bytes makes me realize I have a lot to learn about writing memoir.

Next week’s post: Memoir vs. Fiction

Here’s a writer’s view of boomtown in the early 20th century, with a photo of a never realized plan of Calgary as ‘Vienna on the Bow.’ Anyone up for the Blue Bow Polka?

Author Dale Lee Kwong’s Calgary story is a heart-wrenching search for her past.

Author Bruce Hunter wrote about Calgary metaphorically in his story set in the early 1960s, when the neighbourhood of Ogden was at the southeast edge of the city. I live south of Ogden and Calgary stretches way to the south and east of my home.

Fall 2003 to Spring 2014 was my mystery writing decade. Naturally, there were breaks for holidays and personal matters, but most of my writing hours were spent on Deadly Fall and its sequels.

In 2009, a longer break provided the time to start the new To Catch a Fox. I wrote my protagonist Julie and her stepsister onto the plane to California. They found their way to the Italian-styled retreat.

At this point in the writing, I attended the 10 day summer Sage Hill Writing Experience Fiction Colloquium facilitated by author Catherine Bush. The colloquium gave me writing time to finish the draft and Catherine’s feedback assured me my new concept wasn’t totally off-base. Her comments launched me into the second draft, which I completed that fall.

The next spring Deadly Fall‘s acceptance by TouchWood Editions shifted me back to mystery. I spent the summer working on the manuscript with my editor. In the fall, I polished the mystery sequel, sent it to my publisher and started a third book in the series. Almost three years passed before I returned to the fox.

From winter to spring 2013, I finished the third draft and applied once again to the Sage Hill Fiction Colloquium, this time with facilitator Lawrence Hill. This would be my third visit to Sage Hill and I find its isolated and enclosed environment condusive to writing and learning. Hill’s critique helped me improve  the book and my writing skills. His advice at the end of the program was, after my next draft, to get a manuscript evaluation from the Writers Union.

It took me a year and a half to finish the fourth draft, largely due to pulls to the mystery side. My publisher was leaving to join a new company. She had problems with both of my sequels and didn’t feel she could recommend it to her successor. I talked this over with my friend and mystery author Eileen Coughlan, who gave me a clue for a fresh start. I wrote a new first chapter, moved the former opening to chapter three and quickly edited the rest of the novel to make sure the whole worked.

With draft # 4 complete, I looked into the Writers Union Manuscript Critique service, which functions anonymously. The writer doesn’t put her name on the manuscript and doesn’t know who the evaluator is. I’m sure there are advantages to this approach, but I decided that for the same cost I’d rather go with a writer/editor I knew. Among other things, there might be some back and forth comments and clarifications after the evaulation was done.

I stumbled upon author-editor Pearl Luke, whose novel I had enjoyed in the past. Pearl’s comments on my manuscript were both encouraging and a challenge.  I also gave the novel to my two critique group writer-friends. I revised the book based on Pearl’s remarks and asked two relatives who are avid readers to review the manuscript. The husband of one of them got a hold of it and provided feedback too. Then, a friend from an email writing group suggested we exchange our work and I gave her the first 200 pages to critique.

It wasn’t easy to assemble this multitude of varied remarks and decide which to accept, which to reject (at least for now) and which to use in a modified way. Editing isn’t my favourite summer project, but I didn’t want to delay this to fall or later. Somehow, I managed to get the job done while enjoying a summer of outdoor activities and visits from family and friends. Getting up two hours earlier than ususal a few mornings helped. Who needs sleep?

At the summer’s end, I had a manuscript that I believed was as good as I could get it for now and ready to send to the world.

In a way, it feels like I’ve been working on To Catch a Fox forever. The novel has been there in some form since almost the beginning of my writing career, even when I put it in the drawer.

On the other hand, the current story feels like it was written in my spare time, during the breaks from my main job of writing murder mystery.

Sometimes the real stuff happens when you aren’t looking.

Will Calgary will always be a little out of sync with the rest of Canada? Alberta author and Alberta Views humour columnist Fred Stenson tells us why he thinks this.

In the earlier versions of To Catch a Fox, Julie travelled from Toronto to Vancouver to search for her mother. Now that I had moved from eastern Canada to Calgary, I envisioned her living in my current city. Vancouver, just over the mountains, didn’t feel far enough for her quest.

I was pondering such draft basics after returning from a holiday in Italy. Tuscany would be an appealing setting. Guests at my story retreat would be largely North American transplants, so I could use this exotic location without having to research local culture too much. Except, I couldn’t see Julie hopping on a plane to cross an ocean based on the minimal information she’d have.

My husband Will and I were planning a trip to Los Angeles the next winter. Southern California was the sort of place people went to escape the past and find opportunity. Its meditteranean climate was similar to Italy’s.

In the 1950s, industrialist J. Paul Getty began work on a villa in Pacific Palisades modelled on a country home in ancient Rome.  I decided my story retreat could be a similar Italianesque fantasy planted a two or three hour drive south of LA.

On the holiday, Will and I toured prospective locations and chose one near mountains in the orange belt. We also visited the Getty Villa when we stayed in nearby Santa Monica. The apartment we rented inspired another setting in the book.

Previously, Julie had travelled alone on her journey. This time, she’d have a side-kick, a stepsister Delilah with whom she has a prickly relationship. In the old versions, Julie’s father and stepmother had only appeared in flashbacks. Now they would be in the main storyline.

During the novel’s eight or so years in the drawer, Julie had aged six years, from 32 two to 38. Her maturity gained her a husband, Eric, a dentist/poet. They had separated about ten months before the story start due to Julie’s psychological problems. In versions one and two, she’d suffered from depression. I now thought this might be too ordinary. Psychotic would add interest.

From my work in genre fiction, I’d learned about the need to raise the stakes and challenge your protagonist to the core.  Mentors advised, make things as bad as you can for her, then make it worse. Since Julie’s main issues related to her mother, I gave her a child she had trouble mothering. Psychosis … troubled mother … Women who kill their children.

Their actions so rare and beyond the pale always shocked me and everyone else. It was unfathomable, intriguing. As I mulled this, I could see how Julie attempting to drown her child would work in the novel. I’d find it hard, if not impossible, to create sympathy for her character, but the idea was there and it would be cowardly to scrap it for that reason.

Multiple viewpoints would help. If readers hated Julie, they might stay the course with one of the other viewpoint characters, whose reliablity would balance Julie’s sometimes skewed observations. My villains would be narrators too, so readers would know what they were up to and worry about Julie. I hoped.

Before starting to write, I also contemplated the novel’s structure. Around the 1/4 point,  Julie and Delilah would board a plane for California. Around story mid-point, they’d arrive at the Italianesque retreat. How they got there and what happened along the way would come out in the writing of the story.

Next week, the twelfth and final installment of my writing journey: How to Write a Novel in Your Spare Time.

Whenever I drive to Westhills Shopping Centre, I’m always intrigued by the numbers on Signal Hill. So was Calgary native and author Ellen Kelly for personal reasons that she spent a lifetime figuring out.