A sound premise and compelling themes are undoubtedly the hallmarks of great writing. In another addition to the series on literary themes and premise, I’d like you to join me in welcoming Kathleen Pooler.
Kathy’s bio
Kathy is a writer and a retired Family Nurse Practitioner who is working on a memoir about how the power of hope through her faith in God has helped her to transform, heal and transcend life’s obstacles and disappointments: divorce, single parenting, loving and letting go of an alcoholic son, cancer and heart failure to live a life of joy and contentment. She believes that hope matters and that we are all strengthened and enlightened when we share our stories. One of her stories, The Stone on the Shore, is published in the anthology: The Woman I’ve Become: 37 Women Share Their Journeys From Toxic Relationships to Self-Empowerment, by Pat LaPointe. Kathleen blogs weekly at her Memoir Writer’s Journey blog and can be found on Twitter @kathypooler and on LinkedIn, Google+, Goodreads and Facebook.
Kathy on her work-in-progress memoir
If I stacked up the pages of book summaries along with the chapters I have written over the past three years, I’m convinced the pile would hit the ceiling. The main message or theme of my work-in-progress memoir has changed that many times. In fact, the more I wrote, the more it changed because the story unfolded as I wrote. It revealed itself and all I had to do is show up and trust in the process. I also did use some specific techniques along the way to hone in on my story and its main message: outlining, storyboarding, drawing mandalas, writing classes and exercises. The story I started out writing three years ago has unfolded into a completely different story.
When I submitted my first draft manuscript to Manuscript Consultant, Dale Griffiths Stamos in October, 2012, she immediately identified that I had two memoirs. My first w.i.p. memoir is currently in Dale’s hands for a first revision review. The working title is Choice and Chances: My Jagged Journey to Self. I’m aiming for mainstream publication and I’m willing to take the time I need to write it right. No doubt, it will go under the knife in some areas and will need resuscitation in other areas.
The themes and premise of Kathy’s memoir
After many rewrites, I finally found my theme and I’d like to share some lessons I have learned about finding the gist of my story:
Connect with your purpose for writing – once you discover the reason you want to tell your story, your theme becomes clear: We all have a story within but not everybody wants to share their story in writing. When I looked around at the life of joy and peace I was living, I realized I wanted to share my hope with others—no matter how difficult your life challenges may be, there is hope in new beginnings. I feel very connected to that core message as I write.
Define what’s in it for the reader – how can my experiences help the reader understand theirs? My story has to be worth my reader’s time and attention so it is up to me to invest in being clear on my message and how I will deliver it. How I shape my story using specific techniques beyond citing life events will either invite my reader along in my journey or have them putting my book down to engage in other activities such as laundry, cleaning the house, going to the gym, etc.
Define what your story is about – be able to relay it in the form of a question that the story has to answer (here’s mine): How does a young woman who came from a loving, stable family make so many wrong choices when it came to love that she ended up having to flee with her children from an abusive marriage?
http://www.dreamstimefree.com
“Road in the Forest”
Define the theme and sub-themes, also called threads that drive your story – this will help you set up the conflict and tension that will move your story along:
- PREMISE: For every choice you make, there is a chance you take. Finding your voice will help you make healthy choices that give you better chances for happiness in life.
- MAIN THEMES: Love, Choices, Finding Voice, Hope.
- SUB-THEMES (THREADS):
Roots- the roots that do not seem to prepare the main character for the real world become the anchors in finding voice.
Traditional Values vs Career- conflicts set against the culture of the times ( 60s and 70s).
Faith- superficial and sporadic; Catholic faith both stymies and supports choices.
Codependency/Alcoholic Spouse- consequences of not setting healthy boundaries- divorce, single-parenting, abuse.
Empowerment- finding voice to take charge of choices and improve chances for happiness.
Weave the threads throughout each chapter – make sure they tie back to the main question: This is where the phrase “kill your darlings” comes into play. If the scenes do not feed into the main theme, they have to go. The main question becomes your guiding light.
Go with the flow and trust in the process of telling your story – show up, write and be open to what the story wants to tell you: Now that I have my themes and threads and have shaped my slice of life into a story, I will work on polishing and refining it using my main question as my guiding light.
Here is an excellent post on theme of memoir by Brooke Warner of SheWritesPress which includes a link to The National Association of Memoir Writers roundtable discussion podcast with Linda Joy Myers.
Remember, effective book publicity relies on strong promotional messages, which are extracted from the themes contained in your writing that, collectively, make up the premise of the story.
Promotional opportunities for Kathy’s book
Since my premise is about finding your voice so that better choices can lead to improved chances for happiness, promotional activities will center around people who have suffered the consequences of not finding or honoring their voices, with a focus on the alcoholic spouse, abuse, divorce and single-parenting. As a woman, I speak from a women’s point of view but do not intend to exclude men from my target audience. Underlying any discussions would be the power of hope to overcome difficulties and find happiness.
Potential community groups to speak to are:
- High schools to address responsible life choices with teens.
- Alanon to discuss self-awareness about co-dependency.
- Single Parent groups to discuss parenting and relationship issues.
- Church groups to address the role of faith in making choices.
- Domestic Violence Shelters to address the battered spouse syndrome and cycle of abuse.
Join me as I discuss the need for compelling themes and a sound premise with published and newbie authors over the next few months. If you want to participate as a guest blogger in this series, please do not hesitate to contact me for details. You can also participate by leaving a comment for Kathy below.
Excellent advice, Kathy. I can’t wait to read your memoir! I have loved walking side by side with you every step the way in your second career and calling! Thanks, Belinda, for bringing us another inspirational blog filled with writing tips.
Hi Pat, you’re welcome, and thanks for participating. I have no doubt that Kathy has a host of fans who are keeping their eyes peeled for the long-awaited Pooler memoir.
Aww, Belinda, you are too kind but I truly appreciate your encouragement and support as well as the opportunity to participate in such a worthwhile series on your blog. It was challenging and clarifying for me and I hope it will be for others as well. Thanks!
I believe in the series too, because everyone brings their own special perspective to the topic – the learning never ends and neither should it – thank you for sharing your wisdom.
Pat, Thank you so much for stopping by and for offering your endless support and encouragement. It has been fun sharing this journey with you and I am looking forward to reading your memoir as well. This exercise of writing out the gist of my story was very helpful to me and I’m happy you found it helpful, too.
Kathy … I loved the bit about all the pages stacked up to the ceiling. I cannot tell you how many thousands of words I wrote for my novel that will never see the light of day … or at least not in this novel. But for beginning writers (I still consider myself a newbie), it takes all the pages to come to an understanding of what your premise really is, and what themes you want to/need to deal with.
I am looking forward to reading your memoir when it comes out.
Hi Mary, Thanks so much for stopping by. I appreciate your comments about the volume of writing that seems to be necessary before identifying themes and premise. I also find it interesting that many memoir writers seem to turn to fiction after publishing their memoir. Best wishes on your novel.You have great preparation having published your memoir. it’s on my list.
Mary, I’m so glad we’ve got the next step of our writing career in common – writing fiction. I look forward to exchanging notes and mutual encouragement. Thanks for stopping by.
I, too, am a writer of many more words than will be in the final manuscript, Kathy. True for my memoir and even more true for my work-in-progress novel. I appreciate the very clear outline you give of premise, main theme, sub themes. Before I launch into my next re-write, I intend to have those plotted out.
Congratulations on getting Choice and Chances in the hands of an editor!
Thanks for stopping by Carol. I can remember deleting certain vignettes from my memoir on my professor’s recommendation (I had the good fortune of a complete revision during one semester of my MFA). Afterwards, I restored some parts because of a silly attachment I had to the content; then I deleted it again, and restored and deleted…until I finally weaned myself off of a big chunk of the memoir. Sometimes writing is such a painful process; other times it’s exhilarating.
Thanks Carol. I appreciate your comments and am happy you enjoyed the post. Good luck with your novel. Like I told Mary, publishing your memoir is great preparation for your fiction project. We all have to use the same techniques to engage the reader as you did so well in Growing Up Country.
Kathy, the visual of the pages stacked to the ceiling makes me laugh in the face of the techno age we live in. However, I too have many pieces of paper lying around that are full of notes and jotted info from the earliest days of the seed of my memoir coming to life. You have given some excellent advice in this post, and I’m tucking it away in Evernote for future reference.
Belinda, I’m enjoying this series and gaining some much needed insight to what I should be doing and will be facing as my project continues to move down the road. Thanks for hosting Kathy, a wealth of experience and advice.
Hey Sherrey,
Always great to have you here; we still need to connect live (last week presented me with some challenges – so sorry about not following through with the idea to try Google Hangout; I’m pretty green with it, so we can practice together; but who know, maybe Skype works better).
I can’t wait for you to get your book underway again, and I’m so glad that some of my efforts are serving you in the process. In fact, I’d love to bounce some ideas off of you about my creative writing guidebook.
Hugs,
Belinda.
Dear Sherrey,
Yes, isn’t it interesting that in this “techno age” I still feel the need to get my hands on a piece of paper,as if to validate my story’s existence. I’m glad you like the post. I’m looking forward to your memoir. You have built up the interest and suspense in your “Letter to Mama” series. Those stories are still with me. Thank you so much for stopping by. I agree , Belinda’s series has been very insightful and informative.
Your comments and ongoing support are very much appreciated. Perhaps our next projects will be fiction as Belinda, Mary and Carol have shown us! It is wonderful to have you”back.”
Kathy has given us a lot to think about and some good pointers to how she works. Whilst I find this fascinating it is also slightly disconcerting because I cannot be as analytical as this when writing. Even when I am editing my work it is difficult to approach it with the kind of dissecting kit Kathy and others use. Perhaps that’s because I never had any writing training and i just rely on what i learned over half a century ago in school.
It is only later, when my books are released and other people point out themes and threads that they become obvious to me. Perhaps this is because I am writing about events that actually happened, not ones that came from my imagination and, unlike Kathy, I’m not trying to share a ‘message’ of hope or anything else. I’m simply painting pictures about people and events. Yes, they do fall into categories like ‘culture’, ‘life style’ and son on, but those are only like colours on my palette, not themes I actively pursue or have intended to push.
I’m not sure what all these new ideas are going to do to my writing style, but it’s all interesting exploration.
Ian, perhaps the difference here is that you had the good fortune to have real-life adventures with all the requisites of a strong story built in as they happened. They were, in true fact, adventures of the finest sort, the kind of which movies are made and we all dream of having. Such tales require little but shaping, and I know that in order to maintain focus, you pruned more than you published. But you did not have to dig to find a theme. Your four volumes of memoir educate as they enthrall, and your four volumes are less about YOU than they are about the subjects. Even your insights relate to the people you hold dear and how you can better help them get the assistance they need and deserve. You do tell us how situations affected you personally, but in terms of emotion, not life change and personal development.
The longer I read memoir, the more aware I’ve become that as there are numerous subcategories of fiction, so there are also many subcategories of memoir. Yours is adventure memoir, Kathy’s and others like hers are primarily inspirational. Both are educational.
BTW, for students of memoir, it’s important to note that each of Ian’s four currently published memoirs uses a different structure. I’ve read and reviewed all of them, and can’t wait for the next to be released!
Thanks Sharon. I had never thought of my life as ‘adventure’. i was just living among people I had grown up with and using the benefit of my education to help them achieve things they needed and wanted. It was only years later that i realised events which i had taken for granted as ‘normal’ were something others were interested in and found exceptional.
Yes, I suppose some of the events were dramatic, but that is a western concept which doesn’t entirely fit their environment, so i have to spend time explaining them. that is proving exceptionally difficult with the new volume, currently being written, which is largely about sorcery. That is something that has a functional place in many parts of African society but is totally alien. Some of what the sorcerers can and do do also stretches belief so making this comprehensible is not easy. I hope to have the m/s written and into editing by Easter.
Sharon, I appreciate the distinction you make about the different purposes and structure for memoir. You have piqued my interest in Ian’s “adventure memoirs”!
Thank you for your interest Kathleen. If you want to know a little more you can look at my website – http://www.ianmathie.com – and you’ll find they are all available on Amazon.
The first one, Bride Price, is now out as an e-book, available through Smashwords until Amazon lick it up and the others will follow over the next few months.
If you read any of them I always welcome comments, questions and feedback.
Thank you, Ian,for the link to your treasure trove of books. What an amazing achievement. I will check them out and look forward to delving into the Africa experience.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your interesting perspective, Ian. Judging from reviews of your work that I have read, it appears that your writing accomplishes what we all hope to achieve- an engaged, entertained and satisfied reader. I appreciate your qualms about an analytical approach and would like to underscore that we all have our own systems that work. What I list has worked for me so far in terms of defining what my story is about and who my target audience is.The real proof about whether it works or not will be determined by my reader. I am hopeful I can accomplish what you have as a published author. I agree this has been an “interesting exploration”and we can all learn so much from sharing our views. Thanks!
Thanks for the kind words about my writing and what it has accomplished. It is always gratifying when fellow writers, who understand what writing is all about, feel that I have managed to tell my tale in a manner that gives them something they can appreciate and understand.
I’m interested that you speak of ‘defining your audience’ and realise that this is something I have never bothered to do. This might be remiss of me and makes me wonder if I should give more thought to who might eventually read my work and concentrate less on just writing the story. Then I might sell more copies!
My one hangup in considering the audience is that much of what I am writing about is going to be totally alien and very strange to almost all my readers. this is because Africa is a continent of so many contradictions and bizarre contrasts. It is somewhere where the impossible is commonplace and the expected seldom happens. As a result I tend to concentrate on trying to make the story accessible rather than worrying about who might read it.
I suppose someone will now tell me this is me considering the audience, but it is really me trying to translate into comprehensible western terms something that is wholly African and needs to be understood intuitively, not rationally.
Either way, it’s good fun writing about it all.
Ian, your comments prompt me to think of two things: good writing will attract readers and it’s not the events in a story that count as much as the way they are written. Perhaps the story will find the audience vs writing for a specific audience? The reader decides. Thanks for prompting such an interesting conversation!
I’m sure you are right, the reader does decide, but first the reader must become aware of an author’s writing. Getting known about in the first place seems to be the biggest hurdle.
Agreed. Therein lies the challenge. Some say write a great book then establish your platform; others say work on your platform for at least three years before your book is launched. Either way, writing a good book is the key.
What is the use of an empty platform?
No one wants an empty platform. Here’s a relevant post on the topic via Rachelle Gardner:
http://www.rachellegardner.com/2013/02/building-a-platform-vs-promoting-a-book/
thanks for the link, It’s fascinating but I shall need to read it ball several times to understand how to apply it and still have even five minutes a week for writing. Those who think an author’s work is only writing ought to read this to realise how little time can actually be afforded for that component,. That’s the easy bit, the rest is hard graft.
You’ve said it, Ian. I release of my memoir last June and I’m only getting back to doing some quality writing now; all my time since then has been focused on marketing. My advice is to work at being relaxed about the learning curves; I believe we do all this stuff instinctively, anyway; and then we start perfecting it when our awareness expands.
I look forward to the birth of my awareness!
I believe all books are infused with the author’s subjective sentiments whether it’s brought about intentionally or happens on a subconscious level. I also believe readers bring their own subjectivity to the content, which is why we often find surprising analysis of our own and other author’s work in academic studies and general feedback, like book reviews.
Kathy, your blog post here and so many in the past remind me of Bible verses assuring us God goes before us and prepares the way for us to go. Similarly, you are going before and preparing the way for so many memoir writers by blogging about you journey through writing and publishing your memoir. Your blog posts are full of specifics that indeed are treasures! I will share with others. Thank you, thank you!
Dear Linda, You are so kind and I appreciate your ongoing support and cheers. I have learned so much from so many, including yourself and I am paying it forward. That is the beauty of community. We gain so much from one another and we are all richer for it. I’m happy you enjoyed the post and appreciate you sharing it. Thank you, thank you in return!
That’s great to hear, Belinda. Thank you for facilitating this important and stimulating discussion.
You’re welcome; I just wish the spammers would stay away
Spammers seem to be attracted to high-traffic sites so you can consider it a compliment of sorts
Oh, good to know, and bless their hearts then – thanks
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I just wanted to let you all know that this series is generating an increasing amount of blog traffic, which is an excellent achievement for all of us, so thank you for your wonderful contributions. I just love the lively discussions and all the learning and mutual support going on here.