Guest Post Writing About Your Family Lessons I Have Learned

Today’s guest post is written by Sharon Hicks, author of How Do You Grab a Naked Lady, a memoir about her life with her bipolar mother. I reviewed the book here. The best way to gain insight into yourself, in my opinion, is by learning about your family, even if what you learn is somewhat painful.

Sharon Hicks

A few years ago, I met with Mother’s psychiatrist, Dr. Amjadi, to ask him a few questions about my mother. I was writing Mother’s story. I wanted to know more about her. Why did he tell me years ago that she was obsessed with knowing the truth? Aren’t we all?  Is obsession a symptom of bipolar? She was diagnosed as manic-depressive with schizophrenic tendencies. What does that mean? Another psychiatrist told me: “Can’t be both.” Could it?

After a few hours of discussion, he said he was amazed that I was writing her story rather than entering a field like psychology or social work that might help me understand mental illness better. Many of the family members of mentally ill patients he had previously encountered had done that. Then, he suggested I make it my memoir: showing the differences between mother and daughter, mentioning the things I had done that mother couldn’t, describing our roles as mother/daughter, etc.

My story! Impossible. She was the colorful, sexy, crazy one; the one arrested over thirty-three times mainly for parading around town naked, in and out of mental hospitals, multiple shock treatments and meds. For Pete’s Sake! She drove around the island in her yellow GS Buick convertible (she named Goose Shit) with the top down, naked. Well, okay, she did wear a yellow Gucci scarf around her neck, but only to blow in the wind. She especially loved coming to a stop sign next to a truck or bus so they could look at her, naked. “Those people can be so stupid. Haven’t they seen a naked body before? Wow, the stop light; ever see anything so fucking red as a blinking red stop light!”  

But, now it was my story. Well, my life with mother: how she was crazy and I was perfect. Heck! I had proof. Mother’s police records, documentations, her audiotapes. And, my senior class voted me Most Ideal and Homecoming Queen. We were clearly opposites! I was determined to prove it.

I wasn’t prepared for the agonizing writing process. The crazy ride on the roller coaster of emotions. Laughing and crying. Pacing, fidgeting and then exhaustion.

I wasn’t prepared for the ending. After the writing, I loved her and connected with her in a way I never did before. After the writing, I learned that the best parts of me were also my mother’s best parts: her inquiring philosophical mind, her raw honesty, her free spirit. And I learned I was not perfect! 

Today, I wish I could reach out, hug her and whisper in her ear: “I can’t possibly understand, but I want you to know I am your biggest ally. I love you.” 

Mother would quote Erhard: “Understanding is the booby prize.” Then she would snicker: “Who gives a shit?”   

Then we both would laugh and eat her “fart” cookies.

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Others ask me to share lessons I learned in writing my memoir. I don’t think any are hazardous, but some may be considered dangerous and scary, like diving into the deep end of a dark lagoon where the monsters live. You really don’t know what lurks in the darkness or crevices of your mind. Give up the fight to be right and know that “What you resist persists.” (Carl Jung) Once you face honesty in the face, humility bathes your body. And, you can shake hands with authenticity.

Lessons I have learned:

Be honest. With each event: what were you doing? Wearing? Thinking? Feeling? Be as honest as you can with each episode. Re-live it!  During the writing I paced, cried, panted, took deep breaths and ate dark chocolate. With your honesty, readers will relate whether they share the same experience or not, much like The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr or Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs.

A memoir (non-fiction) is written as a novel (fiction). Fiction has three parts: The Set Up/Climax/Resolution. A movie producer interested, asked me quickly: “What is Act 1?” I answered: “Growing up with crazy/manic Mother.”  “Act 2?” “Marrying squeaky clean proving I am nothing like Mother.” “Act 3?”  “Discovering I am like my mother. Her best qualities are my best qualities.” He then said he was interested and wanted to read my memoir.

He did offer a movie option. But wait, not so easy: How was my life resolved?  Who am I?  Who is my authentic self? Part 3 was the most difficult to write. To resolve. Oh shit…Mark Twain to the rescue: “It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” Then I relaxed with the understanding that Part 3 is a work in progress.

Focus on what your memoir is about.Write a couple of sentences or what is called an elevator pitch. Write a synopsis of one page to indicate the three parts as described above. Focus.

Legal advice may be neededwhen writing about others. Does writing about this particular incident/person contribute to my story? Will it damage my relationship with this person or harm this other person unduly?

Do your research.Attend Writers Conferences, Storytelling and Writing Workshops. Read. Learn. The best work I read is On Writing by Stephen King.

Focus on writing to one person. I focused writing to my only sibling, my brother who is four years older. David says my book answers many questions in his life and he has a deeper understanding why he does certain things a certain way. And, the biggest bonanza: he now knows me at a deeper level.

Know that there will be questions.I thought after I wrote my memoir, I would feel relief and satisfaction. It was over. The burning desire inside me to write “mother’s story” was finally completed. Published. I could relax. Oh no! The questions keep coming. I am reliving it over and over: painful, yet cathartic, exhausting and consuming. No end to the story.

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My dad told me I broke his heart when I was ten years old. I asked him the most difficult question: “Will I grow up to be like Mother?”  We were driving to the mental hospital to see Mother. I noticed him gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles were white and, looking straight ahead answered in a low voice: “no.”

The question lingered. Others continually asked me the question. Friends, husbands, lovers. “Are you anything like your mother?”  Anger would boil inside me as I answered with a loud “NO. Absolutely not!”  I broke off relationships. He doesn’t even know me. I am perfect. Mother was the crazy one. Screw him.

Today, after publication of How Do You Grab a Naked Lady? I am asked again at book signings, meetings, and interviews; in emails; on face book and twittering, “Are you anything like your mother?”  I answer calmly and proudly:  “I hope so.”   

Sharon L. Hicks is a retired executive living in Honolulu, Hawaii. She is the daughter of businessman and community leader Harold E. Hicks, whose company, Hicks Homes, built over 20,000 affordable pre-designed homes in Hawaii. How to Grab a Naked Lady is her first book, inspired by her mother.  It is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Writing YA Small Behaviors Add Up a little more on showing intense emotions

Last week I blogged about showing emotion through the pacing and organization of narration and characters' inner thoughts. This week, I've been reading the excellent Hold Still by Nina LaCour. It's about a girl grieving after her best friend's suicide. If you're looking for another example of thought disorganization as a demonstration of strong emotion, definitely check out this book. The first few pages in particular are beautifully instructive.

As I was reading this book, I noticed another technique the author uses to demonstrate the character's intense emotions:

Idiosyncratic behaviors.

Let me explain. Caitlin, the MC, begins the book with her response to the news of her best friend's death. And instead of saying, "OMG, I was so devastated," and screaming and crying, Caitlin does this:

But my hands are wild, they need to move, so I pick at a piece of the bench where the wood is splintering. I break a short nail on my right hand even shorter, but I manage to pull off a small piece of wood. I drop it into my cupped palm and pry off another ... My left hand is all the way full of wood now, and it's starting to spill over.

At another point, she does this:

I'm pulling the fake fur from the front seat covers even though I love them. I can't stop my fingers; white tufts are falling everywhere ... the backs of the seat covers are furless. My hand aches.

Whoa. Is this book about a kid with OCD? No! In these moments, the author is showing us just how deeply distressed Caitlin is by having her perform a seemingly purposeless, idiosyncratic behavior. Simple. Concrete. Fascinating. We're not being told Caitlin is crying/moping/sobbing/lamenting. We're being shown that there are things inside her, intense feelings, deep regrets, panic ... all screaming, growing, the pressure building up and ... it comes out in these behaviors. Something tangible. Something observable.

What I love about the way Ms. LeCour does this (there are many other wonderful examples in the book, in addition to it just being a great read) is that it's not expected. It's not stereotypical. It's not predictable. But, at the same time, it is BELIEVABLE.  And I understand. Without being told Caitlin is really, super-duper upset, I totally get it.

Because this is the way human beings actually behave. We don't always know or say exactly how we're feeling. Sometimes there are no words. Sometimes it's not the right time to talk. Sometimes there's so much there that we can't even scream and cry. Sometimes that's just not the type of person we are. But sometimes, those emotions find their way to the surface through our random behaviors.

We pick at things. We move our bodies/fingers/toes/tongues in funny ways. We engage in odd activities and rituals, like scrubbing the dishes clockwise or counting the ceiling tiles. We touch ourselves in ways of which we're not even conscious (hey now, calm down), like tugging at our earlobes or pinching ourselves or pressing our fingers against a hard surface until the tips turn white. No matter what those behaviors are, they can be outlet valves, a pressure release. Things that keep us from exploding or collapsing or becoming completely catatonic. As writers, we can use that understanding to create 3-D characters. And we can use those idiosyncratic behaviors to make those characters stick with the reader long after he/she reads the last page.

How about your characters? How do you SHOW their intense emotions? How do you get beyond the basics--just saying "she was devastated" or "tears poured down her face" or "her head/heart pounded with grief"--and get to something deeper ... and maybe more basic? More believable? More demonstrative? Unique? UNPUTDOWNABLE?

Writing YA Showing Intense Emotions

I've been writing fiction for 13 whole months now (but I wrote about 500K words in the last year. Now THAT was intense). I believe I still have a lot to learn. Want to know one of the first things I learned about writing fiction, though?

Showing is better than telling.

I know, I know. DUH.

And yet, many of us have to work to avoid telling. I beta for some talented writers, and I often peruse samples at the various forums. Uh, and I read my own writing. Even though we all know to show and not tell, most of us have to really think about how to do that.

When it comes to writing strong emotions,  instead of saying our character is scared, we know to describe her physical sensations. We say her heart is pounding. Her palms are sweating. Her ears are ringing. Her breath is sawing in and out of her lungs. Her skin is tingling. Her knees are knocking together. She's trembling. Shaking. Wobbly. Jumpy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes it's hard to come up with different ways of describing an intense emotion, right? Especially since so many of those descriptions are just straight up clichéd. Trust me, I'm right there with y'all.

So here's another way to show a character's intense emotions:

The pacing and organization of the narration or inner thoughts.

I'm taking a page from the haunting Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott. It's about a girl who's been living in the clutches of a sadistic pedophile for years. It is extraordinary. And thoroughly harrowing.

As I was reading Living Dead Girl, I noticed something. Although the entire book is narrated by the MC (the pedophile only calls her "Alice", but I can't bear to) and it's deep in her point of view, she rarely says she's terrified or scared or upset or ... anything. She sometimes talks about what's happening to her body as a result of a strong emotion, but not often, because she's convinced she feels nothing at all. And yet, at certain moments, her terror is obvious.

How? When she's really distressed, dreading what's going to happen or what is happening, her inner thoughts and narration in general become incredibly jumbled. Her sentences run together. They get longer and the punctuation disappears, leaving this:

... and I am talking, babbling, grinding out words through a cracked throat I have a plan never hurt you never leave you love you please love you please ...

and this:

His eyes are gleaming and he stands up and he has been thinking about her while I've been gone and then whispers what he will do to her, what I will help him do ...

I don't need her to tell me she's terrified or full of dread. I can see it. I can FEEL it. She doesn't need to tell me her heart is pounding. I know it is. And mine, when I read it, certainly is. Without a single emotion label or description of physical sensation, I get it. I'm right there with her, freaked out for her and hurting for her. 

When human beings are in a state of high emotional activation, our bodies aren't the only things affected. When we're panicking or enraged or confused, our thoughts become scattered and disorganized, or we get hyperfocused on the smallest details. Our minds are so complicated; the most random things pass through them, or our inner dialogue speeds up. Sometimes our thoughts become nearly silent, wordless, because we're so overwhelmed.

Clearly, losing your punctuation isn't the only way to accomplish the goal of showing intense emotion. You can make your tone more staccato and clipped by shortening your sentences, phrases and words. You can show disorganization and confusion with sentence fragments and rapid transitions. You can switch from one style to another within a scene to convey a major change in the character's thinking or state of mind.

Of course, everything you write is in the service of the story, so you have to keep it tight. You have to be selective and choose your words just right. You have to do just enough to convey the perfect intensity, but not too much, or you'll totally confuse the reader or bog down your pace. And no matter what your technique, you have to know the language--grammar, punctuation, and all--to be able to do this well. You can't break the rules until you know them inside and out. Sometimes it's art. Sometimes it's just bad writing.

But I save that for the editing. Sometimes, if I'm writing a scene like this, I just close my eyes and type. (Yes, I can type fast without looking. It's how I survived grad school.) When I do that, it helps me access the character's thoughts--I just let go, and I write everything that's going through my character's mind. I end up cutting a huge portion of that, sure, and shaping whatever's left, but I think the flavor of that emotion can be preserved if I don't edit myself the first time around. That's just me, though.

So what about you--how do you show a character's intense emotion?

(Oh, and I'm not done with Living Dead Girl. On Friday, I'll be posting about Scott's characterization of her MC and the effects of trauma on young people's brains.)