Nikki Moustaki
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CREATING A CHARACTER IN MEMOIR

9/29/2015

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The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly." ~Isaac Bashevis Singer
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Character is the heart of your memoir. Without compelling characters, you have no story. Readers like interesting plotlines, but if you don’t have a great, well-rounded character to place inside of your plot, the reader will put down the book. The reader has to care about someone in your memoir enough to follow him or her through the story. Make the reader root for your character.  
 
A character should never be predictable, but you should know your character well enough to know what he or she would do in any given situation. In many memoirs, the main character is the writer, so you’re already ahead! 
 
The most profound thing you can write about is not worth it if your characters aren’t interesting. Make your characters interesting through detail and desire. If the reader can see, hear, and feel the character, then you’ve made him/her real. If the reader can relate to your character’s wants and desires, then you have created a character worth following until the end of the story. A character that wants nothing is worthless to your story. Since you are writing memoir, you have to choose the part of your story where the character’s desire is overwhelming.

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MEMOIR PROMPT: WHAT DO YOU CARRY?

9/29/2015

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​In the first chapter of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, the narrator tells us what the soldiers in a platoon carried throughout Vietnam. As the list is revealed, so are the characters, setting, and plot.  The first chapter of this story collection, which reads beautifully like memoir, uses listing as its literary device. What do your memoir "characters" carry that makes them distinctive? How can you use listing as a way to reveal more of your story? 

The Things They Carried The Things They Carried 

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed 10 ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.

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    Nikki Moustaki

    Here are some posts on beginning and crafting your memoir. These are based on  lessons from a memoir class I teach at Miami Dade College. 

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