Making a Scene

‘Keep the drama on the page.’ So says Julia Cameron, author of The Artists Way. In other words, make your writing dramatic, not your life. (Well, we can but try.)

In my memoir drafts I have a series of themes and anecdotes, but not so much the stuff of drama. By this I mean a narrative arc. 

Take a story I wrote about working on my father’s poultry farm when I was a teenager. In the sixties I worked with him over a period of ten Sundays to raise money for the school ‘missions’. I hated it.

How did I turn this aversive feeling into a scene? I was fifteen and in love with the Beatles. My friends and I danced every day after school to ‘She Loves You’, ruining the floorboards of a friend’s family room. We planned to kidnap the ‘mop top’ when they arrived to perform in Melbourne, thus paving the way for me to secretly marry Paul. – or any of them really. The scene on my father’s poultry farm grows out of what I want – versus what he wants. I wanted fun and freedom, he needed help with the squawking chooks.

There is the protagonist (me), versus the antagonist (my father). Or is it the other way around? In memoir the roles are often reversed. Something was standing in the way of what the protagonist wanted. My father was not accommodating my self-indulgent, teenage needs. And why should he?

Memoir features what the ‘I‘ wants. She may want something, might even be righteous about it, but not necessarily right. She’s simply the story’s narrator. Getting or not getting what one wants creates tension, thereby creating a scene.

Did she get what she wanted? Only after writing about it these many years later when I developed an overview. That’s  a benefit of memoir, maybe even of writing itself. Seeing the whole of what we cannot see at the time.