Not much room for narrative action, but plenty of room for characterization. So here we are, three people in a car, waiting for the rain to let up. When I wrote about it in my first memoir, From Our House, I began this way: “We drove through the night, and the next morning it was raining so hard, my father had to pull off the highway and wait for the weather to clear.” This is a statement of fact, but it’s also a scene-setting sentence that has narrative momentum: “We drove through the night.” It also quickly presents a complication in the narrative: “.and the next morning it was raining so hard.” Complications in narratives usually require actions: “.my father had to pull off the highway and wait for the weather to clear.” I remember the drive we made to Oak Forest, so my mother could interview for the job. “He thought we needed the money,” she said. My mother told me years later that it had been my father’s idea that she take a teaching position up north after losing her job downstate. We left our farm behind and entered a new way of living. I went from a two-room country school to a large urban grade school. When I was about to begin the third grade, my parents moved us from our farm in southeastern Illinois to Oak Forest, a southern suburb of Chicago. We’re also interrogating and interpreting our experiences. We aren’t merely reporting or recreating. If we string together enough significant scenes, we can enhance our readers’ participation in the narrative while also creating an artful arrangement that will enable us to make meaning from what previously may have been puzzling. When we write memoir, we strive to document, but we also try to give some shape to experience. Dramatization allows us to find a causal chain that perhaps didn’t exist in real life. Memoirists tap into those moments when constructing a narrative. We all have moments from our pasts we can never forget.
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