But, Because, So: Simple Brilliance

They might be closed but their awesomeness is in tact.

In November 2021, I wrote a post for my blog titled “Write with Purpose Using Indexing.” I had gone down a rabbit hole while doing research for a coaching client. In summary, “Write with Purpose Using Indexing” defines 13 different purposes a paragraph can serve. Yes, 13. For now, if you aren’t ready to dig that deeply into your paragraph-by-paragraph writing, let me present something a little simpler but still worthwhile that will improve your writing sentence by sentence.  

Simple Yet Brilliant: But, Because, So

If 13 paragraph purposes overwhelm you, let’s look at how to write with greater depth and clarity using these three little words—but, because, and so. Consider these three sentences, which all start with the same independent clause:

1.     If you want to buy a house, consider buying an older home but recognize that major repairs might be right around the corner.

2.     If you want to buy a house, consider buying an older home because builders used older-growth wood than was stronger and more resistant to sagging and delamination.

3.     If you want to buy a house, consider buying an older home so you will benefit from moving into an established, landscaped neighborhood.

The independent clause is “If you want to buy a house, consider buying an older home.” In case your grammar is rusty, an independent clause is a group of words that contains a subject and a verb and can stand alone as a complete sentence. So, you could make the statement, “If you want to buy a house, consider buying an older home” and be done. Should you want to offer a contrast, a reason, or a consequence, tacking on another clause that begins with but, because, or so gives you that opportunity. Like this:

1.     If you want to buy a house, consider buying an older home but recognize that major repairs might be right around the corner. (But offers a contrast or change in direction in thought.)

2.     If you want to buy a house, consider buying an older home because builders used older-growth wood than was stronger and more resistant to sagging and delamination. (Because offers a cause or reason for why the statement is true.)

3.     If you want to buy a house, consider buying an older home so you will benefit from moving into an established, landscaped neighborhood. (So offers a cause and effect, consequence, or result.)

The use of but, because, so sentence construction is a simple way to validate the points made in your writing. It’s a type of writing analysis that is encouraged in the early grades, high school, and even English Comp college classes. At the higher levels of education, the thoughts and statements become more nuanced and complex, requiring qualifying, evaluating, and synthesizing multiple statements over several paragraphs. But the basic structure is the same.

Final Thoughts

“But, Because, So” is clever.

• “But, Because, So” is clever but it must be used selectively for greatest impact.

• “But, Because, So” is clever because it forces the writer to validate their statements.

• “But, Because, So” is clever so writers should use this construction as a springboard to creating more in-depth, paragraph-level prose.

What do you think?

Let me know but don’t be cruel.

Let me know because I love to hear from you.

Let me know so I can improve my blog content.

Memoir Is Like a Novel, Not Autobiography

I feel sorry for the creative nonfiction subgenre of memoir. It is so misunderstood. Even I didn’t fully understand what a proper memoir was until I decided to take a deep dive into it about four years ago. I’ve said in earlier blog posts that I blame libraries and bookstores, whether online or brick and mortar, for perpetuating this confusion. Memoir is always lumped together with biography and autobiography. Now, if you are coming at memoir simply as a reader, this distinction might seem petty. You’ll get your hands on a memoir, biography, or autobiography and learn something about someone. If your goal is to learn everything you can about a person’s life, then biography and autobiography are what you want. I’ll show you.

Here are the first two paragraphs from Nelson Mandela’s bestselling autobiography Long Walk to Freedom:

Apart from life, a strong constitution, and an abiding connection to the Thembu royal house, the only thing my father bestowed upon me at birth was a name, Rolihlahla. In Xhosa, Rolihlahla literally means "pulling the branch of a tree," but its colloquial meaning more accurately would be "troublemaker." I do not believe that names are destiny or that my father somehow divined my future, but in later years, friends and relatives would ascribe to my birth name the many storms I have both caused and weathered. My more familiar English or Christian name was not given to me until my first day of school. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I was born on the eighteenth of July, 1918, at Mvezo, a tiny village on the banks of the Mbashe River in the district of Umtata, the capital of the Transkei. The year of my birth marked the end of the Great War; the outbreak of an influenza epidemic that killed millions throughout the world; and the visit of a delegation of the Afriçan National Congress to the Versailles peace conference to voice the grievances of the African people of South Africa. Mvezo, however, was a place apart, a tiny precinct removed from the world of great events, where life was lived much as it had been for hundreds of years.

Mandela’s opening paragraphs are classic autobiography—a quick jump into the facts about the beginnings of his life. Here’s another to make my point. These are the first two paragraphs from Love, Lucy, Lucille Ball’s autobiography:

I'm a Leo. I was born on a Sunday, August 6, 1911. Unfortunately, everybody knows my birth date because I told the truth when I first came to Hollywood. I grew up not on the sidewalks of New York City, as some people think, but in the beautiful resort area of Lake Chautauqua, New York, near the green, wooded Allegheny wilderness. I used to say I was born in Butte, Montana--I thought it sounded more glamorous than western New York.

I was conceived in Montana when my father was working for his father as a lineman at Independent Telephone Company in Anaconda. But I was born at my grandparents' apartment on Stewart Street in Jamestown, New York, where I was delivered by my grandmother Flora Belle Hunt.

Do you see a pattern? When and where they were born. Their birth name. Grandparents and parents. That’s classic biography and autobiography—chronological life facts. You read a biography or autobiography to learn everything about a person—99.9% of the time, a famous person.

That is not the role of memoir.

Now, here are the first two paragraphs from the glorious, bestselling memoir Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp, about her twenty-one-year love affair with alcohol:

I drank. I drank Fumé Blanc at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and I drank double shots of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks at a dingy Chinese restaurant across the street from my office, and I drank at home. For a long time I drank expensive red wine, and I learned to appreciate the subtle differences between a silky Merlot and a tart Cabernet Sauvignon and a soft, earthy Beaucastel from the south of France, but I never really cared about those nuances because, honestly, they were beside the point. Toward the end I kept two bottles of Cognac in my house: the bottle for show, which I kept on the counter, and the real bottle, which I kept in the back of a cupboard beside an old toaster. The level of liquid in the show bottle was fairly consistent, decreasing by an inch or so, perhaps less, each week. The liquid in the real bottle disappeared quickly, sometimes within days. I was living alone at the time, when I did this, but I did it anyway and it didn't occur to me not to: it was always important to maintain appearances.

I drank when I was happy and I drank when I was anxious and I drank when I was bored and I drank when I was depressed, which was often. I started to raid my parents' liquor cabinet the year my father was dying. He'd be in the back of their house in Cambridge, lying in the hospital bed in their bedroom, and I'd steal into the front hall bathroom and pull out a bottle of Old Grand-Dad that I'd hidden behind the toilet. It tasted vile--the bottle must have been fifteen years old--but my father was dying, dying very slowly and gradually from a brain tumor, so I drank it anyway and it helped.

Let me tell you, that’s a brilliant opening to a memoir. And I can’t imagine I need to spend much time explaining the stylistic differences between the start of Mandela’s and Ball’s autobiographies and the opening of Knapp’s memoir. The closest Knapp gets to offering family history is:

Alcohol travels through families like water over a landscape. . . . In some families, alcohol washes across whole generations, a liquid plague.

Her family history, mentioned briefly, is important to her memoir only to demonstrate that alcohol consumption is often a family tradition, or as she puts it, “It’s encoded in your DNA, embedded in your history. . . .” Knapp’s theme—what her memoir is about—is analyzing her early attraction to drinking (age fourteen), the adverse effects drinking had on her education, career, and relationships, and how she emerged triumphant from its grip.

Memoir as a Kind of Novel

As a memoir writing coach, potential clients are often surprised when I say that a memoir should be written like a novel, not like an autobiography. And some don’t like it and don’t want to hear it. But, at the very least, a memoir must have a point; if it doesn’t, well then, it’s not really a memoir.

At this point, I’m nearly overcome with the urge to repeat everything I wrote in my February 2022 post Memoir is a Journey Story and my March 2022 post Three-act Structure for Memoir Ensures the Best Read. What’s different about this post is, I always say memoir is not autobiography but I’ve never offered excerpts as examples. Now I have and I could do this all day long. I’ll prove it; here's the second paragraph from the autobiography of Mohandas Gandhi:

Ota Gandhi [his grandfather] married a second time, having lost his first wife. He had four sons by his first wife and two by his second wife. I do not think that in my childhood I ever felt or knew that these sons of Ota Gandhi were not all of the same mother. The fifth of these six brothers was Karamchand Gandhi, alias Kaba Gandhi, and the sixth was Tulsidas Gandhi. Both these brothers were Prime Ministers in Porbandar, one after the other. Kaba Gandhi was my father. He was a member of the Rajasthanik Court. It is now extinct, but in those days it was a very influential body for settling disputes between the chiefs and their fellow clansmen. He was for some time Prime Minister in Rajkot and then in Vankaner. He was a pensioner of the Rajkot State when he died.

Gandhi was a brilliant freedom fighter and moral activist, but a few pages of this and I’m in dreamland. It is classic autobiography, though.

To close this out, I will repeat the point I most want you to remember:

A memoir is not the recounting of stuff that happened to you. Stuff happens to everybody. A proper memoir must contain reflection. . . . No meaning, no memoir. No transcendence, no memoir. No takeaway for the reader, no memoir.

Let me know if I can help you craft your memoir.

In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.

P.O.W.E.R.: My Formula for Writing about Tough Stuff

P.O.W.E.R.

To guide writers into the ofttimes difficult job of creating a memoir, I have developed a formula. But to keep the suspense high, here is what this formula is not: As an editor, I’m all about syntax (word arrangement), grammar, spelling, word choice, and all those necessary components of quality writing. As a coach, I’m all about helping the writer identify their audience (who they are writing for), settle on their theme (point or argument), and improve in the art of dialogue, description, and scene creation. My formula isn’t about any of this. Keep reading.

I’m Not a Doctor, I Just Play One

Forgive me, it’s just some old-school humor. No, my college degree is in English, not Psychology. But my years of experience leading support groups and teaching classes for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) have given me extra insight into understanding the effects of trauma, grief, loss, as well as reflection on joyful or happier times gone by. Any time we take a walk through our memories, we never know what emotions we might stir up. I found my NAMI experience to be surprisingly helpful in working with people as they write their memoirs; an unexpected bonus, of sorts.

P.O.W.E.R.

My formula is not about grammar and syntax, or dialogue and scene creation. It is a guide for writing while exercising self-care and self-kindness. It’s P.O.W.E.R.

Pace yourself.

Own your feelings.

Write when you feel like it.

Ease into the tough stuff.

Reflect as you remember.

You see, there is no writing instruction here. It’s strictly about protecting your psyche as you delve into memories that at times might sting. Let me discuss each point of P.O.W.E.R.

P: Pace yourself

Let me congratulate you on deciding to write a book, be it a memoir or another genre. It takes courage to start a project this expansive. And it will take courage to finish it. Many first-time writers settle on a self-imposed deadline for their book; they set a date, usually completely arbitrary, by which they want their book published. Then the pressure’s on! They must produce a certain number of words each day to keep up with the schedule. Author Stephen King notoriously recommends writing 2,000 words each day, for a total of 180,000 words in three months. Folks, that’s Stephen King’s output, not mine or anyone else I know! Plus—spoiler alert—don’t write a 180,000-word anything as a first-time author, especially a memoir. Creating an outline for your book is an excellent idea and I highly recommend it. And if you are a very disciplined person, you can come up a timeline that corresponds to the sections of that outline, which can result in a projected date range to wrap up the writing and move into the next phase. But, first and foremost, the process of writing a book should be fun, or at least as much fun as you can garner from it. Self-imposed deadlines are a great way to rob yourself of whatever joy creating your book could offer.

O: Own your feelings

A memoir is not an academic treatise. If you hope to write your memoir without exploring your innermost thoughts and feelings, I suggest that you are not ready to write. Within your family, among your friends, maybe at work, you might gloss over pain or mistakes or abuse or anger. You might be so accustomed to sugar-coating your life’s experiences, you’ve forgotten how to be honest with others—and with yourself. I will ask my clients over and over, “But how did you feel?” If you have a story worth sharing—one that will offer a life lesson to your readers—you will have to dig deeply into your memories, your heart, your spirit, your soul. Grab onto what you find there and bring it into the light. The time for hiding is past.

W: Write when you feel like it

This point works in concert with the P, Pace yourself. If you inflict a self-imposed deadline on your project, you sacrifice giving yourself permission to create when and how it best suits you. There will be days when you write good stuff for hours—you’re in the zone, you’re firing on all cylinders, and other clichés. Then there will be days where you’re lucky to finish a page. You write a scene that consists of four paragraphs, read it, hate it, delete it. An hour later, you do it all over again. Writing is hard, but it shouldn’t feel like torture. If your writing is strained or forced, it shows and you know it. Give yourself a break.

E: Ease into the tough stuff

I know from working with new memoirists that writing a memoir can be emotionally exhausting. I have seen writers get anxious just thinking about the part of the memoir they’re going to be working on next. This is tough stuff. Books have been written about it, one of the best being Melanie Brooks’s Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma. I suggest two ways to come at this. One, just write the bare-bones version of a scene or incident. Report it like a news story. Write the facts and only the facts. During this first round, avoid emotional language to whatever degree the situation allows. Don’t reflect yet (the R in P.O.W.E.R.). Two, this method might work for you: make a few simple notes as a placeholder in the story, then leave it; return a day or two later and add a few more notes. Take baby steps. Do this until you have recounted the entire scene.

R: Reflect as you remember

A quality of memoir that sets it apart from every other genre is reflection. A memoir without reflection is like a murder mystery novel that ends without solving the mystery. By reflection I mean, don’t just recall a memory but analyze it. Merriam-Webster defines reflection as a thought, idea, or opinion formed or a remark made as a result of meditation. What emotion does the memory conjure? You know what happened (it’s your memory), but why did it happen? How did it happen? How did you feel at the time? How do you feel now? If your feelings or impressions changed over time, why did they? How does the scene play into setting up what else is coming in the book? Reflection in the now helps you put your past in perspective. Here’s where you figure out how what happened shaped you into who you are now for the purpose of this memoir.

Exercise P.O.W.E.R. as a Writer

Writing a book is not for the faint of heart. There are so many moving parts: theme, structure, grammar, supporting your argument, adding creative elements, what to put in, what to leave out. . . it can be the challenge of a lifetime. For my website’s blog, I have written several articles to help improve your writing:

Write with a Purpose Using Indexing

Best Writing and Editing Resources

How to Write Good Dialogue

Writing Sensory Description, Part 1 and Writing Sensory Description, Part 2

But P.O.W.E.R. is about you, as a person, tackling a big job. Don’t let the writing dominate you. Don’t let it drag you into your past and leave you there. This is your book and you are in control now—of the people, of the words, of the scenes. You decide who enters, what they do, and when they leave. They can’t stay longer than you want them to. They can’t say anything you don’t want them to say. Exercise your P.O.W.E.R.

In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.