Writing as Architecture: Notes on Building vs. Writing Your Memoir
Before I began writing, I imagined every writer began at the beginning and laid down the tracks of their story in one clean take. And perhaps there are writers out there who do just that. But I have personally found the writing process to be more physical than intellectual.
(9 Things I’ve Learned Writing a Memoir.)
In the beginning, we are surveying the land of possibility, searching for firm ground that might support the story we want to tell. We start digging trenches to test that ground. Perhaps a question rises from the sea of possible questions. It grabs hold of us and doesn’t let go.
The first question that grabbed me as I was writing my memoir, My Mother in Havana, was why, at age 49—30 years after I’d lost my mother—I missed her more than ever. And why that missing was calling me to Cuba—a country neither she nor I were from.
The lines and angles that connected my story with the island’s felt both impossible and inevitable. It would take the writing of My Mother in Havana—a memoir about traveling to Cuba to find my mother among their gods and ghosts and mother saints—for that geometry to click into place. And that writing process felt more akin to building than it did to writing.
Building Foundations/Framing Walls
We are sensory creatures, taking in the world around us and translating those bits of sensory experience into meaning, which means that when we write we are constantly deconstructing and reconstructing the world in a way that makes meaning both for us and for our reader.
As I found my way into the architecture of My Mother in Havana, I studied memoirs like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk that seemed to adhere to this building principle. I was particularly interested in the way Strayed structured her book so that each chapter begins on the Appalachian Trail, a decision that creates the foundation upon which the reader moves along the narrative of that arduous hike while allowing Strayed to set the posts that frame its themes of grief and loss, motherhood, and survival.
Similarly, all but one chapter of My Mother in Havana begins on my pilgrimage to Cuba. I poured that foundation in a mad fever, laying down the narrative that led me from sacred dance to séance, sacrifice to pilgrimage. But there were also multiple layers of backstory I needed to introduce my reader to: who my mother had been; why her death had plagued me for so long; how my grief over her loss had morphed over the years. And why I was looking for answers in a country and spiritual experience so far from my own.
Materials
As I wrote my way into those themes, I scoured family letters for backstory; puzzled over how and where to insert memories of my mother into the more linear narrative of my trip to Cuba. Devoured books about the mythology and practices of Santería and the Afro-Cuban gods known as the oricha. I made numerous trips to Cuba to scour archives and deepen my understanding of the rituals that lie at the heart of this book.
I laid down these materials like a brick layer lays down bricks, or a teacher lays down transparencies—with each new layer illuminating and building upon what lies beneath it.
An Incomplete List of Materials to Try as You Build Your Memoir:
- Memory
- Photographs
- Letters
- Genealogy & family lore
- Timelines
- Interviews
- Archival research
- Immersion into your subject matter
- Image & Motifs
- Narrative
- Lyricism
- Inquiry & Speculation
Time
We live in times that privilege speed and efficiency, doing vs. being. But there is a beauty, even a subversiveness, in allowing ourselves to take our time. As we try out different materials, we trust that the ways they’ll find their way to one another will lead much deeper than the surface of any single narrative. And it is often only after the writer turns off the conscious part of their writing brain—say to take a nap or go for a walk—that the new arrangement comes.
At first our manuscript looks like a big mess, and perhaps this is one of the most challenging aspects of writing—to resist simplification. Turn off the part of our brain that craves instant results and lean into the mess, climb the ladders of our scaffolding to survey our work in progress, move or add walls and plumbing as necessary. Make room for the process to take as long as it needs to take.
Patterns
What keeps our work from staying a mess are the foundation and walls we’ve put in place, and the patterns and repetitions that emerge from and support that framework.
And so, once we’ve waded into the mess of possibility that is our manuscript comes the time to seek pattern and connection, and prune away any element that detracts from those patterns.
The first drafts of My Mother in Havana resembled a cross between a Pinterest and a forensic murder board. I wrote themes and images on index cards and Post-It notes. Arranged and rearranged them across pinboards and floors.
With each revision, I found myself making choices—saying yes to images I believed were central to the architecture of the writing, and no to those that led the reader away from that center.
There is something intuitive and dare I say magical about this process. You must trust that all those carefully placed note cards and Post-Its are leading somewhere. Because, at the end of the day, the beauty of building vs. writing is the element of surprise. Whether it’s a poem or a book-length memoir, both the writer and the reader enter the piece not knowing how these seemingly-competing materials and patterns will resolve themselves. And then, if you’re lucky, somehow, both impossibly and inevitably, they do.
Check out Rebe Huntman’s My Mother in Havana here:
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