11 Truths Writers Can Learn From Memoirist Mary Karr
The words, the white space, the letters, the frozen moments, it’s all writing.
Mary Karr is an acclaimed American author renowned for her candid and incisive memoirs and poetry.
Karr’s writing has garnered numerous awards and accolades, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Her memoir-writing workshops have attracted a devoted following and have contributed to shaping the next generation of literary voices.
What can you learn from Karr? Probably more than you’ll ever need to know, but here are a few things that stood out to me…
1.
Understand that the bar is low and it’s your responsibility to raise it. “On the most basic level,” writes Mary Karr, “bad sentences make bad books.” She also writes, “A story told poorly is life made small by words.”
2.
It will change as you move from idea to words on the page. In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes, “You think you know the story so well. It’s a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described. But pretty much every memoirist I’ve ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her.”
3.
It takes quantity to find the quality. “A memoirist starts off fumbling — jotting down facts, recounting anecdotes. It may take a writer hundreds of rough trial pages for a way of speaking to start to emerge unique to himself and his experience, but when he does, both carnal and interior experiences come back with clarity, and the work gains an electrical charge. For the reader, the voice has to exist from the first sentence.”
4.
In memoirs (and everywhere else) your voice must be distinct. “Most memoirs fail because of voice. It’s not distinct enough to sound alive and compelling, or there are staunch limits to emotional tone, so it emits a single register. Being too cool or too shrill can ruin the read. You don’t believe or trust the voice. You’re not curious about the inner or outer lives of the writer. The author’s dead in the water.”
5.
Who you were then is not who you are now. “The sharpest memories often give me the spooky sense of looking out from former eyeholes at a landscape decades-since gone.” It’s through these various points of vision that she’s able to see herself in a new way. “You’ll need both sides of yourself — the beautiful and the beastly — to hold a reader’s attention.”
6.
Truth is the only thing that matters. “Truth may have become a foggy, fuzzy nether area, but untruth is simple: making up events with the intention to deceive.”
Many of these quotes and ideas come from Mary Karr’s remarkable book, The Art of Memoir. Buy your copy right here.
7.
Sometimes meaning comes first, sometimes it comes last. “A fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufacturers events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.”
8.
Curiosity comes first. “The goal of a voice is to speak not with objective authority, but with subjective curiosity,” says Mary Karr.
9.
If the solution is easy, it might not be the best solution. “If you can’t rewrite, give it up,” admonishes Mary Karr. “You need to be able to rethink and correct the easy interpretation.” Karr also says, “I am not much of a writer, but I am a stubborn bulldog of a reviser.”
10.
The words, the white space, the letters, the frozen moments, it’s all writing. “In the beginning, when there are zero pages, you have to cheer yourself into cranking stuff out, even if it later lands on the cutting room floor. Each page takes you somewhere you need to travel before you can land in the next spot.”
11.
Early in any career, it’s tricky and cumbersome trying to balance the mental and the physical, but both are necessary for success. “It’s like trying to dance with armor strapped on, bulky and awkward,” writes Mary Karr. “By the third year, though, most seem to grow muscles to maneuver in that armor.”
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Want more? All of these quotes help make up my first book about the craft of writing, Ink by the Barrel — Secrets From Prolific Writers. Get your copy for free, right here.
