Here’s a moment from Carvell Wallace’s Another Word for Love:
It was nice to have a bedroom to sleep in and food to eat and furniture and lots and lots of orange juice, which to this day is my favorite beverage. My aunt made it in a plastic pitcher from Minute Maid frozen concentrate. I could not control myself. I drank it like it was the stuff of life.
In this scene, Carvell is a child. He’s staying with his aunt for a while—a stable moment for him in his otherwise turbulent home life. It’s a small moment, but if I had been Carvell’s editor, I would have cut or edited this line: which to this day is my favorite beverage.
If it really mattered to Carvell that the reader know he still loves orange juice, to this day, there are two possible edits:
It was nice to have a bedroom to sleep in and food to eat and furniture and lots and lots of orange juice, which will forever be my favorite beverage.
OR:
It was nice to have a bedroom to sleep in and food to eat and furniture and lots and lots of orange juice, a beverage I would/will never stop loving.
I share this example because it’s something I see writers doing all the time—straddling two “nows” in memoir. The most effective writing stays in a single moment. The minute you pull us to the future, to now, to explain or give context from your current perspective, is the moment you “break” the scene you’re trying to hold for your writer.
Where is your “now”?
I often advise writers to close their eyes and transport themselves back into the moment in which they’re writing. Your memoir is in the past. You embody that version of you—you at age eight, you at age 22, you at age 40. You are no longer the age you are today in your memoir, and therefore any reference to the current moment can be confusing or jarring on the page.
The best scenes stay in the time in which they happened, which means avoiding certain tells in your writing that suggest a hovering 2026 narrator at the keyboard, tells that include:
• I still . . .
• Even now, or even today . . . .
• Now I know . . .
• At the time/In those days . . .
• To this day . . .
• I remember . . .
In almost every single case, this kind of phrasing can be eliminated. Your reader doesn’t need to know “in those days” there were no cell phones. It’s much more effective to say: “There was no way to get in touch, and I couldn’t find a pay phone anywhere.”
Your reader doesn’t need to be reminded that you’re remembering something. Memoir is remembrance, so “remember” is a word that you can search and find and almost always eliminate—and the meaning of the sentence will almost always remain intact (unless you’re literally in scene remembering that you left your dog in the car).
These tells are helpful to start to identify in your work because really they’re just bad habits, and easy to spot and eliminate, or spot and rephrase in a way that keeps your reader in the moment (ie, in scene).
How to handle what you didn’t know then . . .
This is probably the biggest reason writers lean on the crutch of writing from present-day. We want to articulate something to our readers that our 16-year-old or 35-year-old self didn’t know. Now—today—we know. Now, we have the answers.
In memoir, you can share your insights without anchoring your reader to the current moment. You can stay anchored in your scene—in your 16-year-old or 35-year-old self—and reflect from that age and that time. Or, you can project into the future, or muse from what I’ll call an “omniscient” narrator, which simply means that you can tell your reader something without using the word “now”—since your “now” is not 2026, but rather the “now” of the scene from which you’re writing.
Here’s an example from Courtney Kocak’s Girls Gone Wild. (Courtney was recently on the Memoir Nation podcast.) She’s writing about losing her virginity, and handles the writing in a way that reflects from a wiser self without being too heavy-handed about it.
I see all the scenes, I smell it as if I were lying right there, but years later, I will struggle to remember what attracted me to him in the first place. I was attracted to him, though—I must have been—because after I let out a little giggle at his phrasing, I said, “Yeah.”
There’s a subtle way in which this breaks scene here, but she avoids the “tell” words and brings us RIGHT BACK into the scene with the giggle and the response, so it’s effective.
Writers, you can and should consider this technique when you want to explain or give context, or even if you want to write about something you don’t remember. Here, Courtney doesn’t remember being attracted to this guy, but she “must have been,” she tells us, and this remove is effective because it shows us that there is a wiser self trying to make sense of events. That wiser self is just hovering there, nearby, narrating in almost a whisper. The reason it works is because she keeps us in the moment.
Strategic Use of Future Tense in Memoir
I use a metaphor in my memoir classes that you, the writer, have a camera on your shoulder in every scene. The camera shows only what you are seeing—in that moment. You do not have two cameras, so you cannot be projecting one from 2026 into your past-tense scene.
The camera can swivel. It can point to the future with the use of the future or conditional tense. But if you speak to the reader from the present day, you’re either breaking the fourth wall, or you want to consider editing/rewording, and staying grounded in the time and place from which you’re writing.
In the example above, Courtney Kocak uses the future tense when she says: “I will struggle to remember…” The reason it works, I said, is because she doesn’t break us out of the scene. She takes that camera and swivels it to point to the future. She doesn’t time travel to 2026 and write: I can’t remember why I liked him.
In memoir, what matters is your point of view. From which vantage point are you writing? Where are your two feet located—in space and in time? Here’s another example of a fix I recently suggested to one of my writers to prevent them from jumping to the present with their camera:
ORIGINAL: I never wanted to go to his house, although my parents insisted. I now understand that the climate was different back then, that kids were to be seen, not heard.
FIX: I never wanted to go to his house, although my parents insisted. The culture wasn’t child-friendly in the 1950s. Kids were to be seen, not heard.
It’s a subtle but effective fix, and in this case the future tense isn’t even needed. The culture simply wasn’t friendly. We can stay in the past tense (suggesting the way things were) and name a truth.
Here’s another example:
ORIGINAL: I was labeled a “geek,” an insult to be sure, even though today kids don’t bat an eye at this term, and in fact now it seems to be worn as a badge of
honor.
FIX: I was labeled a “geek,” wielded by other kids as an insult, despite the fact that a generation later kids would be wearing this very label as a badge of honor.
Here the suggested fix is the future tense: “would be.” It could just as easily be “will be.”
A word of caution: this device is not a license to narrate your entire book from a wised-up remove. Use it sparingly because readers will become quickly exhausted by the overuse of “I will” and “I would.” Overdoing the future pull flattens your guiding narrator into a mouthpiece for your present-day conclusions.
Breaking the Fourth Wall
The fourth wall is a theater term, originating from the notion that the audience is the fourth wall, and that actors should perform as though that fourth wall were solid, never acknowledging the audience’s presence. This allows the audience to feel like invisible observers of a real world rather than spectators being performed at.
This concept extends to writing because the best writers are creating scenes, whether fictionalized or real-life recreations. You are allowing the reader into that room with you, and the very best books (and movies) are those where you’re so immersed you forget your reading (or watching).
Breaking the fourth wall is a device, therefore, an intentional choice that we’ll mostly recognize from films. I found this short on YouTube that gives a great summary of how it works, and references Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where Ferris (Matthew Broderick) breaks the fourth wall to talk at the camera from time to time. So, too, Kevin Spacey in the series, “House of Cards.”
This can be a literary choice in memoir, too, and Maggie Smith effectively did this in You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a choice readers seem to love or hate. Some readers I know dislike how Maggie talks “at them” in the book, but she’s doing this by design. Here’s an example:
Reader, I’m not going to give you a scene of us telling our kids we were getting divorced. I won’t tell you what we said, and I won’t tell you how they reacted. It was the hardest conversation I’ve ever had with anyone. I hope to never have one harder.
If you choose to “talk to” your reader in this way, just beware. It’s a controversial choice, and it should also be used sparingly. Another writer who does this well (and sparingly) is Mary Karr in The Liars’ Club. Her parenthetical asides often break the fourth wall. Mary narrates this book from a child’s point of view, but occasionally she tells us things about her adult life, or her sister’s, or what her sister “remembers.” For me, she gets away with it because she’s such a skilled writer. I’d never advise any student to emulate her style.
Controlling your “now”
A scene is a particular moment in a particular place. That’s the whole definition. It’s embodied, which means you are specifically located somewhere, in space and time, and so is your reader, by extension.
I’ve worked with students long enough to know that controlling time is no easy feat. The impulse to write the tells is strong. Beginning writers love to caveat, and it takes time to trust yourself enough to realize you don’t have to give all the context (ie, like being reminded that there were no cell phones in 1980).
Also, there are so many examples of ways you can break the rules, and plenty of published memoirs where the narrator is constantly talking to you from the “now,” which would seem to give license to do all the things I’m recommending against.
However, the most sophisticated memoirists control time masterfully, or they make explicit narration choices (like Smith and Karr). I’m all for drawing outside the lines, but it’s only effective if you know you’re drawing outside the lines.
It’s a win for me when my memoir students start to see in other people’s writing the things they want to implement into their own writing, or the things they want to avoid. Time is so critical to the reading experience that once you start to pay attention to it, you can no longer ignore it.
In the end, controlling time isn’t about rules so much as remembering that you’re your readers’ guide on the journey. You are the one who lets them know where they are standing. If you’re doing it well, you’re an avatar for your reader (another Mary Karrism I love). I like to remind my students that they don’t need to leave the moment to explain it. Challenge yourself to stay in scene. One now, fully inhabited, will always do more work than two.
Ready for More? Join Brooke’s “mastering time” class this afternoon at 3pm PT/6pm ET.
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Weekly Prompt
Try out Emily Rapp Black’s “Up in the Air” exercise from her new book, I Would Die If I Were You. The idea is fun and simple. Print out a scene or a chapter you’re working on. Cut it into pieces, literally, with scissors. Then throw the pieces into the air and let them land. Once you gather the bits, read them in whatever order. See what this exercise shakes up. What new perspective might it offer? Try it and let us know what you discover!
Weekly Question
What is the time or era of your life that most intrigues you? That you keep coming back to in your memoir or in your memory—and why?
Answer this in the Community.
Emily Rapp Black on Writing
the Hardest Things
Memoir Nation explores the hardest things this week with guest Emily Rapp Black. Her new book is I Would Die If I Were You, part memoir, part how-to, that supports writers through writing trauma and the things that won’t let us go, and how to stay the course. In this week’s show, we talk a lot about process—doing the work, the permission to write what is calling to be written, and how to shake things up when you’re struggling. We talk about being in the mess, not worrying about your book being right for everyone, and how to grapple with the things other people say—like I would die if I were you. There is so much wisdom and grace in this interview, and in Rapp Black’s new book. In this week’s trend, we cover Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir, Careless People, in an effort to continue the upward sales trajectory of this book that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are desperate to silence.
Bio: Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller, Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN-USA Award; Sanctuary, a New York Times Editor’s Pick; Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg; and most recently, I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truthtelling. A former Fulbright scholar, she was educated at Harvard, Trinity College-Dublin, Saint Olaf College, and the University of Texas-Austin. Her work has appeared in VOGUE, the New York Times, The Sun, TIME, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and other publications. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside.
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Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
Mignon Fogarty, aka “Grammar Girl,” was one of our first podcast guests and she’s a dear friend of Memoir Nation. She knows grammar like …someone who has hosted the most popular grammar podcast since basically the beginning of the internet. Take her class to brush up your grammar—and learn how grammar can shape your sentences and thoughts.
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This "Time" Newsletter is jam-packed with great information. I love reading anything from Memoir Nation. It feels like I'm becoming a better writer. I hope so. Thanks for all that you do to help new writers like myself.