Today’s post is by editor and book coach Stephanie Mitchell.
Is it too much to hope that your memoir can have a concrete impact on the world? I think not—thanks to a particular miracle of the human brain.
Every memoir is about something deeper and more universal than its plot or hook—Marion Roach Smith terms this the argument, something the writer wants the reader to come to understand through reading the book.
While many memoirs’ arguments are personal, others are social or political. Let’s call books with a broader social or political argument activist memoirs. I don’t necessarily mean that these are memoirs about lives in activism—rather that the books themselves are political or social acts, with a message for the reader that might impact society.
Sometimes a memoir’s activist bent is explicit. Bryan Stevenson wants readers of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption to support advocacy for equal justice initiatives and against the death penalty and mass incarceration. With The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education, Theodore R. Sizer wants to change the conversation about public education. Books like these announce themselves as having a social agenda. You needn’t read beyond the logline to recognize it; sometimes you needn’t read beyond the title.
Other activist memoirs wrap their arguments a little more deeply in plot. Javier Zamora certainly has a message in Solito, his memoir about his experiences crossing the southern border of the United States as a child—he wants compassion and sympathy for people who have made that journey, an understanding of what they have gone through to reach American soil. But he doesn’t foreground that argument. He foregrounds his story and lets readers draw their own conclusions.
The power of memoir to convince us of an argument stems from the way good writing can harness our empathy—a phenomenon rooted in neuroscience.
We have cells in our brains called mirror neurons. The job of the mirror neuron is to observe what someone else is doing, to understand how to do it, and to understand what the purpose of the action is. This is how we learn by watching: as babies, we see a parent open a jar by twisting the lid, our mirror neurons fire up, and we understand that by twisting a lid, we too can open a jar. We listen to people speaking, the mirror neurons in our brains activate as though we too are speaking, and we begin to learn how to produce those same sounds. At the same time, we learn to interpret the nonverbal elements of speech—gesture, expression, tone. All thanks to mirror neurons.
Scientists also believe that mirror neurons are a big part of how we experience empathy. When we see someone else experience an emotion, part of our brains also experiences that emotion. This mirroring process is fundamental to human nature. It’s one of the essential building blocks of society.
It is also why we, as a species, gravitate so strongly to story. A good story, well told, activates those same neurons. When we listen to a story, watch a film, or read a book, we feel what the characters are feeling. This is why a loss in a book can make us cry, why a love scene acts on our bodies, why we feel such satisfaction when a protagonist gets a well-deserved happy ending. And it’s why reading about an injustice can fire us up, enrage us, inspire us to action.
Herein lies the power of memoir. As a memoir writer, you can make your readers feel what you felt when the events of your book happened to you. You can make them understand the choices you made. And if you’re writing a memoir with an activist bent, you can inspire your readers into action, or at least into supporting your cause. After all, your readers expect that what you’re showing them is all true. These are real issues in the world, with real consequences, and you’re a real person bringing them along through a real experience of those consequences.
Ah, but how? What sorts of scenes, reflections, or discussions provoke the mirror neurons into activity?
The ancient Greeks thought that there were three ways to convince someone of something: through logos, or logic; through ethos, or authority; and through pathos, or emotion. The Greeks, naturally, thought of logos as the highest form of persuasion. Breaking down your argument logically was superior to calling upon your audience to believe you because of your qualifications or simply working on their emotions.
But that’s not what activates the mirror neurons and the empathy circuits. That’s not what reaches inside a person and flips a switch for motivation. You can’t trigger your readers to mirror your feelings by telling them what to think or feel, nor by persuasive argument—only by showing them what you thought or felt.
Jen Sookfong Lee describes this phenomenon in her memoir Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart this way:
As a writer who has written about abuse and trauma for most of my career, I know that the most effective way to help people understand a concept, an ideology even, that marginalizes, oppresses, and dehumanizes a group of people is to say, “This is what happened to me.” It is this individual spectacle, in all its visceral, fleshy detail, that pierces the heart and brain and makes readers feel our pain as we have felt it, as we feel it again while we are remembering and writing about it.
Compare these two versions of the same moment from a nonexistent memoir:
I looked at the haggard, exhausted men and women in the boat and knew: anyone with an ounce of compassion had to be on their side.
Versus:
I looked at the men and women in the boat. Their faces were lined with grime and exhaustion, their eyes searching mine—for some sign, I assumed, of how I was going to treat them. I tried to soften my expression, to open my stance. Of course I was going to welcome them. Of course I was.
One of these versions works on the mind; the other works on the brain on a deeper level, reaching for the mirror neurons. There are two things to notice here.
- The narrator in the second version is having an experience: they are seeing something specific and it is affecting them in a specific way, changing how they are holding their body. Our brains picture that softening, that opening, and automatically fire up as though our bodies are doing the same.
- Both versions end in a thought, but only the thought in the second version is personal to the narrator—they are thinking about what they themselves are going to do, not thinking about what people in general should do. The mirror neurons respond to personal experience, not to logical conclusions. Showing your thoughts and feelings—keeping them internal, focused on your own experience—is a much more reliable way to make those thoughts and feelings contagious than telegraphing your conclusions is.
Has this all been yet another way of saying to show more than you tell? Maybe so. But in memoir, you have more space for telling than you have in some other genres. You have space for reflection, for self-observation, even for straight-up instructing your readers what to take from a moment. And when you’re writing a memoir with a purpose—that is, a purpose beyond sharing your experience and engrossing your readers—choosing when to summarize your point and when to show it, from as deeply within your point of view as possible, can be the difference between your readers understanding what you mean and feeling what you mean.
And that can be the difference between your book being a subject of discussion and being a force for change.
Look through your book for the moments that should hit the readers hardest—the moments that really make your point. Rewrite those scenes with as much showing and as little telling as you can. You can reflect and even explain yourself elsewhere. Those moments, the change-making moments, call for showing and inner, personal experience. Show why you think the things you think.
Feelings lead to thoughts. Thoughts lead to action. If you want to activate your readers, start by making them feel.
Stephanie Mitchell has been a book coach and editor for over fifteen years. She specializes in working with people to write their first memoir—whether they’ve got a published novel under their belt, a long-running blog, or no writing experience whatsoever. She has been published on the Brevity blog and by Tŷ Newydd, home of Literature Wales (though, sadly, she isn’t Welsh), and has appeared on a range of podcasts talking about the power of writing to heal and to inspire. Join her Facebook group The Memoir Writers’ Book Club, where she gives daily tips on what’s working in traditionally published memoirs, or download her free workbook to identify which stories to keep in yours and which to cut.