Scenes vs Chapters

It was validating yesterday to hear a book coach encourage us to write scenes instead of chapters to complete a memoir. I really like this approach.

My background is full of scenes. Scenes with my sister over ice cream. (I was holding two. So sad that I dropped “hers” and not mine.) Scenes of battling parents. Schoolyard scenes of playing marbles and pounding a tetherball into submission. Scenes of barely contained laughter at a funeral.

In his eulogy for my great-uncle – a man he did not previously know – the minister solemnly intoned about his “deathbed” conversion to the “word of Jesus Christ, Our Savior,” I tried to hold my legs tightly together and my arms folded across my chest to hold in the laughter. I beelined for the bathroom outside the sanctuary and barely made it inside before blurting out an explosive guffaw.

If you knew my great-uncle, you’d get the joke. Not a reverential man. When I returned to the pew – red-faced, shaking (mostly with embarrassment), and with my head hung down – a kindly lady patted me on the arm and said, comfortingly: “There, there, dear. It’s alright. He’s gone to a better place.” I smiled wanly.

I could devote a whole chapter of scenes to funerals. Both the hysterical and the horrific. The tone usually depended on the circumstances of the decedent’s passing. The funerals of older people were generally hushed and respectful. Mourners murmured platitudes about the blessing of a long, well-lived life. Sometimes tinged with relief. When young people died, however, the church was often filled with anger as well as despair at life’s cruelty and unfairness. Unfortunately, there are all kinds.

The online writing webinars happily consumed much of my day yesterday. A shoutout here to Perfect Your Process Writing Summit host and organizer Daniel David Wallace. Of particular value was learning there are countless helping resources should I start to falter in this writing process. It is a common writer’s complaint that we start to flail mid-process with our material, our fears of insignificance, rejection, motivation, and numerous et. al. of all types

As the webinar day wore on, other authors, influencers, book coaches covered a wide range of subjects. There were helpful sessions about how AI may actually relieve the drudgery of non-creative writing. The world is still in a postpartum period after the birth of this newborn technology. We’re all adjusting our lives and anxious to see how it/she/him grows.

Today, a seven-hour marathon writing session is planned on Zoom. instead of our usual 3X Weekly Writer’s Accountability Group. The same 3X weekly folks have committed to this extended writing session today to see how deep and far our writing will go inside that container. I’m pretty excited.

As I have committed myself to birth this memoir, the Universe is faithfully bringing me insights, support, solutions, and guides that I may well need up the road. The rest is up to me. You may not go for that wooey-wooey framing of this process as the Universe’s doing. That’s okay. We all draw motivation from somewhere, whatever we choose to call it.