Guest Blogging. Lovely! Let’s Express an Experience!

Recently I had the pleasure of contributing to Mandy Whyman‘s web-site as a guest blogger for her Writing Insights series. It was a wonderful opportunity and I enjoyed being able to contribute to someone else’s pages and audience. The subject for the post evolved into a discussion about ways to express an experience, so that a reader can access what a writer is trying to convey.

So. How can a writer express an experience? And how can it be made over into a written form, so that another person – a reader who is a stranger to the experience – can empathize with it and associated feelings. That was the challenge.

Show, don’t tell. It’s obvious, isn’t it?

Storytelling is dependent, I think, on a process of gradual revelation. To my mind, it is akin to a visual process.

A reader will only feel an emotional quickening if they can ‘see’ the experience, and I’m acutely aware that readers have a diverse range of backgrounds and personal experiences – each of them unique. My own upbringing and background was in a small town in Australia, but . . .

But there is more. There is always more.

There is a wide breadth of reader backgrounds.

I was born in Germany. My parents spent a year there in the process of migrating out of old Yugoslavia. The first picture of myself in Australia is a baby in the arms of his grandfather, descending the landing steps of an aeroplane, in the middle of an Australian nowhere.

Someone else might have grown up in a London suburb, or a Zimbabwean farm, or perhaps rustbelt America. There may be another back story, or more, behind these first impressions, as well.

What does a writer want to communicate?

It is not my wish as the writer (as an autobiographer, perhaps) to tell a reader about the kid who grew up in the 1960s and 70s as though that was the only childhood possible. What I hope is that he or she will step back into a time and place with me, yes, but I then want the reader to use my opening of that door as an invitation to re-experience their own childhood and background.

The story of Frank Prem has its moments (did I happen to mention the time when I . . .), but overall is pretty ordinary. It is not the stuff of after dinner talk or sleepless nights.

The story of childhood and of growing up, however, is always filled with adventure and excitement and drama. It is these elements that can (perhaps) inflame the imagination of a reader. My objective is to engage the imagination in just this way.

Details are important, too.

So, what happened in my life back then that a reader might respond to? After all, a memoir or a recollection has to have some actual events to describe or to introduce the reader to.

Here are some of the things that I tried to convey as the experience of a small boy, and I’ve added the kind of questions that I hope my readers might be asking themselves as they read.

• The annual town fete is on. There are wood-chopping competitions, Knock-Em-Down stalls, fairy floss on a stick. Carnival sounds fill even in a small town, starting with the garbled spruiking of a loudspeaker mounted on a car that no-one can understand, and don’t need to. People are everywhere, children are running all over the show ground. Excitement that even the adults are feeling. Delight at being among friends and neighbours in the noise and glamour of an EVENT!
• What big local social event can you recall from your childhood that was long anticipated every year? A parade? A fete? The Agricultural Show?

 

• For weeks we build a bonfire to light on Guy Fawkes night. Higher and higher, with rubber tyres and a straw man to burn on the top. Kids buy or steal crackers to let off on the night. Fathers hide secret stashes. Will we explode some crackers in the Deputy Headmaster’s letterbox again, this year?
• Were there rituals in your local area on the big holidays and occasions? What regular or traditional mischiefs were indulged?

 

• What is a sunset? Can you describe what it look like? Where do you see it – through trees; across a valley; outside your back door?
• What is your Sunset memory from childhood? Don’t think hard, just allow an image.

 

• What happened when the town was sewered for the first time? What changed? Did the toilet migrate indoors?
• Moving toilets and laundries indoors was a generation-changing event in my community. Changing whole lives and especially, I think, for wives and mothers. Was there something similar that you experienced during your childhood? What effect did it have on your community?

How do you know your story has been effective?

When I first started taking my writing seriously one of the ways I tried to test my work and to get a sense of whether anything I was attempting had merit was to read to an audience. Live reading provides an opportunity to smooth the work, to make it flow well off the tongue. It also provides immediate feedback that goes to both, the content of the work and to the delivery. I learned to trust audience reactions and, over time, to write in a manner that might tilt the balance towards positive reactions. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

You are the author. So write what you want to say, but . . . write (express the experience) in a way that a reader, or listener, might best read or hear it.

My experience of reading the poems in my memoir collection Small Town Kid to an audience has been that there will be a queue of people afterwards with a desire, and need to tell their own version of the same stories, along the lines of those questions that I’ve posed above. It is a high form of flattery to have someone inspired to tell their own story, just through listening to one of mine.

‘. . . that was a good Cracker Night poem, but wait till I tell you about mine . . .’

And there, I think, is the key. To express an experience, the writing needs to be aimed at conveying an experience, but inviting the reader to find or re-visit their own equivalent. To see it dance before them again.

A Small Town Kid example

I’ll finish this visit with one of the poems from Small Town Kid. This is a small moment of childhood exhilaration. I hope you are able to feel a little wind in your hair, and a little racing in your hearts.

sweet maureen

I rode my bike
for sweet maureen
from beechworth to yackandandah

fourteen miles
of love-smit pedalling
down the hill
of the rising sun

a million miles an hour
not fast enough
but my breath
was taken away

I was drawn
down the road
descending like a bullet
from the barrel
of my rifle

drawn to ride
to sweet maureen

~