I’ll start the same way I began my last post: I’ve been working with a client on an extraordinary memoir that starts in an idyllic Mennonite farm family in Kentucky and tunnels into a violent marriage that engenders her rage with God.

What I heard myself repeating in conversation with my client were instructions for engaging the reader. Particularly, engaging the reader’s experience that is parallel to the writer’s. Engaging the reader to consider how she would react in the protagonist’s circumstances – that is engagement.

The constant phrase of editors is “Show, don’t tell.” In this case it translates as: Don’t tell the reader what the character’s experience is, but describe what befalls the character with such richness of detail, tension of the action, and/or evocative words that the reader has empathic resonance with the character. The resonance can include a visceral memory of the reader’s own experience, as well as a musing on how another person handled the same situation differently, and why. I consider that kind of reader engagement valuable, since I have a predilection (dare I say prejudice?) for stories that connect and expand our hearts and lead to understanding.

Memoir writing teachers emphasize the importance of the author’s musing from the Now upon the time of the experience. Things like: what did you not realize then that you know now; how what you learned later would have changed your reaction to the circumstances then; what became part of your life pattern from that initial experience.

Unless the author is a person of renown (a hero, a prominent business person, a star, a criminal, Dick Cheney) whose psychological development a reader would want to understand, I’m not sure that that is always important. The invitation to the reader to muse on these questions as she looks at her own parallel experiences can be more impactful/valuable.

I’m expanding on an image that my client read to me on the phone: I turn my head away from the assignments being distributed around the breakfast table. Beyond the ripple in the old farmhouse window, my eye is captured by an enormous drop of water from the night’s rain that hangs from the sag in the telephone line. The line that ambles gracefully from pole to pole along the county road without stopping at our house. The drop encapsulates the grayness of winter and magnifies the desolation of the barn gone gray with cyclone winds and the battering of tools and the daily cycle of tasks that come first.

There is no musing on boredom, hopelessness, desire for escape, drudgery of farm life. Besides that it is a child speaking, the reader can infer all those feeling, as well as add her own experience – perhaps for rescue by the family whose child I really am (though if I was born on a farm, there’s little grounds for the fantasy that my parents took home the wrong baby). This is beautiful inference – inference meaning that the reader supplies her own projections on a scene. Of course, it’s a scene that implies all these things, but the implication is generic. The inference is personal – and therefore engaging.

Looking at the other side:

He was very well spoken and his basic human decency resulted in his willingness to help a parolee who was really trying to better his situation, though he had no sympathy for slackers. He was ambitious, well respected and went back to college at night to pursue a Bachelors Degree. This was a time when doors were opening up for well educated blacks. He was ambitious and smart enough to be willing to juggle a demanding job and college in order to advance. He was also fortunate enough to have a very high energy level enabling him to manage the demands of both effectively.

Yes, the character may be worth exploring, but the attraction is intellectual, not personal. Everything is told to the reader, nothing is implied and no inference is welcome. We don’t even  have to engage our own sense of the ’60s. It takes imagination to write implications that invite inference. Next week I’ll be exploring Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior because her imagination is powerful.

Until then, delight in the process.

Download PDF:  DCC_Inference is Compelling