How to Tell My Story Without Sounding Like I’m Playing the Victim

Lisa [0:00]
Well, hello, Wendy, welcome to the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so delighted to have you on.

Wendy [0:04]
Oh, thank you so much. It’s an honor to be here, and thanks for letting your listeners and your followers of your newsletter jump on in. So appreciative of that.

Lisa [0:14]
Well, it’s always exciting to have one of my newsletter followers on because then I get to see your faces. You know, I see your names when people email me, but then I don’t know what anyone looks like. And today, I get to see what you look like and know a little bit more about you and the story you’re working on. So, let’s go ahead and start there. Sure.

Wendy [0:35]
Well, I guess my term is emerging writer. I’m new, about a year in or so of writing. So far, I’ve published one article in Insider.

Lisa [0:38]Congratulations.

Wendy [0:40]Thank you. I was shortlisted for a Women on Writing Nonfiction Essay Contest. I won second place in the Writer’s Digest 2023 Personal Essay Awards, which just keeps nudging me along to keep going, which is great. So that last essay was in concert with my current project, writing my debut memoir, kind of a coming-of-middle-age survival memoir. I’ve been a nomad all my life. I was an Army brat, so I moved around a lot as a child. My first career was as a professional dancer; we were called gypsies because you move around the world for different gigs. And I’ve been a scuba diver for what seems like forever. So, I wanted to be a mermaid, dreaming one day of living on a tropical island. And in 2019, I got that chance.

Lisa [1:30]
Wow.

Wendy [1:31]I know. I know. We kind of went crazy and decided to ditch this normal American life. My new second husband, newlyweds at the time, had a fantastic opportunity to move to the Bahamas. We got to stay at a friend’s house and try it out while we figured it out. And we decided in that short time, a few months over the summer, yep, this is it. We’re going to move here until we were walloped by climate change and the intensification of category five Hurricane Dorian. Yeah, we were at ground zero. So yeah, the survival story of when your Eat Pray Love life turns into the Perfect Storm is what I have been working on. So, kind of dealing with the aftermath. How do you escape a completely devastated island and the stuckness? We moved in with my mom to heal, and then the pandemic hit, and we were very stuck there, sort of captive, for about a year. So, we escaped only to get stuck again. It kind of makes you wonder what’s the price of paradise. So, I am dealing with examining what it means to have community and to take control of your life and grab that brass ring and realizing that maybe there’s not so much control, and you have to learn how to go with the flow. So now you might notice the water, I go with the flow every day because now we live on a boat.

Lisa [3:06]
Very cool. And I love that we have this water theme. And a couple of things I want to point out in your pitch because we talked about this before I hit the record button. So, this your first podcast appearance, and this is a beautiful pitch that you have created. And one of the things that you did really well, and I want to point this out for listeners who might also be emerging writers going like, “Oh, what do I do? Or how can I do this?” And that is the two books that you chose, when Eat Pray Love meets The Perfect Storm. Now, when you’re sending this to agents, you might use some different books to be your comps, right? Because those are huge things that we’re talking about. But being able to talk about conceptually what your book is about using terms like that, I have an immediate sense of what your book’s about. So, kudos to that. And even though you say you’re an emerging writer, you’re doing great. I mean, you’ve got all these publications, you won a contest. That is amazing and a testament to both your talent and your hard work. So, you’ve been working hard on this project for a while, and a question has been coming to you. So, tell us about the question that you have.

Wendy [4:24]
Absolutely. Part of it might be because I’m writing, my work is written in the present tense, which some people, that’s a whole different question, because some people are like, it can’t be memoir if it’s present tense, how can you think back and make sense of it? It’s been challenging, but yay for doing the hardest genre and the hardest right out of the gate. But one of the things that came up with writing in the present tense, or maybe even if it were past tense when we’re writing those scenes of memoir that are most formative for us, so the stakes get high, and then something happens, that last straw that makes us change. How do we write that to keep the reader engaged, to show how important it is, and to up those stakes and keep that drawn tension going without slipping into that victim mode? And perhaps, dwelling in the “oh, this happened, oh, woe is me.” So, juggling that balance of keeping it going, and this is important to share without it seeming overdramatic.

Lisa [5:35]
Yeah, so making it not gratuitous, and understanding does it need to be here? And I think this is a question that so many writers face, especially in the memoir genre, because there are things that you must write for yourself to heal that may or may not belong in your book. So, you know, that’s one of the first things that you want to think about when you come to any scene that might be over the top or more than the reader can handle, or especially if there’s some sort of traumatic element in the experience. You want to pause and say, “What does it feel like to me in my body when I’m writing about this? What is that intensity level?” You know, where one is like a fly going by, ten is like, this feels like high trauma to me, worst thing has ever happened. You want to think about that. Because the very best writing for you as the writer, and for the readers, is between a four and a seven. It’s not nothing, right? It’s got to have some intensity. And that intensity, just as you beautifully said, must wrap it up. However, you don’t want it to be so high that the reader doesn’t know what to do with it, and that you as the writer don’t know what it means. So, you want to check in with the body. And then you want to ask yourself, “Why am I writing this? Why have I put this in?” And the reason you do that is because the first question that every writer comes to the page for when it comes to memoir is what happened to me. And sometimes this can be a litmus test, you know, and based on the things we’ve talked about, you may be past this litmus test, but I always tell everyone to start here when you’re putting it on the page in a book form and you’re saying this is the book, not just like these disparate pieces that you wrote for a while that you’re trying to, hope will become a book, right? Why are you putting it in there? And sometimes people will have this conscious or even unconscious thought of, but they need to know what happened to me. Or they need to know what’s real.

Wendy [7:45]
Like validating our own story, sort of.

Lisa [7:49]
Yes. So, as you think about these pieces, did that come to mind at all?

Wendy [7:52]
It definitely, yes, definitely. I could see this came to me because I had a lovely critique partner who was the one who pointed it out. Up until that point, which brings me sort of to that dark night of the soul. That’s a big, right before where I think all hope is lost. What are we going to do now? So, I knew that or thought or feel that it’s important, but she thought it was so much. And I think her term was, it started feeling like the Keystone Cops, like, no, now this thing is happening, and now another thing is happening. So yes, I think it was perhaps the way I was writing it, which, for me, is probably too detailed, probably putting in every little thing that happened because I remember it that way. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be told that way, I think is what I’m learning.

Lisa [8:50]

And what I hear is that if we were to think in beat sheet terminology, and if you are listening to this, and you’re like, what do you mean by beat sheets, I will put a link in the show notes that describes what these beats are. This is something that comes from Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. So, this is a screenwriting tool that people use to understand their books. And this would be the beat sequence called Bad Guys Closing In. So we’re going to talk about how do you make sense of this from your book, or for your book in just a moment, but I want to first think about okay, so once you’ve it gotten out of your system, I know what happened to me, I’ve made some sense of this for myself, is very important, because you cannot write a book for an audience that is not you until you’ve made sense of it for yourself. You want to make sure that you know who your readers are, like who is going to pick up this book. And you need to know what questions they have.

There are going to be two sets of questions like some of it will be logistical issues. Like what is on an island that has just been devastated, what resources are there or not there? Or how do people call for help? Or, you know, how do you escape a place that’s in the middle of the ocean, and you can’t just get in your car and drive away. So, they are going to be some logistical things that readers will have questions about, and you need to make sure you’re answering these questions. The most important thing with memoir is that we have a transformation inside your narrator. Okay, so the narrator has to change. So, when we’re thinking about the bad guys closing in, the thing you want to think about are the six things that need fixing. Now, again, if you do not know anything about beat sheets, you might be like, what the what, so let me break it down for you. So, the six things that need fixing are the character’s defects or problems that they bring into the story. So, these are faulty beliefs, faulty behaviors that they have, you know, things they do, things they do that don’t get them what they want, relationships that are problematic. That’s what the six things that need fixing are. So, these character traits are going to be developed in your beginning, along with the action sequence that also has to happen, you know, in terms of what the plot points are in your book, when we get to the bad guys closing in, things in the external environment, are going to trigger those internal bad guys. So maybe I don’t feel like I can be a leader. And you’re showing this in your opening, like, I’m just a follower, I do what everyone else says, suddenly, you’re in a situation where everybody’s looking to you for the answers. And now that bad guy of I can’t be a leader is coming back. And so, one of the things you have to show in the sequence is the narrator wrestling with the fact that she doesn’t know if she can do it. So, it’s the details plus the internal conflict problem. So, you want to make sure with all these sequences that that’s there. And once you’ve done that, you do have to ratchet up the tension. And it should be, you know, I think this is going to work, but then a setback happens, or I think this is going to work and it seems like it starts to work, but then it doesn’t. So, you do want a little of that push-pull during this point, because you are trying to get to the lowest point in the book. That’s your goal. The all hope is lost moment where you’re getting into the dark night of the soul, which you explained beautifully.

Once you’ve done that, you want to look at the details. Again, you’re thinking about what does the reader need to know, what questions might the reader have? And when it comes to emotions, this is where we get ourselves in trouble. This is where it gets a little saccharin, or overly melancholic, or, you know, it’s moving into that victim role. Right? In the bad guys closing in, because you are ratcheting up the tension and you are being hard on your character, which is, the story terms we use sometimes to talk about raising the tension. At this point, we can have a lot of emotional language. One thing you want to look for is, am I crying a lot? Am I screaming dramatically? Are there a lot of feeling words in this sequence? Get out a highlighter and print out your draft and highlight all of that, and see what’s there. Another thing you want to look for are sequences that sounds like “this keeps happening to me, and then, oh no, this keeps happening.” That’s because if this keeps happening, you haven’t established your narrator as the hero. And what I mean by hero is a person who makes decisions. Right? So, even though bad things keep happening, they still have to be making decisions. So, how is all this hitting you?

Wendy [14:06]

Yeah, absolutely. So, what I’m hearing you say too, is yes, you have to show those things that are important, and then fill in selective details, to be able to place the reader so they can follow along in the scene and have an understanding. But that there also has to be that voice from the narrator or the main character, me in a memoir, that shows that I still have a certain amount of agency. So yes, it can happen, that I’m still in charge of my life. This kind of goes to that “and this happened, and this happened” issue with memoir. It’s not just this happened, it’s making sense of it. So maybe what I need to do is in that scene, is zoom out and make sure that I have a little bit of that, that reflective voice to balance all those things that are happening to ratchet up. Will that help take away some of that victim feel as well?

Lisa [15:15]

Yeah, and I would say it doesn’t even have to be reflection. Reflection is the writer at her desk, inserting her wisdom, sometimes it’s interiority. Right? So, the difference is interiority is what is the character thinking right now? And can you show without, you know, having five pages of the character just in their head, but you want to show quickly, the character wrestling with the problem? You know, they’re racing around the island, and they see this payphone and they go, yes, a payphone. They pick it up, and it’s dead. internal dialogue. Are you kidding me? I can’t believe this is happening again. And then, you know, it always happens like this, maybe that’s part of the thing that needs fixing is like, there’s they’re always feeling that doom is around the corner. And so maybe that’s a piece that’s being pulled forward. So, you want to think about what you set up in the beginning, pull that forward and make that part of the internal conflict. And, you know, another thing you can do when you’re looking at these scenes, is look at how long they are. And so, the part where the narrator is dealing with a conflict, like something happens, obstacle happens, and they’re wrestling with what it means for them and figuring out what to do. That part is called the emotional beat. That place in your scene is going to have the most words, right, that’s where you want your words. But what often happens when we’re developing these scenes is we start way before and we share this long setup of all the things that are happening and the fauna and the flowers, and you know, and every single person and the smells, and you do need a little of that. But you don’t need that much. So, you want to ask yourself, how can I get in as late as possible? And then once the decision is made, get out as fast as you can. Right. So, as you reflect on the scenes, do you think that that could be part of the issue is like maybe your setup is a little too long?

Wendy [17:21]

Yeah, I think that’s part of it. I think it’s probably a little over detailed. There, I can probably go back in yet again, because it’s yet again, more revisions. Yes, to cut out more, and probably one of the hardest things that I’m learning, and I’m sure it’s the same for many new writers is figuring out that trust your reader. Too much, how much is too little, and finding that balance of, of not over detailing, yes.

Lisa [17:50]
And something that can actually help you is listening to your book be read to you. So, there’s great value in reading your book out loud. But you can actually have your book read to you. And there are several different apps you can use. Someone wrote a post on the Jane Friedman blog about this, and I will share that in the show notes so that people have that. Also, and I am NOT an affiliate of anyone. So, I’m not endorsing anything. But Natural Reader is an app that you can use that has a natural voice. They do have a free version, so you can listen to a sample, and then there is a paid version. So, you would have to decide if it’s worth it to you. But even if you just use the sample and listen to a small portion, I was listening to a manuscript of mine, and it was revolutionary for me because it was in a regular voice. So, it wasn’t like a Siri robot voice. It was a real voice reading it back to me. And I could hear things like, “Oh, cut that line.” “Oh, wait, what is that?” “Oh, my gosh, I’m bored here.” So that can be helpful. And you may get listening and sitting back and just even closing your eyes, not even looking at the words. But just listening. You may have some revelations.

Wendy [19:13]
That’s a great idea. Thank you. Great tip. See, you came for the tips. Yeah.

Lisa [19:18]
Well, and you had a great question. And I know a lot of people struggle with this. So, I’m so glad that you asked this. And I always like to end with three lightning round questions. So, I’m going to share those with you and hear what you have to say because even though you are an emerging writer, you are not without wisdom, my friend. So, we’re going to take some of it. So, what is the best piece of writing advice you have ever received?

Wendy [19:43]
This is going to sound a little out of the box, but shortly after I started writing everything down after we did get back to safety. At that point, it was just cathartic, I need to get this out of my head. I got a fortune cookie that I have taped the fortune onto my laptop that says, “Get to the point and keep it clear and simple.” So yes, since I am one who loves all the words and needs to shove them all in there, this is sort of what I struggle with constantly. So, it’s a fortune cookie. But for me, it’s what I try to work for, is just try to get down, hone it down to the nitty gritty and to the important stuff.

Lisa [20:00]

That is the most important thing any writer can do. And it is also one of the hardest things for every writer to do. So, you are definitely not alone in that. So, you’re working on a memoir, which is always an emotionally challenging endeavor. How do you nurture your resilience as you do this work?

Wendy [20:41]
That’s a great question. And something that all of us need to think about because that whole thing about self-care, man, especially, I don’t know, I’m a mom, I have two kids grown. And that habit so many of us, especially women, especially moms, we’re all busy, and we always put ourselves last. So, one of the lovely things that I got from one of your episodes where your mentor Professor Lennie??

Lisa [21:02]

Oh, yes, Lennie Echterling.

Wendy [21:04]

I loved that. And he was talking about post-traumatic growth and savoring life, appreciating savoring life. And I’m super fortunate in that I have this new life where I live out in nature on the water. And while it’s not without its challenges, all I have to do is go outside and remind myself that we get one shot at this journey of laps around the sun. And so, I do try to savor that. If I write a particularly challenging scene or something that’s hard, I try to reward myself. So, you know, chocolate, for sure, do something fun. Like I wrote one really emotionally, oh, my gosh, scene, and then went and did something fun with my hair and got some fairy hair tinsels put in it just like completely shifts the scale on that. So yeah, and community, which I think that was also on that episode. And finding a new community with boaters has been fantastic. But now finding new I’m still working on this and building my community of writers and that, you know, other people who kind of get it. And that connection is wonderful for me. Absolutely.

Lisa [22:28]
We all need to have writers in our lives because all our other friends love us. Yes, it’s very true. And they will ask you a thousand times, “When is your book coming out?” And “Why can’t I hold it?” And “What’s the holdup?” They don’t understand how long all of this takes. So yes, your writer friends normalize both the doubts and all the trials and tribulations. Well, if someone wants to learn more about you, or they’d like to connect, what is the best way for them to do that?

Wendy [22:54]
Sure. Thanks for asking. I have a newish website. It’s my name: WendyHawkes.com. I don’t have any idea how I managed to get my name for the URL, but WendyHawkes.com, where I just write some stuff. And hopefully, we’ll be filling that out more as my journey goes along. And then I also do follow along on Instagram, @wendy_aquatania. That’s the name of my boat, Aquatania, on Instagram. So wonderful.

Lisa [23:31]
And if you missed that, it will be in the show notes. So, fear not, you will be able to see exactly how things are spelled, and you will be able to get in touch with Wendy. Well, Wendy, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It’s such a joy to have you on I’ve loved this conversation, and I can’t wait to share it with everyone else.

Wendy [23:49]
Ah, thank you. It’s been a pleasure. And again, appreciate you sharing all the knowledge and bringing even more knowledgeable writers and editors and everybody that you curate for us. It’s a wealth of information and we’re so grateful. This has been a blast. Thanks.