If you picked a hundred memoirs, all written in the English language, you’d quickly realize that even though they fall under this umbrella, they all use the language differently. This very observation highlights the critical importance of skilled nonfiction word choice.
And that’s a good operating word as you think about the personality of your book: use. This sets out that language isn’t dormant.
Yes, you could—and perhaps should—very well just start writing and see what comes to paper. But once you do, during editing, you ought to make sure you were deliberate about your word choice. There needs to be an intention accompanying the overall language of your book.
It can also be specific to chapters, paragraphs or sentences. What do you want the reader to feel like at the end? When you answer that, you now know that your language and approach will need to be in service of that. There are a few basics that could get you where you need to go in using language effectively in your writing:
Writing for Emotional Connection
When writing, you are building a world. Some writers of memoirs get so lost in the reality of it all that they lose their intentionality in the words they choose, feeling too afraid to be artful with their writing.
When inviting a reader into your story or a scene, they want to be able to experience the scene with you. How good you are with language can, in some ways, be measured through this: your ability to transfer how you felt to the reader. A room should feel like the room you were in. Give us detail: What was in it, who was in it, what were they doing? Specificity is your friend. For example:
A trembling hand can summarize the mood of the room. You can even choose words that feel and sound like how the moment felt.
A girl can run through an alley but she can also barrel through one.
If you are describing an uncomfortable situation, your best bet is to also reach for words that resist smoothness, that choke, scrape or lurch in the reader’s mind.
Instead of walked you could say clomped, trudged, or lumbered.
The knife didn’t just cut, it hacked through, each slice a sharp, wet chop that filled the silence.
The image should jump out quickly for the reader as they read. Remember, they aren’t meant to notice what you are doing with your words, but simply experience the effect.
Your Language Must Not Sweat
When asked in a 1981 interview published in The New Republic what made her work good and distinctive, Toni Morrison said:
The language, only the language. The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time … Its function is like a preacher’s: to make you stand up out of your seat, make you lose yourself and hear yourself.
When writing, it’s good to make sure there is good flow in your writing and that you didn’t choose words just because they sound sophisticated. If a word is in your story, it’s because it was the most precise one. It has to be possible for the reader to be immersed in your story, and that can’t happen if it doesn’t feel like it simply belongs in the sentence.
The Multi-Sensory Approach: “Paint Me Blue”
This is closely tied to writing prose your readers can feel. Your readers should be able to read with all their senses. Paint the picture for them, but not only visually; paint it until they can hear the drop of a spoon, touch the callus in your father’s hands, smell the thick burnt smell that followed you everywhere after the fire, and they should taste it too. Every one of those senses.
There is no one way to do this in your writing, but keeping it in mind means at least knowing what your writing is trying to do.
For example, in an unpublished work of mine, I at one point talked about how I had come to read as many books as I had, and in there, I dropped details about how it felt like to be in my childhood home at the same time as I was also painting for the reader that the picture changed drastically as I grew. I said about trying to reread a book I had loved as a kid as an adult:
Maybe I had just wanted to be in Mvuma again. Hundreds of kilometers removed from the capital city of Zimbabwe. At this point, I probably hadn't been to Harare, but had my imagination of it, based on short video clips that showed during the main news on TV. Maybe I wanted to be that little kid, sitting on the floor in the sitting room, with those maroon couches hugging the air around me from all sided–oh those couches! Couches that are as dead as the family that once loved them. Maybe that is all I was looking for, and not to read a book?
Talking about a couch was not enough. What colour was it? Adding “oh those couches” after a slight pause is another attempt to build an image of ‘coziness’ and possibly imply my childhood at this point was something beautiful. Then right in the next sentence is the bomb that introduces sadness to the passage, and maybe what intensifies the sadness is the very fact of how that sentence contrasts with the feeling the passage had been building before it.
When you are writing, you should think of it as sharing an experience with someone, and they can't fully share it if they don't feel how the moment feels like for you. Saying that you were afraid is one thing, but making them see and feel it is another, and the latter is what you're aiming for.
Editing for Precision: Cutting the Extra Baggage
Now, as you are re-reading your memoir, you will likely see patterns:
Words you reach for too often. Did you say sift twice in a sentence? Or sometimes it’s in a paragraph, and it’s giving the reader that déjà vu feeling of Wait a minute, didn’t I see this just one second ago? Unless it’s done for rhythm, make sure you remove unnecessary repetition for the reader.
Words that are in a sentence but are doing nothing. If you read a sentence and see that it could still work just fine without a certain word or words, then remove them. There is no space for lounging around in good prose. Each word must be doing something.
Repetition of ideas. Sometimes you don’t even see it because you said it in different words, and now it feels like a brand-new idea. But no. Say it once. Say it strongly, and move on. It’s usually more powerful that way.
Bland language. Seriously, what is She was very happy doing in that sentence when you could find a word you don’t need to modify? Maybe she was just ecstatic? Precision, ladies and gentlemen, is what you’re aiming for! If you see yourself needing to modify a word for it to work, it’s usually a good sign to look for the actual word you are looking to use.
Closely related to the last one: tired language. Clichés, clichés, clichés! You can find a way of saying what you know has been said over and over in a fresh way. Overused words and phrases stand between you and the reader. They have been used so much the reader will probably skim past them without seeing the picture the phrase originally meant to portray. You wouldn’t keep chewing on spent bubblegum, would you? So it should be with the words and images you choose.
Sentences that sound like metal grazing on tar. A sentence, like a ball, should be able to roll when set in motion. That’s why so many editors will tell you to read your work out loud. If a sentence needs restructuring just so it takes the version that is easiest on the tongue, so be it. Flow is critically important.
Grammar: Need I say anything here?
All these are a good way to start if you are self-editing your work to make the language and style a little stronger.
Conclusion
James Joyce easily comes to mind when wanting to cite writers who sometimes seemed to write with the express intent not to be understood. Have you read Finnegans Wake? It’s one of his hardest works to try and follow.
Then there is Hemingway, always choosing accessibility: If a simpler word exists, ditch the one that would complicate the reader’s life.
When writing nonfiction, you stand between two worlds. You get to wield the tools of the fiction world, but not so much that you tamper with your reader’s ability to believe your story. The best writers are able to bend words, just enough for them to serve the story they want to tell.
