Sam Bass – Author

What I Learned Writing A Memoir

Boys on the Edge wasn’t originally intended to be a memoir. It started as a long narrative of short stories of the wild adventures we had growing up on Cape Lookout. As I wrote chapter after chapter, I noticed that my speed and excitement increased as the events, scenes, and characters came alive. Next thing I knew, they took over and started creating events that didn’t’ actually happen, but could have. 

After several chapters of reporting what these characters dreamed up – I realized I had a novel. It was an exciting prospect with a big problem. You can’t make up things about real people. If you do, you have to change their names and alter enough of the descriptions of the events to make them unrecognizable to those people – in this case my family and close friends. The Cape Lookout community was too small, and the stories too well known for that to work.

So, I decided to turn a 95,000-word novel into a 60,000-word memoir as I removed fiction and focused the stories on an important event in my life – the summer of my driver’s license. Little did I realize – the depth, quality and quantity of personal insight that was in store when I began remembering the people, places, and events that comprise this memoir.

A memoir is a non-fiction work. In memoir, truth provides guardrails, but an author who travels right down the middle will find it difficult to live with family and friends he might bruise with descriptions of excessive candor. I can be as frank and raw as I like with my own emotions, but when they involve others, truth must be balanced with respect. Nuance and artistic license are required to share the story as faithfully as possible while maintaining peace among family and friends.

A key element in the writing of memoir is, of course, MEMORY.  Months ago, I started drinking coffee for the first time in my life in hopes that caffeine would supercharge my recall of sights and sounds – smells and tastes – hurts and delights, adding flesh to my initial skeletal memories. The caffeine helped my focus and efficiency but did not offer the solution to my problem of richer memories. In a writing class last spring local author Tom Kies said something that has become my mantra. “Writing is dipping a straw into the subconscious.” Boy was he right – especially where memoir is concerned.

I’ve done a fair amount of reading on the brain and how it works. The point here is how and why that’s important for memoir. The conscious mind guides our waking thoughts with logic and reason. It’s a vigilant, incredibly fast guidance system that enables us to make choices, solve problems, and filter out unnecessary noise. These are vital processes for day-to-day living, but not very helpful for the writing of memoir.

Whirring beneath our conscious mind is a vast database, a storehouse of immense capacity and power. We call it our subconscious mind. Psychologists study how it influences our behavior, but we are interested in its contents. It is an archive, a library of the ‘videos’ of our lives’ – the stories, events, emotions – happy, sad, and horrific – all in vibrant technicolor.

This massive database rarely answers to the real-time demands of our conscious mind. It can’t be quickly Googled – that’s God’s grace. Dreams, intuitions, and flashes of inspiration are how the subconscious communicates with our demanding, impatient, and active brain. Conversely, the active brain has little to no use for imagination, deep thoughts, and rich memories – no time. It works in milliseconds.

Writers, poets, inventors, and entrepreneurs have long recognized the treasury that lies beneath the surface of conscious thought. To access it, to draw from its riches, they’ve trained themselves to communicate with, to coax their subconscious mind.

Maxwell Maltz in his book, Psycho Cybernetics[1]provides an excellent, if lengthy, read on the subject.  In it he writes that Thomas Edison would take a short nap when he came to an unsolvable problem and usually find the answer waiting upon his waking. Lennox Riley Lohr, former president of NBC said that “Ideas, I find, come most readily when you are doing something that keeps the mind alert without putting too much strain upon it. . . Some of my best ideas came from information picked up casually and entirely unrelated to my work.”

I found these observations to be extremely helpful in the writing my memoir. I followed Edison’s practice of going over in my mind a specific person, place or time that needed more color for my stories.  I actually imagined placing a list at the doorstep of my subconscious mind before retiring. More times than not, the next morning, before or after my quiet time, in the shower, or while sipping coffee, the answers appeared in a flash, in my conscious mind. Other times, the solutions or new ways of thinking about something popped up on a walk, reading, or putting a puzzle together. Puzzles are great ways to keep the mind busy, without putting too great a ‘strain upon it.’

As the memoires flooded back – as the people, places, and feelings came alive, I realized how hollow my working memory of them had become. My writing provided a medium for them to speak, laugh, and cry again in my nearly real imagination. I re-imagined them from the inside out. I saw their hearts, hurts, hopes, and dreams, not their exterior brokenness that we all exhibit in one way or another. During the last two-plus years, in the writing of this memoir, beautifully broken people have had a profound impact on my life all over again.

I will miss the dear times I’ve had living again with my fourteen-year-old brother Clyde, fifteen-year-old cousin John, and seventeen-year-old friend Henry – Mom and Dad – Aunt Sarah and Uncle Charlie – Mr. Credle – and Walter.  Saying goodbye to the closeness that my two-year sojourn with these sweet folks is surprisingly sad.

Finally, memoir has taught me how connected we are. No one’s story is his or hers alone. Our lives touch and are touched by so many others. We can’t tell one story without rubbing against or bumping into others. The trick is to not bump too hard.

[1] Maltz, Maxwell. Psycho-Cybernetics Updated ed, Perigee 2015

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