or How Not to Remember Wrongly
To fill a page always feels too wide when I start writing. Emotionally, I feel as if I’m reaching beyond the margins of the white, blank, open space, groping for that thing deserving attention.
Often, a draft starts by prompting an automatic agent to brainstorm some fictional events or memories. Then hopefully, some true moments come, apt images crafted for that lived by essence and sensual impact. The encoded syntax might echo an honest resonance later, if I typed beyond mere self-projection. Writing the moments tries too hard to prove that they are worth telling. Filling the page starts with circling the moments, then expanding, then explaining. To get to the point of the experience is to stay with the general idea until it narrows down to that exact atmosphere or texture, where a word was spoken, or where silence ensued.
Where the Page Begins to Narrow
This is where my writing shifts on the wide page. Nothing is resisting; everything is begging to stay.
Any single moment is a question, not easy to answer, demanding no answer, not waiting for an answer, without an answer. The text of that moment comes to life when the difficulty, the struggle, and the unreasonable demand of simply writing it down, even when there is no meaning, become imminent.
Memories from childhood: I recall walking home with my best friend, kneeling on mongo beans as punishment in grade four, getting low marks in math, best in cursive handwriting, Inay bundling my 100 perfect scores, a bully chanting my name like it’s a curse, my younger sister shouting for her allowance from the main door of the classroom.
Every memory reenactable, easy scenes I can imagine in words, turning into style for the final essence. I’m completely uncertain about everything, but what will invalidate them in my mind? I frame the fragments into clauses and strings of thoughts, scheme and plot them for your attention. There is no other reason.
Making Space for the Reader’s Breath
But you need to breathe within the text as well. It is about caring after meeting someone in a room. Every detail on the page is a kind of ushering you into a stand, a faith, a conviction, and an empathy.
That I leave something unsaid, that I insist on saying something difficult to say, that I remain vague or abstract or neutral on issues, what is there to trust or distrust? You will always find something to take away, but first, you must desire the value I bring into your sphere of experience. This other life, this other story, can be yours only if you decide to breathe it in.
This is taxing; when I write, I aim for you to take me as I am. Your meaning comes after mine, if you think my life mattered.
When the Page Is No Longer Too Wide
And then, the page begins to hold. There is power in a memory of a single moment. Parsing my life into single events is staying true to the creative process. I will skip most of the details while choosing the image that will bring the memory back to life. This is how I navigate the blank space.
A Word Fellow Shop Module Overview: Entering the Wide Page
When we are beginning to write, the page before us always looks intimidating. Yet our goal as writers is to conquer this initial shock. In this WordShop, we will:
- Write from a specific lived moment
- Trust fragments as valid narrative units
- Practice withholding and revealing meaning
- Develop a short piece grounded in image, texture, and atmosphere
| 1. Writing that Living Moment | 2. Trusting the Units of meaning | 3. Making Space for the Reader | 4. When the Page Begins to Hold |
| Moving from general ideas to specific sensory recall | Writing fragments without forcing coherence | Encoding strategic silence and with restraint | Selecting the image |
| Letting the moment exist without explanation | Allowing uncertainty to remain visible in the text | Writing with awareness of the reader’s presence | Choosing the most apt details without loss of depth |
Writing Prompts for Short Memoir Essay (300–800 words)
- Writing the moment without explanation Write a single memory without explaining its meaning. Stay in the scene: Where are you? What is happening? What is said, or not said? End the piece before interpretation begins.
- Writing a fragment sequence List five to seven fragments from childhood or a specific age. Write them as a continuous piece without transitions, explaining their connection. Let the arrangement itself create resonance.
- Writing the image that holds the memory Choose one image that returns a memory to life (an object, gesture, or sound). Write the memory through that image. Everything in the piece must return to it.
- Writing what Is withheld Write a memory where something important is deliberately left unsaid. Allow the reader to feel the absence through: pauses, indirect references, shifts in tone.
- Writing on the wide page Start with a broad statement (e.g., “I was a good student,” “I was afraid,” “I was loved”). Rewrite it into a scene that shows everything. Let the abstraction disappear into a lived moment.
- In the Dream House – Fragmentary memoir structure, repetition, and the use of form as psychological architecture.
- Bluets – Lyric fragments, associative thinking, and the refusal of linear memoir logic.
- A Field Guide to Getting Lost – Method writing through uncertainty, digression, and reflective wandering.
- The Liars’ Club – Vivid, grounded childhood memory rendered through scene precision and emotional specificity.
- The Art of Memoir – A companion craft text on truth, distortion, and emotional accuracy in memoir writing.
- Tell It Slant – Practical and teachable strategies for lyric essay, fragmentation, and non-linear memory.
- The Chronology of Water – Embodied, disrupted memoir structure where trauma is rendered through non-sequential form.
- Fun Home – Graphic memoir demonstrating how image, scene, and recursion build layered autobiographical truth.
- Dept. of Speculation – Fragment-based narrative that mirrors cognitive and emotional discontinuity in lived experience.
