"I hate being paralyzed. I hate every minute of it. Everytime it dawns on me that I can't do something like swing on a passing tree limb or take Blaine or Max down for a three count in the backyard, it's like a stab in the gut."
That's a vivid couple sentences from Allen Rucker's memoir about his paralysis, The Best Seat in the House. The book takes an unexpected, often entertaining, look at a tragic subject, avoiding all the clichés that rule the memoir genre.
This television and film writer brought a whole new toolkit to the memoir, and today he tells us how spice up our own non-fiction. Rucker is our guest this week in my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions.
In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.
Jason Boog:
Your memoir has this amazing sense of organization, encapsulating each step of an overwhelming journey inside thematic chapters. How did you take this utterly bewildering event and shape it into a coherent written story? How did you craft (and revise) deeply emotional events into such easy-reading, humorous prose?
Allen Rucker:
The story had an obvious “inciting incident,” to use screenwriting jargon – I woke up one day and was paralyzed. Continue reading...
One of the organizing principles I hit upon early was the born-again one, but not in a religious sense, mind you. I was starting my life over, in a sense, going from childhood to adolescence to some new form of adulthood.
I really did feel like a helpless infant in the hospital and a clueless 5th grader when I had to enter the world again. In addition, I keyed off of turning points and epiphanies: leaving the hospital, for instance, or realizing that my only true role model for dealing with this was my late mother.
My editor at HarperCollins, Gail Winston, was extremely helpful in prodding me to keep the story on track. I do digress in the book, but never long enough for the reader to say, “Okay, where in the hell is he going with this?”
In terms of the humor, the truth is, the humor came first and the emotional blood-letting came second. When you learn to write comedy from the likes of Martin Mull and Harry Shearer, you’re armed and ready for an absurd event like sudden paralysis.
It would be thoroughly hysterical if it didn’t actually happen. On the other hand, I had never written about embarrassing bodily functions or relentless depression before. And no one ever said you couldn’t mix the two tones. In fact, Kurt Vonnegut, for one, had long said that you could.
Finally, I came from writing entertainment, not confessionals or self-help manuals, so I was ever mindful of boring you with my sad story. I take “easy to read” and “was just like you were talking to me” as compliments. I’m far from a psychologist, philosopher, or spiritual master of anything.
I’m at best a comic anthropologist. In the case of The Best Seat in the House, the aborigine I studied was me.
» "The humor came first and the emotional blood-letting came second" : How To Structure and Revise A Memoir from ThePublishingSpot
"I hate being paralyzed. I hate every minute of it. Everytime it dawns on me that I can't do something like swing on a passing tree limb or take Blaine or Max down for a three count in the backyard,... [Read More]
Tracked on: October 17, 2007 8:44 AM | Permalink to Trackback