When writing memoir we’re expected to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, right? Blanket lying to readers is a definite no-no. For instance, I’ve never been to Abu Dhabi, so I can’t (or should not) write about the year I spent (did not spend) in this major cultural and commercial metropolis on coast of the Persian Gulf. But when writing memoir dialogue, it’s impossible to recall, say, the exact conversation you had with your grandmother just hours before she collapsed from a stroke twenty years ago, or precisely what your mother said to you when she dropped you off at school on your first day of kindergarten.

“We alter our memories just by remembering them,” says McGill University psychologist Alain Brunet. The more we recall a piece of dialogue, or event, the more we change it. So how do memoir writers stay as close to the truth as possible when writing dialogue? In every memoir workshop I’ve attended over the past eight years, that question has been the single, most urgent one asked by my writing peers. Dialogue is the brick-wall writers often fear scaling. It’s the aspect of memoir that can easily drive us to say, “Maybe I shouldn’t write this book after all.”

But, wait, if you’re working on a memoir, and considering giving up on it because you can’t seem to find a way over the dialogue wall, I’m here to spot you on your climb upward. This is what I learned about writing dialogue during a recent memoir retreat led by award winning authors Kate Moses and Elizabeth Cohen:

Unless you were blessed with the opportunity to record or write down every last word of the conversation you had with your grandmother twenty years ago, or happen to have had enough savvy as a kindergartner to crayon what I hope were your mother’s encouraging words, then you might want to try what is called the “subjunctive,” or “suggestive,” mode. In this case, you might preface the dialogue with “something like” or “as if.” You can also use “I imagine,” as in “I imagine my mother said, ‘Sweetie, you’ll be okay, I’ll be right here to pick you up …’”

The other option is to employ “representative” dialogue. For example, you might write, “Whenever I was afraid, my mother would assure me, ‘I’m here for you.’” It’s the word “would” which shows readers that your intention is to capture the sentiment of what your mother actually said. The dialogue does not have to be exact, as long as you convey the intended information: maybe it’s how comforted you felt knowing you could rely on your mother to protect you.

Use these strategies judiciously, though. Relying on them too often makes for an unwieldy narrative.

Another alternative is to announce, “I don’t remember what my mother said to me on my first day of kindergarten. All I know is that I was afraid.” Admitting you don’t remember makes you, the author, more credible.

If you’re looking for a good example of how an author recalls dialogue and scene from childhood, Kate and Elizabeth suggest reading Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs.

Good luck!

I recently attended a memoir writing retreat at La Finca in Vieques, Puerto Rico, where eleven of us gathered in the Caribbean breeze each morning to discuss work submitted by two separate participants. But before we plunged into the nitty-gritty of structure, voice, character development, and so on, we warmed up our brains each morning by spending fifteen minutes responding to a writing prompt provided by Elizabeth Cohen, award winning writer, poet, memoirist, journalist, steadfast writing mentor, and Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Plattsburgh.

I like writing prompts, timed prompts; they drive me to write fast, to keep the pen moving, to not fret over whatever it is I’m writing about. Prompts force me to let it all out, to express what I otherwise would second-guess expressing. One of my favorite prompts Elizabeth offered us came from a Mary Oliver poem, “The Summer Day.” In the poem she says, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.” The prompt: “What is a prayer?”

Maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what Elizabeth asked us to respond to, because I heard her say this: “What does it mean to pray.” But, hey, that’s the beauty of prompts; they leave room for choice. So here’s what I wrote:

To be still and quiet is to pray. To walk barefoot in the grass, and feel each blade between the toes. To close your eyes against the day’s glare and turn inside yourself and breath out any knots and tangles. To breath in the memory of being carefree, of doing water angels and skipping stones on a midnight lake. To pray is to sing, to write, to call forward that which makes you still, still enough to listen to the sounds you cannot hear. It’s to hold close to you the heartbeat of what matters most to you. To pray is to remember that you are not alone, and that candy breezes have the capacity to carry you closer and closer toward the inside of you, deep into the uterine center of you. To pray is to imagine, to feel, to hold a butterfly in the palm of our hand.

I’d love to hear from others what it means to you to pray. (or if you’re good at paying attention, “What is a prayer?”) What other mind-limbering prompts do you have to share?