What Filmmaking Couldn’t Teach Me About Writing Memoir
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Larkin McPhee discusses what filmmaking couldn’t teach her about writing memoir.
Standing on a beach in Big Sur, I was swept away by its beauty, the wind whipping my face, the deep blue waves crashing before me, the gorgeous hues of garnet, claret, and ruby reds impregnated in the sand, the towering rocks standing like sentinels not far off shore. If I had been there on assignment with a documentary crew, I could show it all to you in breathtaking detail. But I had no cinematographer or sound person with me that fateful day. I was on spring break with my family and brother, Charles McPhee, who had brought us here for a visit to enjoy one of his favorite places on earth. Never could I have imagined that I would recreate this day, “this perfect day” as I described it, in words alone years later for a memoir about losing my brother to the fatal neurogenerative illness, ALS.
Charles was my best friend and host of the nationally syndicated radio program, The Dream Doctor Show when he became ill. He was just 44 years old. Over the course of his illness, I never once thought to document his story on film. I never even asked for his permission. I think I was in too much pain to immerse myself in a film project about losing my beloved brother to a merciless illness. Instead I kept making documentaries for national PBS and would visit him and his family in California as often as I could.
Years later after my brother died, I contemplated writing a memoir about our spectacular friendship. But I hesitated, not because I was pivoting from my well-established craft as a documentarian to the role of an author, but because I worried that I would not have enough material to fill a compelling memoir. How many stories could I tell that would be worthy of a national audience? How much did I really want to turn the camera on myself? What elements could I bring to bear, the way I would with archival footage for my films? How about dialogue? I would not have reams of transcripts from interviews that I could pull from. Just my emotional memory of how Charles and I spoke to each other.
Despite my doubts, I jumped in. I quickly discovered that the craft of writing is liberating because you can travel in your mind’s eye anywhere, any place, any time and capture extraordinary scenes and memories without ever having to leave your office. No film budget was going to constrain my creative impulses. All my memories were fair game, including the surreal dreams that Charles and I shared together growing up, along with dreams that he analyzed on live radio with his listening audience. As long as I could use words to summon powerful dreams of say a neon lit jungle or an aircraft carrier splitting in two on high seas, there was no need for Hollywood CGI graphics, or a huge budget. That was a relief.
When writing about that perfect day on Big Sur, I did not fret about the lack of a camera. I embraced the writing experience. I knew that all I had to do was set the visual stage with a few sentences. As Stephen King explains in On Writing, “Description begins in the writer’s mind but should end in the reader’s.” By providing a few choice details, the reader can fill in the rest of the canvas. In fact, to me, that is the pleasure of reading. Our imaginations can soar and we fill in the blanks, in this example, with our own connections to places of beauty or repose. With a camera pointed at the scene, I would have given viewers many more details but I would have limited their own visions of ideal beauty.
My purpose in including that day was not about the scene as a vacation destination per se, but instead, as a way to capture the fragility of life. The act of remembering, of stringing together inconsequential events in a single day, lent itself to writing better than filmmaking, I thought. There I was, in what felt like paradise, experiencing utter joy with my brother by my side, fully unaware that he was about to be diagnosed with a deadly disease. At dinner that evening, he made our kids laugh when he accidentally dribbled wine from his lips. None of us recognized that his body was signaling the beginning of the end of his life. A massive breakdown of his nerves that would unfold like a slow-rolling blackout. Looking back, the agony and ecstasy of that day would all be there in the retelling, in the memoir. As a filmmaker, I would not have known what to capture that day.
As I researched my brother’s life, I secured a trove of letters Charles wrote to the family when he took a year off from college to work in Antarctica. He handwrote copious letters home, describing his routine and adventures in this exotic, far away land. He was a beautiful writer so I knew that readers would enjoy his impressions of Antarctica and his soulful musings. I viewed these letters as a “writer’s” stock footage, to be carefully excerpted throughout the memoir to make a point or reveal something about my brother’s interior thoughts. His first-person accounts in those handwritten letters were immediate, intimate, and powerful.
There is no doubt that my career as a filmmaker taught me how to be a professional storyteller. But could I bring those skills to bear to a memoir about me and my brother? With documentary film, I am always assessing stories based on the information I can impart to an audience. Will this cutting-edge treatment for depression have a measurable impact on peoples’ quality of life? Are men aware of the role they might play in a woman’s infertility? Regarding the memoir, it was hardly objective. I had to evaluate myself. Each story I chose to tell needed to resonate as a universal truth. At least if I followed the same guidelines as my films.
In this process, I discovered an advantage in writing over filmmaking. It would turn out that sharing my pain, vulnerability, and fear of loss sitting at my desk writing felt more effective than staring into a camera, trying to articulate all the jumble of thoughts and emotions flooding my memories. Again, Stephen King, talks about excavating an idea (or in my case, an emotion), as if it’s a relic in the ground. It needs to be handled delicately. I absolutely found that writing and being patient with writing can unearth all sorts of feelings and connections that I needed to harvest slowly, not in the real time of “lights, camera, action.” I learned that a few well-thought out and crafted sentences can convey volumes about the insights and lessons I gleaned with my brother.
Lastly, when writing dialogue for scenes in the memoir, I found it easier to do than combing through hours of interview transcripts for a film. I only had emotional memory to draw upon and it was fun evoking my brother’s speech. I read the dialogue out loud as if we were in a room together. It was comforting and I reworked the pacing of it until it felt familiar. We all talk informally and reading dialogue out loud makes that patently clear. I will add that as a documentary filmmaker, I had honed my ear to the speech patterns of myriad participants in my films, which surely helped. But simply living life gives us all an angle on how to write dialogue.
Check out Larkin McPhee's I'll See You in My Dreams here:
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