Eggers's excerpt of "A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius"

When I took Writing for Electronic Media and Film at SRU, we covered many lesson plans for writing in different styles, like vlogs and moving poetry and such. The point of the whole class (the way that particular professor taught it) was that we didn’t have to stick to the conventional methods of words on a page or screen in order to tell a story. Eggers using graphs, lists, play scripts and anything else he could think of is just another way to convey the same information. It’s the same as writing everything out, and the messages still get across. It also provides the reader with something else to look at that might not require as much thinking, or would stimulate other portions of our brains so we don’t feel like we’re looking at monotonous bits of information and continuous text blocks. This method is unique and I think works well.

The fact that he creates some of the scenes is okay. As we saw in the assigned excerpt, he created a scene by writing it as a script. The conversations probably happened many times, and even if those exact words didn’t happen, they still truthfully represented the other conversations. Writers of memoir will take whatever point in their lives they’re trying to write, and condense it into a proper narration. The dialogue there may not be exactly the same, but it matches the technique Eggers used of making it fit the scene and represent what happened. The only difference is that one was within narration, and one was without it.

Eggers’s method shows us that it doesn’t matter what memoir method writers choose, we can still arrive to the same conclusions and enlightenments. All it takes is remembering, writing, reading, reflecting and making connections—it doesn’t matter what format the writing takes. In Eggers’s case, it did take a bit of pondering to realize why he used those differing techniques, but that only resulted in further enlightenment when the rest of the pieces started fitting together. If I were writing a memoir and came upon a discussion or even that happened many times, I would definitely consider using techniques like recipes and play scripts or graphs, if they were relevant. Relevance and easy readability are all that matters.