The Letter H and a List—How I Connected the Stories in My Memoir | The Brevity Blog

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The Letter H and a List—How I Connected the Stories in My Memoir

July 8, 2026 § 18 Comments

By Wanda S. Duncan

My memoir was ten years in the making. I didn’t know I was writing a book when I started. My small hometown in Florida, that I happily escaped at eighteen, emerged with a deep pull on my middle-aged self, catching me off guard. The tug began in my senses. The balmy smell of a riverside town, moss-covered live oaks casting deep, cooling shade across ancient brick streets, the relaxed and easy speech of the locals. Things I did not appreciate when I was younger. On visits back, I began writing: the scenes, the people, the place of my home. Then two things happened, changing my life and the direction of my writing.

First, my mother was diagnosed with dementia. I traveled back and forth from my home five hundred miles away in North Carolina every four to six weeks to help with her care. On these visits, my exposure to my hometown deepened, and an entirely new subject area for my essays opened up—the complexities, frustrations, and heartbreak of caring for my mother as her mind slipped away.

Then my husband died unexpectedly, and I simply stopped writing. Staying with my mother became my grounding point, a place to let myself heal, to gain distance from what felt like a fishbowl existence of sudden widowhood back in North Carolina.

After my mother died, I began writing again. Friends were supportive to the point of insisting that everything I was writing, and had written, could come together as a memoir. There were stories about the town’s history, my ancestors, and anecdotes about living with a dementia patient. Then there were stories about the quirks of the town, the strange characters, the graveyards, the monster movie filmed there decades ago, even stories about paranormal activity— things about the town that whispered gothic. And finally, there was my personal grief journey through all of this.

Themes, chapter topics, outline notes, jotted on dozens of index cards, were often scattered across my kitchen table. I would shuffle them around like a blackjack dealer. How does this fit with that? What type of transition will it take to get from here to there? I struggled with how to, or whether to, incorporate them all into my memoir. I confessed to a writer friend that it was like having a bowl full of beautiful beads, but I couldn’t figure out how to string them together into a coherent story.

In addition to the challenge of trying to connect all the disparate stories, I had one problematic page of notes that I could not wrangle into a satisfying form. It started as a Google search for a Latin word origin, and before I knew it, I went down a rabbit hole that led me to constellations, latitude lines, bizarre supernatural stories, and ultimately back to my hometown. All I had was a chronological list of websites and a few notes I had taken, but it seemed important.

At the same time, I had resumed my graduate studies, and in one of my courses we read To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. My daughter, also having read it in a college course, pointed out that the book’s narrative arc is shaped like the capital letter H, with a center point that transitions to the second “book” of the novel. She wondered if Woolf’s “H structure” could help me.

I returned to my index cards. I grouped the history and family stories together to form the first half of my book. That left essays about the mysterious and gothic aspects of the town and the more introspective and personal pieces for the second half. In between these two sections, I placed the problem child, the list, as a stand-alone chapter. Miraculously, it worked. The list became a stream of consciousness, drawing the reader, step by step, from the stability of stories about my town and family, into the weirdness, the gothic space, and ultimately to a place of healing. It was the transition I needed into the second half of the book. Once I had the book set up with two separate themes and a bridge, I was better able to position the essays within each section. My publisher balked when I described my bullet point list as a chapter, but when he saw it in the full context, he agreed it was perfect.

Using the list and the H-structure cleared my logjam. What had been a collection of mostly unrelated essays finally came together in a way that I felt would make sense to readers. A year after my book was published, I read As I Lay Dying by Faulkner, and I literally squealed out loud when I saw it—one of Faulkner’s chapters is a list. Pay attention, whether you are interacting with the people in your life who are readers and writers, or reading your favorite literary works. Maybe a comment will spark an idea, maybe you will notice a construct or device...