Into Thin Air Memoir Reflection Blog #3

     I think the hardest problem for a memoir writer to face is getting what they want to say on the page(s) and understandable to the reader. Most people say a hard problem for memoir writers is the inability to remember very specific details, which is true. However, chances are if you are spending time to write a memoir and expecting people to actually read it (outside of school), then the specific area of your life you are focusing on was probably a pretty significant experience to you and will, most likely, be very difficult to forget even the smallest of details. In Into Thin Air (written by Jon Krakauer), Krakauer actually remembers a lot of what happens to him in the deadly trip up and down Mount Everest. This is probably due to the fact that everything went wrong and a lot of people died…Maybe…Possibly… Now some stuff he did not remember, and he did have recordings of interviews and other things to help him if he forgot something, but for the most part, he remembered what happened pretty accurately. This is where the problem comes into play. I think Krakauer, being the professional writer that he is, had trouble describing the event effectively in the beginning when he first wrote the book. Now that I am actually reading it I think the book turned out well, but he has a tendency to get off topic or go into too little or too much detail about specific things. He also describes some things very well and others just seem like a page filler. For example, in the story Krakauer explains several stories on how the other climbing groups had very little experience, people were not following Nepalese Sherpa cultural traditions on the mountain, and people are climbing for publicity or are just bad people. This adds meaning to the difficulty of climbing the mountain (with inexperienced people slowing you down and making mistakes) but it has very little to do with furthering the story of what happened when they climbed up the mountain. We do not need to know what people were doing noisily with other people in the same tent...We need to know a little background of the characters at least, how they got up the mountain, what happened at the summit, and what was a result of the disaster. Another reason getting their words onto a page is the hardest problem the writer has to face is because it might be very emotional for them and they might not be able to word it without crying, laughing, etc. Krakauer did a pretty good job in the end with keeping the useful information in the book, but sometimes you can see the remnants of the off-track stories. He does use literary devices well for explaining what he wants the reader to know, though, and (even though he occasionally goes overboard with the metaphors and similes) I think it is a good compensation for finding a way to get what you want to tell the reader onto a page, fast, and still be understandable.