Writing the Longer Memoir – By: Robert Waldvogel

Writing the Longer Memoir

By: Robert Waldvogel

INTRODUCTION:

Longer, book-length memoirs differ from the shorter, single-page ones because they generally cover a significant portion of the author’s life, as opposed to an isolated incident or experience. Memories, needless to say, serve as the inroads to both.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OR MEMOIR?

Because both autobiographies and memoirs are longer works, and can potentially encompass decades of a person’s life, there may be some confusion between them. Nevertheless, there are differences.

The autobiography, for instance, is primarily an historical, chronological recounting of the writer’s life from birth to his current age, while the memoir tends to focus on a common theme or thread, and those events which neither illustrate nor support it are excluded.

Which version you consider writing may be determined by its ultimate purpose. If you do not wish to publish your book, yet are intent upon capturing as much of your life as you can on paper to share with a few friends and family members, then the autobiography is most likely the appropriate genre for you. If, on the other hand, you do not have the notoriety to attract sales of such an account, as political, sports, and film figures do, yet still wish to publish, then writing the memoir, in which you take the reader on your journey and share the lessons of it with him, will most likely offer the greater value.

MEMOIR DEFINED:

Imagine a sizeable blanket through which a single thread runs. It holds it all together. Unlike the all-encompassing, from birth-to-death autobiography, the book-length memoir should be woven around a single, common theme, the one the reader can follow from the first stitch to the last.

GETTING STARTED:

Before you even put your pen to the paper, you may wish to transcend the questions of “Who cares about what I’m writing?” to “Why do I care about what I’m writing?” If, after all, you do not, then the reader certainly will not.

You need to examine why your experiences are important to you-in other words, why do they matter to you?

The first question concerning care is inherently de-motivating, turning off the tap to your inspiration and dampening your self-expression. How can others believe in you and find meaning, importance, and inspiration in what you write when you, as the author in the driver’s seat, do not? If, on the other hand, your work is permeated with the feeling that you do care, so, too, will the reader. He will feel the passion.

When you begin to examine what is important to you, you need to take your analysis further by asking yourself several other questions, such as “What must I tell the world? What is itching inside me to get out? What may my legacy be? What would complete my life if I could only write about it and share its lessons with others?”

FOLLOW YOUR FEELINGS:

Treasure, it seems, is always buried and it may be buried within you. “Treasure” here, however, may not necessarily be pleasant and your greatest life lessons may be camouflaged by the pain you had to endure to learn them. Consider pain a blanket. If you could lift it up, you may find that treasure trove of material you can incorporate in your literary journey-the same one you hope your readers will follow to your destination of insight and understanding.

If this method is less than successful, consider one of two factors:

1). The pain is too intense to penetrate.

2). You have not dug deep enough to strike gold.

“Whether the memories involve physical or emotional pain, each memoirist must be prepared to be touched by events she may think have long lost the power to affect her,” according to Judith Barrington in her book, Writing the Memoir (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1997, p. 114),

MEMOIR THEME EXAMPLES:

No one knows your life better than you. That is why you, as the expert, are writing about it. Nevertheless, here are a few examples of memoir themes.

1). Growing up in an armed services family and being forced to move, on average, every year because of it, as your parents were continually transferred to new bases.

2). Losing one or both parents at an early age and illustrating your emotional struggles, developmental difficulties, discoveries, and questioning your faith as a result of it.

3). Growing up with an abusive parent or primary caregiver.

4). Negotiating the world with a physical debilitation.

5). Trying to fit in the world when you consider yourself “different.” You must define what “different” means to you.

6). Surviving a terrorist attack or other trauma and describing how it changed you and your life.

Although these memoir topics are hardly limited to the ones suggested, each one entails struggles and difficulties. They can teach your readers how you dealt with them, shedding light and insight on experiencing such a life and perhaps turning your pain into a purpose.

ESSENCE OF A MEMOIR:

“… The essence of a memoir,” according to Judith Barrington in her book, “Writing the Memoir” (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1997, p. 88), “is ‘the track of a person’s thoughts, struggling to achieve some understanding of a problem.'”

“For some reason particular to you and your life, you need to tell the truth,” she also wrote (p. 70).

Only you are the authority on your life. After you have traveled a significant portion of it, you can reflect on its journey and the impact it has had on you.

As with the shorter memoir, remember that it is not necessarily what happened, but what you as the author made happen. It is what you can take away from it.

As a venue, your memoir will enable you to process, understand, and interpret your journey, and then share its knowledge, lessons, and insight with others. In essence, it says, “I was here. This was my journey. This is how I made a difference. This is my life and these are my lyrics. This is my legacy.”

THINK OF YOUR READERS:

Think of your potential readers-or the audience you most wish to attract-and ask yourself what you are asking of them.

1). Only to be read and heard.

2). To share my pain, struggles, and wisdom.

3). To commiserate with me and feel sorry for me?

4). To cry with me?

5). To laugh with me?

6). To get them to understand me?

7). To see how I ultimately grew from my experience?

MEMOIR: YES. MEMORY: NO:

“I would love to start writing my memoir, but what if I can’t remember every person, place, event, date, and conversation?”

Few can. What is important is not necessarily details such as these, but the fact that what you write is your core story-that is, what occurred and how you interpreted it. These other details only provide the raw material or foundation for your book. The memoir, as opposed to contrived fiction, is circumscribed by facts.

“… When you name what you write a memoir or fiction, you enter into a contract with the reader,” according to Judith Barrington in her book, Writing the Memoir (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1997, p. 26).

Although you may not necessarily know a person or the one behind the photographs in an old album, “The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject, but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers,” Barrington continued (p. 28).

DIGGING FOR MEMORIES:

Because most people do not have perfect recall, you may wish to consider the following methods for recovering important information.

1). Probe your memory, but do not expect to recall every incident or event as if they occurred yesterday. The more you do so, however, the more, over time, will become available.

2). Talk with friends, family members, schoolmates, and colleagues you have not spoken to in a considerable time. Be blunt, “Do you remember that time when we were ten-years-old and… ?”

3). Probe your records, old letters, photographs, school notebooks, and anything else you can think of and may still have access to in order to refresh your memory.

Initiate the flow of memory by identifying your life’s milestones, such as graduations, first dates, first jobs, promotions, awards, marriages, career changes, vacations, and relocations, and follow their lines to the information you need.

“(However), It is not the obvious landmarks of life that (necessarily) hold the passionate moments, the transformations, and the painful growth: those lie within incidents and relationships that are unique to each of us,” according to Judith Barrington in her book, Writing the Memoir (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1997, p. 41).

MEMOIR WRITING SUGGESTIONS:

“Those suggestions were only partially helpful. Now what do I do?” Consider the following guidelines.

1). If you cannot remember exact dialogue, re-create its essence. The exact words themselves are not as vital as you think. Who would remember the exact conversation you had at the breakfast table with your uncle when you were twelve?

2). Eliminate anything that does not perpetuate the memoir’s momentum and is therefore not integral to its central theme.

3). Re-order events if the original sequence is confusing or there is no logical, structured journey to your story.

There may be a difference between facts and truth-that is, what occurred may not necessarily be your reality. You may have perceived, filtered, or interpreted events differently. Its “real truth” may lie within how it affected or changed you. As in life, there may be no absolute truth. But the truth of your story may be its honest heart.

MEMOIR STRUCTURE:

Like the shorter memoir, the longer one utilizes the three principle types of writing: exposition, narrative, and narrative summary. However, because of its length, there are other organizational components to consider.

“Although the roots of the memoir lie in the realm of personal essay, the modern literary memoir also has many of the characteristics of fiction,” according to Judith Barrington in her book, “Writing the Memoir” (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1997, p. 22). “Moving backward and forward in time, re-creating believable dialogue, switching back and forth between scene and summary, and controlling the pace and tension of the story, the memoirist keeps her reader engaged by being an adept story teller.”

Once you have established the thread that runs throughout your book and stitches its pages and chapters together, you must organize events, observations, conclusions, and insights together to attain a degree of logical structure and cohesion. You must be selective in what you include and exclude. An important part of the writing process includes planning and creating outlines.

Everything that occurs is connected to you and your life, but they may not all support or be significant to your memoir’s theme.

Writing that memoir, however, requires a balance between the outside world (what, when, where, why, and how it happened) and the inner world-that is, what it did to you; how you interpreted, processed, and emotionalized it and how it changed you. Doing so prompts you to become more conscious of yourself as a person.

TIME AND TENSE:

Because the memoirist is usually both the protagonist (the person to whom everything in the story occurs) and the narrator, there are several verb tenses he can use to tell his story, including past, present, future, and conditional.. He may, at times, use all of them, making it vital that the reader can distinguish them.

“The first thing to remember is that there must be a ‘now,'” according to Judith Barrington in her book, Writing the Memoir (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1997, p. 95). “The reader must have a sense that the narrator is rooted in a particular moment form which he or she may look back, may speak in present tense, and may look forward to the future.”

WRITING ABOUT OTHERS:

Few memoirs are one-man or -woman monologues, since few people live in vacuums. As you write about your life, other people will invariably enter it and become entwined with your own, as you interact with them and are affected by them to either a lesser or greater degree. These interactions may leave you with the choice-or dilemma-of either including or excluding them.

Part of this conundrum stems from the fact that those you include in your memoir may not remember and interpret events the way you do. Most people selectively filter their lives, avoiding some of their deficiencies and inaccuracies. On one hand, it may not matter, because this is your story and how you saw and experienced it. On the other, there may be complications.

“As soon as I started to write about my own life, I understood that to speak honestly about family and community is to step way out of line, to risk accusations of betrayal and to shoulder the burden of being the one who blows the whistle on the myths that families and communities create to protect themselves from painful truths,” according to Judith Barrington in her book, Writing the Memoir (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1997, p. 12).

As you contemplate this aspect, you may wish to consider the following choices.

1). Either use the person’s real name or change it.

2). Minimize any potential damage or defamation by being selective with what you include.

3). Show the manuscript to them before it is published so that you can receive their permission to include those parts which discuss them.

4). If you intend to publish your memoir, determine what its readership may be. If, after all, only a few friends read what you write, the amount of exposure may be minimal.

5). If you include the person’s true name, be cognizant of your motivation for doing so. Would your story be incomplete and unrealistic without it or are you really seeking some type of revenge?

6). People may not see, or be able to see, themselves the way you do, but how they affected you may be one of the most important parts of your memoir.

7). Would you make the same decision if you included a person who is already deceased?

8). Consider the number and severity of any family or friend “secrets” you may reveal.

9). The right to write, especially if it is to be published, carries responsibilities beyond words.

Article Sources:

Barrington, Judith. “Writing the Memoir”. Portland, Oregon: The Eighth Mountain Press, 1997.

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