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| Be true to your voice in memoir |
Restructuring the
memoir is fine. Works in progress go
through many revisions. The first draft
is usually…ahem…vomit, anyway. Okay, at
least mine are. And I need to remember
not to compare my “drafts” with the finished, edited work of other
writers.
But as I redraft and restructure
my memoir, I keep coming back to the same sticking point. Every time I grab a new blank document and
try to open the memoir pithily, enticingly, I lose my voice. My memoir is not a philosophical tome. It’s meant to offer advice and humor to
parents contemplating lengthy endeavors, taking time away from the family. How a parent can cope with this. How they can succeed. It’s meant to inspire and show others how to
take courage and attempt something they may feel inadequate to accomplish. And, of course, it is meant to entertain.
Humor helped me get through ten
years of attending college part time while raising a family. It simply has to be part of my memoir.
The thing about my writing style is
my voice. Whether I’m giving
presentations or writing memoir, it’s the same.
It’s me. If you’ve read any of my
camping adventures on Camping with Kids you get the idea. A few critique partners, professors, and
writing facilitators noted that they enjoy my dry wit.
In my memoir, I have the voice of
innocence and the voice of understanding or experience. Memoir needs these two voices. The narrator must discover something from her
journey through memory and share that information with the reader. I must take the reader into the scenes of my
struggles as a parent in college. I
can’t seem to move forward in my memoir any other way. I can’t babble on in thought. I’ve condensed scenes dramatically and left
others bleeding on the floor and added much, in the first two chapters, by way
of insight. Perhaps this pass through
revision will leave me feeling better prepared for beta readers.
Oh, by the way, my short stories
don’t share this humorous voice. Not
everyone, characters or people, can be me. And
this is probably a good thing. Just ask
my family.