Six Keys to Writing Memoir

                                                                           

Here are some tips about writing memoir that I picked up through books and lectures. 

1.      Memoir is a story, a story where discoveries are usually made.  It’s the writer’s story about a specific time in his or her life with the writer’s present day reflections on that time.  “Just the facts, Ma’am” is autobiography.

2.      To be interesting, a story needs tension, a problem with an outcome.  An exciting journey.  A protagonist and an antagonist—even if the antagonist is a concept; like in my memoir, time or educational understanding.

3.      The reader needs to be immersed in that story.  Scenes keep the story moving forward.  Insight helps the reader understand reasons for actions and emotion.  Tuck telling details and insight within the action of the story. 

4.      Memoir needs to be populated with three dimensional real characters.  Keep the protagonist genuine for readers to stay connected to him or her.  Yes, the protagonist needs to grow and develop throughout the manuscript, but his or her core beliefs or wit should show in each chapter.

5.      The important thing to remember about any chapter in memoir is that it contains substance and moves the plot forward.  Scaffolding or outlining can help a memoirist keep on track and organized.  Remember, outlines can be changed during the writing process.

6.      Don’t let anyone tell you what you should be writing about.  Take all suggestions to your writing as suggestions.  It’s your memoir, not someone else’s.

Memoir can be a bit like writing fiction, except your plot has actually happened.  Please feel free to offer any ideas you may have.  Thanks.

 

 

What’s at Stake in the Memoir?

What’s at stake for the memoirist at the beginning of her journey?  What’s at stake for the reader?  Why should he or she invest time reading your memoir? 

 

Aside from the humor and occasional reversal of parent/child roles, my college memoir needs to demonstrate the importance for the mother to attend each class and in fact finish her educational journey.  But there needs to be more.  There needs to be risk.

 

The possibility of failure is a part of any worthwhile journey.  If it isn’t, the journey becomes boring.  It’s fine to enjoy a mother’s struggles through college, how she copes, how she discovers ways to succeed.  But to add tension, Failure must be an active player, and in my memoir she is.         

            But is the fear of failure enough to hold the reader’s attention?  How about the possibilities in succeeding?  Could I possess a fear of failure and a fear of success?  I was terrified when my community college put the Ivy League within my reach.  How could I not attend when I had been awarded a scholarship?  Everyone was proud of me and excited for me.  I wanted to hide under my bed until everyone forgot about it.

Right now my memoir is a collection of scenes, a progression through college, but to be a successful memoir, it needs to be something more.  Therein lays the reason for reading memoirs and writing help books.  To discover how to make my college journey more than a sum of its educational parts. 

            One thing I have discovered in writing my college memoir is that I am forever learning.  It’s just where I’m learning that has changed.  I am hip deep in Beth Kephart’s wonderful writing reference book Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir.  I highly recommend it to any budding memoirist. 

Was It Like this for You?



Author Beth Kephart
 

I had the pleasure of attending a mini workshop in memoir on Penn’s campus with Beth Kephart, a memoir teacher at the University of Pennsylvania.  Beth has written five memoirs each answering a different question in her life.  She has also written a new book about memoir writing:  Handling the Truth. 

 

            While I learned about universal theme in my “Write Your Memoir in Six Month” course with Brooke Warner and Linda JoyMyers, Beth added another element to memoir writing.  In order to engage the reader in memoir, whatever the topic (mine being a college journey), the memoirist needs to address the question “Was the experience like this for you?”

 

It’s not that the memoirist needs to state this question literally in the memoir, but the essence of the question and the memoirist’s answer to it should at least be implied through the writing.  Memoir needs to be more than autobiographical, more than the humor of raising a family while raising a mother’s education level in my case. 

 

Where others may have journeyed through college alone, in a sense, I took my family with me.  I need universal questions through which to filter my story.  To build suspense, I need to show the search for the answers to these questions through my writing, in my anecdotes, in my mind in order to offer the reader insight into any journey he or she may be planning. 

 

I need to present my memoir in ways to allow readers to enter upon the college journey.  I need to explore the inner self so that my reader can identify with me.  This sounds like the inner dialogue, which I am carefully attempting to incorporate into my memoir manuscript. 

There are many ways to bring a reader into your story.  Do you have any questions that you or your characters ask the reader of your story?  Feel free to offer any advice to keep the reader involved in the story. 

Make Memoirs Unique



Hush, the writer is thinking.

What makes my memoir different?  A very good question. 

If you’ve been reading memoirs, you’ll notice that each experience is unique, whether the memoir is about childhood, death, surviving divorce, or even surviving college.  Through specific details, the memoirist achieves universality. 

 

            Of course universality is not enough.  I need to show my hard-won epiphanies through self-reflection.  This is the difficult part for me.  I’m a scene writer.  I need action.  I enjoy the comic moments of raising a family in all their hilarious detail. 

 

“You need more internal dialogue here, Victoria,” my critique partner told me.

And of course she was correct.  But to look inside myself?

 

Perhaps I had been too busy raising that family of mine and hammering away at my bachelor’s degree to pause and reflect about how I felt when my children constantly interrupted my studying time or when I was attempting to make study tapes for various classes.           

 

            I need to fill my memoir with self-made maxims and self-wisdom learned, not so much the subject matter learned.  My college memoir is a candid story of self-improvement through the college education of a mother.  My children’s presence punctuates my college experience.

I remained their primary care-giver and continued to teach them from my newfound knowledge base.

 

            Are these maxims easy to find?  No.  In fact, I find myself spending whole days trying to figure out “how I felt” or “what I learned” at a particular time during my college journey.  It gets to the point where I need to convince myself that it’s good enough for the first revision and then move on.

 

            How do you get past a sticking point in your manuscripts?  Please offer some tips.  

South Jersey Writers Group

A mix of stories from the Writers Group

A fellow writer from the South Jersey Writing Group has interviewed me for the blog Tall Tales and Short Stories from South Jersey.  Please follow the link to read the interview and see family photos.  Let me know what you think.   

 Thank you so much.

 

South Jersey Writing Group

What to Include in Memoir

Hard-working mother in college

Memoir isn’t a life story.  That is autobiography.  Memoir is one particular period in a person’s life, one instance or one experience in which the memoirist has come to an epiphany or several epiphanies from that experience and wishes to share that insight with the reader.  Memoir provides insight not merely facts of the experience. 

 

It is not necessary to include everything that happened in the particular period which the memoirist wishes to share and elucidate to the reader.  The memoir would be too long and rambling if I included every class taken.  After taking over 40 college courses, I decided to write about my experiences in approximately 25 of them.  Of course that’s not all I wrote about.  I focused on the trials and tribulations of raising a family of five children while attending college for ten years, ten of my children’s growing-up years, ten years of assisting my special needs child to achieve her educational goals.

 

Memoirs encapsulate the important moments, the “aha” moments in the slice of life the memoirist decides to share.  The general, the sameness in experience has no place in memoir.  Memoir needs to be poignant and full of meaning, and in my case, humorous.  For that was a way to cope in the daily grind of going to college as a mother of five.

 

Has anyone read a good memoir lately that I could add to my reading list?

Roving Through Revisions

When it's going well...

Although Hemingway and Anne LaMott may call the first draft by a different name, I feel my synonym works just as well.  I’m plodding through the poopy first draft of my memoir now, chapter by chapter, enlivening scenes here, clarifying details there, and hopefully offering enough insight so that readers can truly see what it was like attending college as a non-traditional student and still raising those five children.

Of course, I could tell the reader my experience in one word: exhausting.  However my fellow memoirists in the writing course I just finished thought I should be a little more specific.  I’m considering each edit of my manuscript, deciding whether or not a cut is in order or simply elucidation.  I’m not opposed to dropping summary in favor of a scene.  My fellow memoirists enjoyed the interaction between my children and me as I struggled through entrance to and classes in my college journey.  I find myself laughing out loud in the library where I sometimes hide to write, and then can’t wait for dinner that night to tell the family what I wrote about that day.  Pretty soon we’re all reliving the experience and laughing out loud.  This is what makes my memoir about college different from other college memoirs.

 

In writing through the memoir course attempting to get that poopy first draft completed, sometimes I rushed through or summarized important situations to finish a topic or to complete a chapter.  I was always looking ahead or trying to decide what to include and what to leave out.  This first revision allows me to open up scenes where there were none; to slow down the pace and allow the reader to absorb all that was happening.
 
Every writer revises, from experts to beginners.  What writing glitches do you deal with in revision?  Please share any tips.  Thanks.