Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

Day: March 20, 2019

Do Facts Matter in a Memoir?

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Some people have diaries to source, but many memoir authors rely on their memories to tell the stories of their lives. You could be trying to remember details of events that took place decades ago. How much time and effort should you put into making sure you get your facts straight?

There’s no perfect answer to this, but here are some guidelines:

  • Interview friends and relatives to find out whether they recall events the same way you do. You’ll probably learn a lot from this exercise. Often, some of the key people have died by the time you write your memoir, so interview the players as soon as you think you may ever want to capture your life’s stories. And even if you don’t have a diary, they might have one to share with you.
  • Check pubic records for birth dates, weather conditions and other information that will help you put together a time line, get people’s ages accurate when you set them into a story and ensure that your descriptions make historical sense.
  • Research online accounts of the locations you talk about for clues about terrain, customs, business names and other details that may have faded from your memory.
  • Consider omitting anecdotes if you’re sketchy on the specifics.
  • On the other hand, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the near-perfect. If you can’t be sure of a few things, you still can tell the story.
  • Use asterisks to include footnotes with uncheckable details that someone you’ve interviewed disagrees with, such as how long the labor was or who caught the biggest fish on that summer trip.
  • Feel relatively free to add “color” to your story without being certain you’re presenting it factually. As long as you capture the true intent of what someone said, you don’t need the person’s exact wording; you still can put quotation marks around the words. You can set a story’s backdrop with detail about what you saw, smelled and heard without worrying that it all has to be exactly right—but it does have to convey the emotional impact in the way it did for you that day.

It’s impossible to remember every moment of your life, even the important ones. You’ll remember how you felt, and aim to make the reader feel the same way. But you can describe the surroundings without worrying about getting everything 100 percent accurate. Confirm any facts you can, ask others for input and write your story from your heart, because it’s your story to tell.

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Then just set up a chapter and start writing your memoir. Don’t worry about rules. There are no rules to writing your memoir; there are only trends. These trends are based on techniques and features identified in current top-selling memoirs. At best, they’re the flavor of the month. If you’re capturing your life in print for your family, for your own gratification or to inspire readers, rather than aiming to set off Hollywood screenplay bidding wars, these trends don’t even apply to you. You’ll write the memoir that suits you best, and it will be timeless, not trend-driven.There are no rules, but there are four steps:

1. Theme/framework
2. Writing
3. Editing/polishing
4. Self-publishing

You’ve researched this, too, and you’ve been shocked at the price for getting help with any one of those steps, much less all four. That’s because most memoir sites promise to commercialize your work. They’ll follow a formula based on current memoir trends, because they want to convince you that they can turn your memoir into a best-seller. These sites overwhelm you with unnecessary information not to help you, the memoir author, but to address Search Engine Optimization (SEO) algorithms so they can sell more.

That’s not what we do at Write My Memoirs. Our small community of coaches, writers and editors are every bit as skilled as any you’ll find, and we charge appropriately for their expertise and the time they’ll spend helping you craft a compelling, enjoyable read. But you won’t pay an upcharge for other websites’ commercialization, the marketing that follows, and the pages of intimidating “advice.” You can sell your book if you like—we have ISBNs available for you—but our organic process of capturing your story takes a noncommercial path.

If you want help with any or all of the four steps above, choose from our services or save money by selecting one of our packages. If you’d like to talk about what’s right for you, schedule a call. One year from now, you can be holding your published memoir in your hand. And at that point, it will be a big deal!

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