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Memoir writing process

Critique of Traditional Writing Rules, Part 1: Write What You Know

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Critique of Traditional Writing Rules, Part 1: Write What You Know
From now until about Christmastime, I’m going to be exploring 10 conventional rules of writing, one rule each week. I’m taking these rules from an interesting Writer’s Digest request of some highly respected writers and writing observers to share their opinions of the rules. For each rule, a “follow it” and a “break it” is expressed, and I will put those insights into context for all of your writing memoirs here on the Write My Memoirs site.
Rule 1: Write What You Know.
Literary agent Donald Maass and author Natalie Goldberg square off on this one. Maass goes for the “follow it” recommendation, saying, “Writing what you know means finding what is extraordinary in that which is ordinary and, conversely, discovering what is universal, meaningful and human in that which is uncommon.” Maas notes that it is not necessary to have lived an extraordinary life or have a unique subject. “You need only an original outlook and a fresh purpose for writing,” he says. “Hey, you can always research what you don’t know. But you can’t fake what’s in your heart. Say what matters. That’s writing what you know.”
Goldberg begs to differ, claiming that we all know only a small amount of what there is to know in the world and, further, your imagination enriches your writing. “We should not limit ourselves,” Goldberg maintains. “We should stretch ourselves beyond our borders. You may know your neighborhood, but what lurks beyond the familiar, safe streets?”
For memoir writers, there’s not much choice here. Mostly, when it comes to the writing-what-you-know rule, you’ll want to “follow it.” I do encourage you to do some fact-checking, research your ancestry and ask a lot of questions to people close to you in order to confirm your memories. Still, when you’re documenting your own impressions of your life, by definition you’re writing what you know.
Check back next time for rule #2!

From now until about Christmastime, I’m going to be exploring 10 conventional rules of writing, one rule each week. I’m taking these rules from an interesting Writer’s Digest request of some highly respected writers and writing observers to share their opinions of the rules. For each rule, a “follow it” and a “break it” is expressed, and I will put those insights into context for all of you writing memoirs here on the Write My Memoirs site.

Rule 1: Write What You Know.

Literary agent Donald Maass and author Natalie Goldberg square off on this one. Maass goes for the “follow it” recommendation, saying, “Writing what you know means finding what is extraordinary in that which is ordinary and, conversely, discovering what is universal, meaningful and human in that which is uncommon.” Maas notes that it is not necessary to have lived an extraordinary life or have a unique subject. “You need only an original outlook and a fresh purpose for writing,” he says. “Hey, you can always research what you don’t know. But you can’t fake what’s in your heart. Say what matters. That’s writing what you know.”

Goldberg begs to differ, claiming that we all know only a small amount of what there is to know in the world and, further, your imagination enriches your writing. “We should not limit ourselves,” Goldberg maintains. “We should stretch ourselves beyond our borders. You may know your neighborhood, but what lurks beyond the familiar, safe streets?”

For memoir writers, there’s not much choice here. Mostly, when it comes to the writing-what-you-know rule, you’ll want to “follow it.” I do encourage you to do some fact-checking, research your ancestry and ask a lot of questions to people close to you in order to confirm your memories. Still, when you’re documenting your own impressions of your life, by definition you’re writing what you know.

Check back next time for rule #2!

Why Your Memoir is Good Enough

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Why Your Memoir is Good Enough
Here on the WriteMyMemoirs blog, we talk a lot about how to craft a compelling memoir. We give general writing tips as well as targeted advice regarding what makes a really good memoir. But you know what? None of that necessarily applies to you.
Many of you are writing your autobiography not with the hope of scoring a best-seller, but really just to get down, digitally or on paper, a record of your life. You probably want your grandchildren to know about their ancestry and to preserve all of the fascinating tidbits that you know about your family. If you publish it at all, most likely you intend to print a small run so that you can hand out a couple of dozen copies to your friends and family. For those targeted readers, your memoir will be compelling, because they have a built-in interest in your story—either they’re part of it or they know people who are. That makes the reading very interesting!
So please don’t worry too much about whether your grammar is perfect or the structure meets the latest conventional wisdom about how to write a memoir. You don’t really need a focus. If you start at the beginning of your life and work your way through the anecdotes and important facts, that will be just fine. You’re not writing a textbook or a novel; you’re producing a highly personal manuscript documenting, in your authentic voice, the truth about your life.

Here on the WriteMyMemoirs blog, we talk a lot about how to craft a compelling memoir. We give general writing tips as well as targeted advice regarding what makes a really good memoir. But you know what? None of that necessarily applies to you.

Many of you are writing your autobiography not with the hope of scoring a best-seller, but really just to get down, digitally or on paper, a record of your life. You probably want your grandchildren to know about their ancestry and to preserve all of the fascinating tidbits that you know about your family. If you publish it at all, most likely you intend to print a small run so that you can hand out a couple of dozen copies to your friends and family. For those targeted readers, your memoir will be compelling, because they have a built-in interest in your story—either they’re part of it or they know people who are. That makes the reading very interesting!

So please don’t worry too much about whether your grammar is perfect or the structure meets the latest conventional wisdom about how to write a memoir. You don’t really need a focus. If you start at the beginning of your life and work your way through the anecdotes and important facts, that will be just fine. You’re not writing a textbook or a novel; you’re producing a highly personal manuscript documenting, in your authentic voice, the truth about your life.

Memoir Structure Help Is Online This Month

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Memoir Structure Help Is Online This Month
If you’re stuck and can’t organize your memoir or develop a cohesive structure that fits for your particular life story, you might want to take an October 25 teleseminar offered by the National Association of Memoir Writers (NAMW). You are required to join NAMW at the regular annual fee of $149 in order to participate in the seminar, called “Are You Struggling with Your Memoir Structure?” (Write My Memoirs is not associated in any way with NAMW.) The seminar is conducted by Judy L. Mandel, author of Replacement Child—A Memoir.
Whether you take the seminar or not, within the course description are hints about what to think about as you begin writing:
How to look objectively at your story structure
Deciding what to leave in and what to leave out of your book
What is your memoir ABOUT?
The seminar aims to provide participants with “clearer ideas about how to think about your memoir structure and learn how to make decisions about the structure that can work for your story.”
You can do a lot of this on your own. You don’t need a theme to your memoir, but it helps to have a direction and a purpose. What will be your memoir’s “takeaway”? That is, what do you want readers to conclude about you, learn from your experiences or view you perhaps differently from the way they thought of you before reading your story? What order do you want them to read about your life? Addressing these questions before you start can make it easier for you to create your chapters and include all the relevant facts and thoughts without overwhelming the reader with extraneous information.
http://www.namw.org/2013/09/are-you-struggling-with-your-memoir-structure/

If you’re stuck and can’t organize your memoir or develop a cohesive structure that fits for your particular life story, you might want to take an October 25 teleseminar offered by the National Association of Memoir Writers (NAMW). You are required to join NAMW at the regular annual fee of $149 in order to participate in the seminar, called “Are You Struggling with Your Memoir Structure?” (Write My Memoirs is not associated in any way with NAMW.) The seminar is conducted by Judy L. Mandel, author of Replacement Child—A Memoir.

Whether you take the seminar or not, within the course description are hints about what to think about as you begin writing:

  • How to look objectively at your story structure
  • Deciding what to leave in and what to leave out of your book
  • What is your memoir ABOUT?

The seminar aims to provide participants with “clearer ideas about how to think about your memoir structure and learn how to make decisions about the structure that can work for your story.”

You can do a lot of this on your own. You don’t need a theme to your memoir, but it helps to have a direction and a purpose. What will be your memoir’s “takeaway”? That is, what do you want readers to conclude about you, learn from your experiences or view you perhaps differently from the way they thought of you before reading your story? In what order do you want them to read about your life? Addressing these questions before you start can make it easier for you to create your chapters and include all the relevant facts and thoughts without overwhelming the reader with extraneous information.

Three Mini-Memoirs Model Effective Writing

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Three Mini-Memoirs Model Effective Writing
Redwood Writers is a group of California writers who support each other’s writing efforts. The group holds writing contests throughout the year and has posted the top three winners of its 2013 Memoir Contest online. These mini-memoirs are a quick read and can provide inspiration in your own memoir writing:
First Place: The Egg Slicer by Simona Carini. This winning entry provides a model for crafting a chapter about what seems like a very minor aspect of your life. Carini skillfully uses something small—her affection for her mother’s egg slicer—to communicate much about her relationship with her mother, her grief upon her mother’s death and her process of finding her own voice at the feet of a daunting authority figure.
Second Place: Crimes of Passion by Jan Edwards. The second-place finisher gives the reader a glimpse into the mind of the occasional shoplifter. The author is boldly honest, neither apologizing nor analyzing beyond matter-of-factly reporting her own rationalizing. The writing keeps the reader engaged, and we want to know whether the behavior continues past the end of the vignette.
Third Place: Gulf Stream by Elspeth Benton. Sharing some blurry childhood memories, the author combines those seemingly accurate memories with speculation and questions. She’s skilled in turning her lack of information about her mother and grandfather into an interesting story. By exploring the motivations and behavior of people so directly connected to her, she’s implicitly looking inward as well, trying to define who she is in light of where she came from.
All three winners are good at focusing on just a couple of points in time in order to convey the passage of many years. You experience your life’s occurrences both as they happen and later when you remember them.
http://redwoodwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/EggSlicerMemoir2-3.pdf
http://redwoodwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/Crimes-of-Passion-light-edit-21.pdf
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Redwood Writers is a group of California writers who support each other’s writing efforts. The group holds writing contests throughout the year and has posted online the top three winners of its 2013 Memoir Contest. These mini-memoirs are a quick read and can provide inspiration for your own memoir writing:

First Place: The Egg Slicer by Simona Carini. This winning entry provides a model for crafting a chapter about what seems like a very minor aspect of your life. Carini skillfully uses something small—her affection for her mother’s egg slicer—to communicate much about her relationship with her mother, her grief upon her mother’s death and her process of finding her own voice at the feet of a daunting authority figure.

Second Place: Crimes of Passion by Jan Edwards. The second-place finisher gives the reader a glimpse into the mind of the occasional shoplifter. The author is boldly honest, neither apologizing nor analyzing beyond matter-of-factly reporting her own rationalizing. The writing keeps the reader engaged, and we want to know whether the behavior continues past the end of the vignette.

Third Place: Gulf Stream by Elspeth Benton. Sharing some blurry childhood memories, the author combines those seemingly accurate memories with speculation and questions. She’s skilled in turning her lack of information about her mother and grandfather into an interesting story. By exploring the motivations and behavior of people so directly connected to her, she’s implicitly looking inward as well, trying to define who she is in light of where she came from.

All three winners are good at focusing on just a couple of points in time in order to convey the passage of many years. You experience your life’s occurrences both as they happen and later when you remember them.

Think Writing a Memoir Is Hard For You? Look at Susan Spencer-Wendel

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Think Writing a Memoir Is Hard For You? Look at Susan Spencer-Wendel
“…she found out her book would be published by HarperCollins. All she had to do was produce an 80,000 word manuscript in four months. On her iPhone. With one thumb.” And so, according to that report in The Huffington Post, Susan Spencer-Wendel, a victim of the ALS that was causing her body to rapidly degenerate, beat the deadline and wrote her 357-page memoir in just three months even though she could not move her arms. Her book, Until I say Good-Bye: My Year of Living with Joy, was published in spring 2013. Spencer-Wendel lost more bodily function throughout the summer but maintained her joy, and by August she’d found a tool that permitted her to write an essay from her hospice bed. To use the HeadMouse Extreme, she positioned her head to use a reflective dot attached to her nose as a pointer that moved the cursor over letters across her laptop screen.
To write your memoir, you probably can sit down at an ordinary computer and apply hands to keyboard. You can knock off a few chapters with your laptop on an airplane, or you can sit under a tree with a pen and legal pad.
I’m sharing Susan’s story not to “guilt you” into appreciating your health but, rather, to serve as inspiration and motivate you to share your experiences in a memoir before that health begins to erode. Unable to communicate easily, Susan put everything she wanted to say in one place. She made sure her three children would have a tangible way to remember their mom. In those ways, she’s just like every other memoirist—just like you. Read more about Susan here and here.
http://www.amazon.com/Until-Say-Good-Bye-Year-Living/dp/0062241451/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378132136&sr=8-1&keywords=susan+wendel
http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/paralyzed-als-susan-spencer-wendel-writes-memoir-beauty-194500854.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-wendel/until-i-say-good-bye_b_3021001.html
http://www.medicaldaily.com/susan-spencer-wendel-author-als-inspired-write-again-thanks-loyal-companion-french-bulldog-named

“…she found out her book would be published by HarperCollins. All she had to do was produce an 80,000 word manuscript in four months. On her iPhone. With one thumb.” And so, according to that report in The Huffington Post, Susan Spencer-Wendel, a victim of the ALS that was causing her body to rapidly degenerate, beat the deadline and wrote her 357-page memoir in just three months even though she could not move her arms. Her book, Until I say Good-Bye: My Year of Living with Joy, was published in spring 2013. Spencer-Wendel lost more bodily function throughout the summer but maintained her joy, and by August she’d found a tool that permitted her to write an essay from her hospice bed. To use the HeadMouse Extreme, she positioned her head to use a reflective dot attached to her nose as a pointer that moved the cursor over letters across her laptop screen.

To write your memoir, you probably can sit down at an ordinary computer and apply hands to keyboard. You can knock out a few chapters with your laptop on an airplane, or you can sit under a tree with a pen and legal pad.

I’m sharing Susan’s story not to “guilt you” into appreciating your health but, rather, to serve as inspiration and motivate you to share your experiences in a memoir before that health begins to erode. Unable to communicate easily, Susan put everything she wanted to say in one place. She made sure her three children would have a tangible way to remember their mom. In those ways, she’s just like every other memoirist—just like you. Read more about Susan here and here.

TV Genealogy Show Strikes a Chord

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TV Genealogy Show Strikes a Chord
As you write your memoir, you may seek information reaching back several generations. Or perhaps after writing a first memoir focusing on your life as you recall it, you will decide to develop a second, research-based book that documents your heritage.
If that topic interests you, you’re probably already a member of ancestry.com, tracing your roots and discovering fascinating information about the generations that preceded you. I suggest you also check out the TV show “Who Do You Think You Are?” This show was on NBC for three seasons, and after it was canceled it was picked up by TLC, which is now running a full season. Each episode follows the journey as a celebrity traces his or her ancestry, uncovering all sorts of interesting material. In the process, viewers learn how to go about a thorough genealogy search. The producers help the celebrities, of course, whereas you’re on your own! They do use ancestry.com to pull up documents, but they also meet with genealogists and view photos and paperwork in person. Perhaps you wouldn’t have as much access to these experts as the producers of a television show, but the professionals seem genuinely interested in enlightening descendants about relatives whose accomplishments have gone largely acknowledged. By the way, the TV show has a spinoff book of the same name.
If you do any sort of genealogical search and turn up interesting history, please email us at WriteMyMemoirs about it, and we will share here it on the blog.
http://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/who-do-you-think-you-are
http://www.amazon.com/Who-You-Think-Are-Essential/dp/0143118919s

As you write your memoir, you may seek information reaching back several generations. Or perhaps after writing a first memoir focusing on your life as you recall it, you will decide to develop a second, research-based book that documents your heritage.

If that topic interests you, you’re probably already a member of ancestry.com, tracing your roots and discovering fascinating information about the generations that preceded you. I suggest you also check out the TV show “Who Do You Think You Are?” This show was on NBC for three seasons, and after it was canceled it was picked up by TLC, which is now running a full season. Each episode follows the journey as a celebrity traces his or her ancestry, uncovering all sorts of interesting material. In the process, viewers learn how to go about a thorough genealogy search. The producers help the celebrities, of course, whereas you’re on your own! They do use ancestry.com to pull up documents, but the celebrities also meet with genealogists and view photos and paperwork in person. Perhaps you wouldn’t have as much access to these experts as the producers of a television show, but the professionals seem genuinely interested in enlightening descendants about relatives whose accomplishments have gone largely unacknowledged. By the way, the TV show has a spinoff book of the same name.

If you do any sort of genealogical search and turn up interesting history, please email us at WriteMyMemoirs about it, and we will share here it on the blog.

Memoirs Keep Your Memories Alive

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Memoirs Keep Your Memories Alive
“Too often memories die with their owner, and too often time surprises us by running out.”
With this last installment of our summer-long series discussing William Zinsser’s essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” I want to focus just on that sentence, which may be the most pivotal thought in the essay. Life goes by quickly. One day you’re busy establishing your career, raising a family, enjoying your mid-life routine, and in no time all of that is in the past. By then you’re busy with other things—grandchildren, hobbies, perhaps still working—and you still have no solid blocks of time to sit down and write a memoir.
But the alternative to not finding the time to write a memoir is that you never write one, and all of those experiences you lived and emotions you felt never make their way out of your head to inspire the generations that follow. Even for your own benefit, you never take the opportunity to review your life in a substantive, organized way that can give you insight into the lessons you’ve learned and the contributions you’ve made just by living your life.
It does take a commitment—and, hardest of all, it takes getting started—to craft your story, something you can point to as your own tale of the little stories that combined to turn you into who you are today. Write your story before time runs out, before life writes your last chapter for you without having any input from the protagonist: you. Do it today.
http://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir/#.UaTLItKsjTo

“Too often memories die with their owner, and too often time surprises us by running out.”

With this last installment of our summer-long series discussing William Zinsser’s essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” I want to focus just on that sentence, which may be the most pivotal thought in the essay. Life goes by quickly. One day you’re busy establishing your career, raising a family, enjoying your mid-life routine, and then you wake up and all of that is in the past. By then you’re busy with other things—grandchildren, hobbies, perhaps working—and you still have no solid blocks of time to sit down and write a memoir.

But the alternative to not finding the time to write a memoir is that you never write one, and all of those experiences you lived and emotions you felt never make their way out of your head to inspire and inform the generations that follow. You grow old never having taken the opportunity to review your life in a substantive, organized way that can give you insight into the lessons you’ve learned and the contributions you’ve made.

It does take a commitment—and, hardest of all, it takes getting started—to craft your story, something you can point to as your own perspective of the little chapters that combined to turn you into who you are today. Write your story before time runs out, before life writes your last chapter for you without having any input from the protagonist: you. Do it today.

Your Memoir as a Collection of Short Stories

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Still focusing on the essay, “How to Write a Memoir” by William Zinsser, let’s discuss one of the essay’s central themes—gathering up all of your life’s major stories. When you think of your memoir in that way, it’s easier to structure. Tackle one story at a time just as you lived one episode at a time, and when you’re finished you will have described an entire life. It’s also more interesting to the reader than going through year by year and giving a laundry list of your schools, romances, workplaces and favorite foods.

In the essay, Zinsser advises, “Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance—not what you did in a certain situation, but how that situation affected you and shaped the person you became.” So consider the person you are and how you would want your great-great-grandchildren to think of you. Then think back to your life’s stories that developed that person.

We’re all a product of our time, so include colorful anecdotes that help the reader envision the setting. Perhaps you’ll describe your dad’s car or the outfit your mother wore to church or bicycling by yourself all over the countryside at a young age. If you feel that your birth order helped to shape you, write about your interactions with your siblings and parents. If the army changed your outlook, recall a couple of pivotal stories from that time rather than detailing everywhere you went. If you had to choose one influence that really helped to define you, what would it be? Keep that influence in mind as you write.

We’re all a product of our time, so include colorful anecdotes that help the reader envision the setting. Perhaps you’ll describe your dad’s car or the outfit your mother wore to church or bicycling by yourself all over the countryside at a young age. If you feel that your birth order helped to shape you, write about your interactions with your siblings and parents. If the army changed your outlook, recall a couple of pivotal stories from that time rather than detailing everywhere you went. If you had to choose one influence that really helped to define you, what would it be? Keep that influence in mind as you write.
p://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir/#.UaTLItKsjTo

Respect for Others’ Privacy in Your Memoir

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Respect for Others’ Privacy in Your Memoir
As you write your memoir, you’re likely to periodically make choices about how much to reveal about yourself. That part’s easy: do whatever’s comfortable for you, because you’re the owner of your story. The harder question is how much to reveal about the other people in your life. You do not own their story in the same way that you own yours. Your friends and relatives may never forgive you for sharing what you know about them.
“Don’t worry about that problem in advance,” advises William Zinsser in his essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” which we’ve been discussing here. “Your first job is to get your story down as you remember it…Say what you want to say, freely and honestly, and finish the job. Then take up the privacy issue. If you wrote your family history only for your family, there’s no legal or ethical need to show it to anyone else. But if you have in mind a broader audience—a mailing to friends or a possible book—you may want to show your relatives the pages in which they are mentioned. That’s a basic courtesy; nobody wants to be surprised in print. It also gives them their moment to ask you to take certain passages out—which you may or may not agree to do.”
Remember that, ultimately, this is your story. Zinsser continues, “You’re the one who has done all the work. If your sister has a problem with your memoir, she can write her own memoir, and it will be just as valid as yours; nobody has a monopoly on the shared past. Some of your relatives will wish you hadn’t said some of the things you said, especially if you reveal various family traits that are less than lovable. But I believe that at some level most families want to have a record left of their effort to be a family, however flawed that effort was, and they will give you their blessing and will thank you for taking on the job—if you do it honestly and not for the wrong reasons.”
The major “wrong reasons” Zinsser mentions are 1) whining in self-pity in order to feed your own need for attention; 2) including sordid details in an attempt to make your book more marketable because of the titillation factor; and 3) using your memoir to settle a score. Zinsser cautions memoir writers not to simply air old grievances. However, he concludes, “if you make an honest transaction with your own humanity and with the humanity of the people who crossed your life, no matter how much pain they caused you or you caused them, readers will connect with your journey.”

As you write your memoir, you’re likely to periodically make choices about how much to reveal about yourself. That part’s easy: do whatever’s comfortable for you, because you’re the owner of your story. The harder question is how much to reveal about the other people in your life. You do not own their story in the same way that you own yours. Your friends and relatives may never forgive you for sharing what you know about them.

“Don’t worry about that problem in advance,” advises William Zinsser in his essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” which we’ve been discussing here. “Your first job is to get your story down as you remember it…Say what you want to say, freely and honestly, and finish the job. Then take up the privacy issue. If you wrote your family history only for your family, there’s no legal or ethical need to show it to anyone else. But if you have in mind a broader audience—a mailing to friends or a possible book—you may want to show your relatives the pages in which they are mentioned. That’s a basic courtesy; nobody wants to be surprised in print. It also gives them their moment to ask you to take certain passages out—which you may or may not agree to do.”

Remember that, ultimately, this is your story. Zinsser continues, “You’re the one who has done all the work. If your sister has a problem with your memoir, she can write her own memoir, and it will be just as valid as yours; nobody has a monopoly on the shared past. Some of your relatives will wish you hadn’t said some of the things you said, especially if you reveal various family traits that are less than lovable. But I believe that at some level most families want to have a record left of their effort to be a family, however flawed that effort was, and they will give you their blessing and will thank you for taking on the job—if you do it honestly and not for the wrong reasons.”

The major “wrong reasons” Zinsser mentions are 1) whining in self-pity in order to feed your own need for attention; 2) including sordid details in an attempt to make your book more marketable because of the titillation factor; and 3) using your memoir to settle a score. Zinsser cautions memoir writers not to simply air old grievances. However, he concludes, “if you make an honest transaction with your own humanity and with the humanity of the people who crossed your life, no matter how much pain they caused you or you caused them, readers will connect with your journey.”

Choose a Perspective for Your Memoir

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Choose a Perspective for Your Memoir
Do you write your about your childhood from the distance you have as an adult looking back, or do you call upon the voice inside you that witnessed the action as a child? This is another key issue discussed in William Zinsser’s essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” which we’re referencing here at Write My Memoirs because it contains so much insight into the memoir writing process.
Zinsser leans toward using your childhood voice to “preserve the unity of a remembered time and place.” He cites Russell Baker’s Growing Up, V. S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door and Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain as examples of autobiographies that effectively convey “what it was like to be a child or an adolescent in a world of adults contending with life’s adversities.”
But Zinsser recognizes that many of you memoir writers will choose to write from the point of view of the adult you are now, and he agrees that the resulting book can “have its own integrity.” For examples of that structure, he mentions Poets in Their Youth, “in which Eileen Simpson recalls her life with her first husband, John Berryman, and his famously self-destructive fellow poets, including Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz, whose demons she was too young as a bride to understand. When she revisited that period as an older woman in her memoir she had become a writer and a practicing psychotherapist, and she used that clinical knowledge to create an invaluable portrait of a major school of American poetry at the high tide of its creativity.” Zinsser recognizes that these are two different types of writing and urges memoir writers to choose one rather than combining the two.
http://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir/#.UaTLItKsjTo

Do you write about your childhood from the distance you have as an adult looking back, or do you call upon the voice inside you that witnessed the action as a child? This is another key issue discussed in William Zinsser’s essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” which we’re referencing here at Write My Memoirs because it contains so much insight into the memoir writing process.

Zinsser leans toward using your childhood voice to “preserve the unity of a remembered time and place.” He cites Russell Baker’s Growing Up, V. S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door and Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain as examples of autobiographies that effectively convey “what it was like to be a child or an adolescent in a world of adults contending with life’s adversities.”

But Zinsser recognizes that many of you memoir writers will choose to write from the point of view of the adult you are now, and he agrees that the resulting book can “have its own integrity.” For examples of that structure, he mentions Poets in Their Youth, “in which Eileen Simpson recalls her life with her first husband, John Berryman, and his famously self-destructive fellow poets, including Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz, whose demons she was too young as a bride to understand. When she revisited that period as an older woman in her memoir she had become a writer and a practicing psychotherapist, and she used that clinical knowledge to create an invaluable portrait of a major school of American poetry at the high tide of its creativity.” Zinsser recognizes that these are two different types of writing and urges memoir writers to choose one rather than combining the two.

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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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