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Memoir writing process

Original Interviews Can Help You Write Memoirs

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When I write my memoirs I plan to mix personal reflection and research with original interviews. I suggest you do this as well. You don’t have to interview everyone you’ve ever known, but I bet you’ll get some great material for inclusion in your life story if you talk to even a few of the people who have influenced you or impacted the direction that your life has taken.

If your parents are alive, get them to a tape or video recorder immediately! They will prove to be rich sources of information about your early life. An aunt, uncle, older neighbor or family friend can substitute or supplement if necessary. How about a teacher or professor? Even if he or she doesn’t remember much about you as a student, a teacher can describe the educational practices of the time and save you hours in the library or on the Internet, especially since the information will relate to the school you actually attended.

Your best friend while growing up, coming of age or during adulthood can lend yet a different perspective, as can a spouse. Even your children will be helpful in providing a vantage point that, by definition, you are incapable of having yourself. In rehashing old stories, my kids often serve up insight that reflects on my parenting. Sometimes their younger minds recall details that have not stuck with me. The simple interview can be enlightening as you write your memoirs and fill a lot of factual holes!

Your Autobiography Reflects Your Generation

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I was reading an article about the aging of Generation X, which got me thinking about how our generation shapes our lives. I don’t mean only the time frame into which we were born. Obviously your life will be influenced by a war as you’re coming of age, a recession that costs you a job, a sociological revolution that adjusts your options in society or a technological boom that changes your professional direction. But the people you grow up alongside also have an impact. Your memoirs are bound to reveal that.

If you’re part of what’s referred to as the “greatest generation,??? which lived through both world wars, your contemporaries have a sense of sacrifice and accomplishment. If, like me, you’re a Baby Boomer, you never feel alone. It’s such a huge and self-analyzing generation that everywhere we turn we have someone to whom we can relate, someone who will commiserate or celebrate with us. It provides a collective consciousness that we love to share with each other.

But if you are part of GenX, you might want to check out that article since it makes it sound as if, unlike the Boomers’ case, very little is written about you. You’re alienated and you feel displaced. That’s a great way to frame your memoirs—and motivation for writing them! At least your own life story will be recorded!

Keep Your Memoirs Free of Dangling Modifiers

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Today I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know. That old Groucho Marx joke perfectly illustrates what a dangling or misplaced modifier is. Many of you memoir writers have never written professionally or formally studied writing. To help you with your writing challenges, I promised this blog would address tricky grammar issues from time to time. So welcome to English class!

How could you rephrase Groucho’s statement to make it less ambiguous? Today, while still in my pajamas, I shot an elephant. That removes the ambiguity. While writing your memoirs, you might have a sentence like this: Not yet 10 years old, my parents’ divorce hit me hard. Do you see why that opening phrase dangles? The word you need after the comma must be “I??? to explain who was not yet 10 years old. The way it’s written, the divorce is what’s 10 years old.

Here’s another example: Walking through the dirty puddles, our shorts were splashed with clumps of mud. That indicates that your shorts were walking through the puddles, when really you were the ones walking. To fix it, you’d say: Walking through the dirty puddles, we splashed clumps of mud on our shorts. Learning this rule will help you to make your memoirs clear for the reader. For more on misplaced modifiers, check this link at infoplease.com.

Summertime Inspires Writers!

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You may be reading this from Australia, South America or some other southern hemisphere location, in which case you’re in the middle of winter. But I’m figuring that for most of you, June brings warm weather. The sun is shining and nature’s colors are popping in fruits, flowers and greenery. Summertime is a temptress, always beckoning you outdoors. When will you find time to work on your memoirs?

Early morning is wonderful during the summer months. I hope you have a window that you can open in the room where you write. With just a screen separating you from the entering breeze, you can write in solitude until you’re hungry or you need to be somewhere. The earlier you start, the quieter it will be. Perhaps you can hear birds waking up or the first sounds of a city coming back to life. Maybe the aroma of a bakery’s bread or a honeysuckle vine will find its way into your writing space.

Today’s sights, sounds and fragrances can remind you of what you saw, heard and smelled in an earlier time of your life. That will help you to create vibrant descriptions as you write your memoirs. Think about how an early morning was different for you 20 or 40 years ago. A rush of feeling can return when you let your senses be your guide.

Another Website Offers a “Memoirs??? Type of Catharsis

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Writing your memoirs can be a way to give yourself closure regarding an episode in your life and finally get something “off your chest.??? When you do, are you directing any of that explanation to a specific person?

Yesterday, a column by Barbara Brotman in my hometown’s Chicago Tribune alerted readers to wouldhavesaid.com, a website that invites everyone to post anything they want to put out there, really. Some contributors write to someone who has died, to someone with whom they’ve lost contact or even to themselves or their “younger selves???; others express a thought they cannot bring themselves to say face-to-face to someone; still others write something they wish the world in general to know.

The contributors say that putting their long-held sentiments into words feels cathartic. As you write your memoirs, you may experience a similar catharsis when you picture various people reading your words. Perhaps you’ll express your regret about something you said or did, or you’ll want someone to see how life turned out for you. The writing process itself may bring you all sorts of surprises, relief and, of course, a sense of accomplishment. What I love about setting a goal to write your memoirs is that the benefit comes not only from the wonderful product you’ll have for your friends and relatives, but also from the process of remembering your life and recording it precisely as you want to present it. It just feels so good.

Will Your High School Writing Class Help You in Writing Memoirs?

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For many people who sit down to write memoirs, the last time they had an important writing assignment was back in high school. So you may find yourself struggling to recapture lessons you learned in English class when you were just a teen. Even if you attended college and wrote papers for courses there, you may have trouble recalling the writing principles you learned that many years ago.

So let me refresh your memory. Typically, young students learn to write in a formula that requires each paragraph to start with a “topic sentence??? followed by three sentences that support that topic. The next step is to shape that topic sentence so that it doubles as a transition from your last paragraph’s topic to the new topic.

This construction is adequate for new writers, and the grammar you learned will serve you well. But to develop any sophistication in your writing, sooner or later you’ll have to abandon strict adherence to any formula. Once you do that and allow your instincts to guide you, you’ll discover your own writing style. Your paragraphs will be more varied and, therefore, more interesting to read. Your sentences will flow harmoniously, losing the staccato feel that characterizes formulaic writing. This assignment you’ve given yourself—writing your memoirs—comes from the heart of an adult who’s had a lifetime of experiences, so don’t fall back too much on what you learned in high school.

Mark Mother’s Day With Memoirs-Related Gift

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Moms are a huge part of our life story, and Mother’s Day, coming up this Sunday, tends to make us nostalgic about growing up with mom raising us. If you’re far away, you’ll probably send your mother a card, gift or flowers. If you live locally, you’re likely to invite her for dinner or take her out to dinner. WriteMyMemoirs would love to be part of your Mother’s Day celebration.

Your mother is probably just as nostalgic as you are, if not more. Why not show her how to sign up and join WriteMyMemoirs? Then show her how to start writing her memoirs, and after that she should find it easy to continue the process on her own. It’s special to give her the gift of your time to sit with her and show her how to navigate the website, and it’s even more special to tell her that you appreciate the effort she’ll make in writing down her personal history. I assure you that you’ll learn a lot about your mother from her memoirs.

Another approach would be to share with her your own goal of writing your memoirs. You could devote a chapter to your parents, or you could even dedicate your book to your mom. If, like me, your mother has passed on, a dedication is a great way to honor her. And if you’re the mom now? Completing your memoirs for your children to read will make a wonderful gift back to them!

Google Can Be a Resource for Memoir Writers

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In a blog last month, I suggested various websites to help you in any research you need to support your memoirs and check facts against your memory. Along those lines, I’d like to refer you to an article by Simon Mackie on webworkerdaily.com that offers tips on using Google for easy research. For memoir writers, A very relevant suggestion from this article is to use Google to research a specific topic within a time frame. “Say, for example, you want to look for information about Olympic events that took place in the 1950s,??? Mackie writes. “You could use this search: Olympics 1950..1960.???

I use many of Mackie’s “top ten??? myself. One way I constantly use Google is to check spelling. Start inserting a word or name, and it will finish what you’ve started and suggest topics with that term—spelled correctly. It’s so quick! I look for phone numbers by putting in the name of the company or person with the area code, and Google finishes the number for me. Currency conversions and finding out what time it is anywhere in the world are other handy Google applications.

This article points out that Google has a calculator, which I didn’t know. Just type in your math problem and push enter, and your answer will appear. If you find more ways to use Google and other common websites as you write your life story, we’d appreciate your sharing your insights with all the members of WriteMyMemoirs. Just reply to the blog right here!

Use the WriteMyMemoirs Site in a Classroom or Other Group Setting

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Across the United States and probably the world, courses are offered regularly to help people write memoirs. High school and college English classes also sometimes assign a project that involves autobiography writing. Less formally, groups get together to encourage each other in this endeavor and read the work aloud for a critique from group members.

To get students/participants started, some of these classes and groups use WriteMyMemoirs for online assistance. It helps to keep everyone focused and, of course, the work never gets lost and everyone can access it from any Internet-connected computer. There are no excuses like, “My dog ate my homework???! With so many ideas on the site, the writers stay motivated and easily come up with topics for their chapters.

If you’re participating in a group of this type or taking a writing class, we’d love for you to suggest WriteMyMemoirs as a group sign-up activity. The assignment doesn’t even have to be memoirs, really, since our site is just as handy for writing novels, short stories, essays and journalistic pieces. If your class or group does sign up with us, please drop us a line! We’d enjoy knowing how you’re progressing and perhaps here on the blog we could share your thoughts on the process.

As a Second Language for Memoir Writing, English Is Challenging!

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Many of the inquiries we receive about help writing memoirs comes from our members who did not grow up speaking English. If you want to write your life story in English but are not a native speaker, it’s not easy to get this language exactly right. You can make yourself understood when you’re speaking it, but to write it properly the level of mastery must be higher.

As an editor, I receive a lot of press releases, and it’s frequently apparent that either the writer or translator is a non-native speaker. As an example, a recent press release that came my way read, “The progressive approach to education, as well as their own down to earth personality’s make for a perfect cocktail to share excitement!??? I can tell what this means, but the choice of words is not natural-sounding, and the grammar is not entirely correct. I would rework this sentence to say, “The instructors’ progressive approach to education combines perfectly with their down-to-earth personalities to generate excitement!???

At WriteMyMemoirs, we encourage you to craft your memoirs however you please—in English or in any language you like—and we believe that you have a valuable story to tell no matter how extensive your knowledge of English grammar. If you do want help with the language, however, please email us or watch the site for our editing services coming soon.

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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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