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word choice

Editing Your Memoir for Word Choice: Part III

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Word choice in memoir writing

Originality and a twist on clichés will help make your memoir memorable.

For the third post in this three-part series about editing your memoir for word choice, I want to discuss originality and ways to use clichés to your advantage. I remind you that this is your memoir. It’s not a famous writer’s story, and it’s not a term paper, either. Be authentic but creative; offer something the reader doesn’t ordinarily see.

Dip Into Your Speaking Voice

When you insert yourself fully into this personal storytelling, your speaking voice will blend naturally with your writing voice. Let’s say you’ve always called your mother “Ma.” Most of the memoirs you read refer to “my mother” or “Mom,” but if you’ve never called your mother “Mom,” your memoir is no time to start. Toggle back and forth between “my mother” and “Ma.” That is the best, most authentic word choice for your memoir. The reader will hear you, not some generic, watered-down version of you.

Now let’s say that you swear a lot when you talk. Confine that aspect of your speaking voice to the dialogue you enclose in quotation marks. The rest of the text will be too distracting if every sentence contains profanity.

Include a few Unusual Words or Ways to Describe Something

In a previous post, I gave an example from movie and television director Ed Zwick’s new memoir, and since that book remains fresh in my mind, forgive me if I use it for an example here as well. Zwick mentions that someone in his life luckily had “reservoirs of patience.” While “reservoirs” is a pretty common word, using it to describe someone’s patient nature strikes me as clever writing. She didn’t have “lots” of patience or “endless” patience; she wasn’t “super-patient” or “tremendously patient.” With “reservoirs of patience,” the author not only delivers a word that isn’t typically associated with having patience; he also creates a visual, stopping you just for a slight pause to consider how much he appreciates the person’s patience. And notice that he does not need an adjective such as “deep reservoirs of patience.” The unmodified noun says it precisely.

Now I’ll make up an example. Let’s say you like the word “serendipity.” Instead of calling something a “pleasant coincidence,” in your everyday speech you just tend to use the word “serendipity.” Then give the reader a taste of your unique flavor of language by using that word. However, using it once, or twice at most, will be enough.

What about including words that you never use? Maybe you’ve already described various people as “smart,” “intelligent,” “wise” and “brainy,” and you don’t want to repeat any of those words, but you have a smart friend you still want to write about. So you Google for synonyms of “smart” and come up with “sagacious.” You’ve seen the word and know what it means, but you’ve never used it. Should you write “sagacious” to describe that friend in your memoir? My vote is probably not. If you feel it fits comfortably into the rest of your memoir, then okay, but if you’re using mostly everyday words, I think a word like “sagacious” sounds as if you’re trying too hard to be, well, sagacious.

Remember that synonyms are not the only solution. You can always rework the sentence. Instead of describing your friend with a synonym for “smart,” you can say that your friend seemed to know everything about everything, or your school friend was always tops in your class, or your work friend sat around doing tough crossword puzzles during his coffee break. Again, get creative.

Not All Clichés Are Bad, and Most Clichés Can Be Made Good

You may have been told to avoid clichés, and that’s generally good advice. But lately I’ve felt more kindly toward the much maligned cliché. I think these common phrases can give your memoir a relatable quality.

Let’s consider the reasons you’ve been told to steer clear of clichés as well as overused similes and metaphors. This is a bad sentence: “She was running around putting out fires, busy as a bee, but when I walked in she looked as if she’d seen a ghost.” Not only are three clichés too many for one sentence, but those particular clichés are not the best choices.

But it can be charming to let a few familiar sayings creep in here and there. And you can control your clichés by altering them for effect. I’ll contrive a paragraph for this purpose:

I believed that every cloud had a silver lining, but I couldn’t find even one in the series of storms that rained on all of my parades that June. I’d hoped my graduation would bring my parents together in some sort of peaceful reunion, but Dad never even showed up. I thought moving out of Mom’s house would certify my entry into adulthood, but by August I’d moved back in, unable to juggle enough jobs to have anything left over after paying rent. Most of all, in Alex I thought I’d found my soul mate, my companion for riding into the sunset and leaving all of my anger and disappointment in the dust. Alex took me for a ride, all right, and the sunset did get darker and darker.

It’s not Shakespeare, but I think the clichés prove useful: “every cloud has a silver lining,” “rain on my parade,” “find my soul mate,” “ride into the sunset,” leave something “in the dust,” and take someone “for a ride.” I could see an editor saying, “Ugh!” But I think it all puts the reader at ease. I find that compelling memoirs tend to have a bit of folksiness in them, and common phrases work toward that end.

I’m just saying that when you edit your first draft, don’t automatically delete your clichés. Give a little thought to whether they might be adding something to your narrative.

Word Choice Is Your Choice

When you write a memoir, it’s motivating and inspiring to read other memoirs. But you don’t want to copy another author’s style. Your memoir is about your life, written in your voice. Every word you choose has a piece of you in it. If a sentence sounds as if someone else said it, replace it with words that are either yours alone or yours as representative of ordinary language.

Editing Your Memoir for Word Choice: Part II

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Editing for word choice photo of glasses, pen and book

Give your memoir a professional touch by avoiding too much word repetition.

My last post focused on editing your memoir to fix any incorrect word usage and also to take the effort to find the most precise word to convey your thought. What else goes into editing your memoir for word choice? Repetition is a big concern.

Word Choice Using a Thesaurus or Digital Equivalent

It’s not a terrible error to unnecessarily use the same word twice in one paragraph or to use one expression frequently throughout your memoir, but it makes your memoir a little less interesting. Don’t permit laziness to keep your memoir from being the best piece of writing you’ve ever done. There are countless ways to say nearly everything, so give each sentence some thought.

As I advised in Part 1 on this topic, don’t be too proud to rely on searching Google for synonyms. Or if you still have some thesaurus you once received as a gift from a grandparent, this might be the time to dust it off and keep it on your desk at easy reach.

The funny thing about checking for word repetition is that you’re looking for opposite problems—super-common words and extremely distinctive words.

Vary the “Verys”—Common Verbs and Adjectives

On your first draft, when you’re just trying to get your story into some sort of narrative form, you might have a paragraph like this:

“I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I was mostly very interested in having him stay away from me. I knew that if I stayed home, I’d have the fear that he’d have the nerve to come back. If I went out, I knew I’d have all sorts of worries that he’d follow me. I would have been interested in going to Mom’s house, where I knew he wouldn’t dare show up, if I hadn’t had to deal with all of her questions. I thought about having a bite of food to eat, but I had no hunger and the thought of food had me feeling very sick.”

That’s an extreme example, but it’s not that much of an exaggeration in a first draft. Verbs like “have/had,” “do/did,” “go/went,” “feel/felt,” “know/knew” and all of the “be” verbs—is, are, were, have been, etc.—can roll off your fingers and onto your keyboard with no effort at all. An adjective like “interested” can sneak in there almost without your consent! And even one or two mentions of “very” is probably too many. A good edit cleans it all up.

This problem isn’t about finding synonyms. You can’t just replace “have” with “own” or “possess,” as in, “I’d possess the fear” instead of “I’d have the fear.” Sometimes you can swap out “interested” for “intrigued,” but more often you just need a different construction and will probably rewrite many sentences. A full edit takes time, but it’s still not as hard as getting your thoughts written down to begin with.

A rewrite of that paragraph could turn out like this:

“I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I focused on keeping him away from me. If I stayed home, I’d shake in fear that he’d have the nerve to come back, but if I went out, I’d worry that he’d follow me. I could have driven over to Mom’s house, where he wouldn’t dare show up, but she’d throw a barrage of questions at me. I thought about making soup, but just the thought of food turned my stomach.”

I wouldn’t call that rewrite a masterpiece, but I hope it gives you an idea of ways you can rework the presentation of your thoughts while retaining the message.

Use Distinctive Words Exactly Once

Whereas those common words are bound to be repeated throughout your memoir, unusual words merit mention only once. You may not realize how much you like a certain adjective or how little anyone else uses some word that you use a lot.

Maybe you’ve always referred to your son as “cantankerous,” so the adjective makes it into your memoir as you describe your little boy. But then three chapters later, you tell readers about your “cantankerous” boss. No. Find a different word. Your boss was crusty or argumentative or ill-tempered, or just tell a couple of stories about your boss and let readers fill in their own adjectival impressions.

This guideline is good for phrases, too. If early in your memoir you describe the meatloaf in your school cafeteria as “hard as a rock,” don’t repeat that description for the tumor you find in your neck later in your book. Or if you prefer it for the tumor, then go back and try a new idea for the meatloaf. You could say, “I practically broke a tooth when I bit into the meatloaf.” Again, language is so rich. You don’t have to find a synonym for “hard,” a different word for “rock,” or another phrase that means the same thing. You can restructure the sentence altogether.

Avoid Repetition of Names

The people you introduce in your memoir typically come with a relationship identifier, such as “mother,” “boss,” “friend” or “teacher.” That gives you two different ways to refer to each of them, so right there you’re breaking up the procession of using the same name or word over and over. With “my mother” and “my father,” you also have “Mom” and “Dad,” and here or there you also can refer to them with their given names, such as: “But James Turner was not one to back down from a challenge”—that sort of thing.

What else can you do? As an example, let’s say you’re writing about your sister Sara, and it goes on for a few paragraphs. You toggle between saying “Sara” and “my sister,” supported by “she” when you feel you don’t have to remind the reader who “she” is. That’s all fine, but with a little attention you can do better. Look at this paragraph:

“With her wholesome good looks and radiant smile, Sara was the quintessential ‘girl next door,’ so it only made sense for her to date the boy next door throughout high school. As the younger sister, I played the important role of covering for them when they’d sneak out of their respective houses to spend time together. I can’t count the number of times I told one parent or the other that the scamp had gone to the store after running out of tampons or notebook paper or her favorite gum. When Ronnie signed up with the US Army, he asked his girlfriend to follow the tradition of waiting for him, but the diminutive blonde cheerleader would have none of that. She’d already applied to work for a cruise line to see Caribbean ports in whatever capacity the employer chose for her. As it turned out, my mother’s first-born had inherited all of Mom’s charm and within a year went from making beds in the cabins to managing the food service. It was enough to spin my head around when we all took a cruise on her ship and saw the former boss of me bossing around everyone else.

I used “Sara” only once. The other mentions were “she” and “her,” “the scamp,” “his girlfriend,” “the little blonde cheerleader,” “my mother’s first-born,” and “the former boss of me.” I didn’t even use “my sister.” In addition to keeping the reader engaged, varying your terms like that provides the opportunity to supply more information. I needed no separate sentence to reveal that my sister was small, blonde, a cheerleader, or the oldest in the family.

More Next Time

We’ve still covered only a piece of the editing you can do concerning word choice. In my next post, I’ll talk about other ways to prevent your memoir from lulling readers to sleep with the same words over and over. And over and over.

Editing Your Memoir for Word Choice: Part 1

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Editing your memoir for word choice requires you to choose your words wisely

Now that you’ve written your story, make sure you’ve worded it for impact.

If you’re like me, you go over your manuscript countless times—literally so often you lost count long ago—and one thing this process covers is editing your memoir for word choice. For your first draft, you likely followed the advice to just write and not worry about the quality of the writing. Get your story down, and you can fuss with it later.

Guess what—it’s later! And you’re probably fussing. I think it’s a good idea to do one read-through with just the storytelling in mind. Does it tell the story you want to tell in the order that works best for the reader? Are there holes, is there repetition, or is there extraneous information that distracts the reader from the main theme of your memoir?

To discern all of that, you’ll want to read your book as if you were your target reader. But it’s a topic for another day. The edit I’m referring to now is the one you do to check out everything else—punctuation, grammar and that devilish word choice issue. Let’s tackle two aspects of word choice—accuracy and precision—and in my next installment I’ll finish off the rest.

Correcting Outright Word Choice Errors

Between homophones, closely related words and word mixups unique to you, it’s easy to make errors as you focus on telling your story. Closely examine every word to ensure it’s the best word for its spot in all of English!

Sometimes we say something automatically that is flat-out incorrect, and we write it the same way because no one has ever corrected us. You may think conflate means the same as confuse, but take the time to make sure. When you look it up, you’ll discover that conflate means to mash together two or more ideas into one. So it relates to confuse, because conflating two things can create confusion, but the two words still are not synonyms.

Other times, since homophones sound the same, we write down the wrong one if they have different spellings. You can know the difference between your and you’re perfectly well but still absentmindedly write the error, “You know your heading for trouble when you start out that way.” It happens. During one of our phone chats, the author of a memoir I’m ghostwriting used the word gait, which I wrote as gate. It’s not that I don’t know the difference, but I’m not sure I’ve ever used the word gait myself, and the correct spelling just didn’t hit my brain as I was writing.

Choosing the Most Precise Word

Editing for precision is a task that might not come until you’ve read your manuscript multiple times. At that point, you have your story as you want it to read, but is every word chosen wisely?

English is such a rich language; don’t settle for a general word when a specific word is available. The replacement word doesn’t have to be esoteric; it’s often an ordinary word but still provides your reader with a clearer picture of the scene. This is not the easier route, since when you replace a word you may have to change other parts of the sentence so that it all works grammatically. Let’s try an example.

Maybe you start out with, “Dad put me on his shoulders so that I could see the parade better as it passed by.” Meh, right? So you change it to, “Dad put me on his shoulders so that I could view the parade better as it passed by.” View is a bit more specialized than see.

On your next read, you decide to try, “Dad put me on his shoulders to give me a better vantage point from which to view the parade.” You like that, but on reviewing later you get stopped by all of the from which wordiness, so you make another edit to combine the best of both: “Dad put me on his shoulders to give me a better vantage point as the parade passed by.” With vantage point, you eliminate the need to tell the reader that being on his shoulders helped you view the parade, so you have to let go of the word view you worked so hard to find.

On yet another read, the word put glares at you. It’s such a general word, so you change it to, “Dad lifted me on his shoulders to give me a better vantage point as the parade passed by.” Well, you lift people, but then you still put, not lift, them on your shoulders.

Now you have a decision to make. You decide to elaborate. “Dad lifted me by my waist and quickly raised me high, plopping me on his shoulders to give me a better vantage point as the parade passed by while he kept his safety hold on my waist.” Now you have the more colorful, distinct verb plopping to replace putting. But you’ve added a lot. Is it necessary? Is it better than the original? I think it helps readers create a visual in their mind’s eye.

Rely on the Simple Search for Synonyms

Often, I look at some general word I’ve written and I think, “I know there’s a word that means exactly what I’m getting at.” I google for synonyms all the time, and eventually I usually find the word I was trying to think of—or an even more suitable word.

Let’s say you’ve written, “Mother was good at making people feel bad.” Here, good works as wordplay with bad. But good is a general adjective, and in other cases your narrative can usually benefit from replacing it.

Let’s say your mother was good at something else. You might say, “Mother was adept at making every person in the family feel valued.” Or, “Mother was effective in using her icy stare to let me know I’d crossed the line.” Or, “Mother was skilled at all outdoor jobs, from mowing and planting to washing windows and patching the roof.” Or, “Mother was useful to have around when Dad would drink too much.” You could have used good in each of those cases, but in no case would good have been as good, er, successful, as the replacement.

On my first draft of two paragraphs up, I wrote that good was a general word. When I read it over, I replaced word with adjective. That’s exactly what I mean—find the most precise word available.

Next time, I’ll help you spot more areas for improvement in word choice to make your copy compelling for the reader. As always, if you need help editing, our editors at Write My Memoirs would be honored to help polish your memoir.

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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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