Memoirs are immensely popular today as a form of writing about one’s life. But clarity is essential to any kind of writing, and journals and autobiographies are also versions of life-writing. Which are you pursuing? If you can clarify the type of life-writing upon which you’re embarking, it will help you focus the story you want to tell. Once you attain this focus, you will be able to make your story more compelling.

FOUR BASICS OF MEMOIR WRITING

Memoirs are immensely popular today as a form of writing about one’s life. But clarity is essential to any kind of writing, and journals and autobiographies are also versions of life-writing. Which are you pursuing? If you can clarify the type of life-writing upon which you’re embarking, it will help you focus the story you want to tell. Once you attain this focus, you will be able to make your story more compelling.

1. AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The dictionary actually does not differentiate between memoir and autobiography. So this is the way I’ve broken it down.

Autobiography spans a certain period of years, determined by the author. Those years might cover childhood and teens and then stop, or they might range across the narrator’s middle years. Then again the autobiography might encompass all of one’s life until the present moment. The autobiographer includes everything he or she finds of interest about their life during the chosen years; and because autobiography is a story, it reveals how the people and events encountered during those years did or did not brought epiphanies and changed, or did not change, the writer.

On the other hand, memoir zeros in on a particular aspect of the narrator’s life.

2. MEMOIR

The aspect which the writer selects might be a relationship with a parent (in MY MOTHER’S HOUSE, A Memoir, my entire book is about my relationship with my mother during various stages of our lives). But the memoir could as easily contend with the narrator’s experience with both parents, or with their whole family, or a spouse or child or children – even a pet.

However, the memoir might also attend to a particular struggle – with alcoholism or drugs, with being an abused spouse, with an illness, or with the particular challenges of being a teen. One short but very intense adventure might comprise a memoir as well: climbing a mountain, falling in love for the first time, surviving a trip through the desert, living for a year in Paris.

Memoirs by celebrities usually emphasize the details of the individual’s career and include whatever extraneous experiences are directly or tangentially related to their careers; but anyone could write about their careers and the experiences which relate to them. You could even write a memoir about your relationship with a house or city or other geographical area and how it shaped you, whom you met and what you learned there and who you became because of that experience.

3. MEMOIR VS. JOURNAL WRITING

Another matter that comes up for the person writing about their life is the difference between memoir and journal. A journal consists primarily of notes to oneself about various incidents. By contrast, a memoir approaches an incident or event with the same level of detail as fiction.

For instance, in a journal, you write about meeting an old flame at a local store. You name the person, the store, the day. You might even include the weather. You can see all of this in your mind. You might also say, “He was just as charming as I remember.” Or, “He’s still very manipulative.” You recognize all the parts of the description through the shorthand of your own emotions and history; but the reader recognizes none of this shorthand and so none of it has any meaning for the reader. And so, why should they read on?

Memoir – which one writes for others to read - must provide all the information missing in the journal.

4. SCENES IN MEMOIR

The memoir plays out as a story. In that way, the memoir is like fiction.

Like fiction, the narrative of the memoir is composed of scenes.

I think of a scene in a memoir as cracking the egg. If you want to enthrall your reader, you have to crack open all the physical details and feelings of each scene and let them emerge.

Any description of a locale must include colors, sounds, smells, indeed, all the sensations that create the particular ambiance in which the scene plays out.

Any dialogue must be as concise and realistic as fiction dialogue (unless taken from a dream the narrator is describing or something similar) and must move the story forward in the same way, as opposed to actual dialogue, through which we can just piddle along for quite a while before we get to the important parts of our conversations.

If a scene in a memoir is about meeting a charming old flame, you need to describe how the old flame looks. You must also “show” and not “tell” how that charm manifests itself. (Contrary to the axiom, there are times when “telling” is better than “showing,” but this is not one of them.) You must capture that charm through describing how the person dresses, their particular mannerisms and other behaviors, and through dialogue. At the same time, you could use both the charmer’s behavior and dialogue to reveal other, underlying aspects their character and foreshadow future events. Readers will then feel compelled to find out what happens next.