9 Things I’ve Learned Writing a Memoir
Honestly, I thought a memoir would be easier. Starting my third book, the memoir I Will Do Better—about the first two years of raising my small daughter after her mom passed—I figured that because I’d written two complex novels and had a sense of what the arc of this memoir would be, I could write the book pretty fast.
(5 Unconventional Ways to Structure Your Memoir.)
Of course, I was wrong, and I had to learn how to write the memoir via trial and failure. Here are some things I learned.
A memoir is at heart a fairy tale, but one that happened. A hero or heroine. A journey. Complications ensue, monsters challenge, difficulty increases. The main character will emerge happily ever after. The reader wants a story of success against the odds, through events that actually happened.
Don’t get in your fairy tale’s way. Write with your eyes on the central story arc—this incredible thing happened to me. That simple sentence can act as your compass, keeping your focus on the throughline the reader wants.
A reader wants to care about you. Wrapping your reader up in what happened to you requires context. You have to set things up—establish the landscape where the story happens, fill in any necessary backstory—meanwhile you also have to remember the previous tip (more on which shortly).
Find the right language. Again, we read memoir for the experience of what happened to the author. Your reader connecting to your voice is a big deal. You have to plug into your truest self. Your writing voice—your sense of humor, your odd perspective, your connection with language—needs to be that distilled, smartest, funniest, bestest you.
You want to develop, cultivate, maintain, and prune the language and sentences that will plant themselves inside your reader’s brain, but this does not mean your authorial voice has to be so self-conscious or ornate it distracts from events and plot, shouting look at me look at me. Your voice might be more minimal.
For my memoir, I had to work toward a voice that was flexible, emotional, and funny, but that also burned its language and sentences (which could be ornate) down to their essence. Finding a balance between a specific voice and an immersive reading experience involved a lot of trial and error, listening and rewriting.
Don’t get in your own way. Two weeks after my wife died, while playing with the toddler, killing time before getting her to bed, I had a freak accident in our apartment lobby, shattering my elbow and fracturing my hip. When writing the memoir, I easily could have delved into the immediate aftermath: the struggle to get back into our apartment, the paramedics, and the ER… If I was writing a streaming series, this could have been a full episode. But my memoir’s larger concern is about raising the little girl.
I ended up using the accident, then introducing an authorial voice of distant authority (more on which in a sec) to talk about, big picture, what a bad situation me and my daughter were in at that moment. Then the story leaves the scene. When the narrative comes back to me and the little girl, I am back from the hospital already, apartment bound, rehabilitating, dealing with grief and the toddler and my shattered body.
Skipping over some of the blow-by-blow details about the accident kept things on track.
Check out Charles Bock’s I Will Do Better here:
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There is a difference between your narrator and the character You, who is going through the experience. In my memoir there were two mes. One: the narrator me who addresses the reader—meaning, all the stuff I understand now these many years after the event, looking back and writing. Two: the character me, who is moving through the experience as described, and whose mindset also is being portrayed as it was during the events of the story.
These mes have different voices. They have different roles and purposes.
Fully understanding what this meant was a big technical issue for yours truly (hi, third me!). I ended up writing passages in which the narrator me stepped in and added perspective from all these years later. This helped. It kept the book from becoming limited to just what I knew when I was going through it all. But it also maintained the integrity of the character me at that time.
Worth admitting: It took me years to understand the seismic importance of negotiating all this. The technical challenges were their own beast.
Does my memoir have to be completely true? I changed names. I condensed and merged and created composites. I changed identifying details. Basically, I wrote fiction, yes? No! I did not! I tried to render the truth of events while also paying attention to what the book has to do in order to be an excellent reading experience. These are not mutually exclusive.
A memoir also is not your private therapy journal—new names constantly zipping through while playing similar roles in the story will cause a reader to tune out. This is a reason to create composites. Similarly, too many similar events will cause the story to lose narrative momentum.
Meanwhile, I can look at any passage in my finished memoir and annotate, telling you, this happened and this happened and this happened, and I used them all together to convey X, which I feel is properly representative, as it fits with those real events, and also serves the larger, true arc of the book.
I believe that is artistically responsible and morally acceptable while working in the memoir form.
What responsibilities do I have to the people I am writing about? It’s your story, your voice, your experience, your primary loyalty must be to that. At the same time, you are consciously choosing to reference real people with real lives. An earlier passage (see: “Don’t Get In Your Own Way”) mentioned that you will not be able to include every detail of what happened; but what if certain omissions—leaving out details that might have added context to a disagreement with a former best friend, for example—make you look better and your friend look worse? What happens to your credibility if people learn that you made the decision to omit something not for the sake of the story but for the sake of how people might perceive you in real life? You’re not legally liable for doing that, but you might be aesthetically and morally compromised.
Or say your memoir involves your grandpa, a former football player. He used to babysit you while your mom worked. He took you to strip clubs and biker bars and involved you in a kidnapping. Much of a reader’s time will be spent wondering, what the hell was Grandpa thinking? Fine. You probably also have to mention, though, the discovery, which occurred after Grandpa’s death, that his brain had long been damaged from CTE. This provides important context for his actions.
I’d argue that the temptation to withhold significant details rises the more contentious the relationships are. But moral and artistic integrity all but demand that you include key contextual information.
It makes for a better book, anyway.
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Two sentences a day. If you don’t write, you know what happens to your memoir. But who can say if you keep at it? Fact: Your book will never matter as much to another reader as it does to you. Another fact: You are the only one who can write this book. Every day, give yourself a chance.
Schedule writing time like it’s your job. Maybe it’s a part time job: Today you work two hours (Wi-Fi off). Maybe you can’t give it even that. Writing just two good sentences a day—twisting clauses, burning away adjectives, adding a surprise turn to that end—keeps you actively connected to your work. It’s specific enough to get your mind engaged in the memoir. My experience is, engagement is super key. So much builds from engaging with language and subject, at both the conscious and subconscious levels.
Okay, I hope some of this is helpful. Know I am on your team. I look forward to reading your book.
Charles Bock