WRITING A MEMOIR

In the beginning

Perhaps you are thinking of writing a memoir, but where do you start?

‘Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’

The King’s instruction to the White Rabbit (Alice in Wonderland) may NOT be the best advice for someone considering the structure of a memoir. There are opening sentences that will command your readers’ attention more effectively than ‘I was born in …’

There are many places to begin.
Beryl Markham, a racehorse trainer and pilot, wrote in her memoir West with the Night:

‘I should like to say, This is the place to start; there can be no other.
But there are a hundred places to start …’

The beginning, or the introduction, is often best written last. Scroll down to read more about beginnings under the heading ‘Keep writing and revising’.

 

A story to tell

We all have stories to tell. Everyone has a book in them, states the old cliché.

You may want to document your career, recall travel experiences, collate gems of wisdom you’ve accumulated while pursuing a hobby, share significant family events, or string together anecdotes prompted by sorting through old photographs. Perhaps you’ve not previously written a book, a magazine article, nor even a letter to the editor of a newspaper. Perhaps your writing is limited to emails which are friendly and rambling or, when necessary, sharp and to the point, but now you feel the need to write about something important to you.

Here are a few suggestions, and a few examples.

 

Preparation

If your inner book of memories is bursting to get out there, but can’t find the escape route, take a little time to prepare the way for it.

The plan in brief:

1. Gather your resources
2. Seek inspiration
3. Read
4. Start writing
5. Develop a stylesheet
6. Choose a structure
7. Keep writing
8. Revise
9. Arrange for your completed draft to be edited and proofread
10. Arrange for a cover to be designed

 

The first five points could be happening concurrently in the first stages of the project and will continue as you progress. The last five points will follow when the project begins to develop. After the final proofreading, and after the content has been formatted, the memoir can be printed—and possibly published.

Gather your resources

—Collect photographs, diaries, letters, notebooks, newspaper cuttings, official documents. maps, etc., which relate to your memoir. You may not have everything yet, but you can add to these references as the work progresses.

—Look at the detail in the photographs you have gathered for your project. Note the memories they evoke: sounds, sights, smells, emotions, or reasons for being there. What are you reminded of when you look at the landscape, the buildings, people, clothes, haircuts, cars, animals, or that bicycle, those toys, and other details in the photo?

—Make notes, which you can refer back to later, and date whatever you can. You many not have exact dates, but it will help if you note details.

e.g. Photo 1: ‘(date if known) James, aged about eight, in his first dinghy at ……’ Photo 2: ‘(date) James, after winning the XYZ yacht race at ……’
In the memoir you might write a summary of what had happened in the years between these two photographic records, e.g. ‘Twelve years later, he was awarded [the XYZ trophy] … In the intervening years, his father had taught and encouraged him, acted as a mentor, and when he progressed to larger boats, then yachts, crewed for him—sometimes with barely suppressed impatience—until …’

 

Seek inspiration

—Attend classes in creative writing

—Read books or online articles about the craft of writing, and specifically about writing a memoir

—Join a genealogy group

—Talk to librarians. They are good people to know, especially when you are writing a memoir, and will be able to advise which databases might help you, e.g. UK Press Online at www.ukpressonline.co.uk  while Australian papers can be accessed at  www.trove.nla.gov.au and New Zealand papers at http://natlib.govt.nz/collections/a-z/papers-past 

—Check newspapers in library archives or online; and note details. Historical newspaper articles can give you background information and they can be fun to read. Did people really think that in those days? Look at the price of food, shoes, and of houses! What was happening in the world when the ship, bringing your emigrating great-grandparents to their new country, sailed from its home port?

 

Read

Type < memoir book list > into a search engine like Google and stand back as thousands of published memoirs appear.

Goodreads www.goodreads.com presents several categories of memoir. Many of the titles will be familiar. Take notes of those to which you relate. You will be able to read a sample of these online or on an e-reader like Kindle. Alternatively, type these titles or <memoir> in the Search our Catalogue box on your local library’s website.

Borrow and read a few of these memoirs; look at them more closely to determine examples of layout, structure, and style, and ask:

Was there a preface or an introduction?
Did that hold your attention?
Was the book illustrated?
Did it have an index?
Did it need one?
What did you like, or not like, about it?

 

Read book reviews written about these memoirs, and ask:

Was it a balanced and fair review?
What did reviewers criticise?
What did they praise?

 

Start writing

Just before you do start writing, define ‘memoir’. Start with as clear an idea as possible of what your memoir will be.

Note that an autobiography will span the greater proportion of a lifetime, and include most aspects of a life. A memoir can focus on one aspect of a life. This may be the establishment and development of a career, a family, a garden, or of another interest. A memoir can also record experiences and impressions within a specific period of time, e.g. travelling, battling a health problem, serving with defence forces or as a volunteer abroad, working for a well-known person or company, restoring a boat, or building the family home. There are more topics than there are authors; as an author you must define your topic and stay (mostly) within its boundaries.
While memoirs are more focused than autobiographies, most authors will include supplementary material—flashbacks, explanatory background notes, and exploration of ideas—to enhance their work. Careful selection of this additional material is critical. Too little will leave questions hanging in the air; too much will distract from the subject of your memoir. When you think you’ve done the best you can, consult a professional editor.

 

Ask ‘Who is going to read this memoir?’ Is it exclusively for the family, for club members, or is it intended for publication and a wider distribution? Once you define the type of memoir you want to write, and who your readership will be, you can more clearly define the content of the memoir. If it’s your sporting associates and the wider sports-loving public, they probably won’t want to read a detailed account of your dog’s trip to the vet.  If it’s fellow animal lovers, that incident might be of great importance, but the mention of sporting heroes may mean nothing to them. A little selective indulgence, which might enlighten the reader or illustrate another facet of a person’s character, is fine; just keep it within limits.

 

As you start to write, remember that you don’t have to begin at the beginning.
Write about a memory that is important to the telling of the story. Write about one of the photographs you want to include. If you haven’t written for a while, it might take time to get the words flowing. Just write. Write words, sentences, notes to yourself, and questions for which you will find answers later. keep writing. Try to write something each day. Make a copy. Back up your work.

If possible establish a routine. You may be able to devote hours each day to this project, or you may have to snatch a few hours from a busy schedule. It may help to record thoughts as you travel to work, or as you are about to fall asleep. Transcribe these flashes of inspiration later. The content of your memoir will grow. You are preparing the basis of the first draft of your work.

 

Bob Dylan, songwriter and poet, as one reviewer said, always ‘had a way with words’ and, in his Chronicles (Volume 1), Dylan maintains an eclectic style slipping from one story to the next and back again. You will develop and refine your own style as your work progresses. The choices you make now in layout, construction and style, can always be revised later.

It might be comforting to know that the words didn’t always come easily to Dylan.

‘I had grasped the idea of what kinds of songs I wanted to write. I just
didn’t know how to do it yet.’
[This could be you with that memoir.]
‘I couldn’t exactly put in words what I was looking for, but I began searching
in principle for it, over at the  New York  Public Library, a monumental building
with marble floors and walls … a building that radiates triumph and glory  when you walk inside.’

He goes on to describe his background research in the reading rooms, taking the reader with him on great looping detours as he records his impressions while searching through the archives and reading newspapers of the period he wanted to write about.

 

Stylesheet

In the beginning, it is satisfying to just let words flow onto the page, but as you progress you could think about a stylesheet. It may be based on a publisher’s stylesheet or an authority like the Style Manual (Snooks & Co, 2002), or your own personal stylesheet compiled just for this memoir, a stylesheet which evolves as you notice inconsistencies or indecision in your writing.

On your stylesheet note, for example, whether you want to write < part time> or <part-time>, and <Skipper> or <skipper>. Do you want to express the time of day as <11:00 am> or <11:00am> or <11am>? The exclusion of a space will prevent <am> from disappearing to the next line whenever it falls at the end of a line of text. Do you want headings to be uppercase or lowercase? Will you use single quotation marks, or double? You could indent longer quotations, such as those from a letter, a diary entry or a newspaper article, and reduce the font size.

There are many decisions to make; note them as you progress and, whatever you decide, aim for consistency.

 

Structure

Now we’re getting to the serious stuff. It’s not that all the early preparation wasn’t serious, but when you’ve assembled all, or most, of the parts, it’s exciting to see what you can build with them. During the preparation, those hundreds of little bits of information were like scattered building blocks. Now, as you bring all those pieces together, their potential to be valuable contributions to the construction of your memoir, is more obvious. At this stage of the ongoing preparation, choose a structure: chronological, thematic, vignettes or fragments, or whatever style you feel will suit your memoir. There is no correct formula, no one-size-fits-all template, for the construction of a memoir. There are many options.

You may have been inspired by the structure of a memoir you read during your preparation. You could start from where you are now in life, and reminisce about the different stages or stepping stones that lead you to this point.

If you’re writing a family history it may include different chapters for each branch of the family. Similarly you can devote chapters to each phase of your career. While these chapters may be arranged chronologically, within each chapter there is scope to reminisce. ‘My supervisor at that time was Charles Green. I had known him since he was a tutor at my high school. He had a peculiar habit of …’

Another more complex structure is to write a memoir following the lives of four or five different people, intertwining the stories just enough to give points of reference. In John’s chapter you might write ‘His sister Catherine had already left for the city by the time he began school.’ In Catherine’s chapter you could describe how she wrote to her mother expressing that: ‘She had found it difficult to leave, and especially difficult to part from her little brother.’ You can mention where each character was, and what was happening in individual lives when the Olympic Games, or other major events were held. When John was competing, Catherine came with her teenage children. In this way you can subtly pin the narrative of each character to dates, and it helps the reader to follow their individual but related lives. In this type of memoir, a wall chart of events, with the years, and with the ages of everybody mentioned at that time, might be useful. It’s not always necessary to mention the ages in the memoir, but it will remind you of each individual’s position (whether they were a child, a student, an adult, pursuing a career, parenting, travelling, recently widowed, in retirement, or at some other milestone) at the time of the event you are writing about.

Some authors like to construct a mud-map. Write words or short sentences on sticky notes (colour-coded if that helps) and arrange and rearrange them on a large piece of paper (or the wall, if it’s yours to decorate) in your preferred order. If you are working in Word, you can adopt a similar strategy by writing a list of possible chapters with headings, then cutting and pasting sub-headings, changing these, if you wish, as you progress. You can delete the actual sub-headings later, but they will mark points where you can add more material as it comes to hand.

One of my favourite memoirs is Platero and I, by Juan Ramón Jiménez. Short chapters, some filling only half a page, describe, with a gentle philosophy, fragments of daily life and impressions of the Spanish countryside. There are no photographs, just simple pencil sketches, but each vignette and each sketch contributes to the whole, i.e. to the reader’s impression of the rapport between the narrator and his donkey.

 

Keep writing and revising

Write the first draft following the structure you have chosen. This may take some time, but if you’ve prepared as much as you can, you will find that it’s not too onerous—and that there’s enjoyment to be found in this endeavour.

Don’t be too tough on yourself. If you find you are procrastinating, acknowledge it, and get back to writing. Write anything. Most, if not all, writers admit to bouts of procrastination, to writer’s block, and to other afflictions.

In her travel memoir Not another Greek salad, Ann Rickard begins by comparing her light-hearted account of travelling in Italy to Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, a memoir written after a more challenging trip, by Paul Theroux. Feeling temporarily inadequate, she procrastinates, avoids writing, and devotes more time to household cleaning—until the Greek islands beckon, and inspiration returns.

Don’t wait too long for inspiration. Go back to your writing, and write in your own style about what interests or inspires you. Persevere. This can seem like a marathon where there’s a level of pain you must push through. If you can’t remember something right now, note it as something to check. If you can’t find that important detail, maybe it doesn’t matter as much as you think.

Think of possible consequences before you write something like ‘Aunt Jenny was an unwelcome visitor; she was a nasty narrow-minded woman who was married to the wealthy [famous name], but who stole whatever she could from us whenever she had the opportunity.’ Aunt Jenny might be easily identifiable and if she reads that, she might like to sue you for libel.

If you feel that writing is a lonely occupation—it can be, so

—Join that class. You are likely to find others who are struggling with their writing and still shy about sharing it with anyone. You may be surprised to find that you are able to offer them help as they, and the tutor, help you.

—Contact people who might be able to help you identify people or details in the photographs. You don’t have to tell them why you want to know, if you’re not ready to share your secret memoir project yet.

—Put the completed first draft of a chapter away for at least three days. Go out, and away from it, for a while. Think about and do other things. Come back, and look at your writing with a refreshed perspective. You will almost certainly see obvious things to change: a spelling error, superfluous words, or an expression that could be improved.

When you are happy with your revision, it may be time to discuss your draft with an editor. Before you do, select an incident, which is of importance to the story you tell, and reposition it as an introduction. You may want to rewrite it, crafting it into a succinct essay with carefully-chosen words, polishing it. It can be, in a sense, the window display for your book. In the gaping hole that has been left in, say, Chapter 6, you can refer briefly to that incident, and to your introduction. Readers (and your editor) will remember it.

This strategy is employed in A big little life. Author Dean Koontz, writing a memoir about his dog, describes ‘a spooky incident’ in which his dog reacted in a strange way when he playfully told her: ‘You’re not just a dog … You’re really an angel.’ Later in the book, he recalls this incident. He doesn’t need to describe it at length as he did in the introduction, but the reader is aware from the beginning that the author regards this dog as something special.

Another example is in Sting’s memoir Broken Music. He began by describing an incident during a South American tour. He writes of the anxiety and rising tension as he waits with his wife, both ‘clearly nervous, but not wanting to admit it to each other or to our hosts,’ before being escorted to a jungle church where the faithful partake of an ancient drug. It is central to one of his themes: searching for answers following the deaths of his parents. At the age of fifty, he wrote:

‘I was compelled to explore specific moments, certain people and
relationships, and particular events, which still resonate powerfully
for me as I try to understand the child I was, and the man I became.’

In Year of no sugar, Eve Schaub documented a family project of abstinence, triggered by a YouTube presentation on the negative biological effects of sugar. She began by stating her love of sugar and childhood memories of cake icing.

As mentioned earlier in this article, Beryl Markham began her memoir musing about where to begin. She follows this with the description of a township in Africa, not far from Nairobi, and how its establishment was based on rumoured gold, then goes on to describe other features.

‘How is it possible to bring order out of memory?
I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom.
I should like to say: This is the place to start; there can be no other.
But there are a hundred places to start …’

‘He … stared at it until it grew in his imagination from a tiny, rusty grain to a
nugget, and from a nugget to a fabulous stake …’

‘There were roads, of course, leading in a dozen directions out of Nairobi.
They started out boldly enough, but grew narrow and rough after a few miles
and dwindled into the rock-studded hills.’

With her vivid descriptions she introduces the reader to the Africa she lived in, and the conditions she remembered. In the first chapter, she is an adult and working as a pilot. Childhood memories are woven into the text later. There are several incidents which she was lucky to survive, including an attack by a ‘domesticated’ lion, and the book concludes with her return to Africa after her pioneering solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, from England to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (West with the Night).

Ernest Hemingway, the celebrated author whose best-selling memoir about his early days in Paris, A Moveable Feast, was published posthumously, wrote of Markham, the inexperienced writer:

‘She has written so well, and marvellously well, that I was completely
ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply  a carpenter
with words … and sometimes making an okay pig pen.’

Whether you are an experienced author or a first-time writer, you can experience doubt and success.

Which incident will you choose to begin? What will the opening sentence be?
Dramatic: ‘I was stranded, totally stranded.’

Descriptive: ‘The autumn light was mellow …’

Introducing a character: ‘My older brother Lou would never …’

Describing a setting: ‘The white timber house stood apart from its neighbours; set back on a wider block, it was almost obscured in summer by the maple trees …’

However you choose to begin your memoir, never forget your personal goal: the completion of that memoir.

Write a reminder to yourself: ‘Write!’ or ‘Another 500 words today!’ and attach it to your diary, keyboard or bathroom mirror. Promise yourself a reward. Choose a tactic that will prompt you to keep writing.

Whether your memoir is a full-length book, or a 2000-word photo essay, the same principles, outlined in this article, apply. It should be an interesting journey.

 

The first proofread

When it’s complete, ask someone who might know something about the history to look over your work. Another pair of eyes will see things you missed, and you will get the first reader feedback. Don’t fret if your work is criticised in any way. You can accept or reject suggestions, but listen and note all comments and thank the reader for the time they spent in reading it.

If you cannot decide on a particular incident to introduce the essence of your memoir to readers, leave your draft as it is and, in your brief to a professional editor, ask for an opinion of the overall structure and the introduction.

 

Summary

You have gathered your resources, researched background material, read other memoirs and studied their structure. You have chosen a structure to suit your project, made an outline, written and revised your work, and arranged for your completed draft to be edited and proofread.

 

@ fineline studios

We offer a range of editing and proofreading services. Our aim is for the content to be clearly written and for the style to be consistent.

We can:

—edit text, commenting on structure and content;
—proofread, correcting spelling, grammar, and punctuation;
—prepare tracked changes on a Word document;
—return a sample edit to you;
—develop a style sheet;
—transcribe your handwritten manuscript, if necessary;
—edit photos and other images;
—suggest cover designs, and
—offer complete confidentiality and friendly professional advice.

 

Comment

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Memoirs cited in this article

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles (Volume 1). Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, London, 2005.

Hemingway, Ernest. A moveable feast (the restored edition). Jonathan Cape, London, 2010. [Originally published 1964.]

Jiménez, Juan Ramón. Platero and I. (trans. Elöise Roach), Thomas Nelson and Sons, London, 1958.

Koontz, Dean R. A big little life: a memoir of a joyful dog. Hyperion, New York, 2009.

Markham, Beryl. West with the night. Penguin, London, 1988. [Originally published 1942.]

Rickard, Ann. Not another Greek salad. New Holland, Frenchs Forest NSW, and London, 2004.

Schaub, Eve O. Year of no sugar: a memoir. Sourcebooks, Naperville Illinois, 2014.

Sting. Broken music: a memoir. Simon & Schuster, London. 2003.

Theroux, Paul. Dark star safari: overland from Cairo to Cape Town. Penguin Books, London, 2003.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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