You all dream of writing a story about your life and getting it published. I know you do. So what better time to make that dream come true than now, the start of the new year. You've examined your life. You've vowed to change it. Writing your story will do that.
Why?
Because writing memoir is all about change; it is an act of transformation. When you look at your past and write a story about those events, you change your future. There's no way around it. Every writer I've worked with comes to understand at some point that the process of narrative, the actual making of a story line from little pieces of memory, assigns meaning to memory. That meaning becomes your truth about the past, and it affects everything you do in the future. It changes the future.
As for publishing, it's true the book industry is rumbling through an earthquake of change these days. The dream of securing a contract with a big house in New York is just that. But take heart! The opportunities for publishing your memoir have never been more multitudinous. For one, Amazon's CreateSpace has opened the door to anyone for publication and distribution of creative work.
So get started this month.
Here are ten steps for writing your memoir in 2011:
1) Understand the difference between memoir and autobiography: Memoir deals with a slim slice of your life, something intense that changed your life. Autobiography is a chronological record of your life to date.
2) Choose three, five, or seven vivid memory moments from a short, intense period in your life -- the months your mother battled cancer, or the last summer you visited your Dad. These memories will come into your mind quickly when you read this sentence.
3) One after the other, stare at the memories in your mind and using first person -- "I" -- write what you see and feel. Use paper or a computer file to record each memory. Include smells and sounds like the reedy quality of your mother's voice calling from the bedroom; the rhythmic beep of a monitor echoing down a hospital hallway; the scent of the earth through the first opened window of spring; the discordant thrum of traffic below the balcony of your Dad's apartment; crushed oregano from your mother's kitchen garden.
4) Be kind with yourself and others in your writing. Good memoir embraces the complexities of life.
5) But don't pull punches. Good memoir also pulses with authentic truth.
6) When you have three, five, or seven memory moments written (or as many as you choose), line them up one after the other, in the order in which they happened -- or whatever order feels right to you -- on paper or in a computer file, dividing each with a few lines of extra space.
7) Write transitions between stories if you think you need them.
8) Edit for typos.
9) Share your story with one trusted friend who will speak truth if you are playing the victim or blaming others. Listen to that trusted friend and revise, if necessary.
10) Print copies from your computer, or make copies if you write by hand, distribute to friends and family. Or, if you've written enough to constitute a book, investigate companies that will help you enlarge the playing field. Here are three of the dozens now available: About Books, Dog Ear Publishing, Lulu.
Follow Lisa Dale Norton on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lisadalenorton
The Problem With Memoirs
By NEIL GENZLINGER
“A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up . . . ”
“. . . Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/books/review/Genzlinger-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema4
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I couldn't agree more.
In working with memoir clients at http://7memories.com I use a similar strategy for approaching what may seem like a daunting task, into manageable steps--and it works. Thank you for mentioning it here.
Great to know there are others out there doing similar work. Helping people get their stories into narrative form is some of the most important work we can do, or so I think.
Your suggestions are sensible Ms Norton--and it behooves me to point out that even the most ordinary life makes interesting reading if well written.
Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
-Ernest Hemingway
Thanks for the article, keep the advice coming!
www.happierthanabillionaire.com
Are you--Nobody--too?
--Emily Dickinson
St. Augustine and Sammy Davis, Jr., Ulysses S. Grant and Ann Heche, they all sat down and decided history and the world deserved to have their life stories at hand. The personal narratives of the powerful, the rich, and the celebrated have always been a magnet for readers. Some serve us well while others are as edifying as an old tape of The Jerry Springer Show.
But what do you make of memoirs of “nobodies”? Frank McCourt and Mary Karr kicked off this spike in the market for books emphasizing the gritty details of lives not yet famous. And the list grows monthly. . . .
So, let's add #11 to the list: Do you and/or the world really need another "nobody" memoir?
Just keep a a journal and use that for some writing of a short story or novel that might have something to say readers other than patient best friends and doting nieces.
Fuller sour tirade here: http://readingatxroads.blogspot.com/search?q=memoir
Finally, I wish to point out that as with any life's enterprises, there are people who are better at it than others.This is true even in the business of writing, some writers are better than others for host of different parameters & their contribution should be judged simply on that: the quality of the final product and not on subjective ideas of what constitutes a story worth telling.
To me, the most appealing aspect of a memoirs is, that it is a person's retrospective retelling from a different place and time. The premise is utterly fascinating and it has little to do with someone being famous or not. Sure, interesting lives make for interesting reads but there is a certain challenge in infusing life into the most jaded and insipid events. I like reading about those as well as singular moments of great brilliance that forever changes the trajectory of life and in some rare instances that of entire mankind.
To add this, famous people rarely ever "write" their own memoirs. At the very least it is ambiguous as to how closely it matches their own expressions and thoughts, packaged by the publisher to cater to the target audience which is pre-decided at the very onset of the project. The idea of exploring one's field, as the author of this article refers to as ''enlarge the playing field'' and for the reader to go along for the ride is abjectly missing.
Thanks for making that point.