Memory

10 Tips Toward a Less Timid Memoir

Turn part of your life into something like art.

Posted June 6, 2011

Memory pops up in little disorganized bits. You can grab the disparate images and arrange them into personal essays, or they can be hoarded and turned into book-length memoirs.

Even when publication is not your primary goal, you'll want to write your life in the most compelling way. Turning a life, part or whole, into something akin to art, offers an incomparable feeling of satisfaction.

Here are 10 tips to help you create a better memoir:

Write about a moment of change, not necessarily just stuff that happens, says Adair Lara in Naked, Drunk, and Writing: Shed Your Inhibitions and Craft a Compelling Memoir or Personal Essay. Lara, an award-winning columnist and writing instructor, explains that even if you've lost your job and are suffering, unless the experience changes you somehow, it's not worthy of an essay or book.

Take a leap and speculate when you don't know why someone in your past did something, suggests Lara. Such thinking can help you make sense of things.

Don't worry about transitions, says Lara. Simply skip a couple of lines and give your reader credit for knowing that you (your character in the story) got somehow from one place (scene) to the next.

Write about your mistakes, rather than seeming too perfect in your own history. People like to read about screw-ups, Lara reminds us, and we all have plenty we might have done differently.

Chart your life's turning points on a time line to see events in context, suggests Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D. in The Power of Memoir: How to Write Your Healing Story. As a psychotherapist, Myers focuses most intently on writing as self-therapy. [Her blog is .]

Work mystery and suspense into your story to make for a better memoir, notes Myers. Even though you know how things turned out, and even if you choose to let your readers know early on, readers will turn pages to see how you got there.

Use fury as a wake-up call for writing, says Patricia Foster in Just Beneath My Skin: Autobiography and Self-Discovery. In 13 linked (very) personal essays about her struggle to find herself through writing, Foster, an award-winning writer and associate professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa, doesn't so much tell readers "how to," but rather shows us one kind of deeply felt result.

Don't fear telling your version of history. Two family members may have very different stories of their shared past, but both can be equally true, says Sue William Silverman, author of Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir. Silverman is an award-winning author, a poet, and faculty advisor at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

You must discover the plot of your memoir, not invent it, points out Silverman, whose book features exercises and examples. Present your story with a sense of urgency that keeps readers intrigued, rather than trying to include everything.

Write as though you're looking through a window, not into a mirror. That way you'll include more than your own image in the story. Writes Silverman, "It's as if you're layering the self onto the world-the self onto family, culturre, society, history-onto issues larger than yourself."