>One of my life goals has always been to write a book…. one day. I’d like to piece together all of these vignettes of my life and these recipes, and make something more cohesive of them. I dream of a little book, with the image of a little girl biting into a croissant on the cover. Today that book is nothing more than a few chapter ideas, scribbled in my notebook, but at some point, it will be written.
I’m grateful for any advice I can garnish as I prepare to launch on this journey. Recently Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D., and author of the Power of Memoir – How to Write your Healing Story, took the time to answer a few of my questions.
Linda’s book is studded with valuable advice from how to get started to considering the ethical issues around memoir writing. She also includes powerful writing exercises to get you started, simple questions to prompt your recall, and tips to keeping you writing. I also really enjoyed the excerpts at the end of the book from students in her workshops. Reading the work of others is always a great inspiration.
Linda Joy Myers Ph.D. is president of the National Association of Memoir Writers and a practicing psychotherapist. She is the author of Don’t Call Me Mother: Breaking the Chain of Mother Daughter Abandonment, which won the Gold Medal Award from the Bay Area Independent Publishing Association in 2007.
Here are Linda’s answers to my questions. I hope you’ll find them as helpful as I did.
Me: I’m considering writing a memoir, but I’m not “famous”. What is the largest time period I should try to write about?
Linda: A memoir focuses on a theme, or a particular time frame. In other words, a memoir does not include a full life—an everything-that-happened-to-me autobiography. A memoir is a slice of your life based on themed topics, such as overcoming some kind of adversity—as in Jeannette Walls’ the Glass Castle, or abuse, mental illness, and general craziness in Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club.
There is no set amount of time to write about, nor do you have to be famous to write your story, but it is important to think about these things: What do I have to say that will be interesting to people who don’t know me? Does my story contain elements of universal experience? No one has your exact story, but one reason people read memoirs is to find out more about how to live, how to solve problems, and I think also not to feel so alone.
I suggest that people start with their turning point moments, the events when nothing was the same afterward. You may not know that nothing will be the same at the time, but looking back, you see a crossroads, a time of change and transformation.
Once you gather 10-20 of your turning points, you will have the spine of a book, some kind of idea about what your themes might be. You can choose more scenes then to fill in the story.
Me: What is a common mistake that beginning memoir writers often make?
Linda: Some memoir writers think they can dig out their old journals and copy journal entries as a memoir. A memoir is a constructed story, not a collection of journal entries. We write our journals in the moment, without thinking of an audience or any kind of structure, but stories are written with a goal in mind, and there is a point, a lesson or theme to a story. A journal entry is stream of consciousness, random thoughts created without the need to consider an outside reader.
Most writers narrate—tell—about a situation, events, or people in their lives. A story is built step by step through scenes that show, not just tell, the world of the writer. Sensual details such as taste, sound, sight, scent, and texture invite the reader to feel and experience the world being created, and in this way share that world, understand it deeply. A story transports us and makes us forget the exactitude of our everyday lives. We step into the shoes of the characters we read about and walk in them awhile. So memoir writers invite the reader to experience their lives, and thereby enlarge their own.
Me: Is it okay to embellish memories to make a memoir more entertaining? Creating meals that bring certain characters together even if you don’t remember they occurred?
Linda: Creating a story that did not happen is called fiction. Remember the James Fry incident a few years ago, where he was dressed down on national television by Oprah? He had altered several incidents in his memoir in major ways—saying he’d been in jail for three months instead of a few hours, and making up facts about relationships to make himself a more central character. A memoir is nonfiction, and requires the writer to be as accurate as memory will allow. There can be minor enhancements in a memoir, such as making up the color of a dress if you don’t quite remember, or creating composite scenes, though these shifts are usually commented upon in the disclaimers at the beginning of the book. Most memoirists change the names of the guilty and the innocent to avoid legal and ethical complications, but again, this is understood by audiences and writers as a necessary part of making personal information public.
Memory can be enhanced by writing, doing research, and interviewing people who lived at that time. Newspapers, music of the era, food, genealogy research, all this helps the mind release more memories. If you can’t remember something, and you want to connect threads of a story, you can imagine how it might have happened. Not remembering is all right. You can admit lack of memory, or imagine what is missing, but you can’t say things occurred if you know they didn’t. Write your book as a fictional novel if you need to change or alter “reality.”
Me: What is your writing process? Do you begin with an outline? Freewrites? Do you write chronologically or piece things together once they’re written?
Linda: My creative process invites freewriting, though as I wrote a novel recently I did have an idea of what needed to occur in each chapter. I had a vague outline. For memoir writing, it was like taking dictation from the movie in my mind, as I remembered all the scenes in my memoir vividly, as if they’d happened recently. I found out that traumatic memory is stored in this vivid Technicolor way, which meant that I was able to soften the edges of the memories once I finished my memoir. I did find that I could make sense of my own story if I wrote it more or less chronologically, as part of the point of my own memoir was my growth and development over time. But I began it by writing vignettes out of order, because I had no idea what I was going to do with all this, and just needed to get stories on the page.
Me: What is your favorite memoir?
Linda: My current favorite memoir is Lit, by Mary Karr. I have read all her books, and found this large, searingly honest, and wonderfully written book to be so pleasurable to read that I hated to finish it. I have frequently taught memoir classes using The Liar’s Club as a text, though its structure is very complex, but her language can teach us all how to create a vivid scene in just a few words.
* The Power of Memoir is being featured here today as a stop on the Wow! Women on Writing blog tour.