Young Writers Society

For those of you who know, I've been writing a memoir. For those of you who doesn't, now you do.

Despite the memoirs I've read, I can never really pin down what I should be talking about. Granted that, I'm only 18 there isn't much to talk about. Writing a memoir is an incredibly soothing exercise, partially because it allows me to revisit all those warm childhood memories and put them to people, to share it with others. But at the same time, I also never quite know what to include in an instalment. How much do I write, what do I write.

So I guess the question I'm asking is, what kind of things would you find interesting in a memoir? What do you expect from it, but to be honest, any tips and advice would be appreciated.

For reference: This is the first instalment in the series, but really they could be read in any order and it wouldn't make a difference.

Thanks everyone!

When I think of memoirs, I usually think of one of two things:

1. They're a recollection of a specific event in the author's life; or
2. They're recollections of multiple events that are tied together through a theme (e.g., "Thanks to A, B, and C, I learned D").

Both have some kind of objective. That is, instead of simply telling your life story, you're trying to impart something to the reader. A couple of good examples are "Night" by Elie Wiesel, which relates his experience in a concentration camp, and "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers, which relates how he coped with the deaths of his parents and took care of his brother.

So in the end, I think I expect to learn something when I read someone's memoir. Not just what it feels like to be in their shoes, but instead to grab a glimpse (however fleeting) of the lessons the author learned on their way to becoming who they are. Sometimes that's best told through a single event, and sometimes it's best told through multiple events.

It sounds like you might be working with a collection of personal essays rather than a memoir? There's a lot of overlap in narrative nonfiction of course, but what sticks out to me is that you're writing a series of self contained pieces (at least in the sense they can be read out of order). I think you'll find a lot more flexibility in the kinds of pieces you could write looking at it this way!

Recommended reading: Once I Was Cool by Megan Stielstra (tw: drug use, depression, suicide though it's really a lovely book I didn't find super sad), Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay (been a while since I read this one, but maybe tw: societal issues of gender and sexuality) and The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison (I've only read the first few essays of this book and there's a rather graphic story toward the start about people who think they have fibers growing in their skin, so tw: potentially graphic medical drama/body horror? I have a fairly tough skin but I haven't come across anything super disconcerting yet). Oh, and also if Second Story still posts recordings of their essay series online those are always amazing!

The essay is to memoir what the short story is to novels: a really good place to practice the elements of creative nonfiction in a small space. As far as qualities of a memoir, I agree with everything Nate said above! I'd add that there's some debate about how creative you can get with creative nonfiction. You likely won't capture everything as it factually happened, but rather give a retelling that captures how you, the author, felt things happened. It's a different kind of truth but like Nate said often captures the lessons the author took away from the experience they're sharing.

My best advice for learning to write memoir/personal essay is to read a bunch of it by a bunch of different authors with different backgrounds. You'll get a good sense of the different ways people process and share things that happened to them. Good luck!

@Nate, hello! Thanks so much for stopping by this topic and replying (it was starting to get lonely and all). Ah, I see. It's really helpful because even though I've read memoirs (and not many of them) I got the I took away something but it was subtle. When you said theme, can you specify on that a bit more?

@Lauren2010
Yup! I agree with you that this is more of a collection of personal essays, thank you for the recommendations though I'll keep those in my mind. But, I'm staying away from other memoirs at the moment. I'll probably read them when I redraft but, I want the first draft to be just my style, without any influence from other writers. But your advice is still very sound though!

Theme is one of those really ambiguous words and I definitely should have specified what I meant by it, haha.

By theme, I just mean some kind of commonality. For example, let's say I'm I'm writing a memoir about acing an exam and how that (somehow) made me a better person. Thus, everything in that memoir would be related to that exam. For example, maybe one exam question asked "What does #FFF represent in HTML?". I could then have one chapter be about learning HTML. Another question might be about geometry, in which case I could write a chapter about a geometry teacher I had and my difficulty learning it when I was 14.

That's probably a terrible example, but suffice to say that if the memoir is telling multiple events, then each event should be related to what the memoir is about.

If any of the above doesn't make sense, just let me know. I'm sitting in a cafe right now and they're playing Disney princess songs for some odd reason, which is making it hard to think!

To add on to what Nate's saying, sort of- I think Stephen King's memoir is sort of what you're going for, and yet follows a theme like Nate said. In the case of Stephen King's memoir, of course his theme is writing. So what he does is he starts the book with his earliest memory of writing. But at the same time, he doesn't just focus on writing, he focuses on stories- which is maybe going against his theme in a sense because some of them had nothing to do with writing, but they all kind of painted a picture of how he became a writer, a famous writer, and how he became that kind of writer. Actually I lied, I think the memoir starts out with him dropping a block on his foot. But it's a collection of little stories about his life that seem out of place, but somehow work.

There's also a memoir by Chis Hadfield (the guitar playing astronaut), and that does start out with him saying when he realized he wanted to be an astronaut. And there's a line in there I still think about a lot. When he was I think eight, after he'd decided he wanted to be an astronaut, he didn't tell anyone, he just thought "well I better start thinking like an astronaut" and so he'd eat good, and stuff like that!

I felt like I had more to say... oh well.

@Nate, ohhh disney princess songs (not exactly the best thinking music though I agree)...not is it the usual music that Starbucks play but I'm not gonna question that. Nope, that makes perfect sense I think I know what you're talking about. Hmm but I have a question, the running theme tied to a common purpose like what @Holysocks talked about with Stephen King and Hadfield (I'll read them once I finish first draft) seems to border on autobiography/memoir?

How do you make a distinction between a memoir and autobiography, I mean does a memoir always have to be tied to one common running theme (albeit with different stories contributing to it) or, can they be a smattering of different events (but in the end you still learn something from those events)?

If I'm not making sense please tell me, the heat is making my brain swoon.

Hey @Apricity I'm actually taking a memoir/autobiography course this semester and have been working on writing some of my own memoirs. If you're still working on this project here are my two-cents:

As I understand it, the difference between Autobiography & Memoir is that autobiography is generally more comprehensive and academic based more on facts rather than feelings (I went to this school at this time, got this degree, did this thing etc) and more of the information could be confirmed by outside research.

A memoir is more personal, doesn't have to be comprehensive, often arranged or grouped by theme rather than necessarily following a chronological order, and includes more personal reflection that wouldn't be able to be confirmed by some other academic (like I'm this person, because this happened, and it makes me feel this way etc.) It doesn't have to have just one theme; it doesn't have to "resolve" itself in the end, it's whatever the author wants to make it in order to tell about their memories/life story.

There's not a thick line between the two, and they can often be lumped together.

I would just suggest writing what you remember most strongly, try to strike a balance between reflection and action, you don't have to try to make every event mean something or have a life lesson, it can just serve the purpose of showing who you are. I would also say that a good memoir has a lot of qualities of a good book. The speaker has a distinct and consistent voice, the characters are multi-faceted, complex, and realistic, and the rule about showing rather than telling still totally applies. While some personal reflection is great and gives insight into the speaker's mind, if you just write about what's going on in your head or how you're processing these memories now, the reader is going to be waiting for the action to start again. For instance if you hate your neighbor, it'd be way more effective to talk about something mean you did to you neighbor than to just saying that you hated him (this was a bad example, but you get the point).

I understand the hesitation to read a bunch of memoirs before you've written a draft, although if you do have a chance to read something before writing/editing I would strongly suggest Mary Karr's book about memoir writing "The Art of Memoir" - it's a quick and informative read (she has also written several really good memoir's herself).