Memoir Writing Tips

Here, I am collecting hints and tips for specific aspects of memoir writing as I come across them. Suggestions for additions are welcome.

First Drafts:

Advice from Mardi Jo Link, Writing Lessons

Striving to write a memoir that your mother will like, or a big nameless, faceless readership will buy, or a reviewer for the NYTBR will rave about, or your best friend will hug to her chest with joy, is just asking for trouble. […] Sit down to write, but before you get started send your mother to her room, the NYTBR to a downhome barbeque, and your best friend to the liquor store (there will be a time to celebrate someday, and she will know what supplies to purchase, right?). Then, write your own real story. Yours. And write it just for you.

Sonya Huber on Lit Hub, The Three Words That Almost Ruined Me As a Writer: ‘Show, Don’t Tell’

For some of our students, “Don’t tell” repeats the abuse they will have endured along with its highest commandment: secrecy. Today the imperative sentence resonates with all the creepiness of forcing someone to keep a secret. For many of us, “don’t tell” in other forms has been a tight constricting rope that has mangled our voices and changed our books and the years of our lives.

Soenke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

A 50-minute video introduction to Zettelkasten, a method for note-taking, thinking, and generating fast first drafts from your research notes. This method, first developed by a hyper-productive German social scientist, Niklas Luhmann, can be used either with paper note cards or electronically with various kinds of software. More explanations and tools can be found on this website.

Revising:

At a writer's conference I attended, one participant wore a black T-shirt imprinted with white text: "There are no great writers, only great re-writers." I thought that piece of T-shirt wisdom hit the main point pretty well. But what are the main things that happen during successful rounds of "re-writing"? According to Tom Jenks, editor of Narrative magazine, "In essence, writing is revision. What separates merely talented writers from truly accomplished ones is the successful pursuit of revision." In his essay A Brief Handbook of Revision for Writers, he put together a pretty useful list of "usual" revisions good writers make. To get access to the full article, you'll need to register for the magazine, but it doesn't cost anything--and registering gives you access to the magazine's stunningly interesting essays, memoirs, stories, and poetry, without any strings attached.

Openings:

They matter.

You can learn a lot about them by listening to this interview with Sue William Silverman, posted on Women's Memoir. (As you listen to her reading from the openings for her book-length memoir Love Sick and for her writing guide Fearless Confessions, you might wonder how they could change if Silverman had chosen specifics for the plants that are helping her to set the scene.)

Structure:

The process of discovering what you want to write about tends to be chaotic. How do you re-weave the pieces and layers you uncover into a textual path that draws your reader right along? One way might be to consult Tim Bascom's craft essay Picturing the personal essay: a visual guide in published in Creative Nonfiction.

Truth:

I suspect that the number of nuanced views on truthfulness matches the number of authors. Here is a quote from an interview with Brenda Miller:

Creative nonfiction demands a certain allegiance to artifice over experience. . . . What I mean by this is that we’re not necessarily setting out to transcribe, or record, the facts of our lives; the goal should be to create art that arises out of experience. That means you will employ imagination, hyperbole, compression: really all the tools of the writing trade to create an essay that is aesthetically pleasing and emotionally true. It doesn’t mean that you lie about facts essential to the self; I would never, for instance, make up the fact of the miscarriages or infertility. That would betray my relationship with the reader. But I may condense several trips to the desert into one, as I did in “A Field Guide to the Desert.” Do you see the difference between the two situations? One has to do with content; the other, with form. You have to look at your intent: Am I making this particular move to shock the reader, or to aggrandize myself; if so, I’m not going to do it. But if I’m making a move that is essential for an artistically satisfying essay, without betraying fundamental facts, then I have no qualms whatsoever. [...]And we have to bear in mind that memory, itself, is creative nonfiction; we create satisfying narratives, or myths, about our lives in order to have a strong sense of self. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s part of our essential makeup as human beings. From the

moment we utter our first words, we’re telling stories about ourselves in order to make sense of the world.

The full interview is available here.

And here's another quote from a different interview, available here:

Do you feel you haven't fully realized an experience until you've written it?

Yes, I think I do. At the same time, when I write, it turns into a different experience. So that's a little scary: There's the experience you're having which is fleeting and evanescent, and then there's the one you write, which is set down after time, and neither one is really true.

Writing about Nature

Excellent Blog Post on LitHub by Helen McDonal, author of H is for Hawk:

The Things I Tell Myself When I’m Writing About Nature

Getting Unstuck:

From William Zinser's On Writing Well:

All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem. It may be a problem of where to obtain the facts or how to organize the material. It may be a problem of approach or attitude, tone or style. Whatever it is, it has to be confronted and solved. Sometimes you will despair of finding the right solution--or any solution. You will think, "If I live to be ninety I'll never get out of this mess." I've often thought it myself.

What you do, according to Zinser and every other writing help book I've read is: You keep on writing. You force yourself to write something. Even if your inner critic, the voice that Ann LaMott calls "station KFCKD", tells you what you write sucks, and so do you.