7 Important Reasons to Write a Memoir

Why write a memoir?  1. You can't help it. You feel a strong compulsion to do it.  2. You have learned something from your life that you want to share with others either so they can avoid repeating your mistakes or because you've proved something works.  3. The rhythms and flavors of your life are unique experiences that you'd like to explain to others.  4. You want to move from writing into speaking about parts of your life that were important to you.  5. You want to get out and compete with others to sell a lot of books.  6. You want to become a celebrity and make a name for yourself.  7. You are a celebrity and know that others want to read about your life and how you succeeded.

I wrote my memoir for reasons 1-3.  I am not a celebrity so reason 7 is for the Oprah Winfreys, Ellen DeGenereses and Maria Shrivers of the world, not for me.  What about reasons 4, 5, 6?  Those are the things that reclusive, shy writers don't consider, don't want, but may have to accept.  Being a professor, I'm more comfortable with speaking than some writers I know.  I don't much like 5, the competition.  And I have a love/hate relationship with 6.  I think I might like being a household word, but I might hate the loss of privacy.  Once you've written and published a memoir, at least part of your privacy curtain is gone anyway, so perhaps it's just as well to imagine it all gone.  But I'd like to have my cake and eat it too: I'd love to sell a lot of books but not be recognized by the woman in the street.  Probably, I'll get at least half my wish!

On Writing What You Know, or Not

One of those powerful dicta that newbie writers receive many times is, "Write what you know."  It certainly worked for Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Hardy to sink body and soul into the places that ran in their bone marrow, to use the accents and verbiage of their homebodies, to ignore the rest of the universe.  Each of them sought the commonality of humanity in the specifics of their own villages and towns, farms and roads, libraries, ramshackle cars or carriages, and tired feet.  But is that the only way you can write anything worthwhile?  What about Blind?  Who has experienced what it would be like for everyone to become blind at a stroke?  Yet it's a profound novel, well worth reading, with great insights into human behavior and emotions.  I've thought a lot about this advice, and I think it can inhibit creativity. Its virtue is that you are likely to know the important details of places you've lived and loved.  But it can prevent you from applying those details to new places and ideas.  And here's the real rub.  You can tell yourself you know a place and its people, but the insides of their heads could be much different than you imagine.  So unless you talk about the world according to your own thoughts, there is no real way to write only what you know.  And if you talk with any philosophers, even your own thoughts will have fading reality.  So, I'd say this.  Keep in mind rooting what you write in the physicality of the universe you're describing.  But let your imagination go free in placing your writing in Stonehenge, on Mars, or in a time and place of your richest desires.  And enjoy yourself in that world.

One special detail is all you need

Something I have become more and more aware of is the way authors I enjoy use the special detail that conveys the whole picture.  Someone from my MFA program, for example, described an old Irishman as having eyebrows like hamsters.  Picture that!  You don't need any more details, do you?  I certainly didn't.  And this master detail that conveys it all shows in full bloom in stories by Chekhov.

Francine Prose, in Reading Like a Writer, decribed how Chekhov broke all the rules for short story writing but said she can't put his short stories down.  I started reading these stories, and I completely agree.  And I think that his use of the one detail is part of the reason the stories work so well.  Of course, Chekhov had other methods as well, including providing a slice of life instead of a nice neat ending.  But the telling detail is so well chosen in Chekhov stories that I often just stop and marvel about how much you can read out of a single detail.  If you haven't tried to describe things with ultimate economy like this, it takes a lot of thought.  You can't just remove all the details but one and have it convey it all.  That special detail has to bring the whole scene into focus, has to be the detail that implies the rest.  You may have to think about what it could be for a few days before you find it.  But it is very worthwhile.  People may read your story and say things like " Such economy of description!"  The underlying secret is not just economy, but worth per word!