10 Tips for Writing a Great Memoir

1. You have to start somewhere.

Too much time staring at a blank first page has been known to cause Severe Reconsideration Syndrome. What is your memoir about? Perhaps you’re not sure. But you know it’s about your father, who spent only one night a week at home during your childhood because he was a long-haul truck driver. There’s something to that; it’s an uncommon experience. And then there was that night during your childhood when the phone rang from St. Louis. It was your father. That week’s haul was diapers and formula, from Houston to Detroit. After he’d spoken to your mom, he asked for you, but not to ask about school. He had something to tell you. What was it?

What I’m getting at is: Pick one scene. It doesn’t have to end up first. It doesn’t even have to stay in the book. It just has to get you started.

2. But how to write this scene?

How do you write a vivid scene about your father calling you from St. Louis to tell you he and your mother are getting a divorce? Well, we should hear the phone line crackling, the blasts from a truck horn nearby, someone is laughing outside the phone booth (so incongruous next to the news he is relaying), maybe the operator cuts in to say “please insert an additional fifty cents,” and so on. And, hopefully, you have started to give us, between the lines or in them, a sense of your father. (Is he trying to get off the phone because he doesn’t want to keep the laughing people waiting? Because he’s anxious about relaying this news to his daughter? Or does he speak roughly to the waiting people so they clear out and give him some time?)

3. There are at least three ways to convey information to a reader:

1) Scene (narrated action with dialogue)

2) Summarized scene (summarized action)

3) Explanation/analysis

1) is best but takes up space. 3) in excess becomes deadly. The sweet spot is a mix of 1) and 2), with the most sparing and occasional fairy dust from 3).

4. If you’ve done the scene-setting well, you’ve bought some time, some reader attention.

The reader has been brought so concretely and viscerally into that phone call that they can now handle some zoomed-out summary and context. (“We lived in a small town six roads away from the road that took you to Houston. Father had been there for five generations, Swedes who had been looking for Minnesota but took a wrong turn somewhere around Arkansas, saw the pretty bluffs of this country, and stayed. At least that is what they said. The real reason, I would not learn for some time, was that, passing through, my great-grandmother-times-five refreshed herself with a mineral water next to a sawmill owner from Travers who liked her eyes.”)

But summary is expensive. Soon, it’s again time for scene. And off you go in this way. There are many ways to write a memoir, and alternating scene with summary is hardly the only one, but it’s not the worst backbone to hold on to as you get started.

5. So your memoir has to do with long-haul trucking, blue-collar upbringings, family, divorce... But what is it really about?

Do you have to know? For the entire freakin’ duration of the first draft, you do not. I learned that when, having written 150 pages of a first draft of my first novel, I consulted an agent. Her response: “Boris, you have no idea what this book is about. Finish this draft. That will teach you what you’re actually trying to say. Then go back and write it all a second time. Then write me again.” The first draft, to put it indelicately, is The Vomit Draft. Get it out there. You’ll shape it later.

6. As you prepare to work on the memoir, do you have to obtain a responsible stack of books on the subjects you’re writing about?

It depends. If I am writing a novel about a character who is an engineer, I should know a little bit about engineering. But if I am writing a memoir about divorce, I am more interested in a well-written memoir about being a newspaper reporter under apartheid in South Africa than in a bad memoir about divorce. 

Ultimately, one should know what has been written before them, because one’s book is, in part, a conversation with those books, and it will show, between the lines, if one hasn’t had those conversations off the page. But don’t be daunted by the feeling that you have to familiarize yourself with everything written on the subject. It can become an excuse not to write. 

With each book I have written, I have left the responsible research until later and later, to give myself time to learn about my characters without the imprint of something else I am reading. I continue to read every day that I write – but for 2/3 of the first draft, I actually try to steer clear of books that are too close in subject.

7. Memoirs and novels are different beasts, right?

Yes and no. For me, the best memoirs read like novels except for the fact that they consist of more or less factual material. I want the characters to be different at the end than they were at the beginning (unless their failure to change is the point), I want the dialogue to be character-specific and idiosyncratic, I want the scene-setting to be concrete and vivid, and by God, that prose better sparkle. 

8. Speaking of more or less factual material: You don’t remember what your father said to you from that phone booth.

You didn’t take notes when he called – you were seven! You didn’t take notes at any point. How could you write a memoir, right? I believe the genre is much more flexible than that. My obligation when I write a memoir is to be true to the spirit of what happened above all, and – because dialogue is such a thorny issue – to the way someone speaks. (Because ideally you will represent your father in the singular way he spoke as opposed to generic language that sounds like anyone. See #9 for more about this.) Of course, you should make every effort to check what you remember with him or people who know, or knew, him. 

9. Speaking of the way someone speaks, compare these opening lines from your father when you pick up the phone:

You: “Hi, Dad.”

a. “Hi, Lily.”

b. “You get that homework done, squirt?”

c. “Hells bells, you sound nearly a lady every time I call lately.”

The first is generic. The second is a little less generic. (Note the way it skips the procedural step of a greeting. Good dialogue is a distillation of the way we speak, not a comprehensive rendering.) The third is perhaps the most individual. “Hells bells,” “nearly a lady.” That’s what you’re trying to capture.

10. How can I write about someone who is still alive/who has not given me permission to write about them/who I know would not want me to?

This one is for your therapist. I am not being flippant. Ultimately, any story that involved you belongs to you as much as to anyone else. But finding the courage to proceed with it despite the objections of others involved in the story – after earnest efforts to solicit and accommodate their positions, within reason – isn’t easy. Some writers believe the work matters above all. (Who said that when a writer is born into a family, that family is finished?) Others have to go through a process to find that conviction. I don’t underestimate the effort involved. But I will also say that a writer who seeks permission is an obedient writer, and no great art ever came from obedience.

11. Is what I want to write about worthy of a memoir?

It may seem strange that I am addressing something so primary toward the end of my list, but there’s a reason. If your father, tired of long-haul trucking, decided to run for President of the United States, and won, you know you have a memoir, not least because being President is of great public consequence. 

But in the absence of a subject that obviously concerns millions of people, you need drama. Two hundred fifty pages of observation and reflection, however skilled, is for more refined minds than mine (and they exist, God bless them). I need a story. You spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay. Nothing extra-dramatic happened, but it was intense, in its own ways – you almost had an affair (though you didn’t), two people were injured when the governor’s helicopter kicked up too much debris (one, a Peace Corps volunteer, was flown to the capital; the other, a local person, was sent to the village infirmary), etc. Is that a memoir? I’m not sure. That shouldn’t stop you, because, as per #6, no amount of reading and reflecting is going to answer this question authoritatively until you start writing. When I was thinking about my third book, my publisher said to me, “Why don’t you write a book about your relationship to food?” I said, “I don’t have a relationship to food.” But once I started writing, I realized I had about 336 pages of relationship to food. 

But as the page count increases, you might begin to gently ask yourself: Why will somebody else want to read this? If you will self-publish, you don’t have to answer that question. But otherwise, the imperative to ignore what the world thinks is just as important as the imperative to ask why it might care.

12. Why are there 11 entries when this blog post is supposed to be about 10 tips on how to write a great memoir?

As per #10… beware obedience!

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