Someone besides you needs to read your memoir. After all, you are writing for an audience. (If you are writing for your own therapeutic reasons, that’s fine, too, and you can disregard this lesson.) The big problem when other people read your work is that they will always compliment you on how great it is. No one wants to hurt your feelings, and that is exactly what would happen if they told it was terrible.

If you were writing fiction, you would want a disinterested third party to read and critique it. People who read fiction are interested in the story, not necessarily in you. But you are learning how to write memoirs for your family and friends to read, so you should have a friend or family member give you feedback. In order to be sure that the feedback is positive and productive, we’ve prepared four questions on Remembers When Lesson 11 Worksheet, “Getting Feedback.” Print the worksheet and include it with your memoir when you give it to your reader. You’ll ask them the following:

• If you have heard me tell the story before, what did I leave out that I usually say or that I should have said?
• What did I include in the story that made it confusing or wasn’t really relevant or interesting?
• At what points did it not sound like me telling a story to family and friends? Where did I lose my “voice?”
• What are some other experiences you know I’ve had that you think I should write about?

These four questions will generate positive feedback that will help you improve this and future memoirs. When you talk to the people who have read your memoir for you, listen carefully to what they think is interesting or noteworthy about your life. This can be a great source of inspiration to you.

When I was in school, I dreaded the thought of rewriting papers for English class. To me, the assignment meant I hadn’t done a good job of writing the first time. But as I progressed to writing articles and novels, I came to regard rewriting as a great opportunity to make my work “say what I meant to.”

As you learn how to write memoirs, you will discover that the first draft of your story may be so focused on getting to the point that you forget to put in the things that make the story interesting or uniquely your own. It may be a single detail or a nuance that you add. It may be something that you always say when you tell a story that you left out when you wrote it.

And on some occasions, you may find that you wandered away from your story (maybe with material that is right for another memoir?) and rewriting is an opportunity to get back on track.

We suggest that as you rewrite your memoir, start with a fresh sheet of paper. Rewrite the entire memoir by hand, copying the parts you are keeping, leaving out those you aren’t, and adding those unique details that make the story your very own. The process of rewriting the story from scratch will enable you to tap into that intricate relationship between the mind and the hand that will enhance your story and your readers’ appreciation of it.

In William Zinsser’s excellent book On Writing Well, he makes the point that you should read your work aloud, and suggests you don’t commit anything to paper that you wouldn’t actually say. That’s great advice on how to write memoirs. But how does it work?

Essentially, you need an audience when you read. That audience could be a person or a tape recorder. The important thing is that you get feedback, either from your own ears, or from someone who knows you well. When you listen to yourself on a tape recorder, you hear yourself differently than when you are reading. Your friend will also be able to tell quickly if it sounds like you telling a story or you reading someone else’s story.

In Lesson 7, you made any necessary factual corrections to your memoir, so now you should have the story the way you would tell it. Find a comfortable place where it feels natural to be talking. This could be your favorite chair in the living room or a spot at a local coffee shop. Just be aware that you may garner strange looks in public places if you are telling the story to yourself. Simply smile and go on.

As you read aloud, make a note of sentences that are uncomfortable, places where you want to say something different than what you’ve written, or even misspelled or incorrect words. Listen to your own (or your friend’s) feedback and note places where it sounded unlike you. After you have your feedback, set about the process of rewriting the story where needed to make it sound more natural. Read it aloud again after you have rewritten it.

Keep in mind that the intention here is to create a natural-sounding memoir, not to memorize or rehearse. When you have finished this step, you should have a clean draft of your story that truly sounds like you telling a favorite story.

Now that you have at least one memoir written, have organized your notes, and have learned how to write memoirs, it is time to enrich your stories and your memory. There are many kinds of “memoir-abilia” and we’ll look at each of them separately. Included on the list are:

• Photographs
• Movies & video
• Tape recordings
• Certificates, diplomas, and documents
• Letters
• Trophies, medals, collectibles and other physical objects

Each of these items can both enrich your memoirs and jog your memory.

Let’s start with photographs. You may have paper photo albums with pictures neatly displayed and labeled, but if you are like most of us, that accounts for a fraction of the photos that are in shoe boxes, desk drawers, slide trays, and one-hour photo envelopes. And if you have a collection of digital photos on your computer, I’m willing to bet they are no better organized than my shoebox.

Don’t even think about organizing them all today!

Today we are just going to look. It will be fun! You’ll need a clean-writing ball-point or gel pen and Post-It® notes. Print the Remembers When Lesson 8 Worksheet and make yourself comfortable with a photo album or your shoebox and your how to write memoirs notebook. Start going through your pictures. Whenever one reminds you of one of your memoir-able experiences, make a note of it on the worksheet. Write the same words on a sticky note. If the photo is loose, attach the sticky to the back of the photo and put it in a pocket insert in your organizer. If it is in an album or collection you don’t want to break up, put the sticky on the album page and note the location in your workbook.

Here’s a hint that you might find useful. Don’t just flip through albums to find appropriate pictures. Really take the time to enjoy your photos. Remember? You took them because they meant something. Take a moment to relive the experiences. You might have fun sharing this exercise with a friend, spouse, child, or grandchild.

REMINDER: Don’t write on the back of your photos. Even if you are careful, you run a huge risk of damaging them. Use the sticky notes.

Our memories can play subtle tricks on us. We remember clearly experiences and what we learned from them, but we may confuse basic facts because they weren’t part of what we learned. When you learn how to write memoirs, you also have to learn how to check your facts.

I remembered an event from my high school years that had a big impact on my opinions and my approach to life. You can read about it in the first post to my own memoirs at Nathan Everett – Wait! I have another good idea. I was part of a group that visited the United Auto Workers headquarters in Detroit the fall after the big summer riots. I remembered it as being in 1966 and that George Meaney, president of the union, spoke to us. However, when I cross-checked my facts, I discovered that the Detroit riots were in the summer of 1967. The event occurred in my Senior year rather than my Junior year. I also found that I had substituted George Meaney, the president of the AFL-CIO, for Walter Reuther, the president of the UAW. I was 18 and the important parts about the experience were the question and answer and my own opinion about unions at the time. The year and person had been filled in with close but inaccurate data.

Use the Remembers When Lesson 7 Worksheet as a checklist for the facts of your story. With the amount of bad publicity that the genre of memoirs received after it was discovered that James Frey had fabricated many details in his memoir A Million Little Pieces, it became clear that writers of memoirs would have to be diligent in having their facts correct to be credible. William Zinsser, author of the book On Writing Well, added a chapter on writing memoirs in his 2006 edition. You can listen to his interview on NPR, On Memoir, Truth and ‘Writing Well’ or purchase the book by following the link below.

On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Whether you write an occasional professional letter, a daily newspaper column, or your personal memoirs, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well should be required reading. Simplicity is Zinsser’s mantra: he preaches a stripped-down writing style, strong and clear. He recommends you read your work aloud, (“Don’t commit something to paper that you wouldn’t actually say.”) This is both a great teaching manual and an entertaining read.

Congratulations! You can finally hold your first memoir in your hands.

Now you need to tackle that pile of paper you generated. Because it will get worse! If you use the steps in Lessons 1-5 to write every one of your memoirs, you’ll accumulate a huge pile of paper¹. And you’re not finished with how to write memoirs yet. If you don’t organize your papers now, you’ll never be able to find your notes when it comes time to revise. Fortunately, if you start now, it’s easy to get and stay organized.

You will need about $15 worth of materials:

• A 3-ring binder, 1-1½ inches thick
• Ruled notebook paper
• Divider tabs (10-12)
• Some pocket inserts

Put the dividers, notebook paper, and pocket inserts in the binder in that order. Think of a topic heading for your first memoir. This is your first step in organizing the “body of work” that your collected memoirs will become. Some sample topic headings are:

• Childhood
• Parenthood
• School
• Places I’ve lived
• Relationships
• Business/Career
• Vacation/Travel
• Accomplishments
• Military service
• Religion

For now, just categorize your first memoir and make that the first tab. Don’t name the other tabs yet. You might decide on different names by the time you write a memoir in that category.

Put your Lesson 1 Worksheet in front of the first tab. Put all other lessons, worksheets and papers related to your first memoir behind the first tab. If you still need additional worksheets, they can all be found at Remembers When Worksheets.

That’s it. You’re organized and ready to start writing your next memoir!

¹If you learned to write with a pen or pencil instead of a computer, your memories may be linked to the physical motion of writing. Even if you use a computer, you may prefer a print version for reading and revising. During the How to Write Memoirs lessons, we will discuss several ways of writing, including typing, dictating, and video-taping. We’ve chosen to start with handwritten text simply because it is likely that many of your memories pre-date keyboards.

Gather all your worksheets so far. At this point you should have a working title for your memoir, a strong opening sentence or hook, and a moral to the story. You should also have a list of important details on the Lesson 2 worksheet. Now it is time to connect the pieces together and actually write your first memoir.

Print the Remembers When Lesson 5 Worksheet, titled “Connecting the dots.” Fill in the title and your opening and closing sentences. After you have read through your notes on the Lesson 2 Worksheet one more time, put all your worksheets aside except Lesson 5. It is time to write a memoir and you do not need to refer to any of the previous worksheets in order to do it.

Why?

How to write memoirs is only giving you a structure to work with. You already know the story. This is what makes writing memoirs such a great experience. Everything you need is in your head. You know how the story begins and how it ends. You know what parts are funny or tragic, and which parts are so important that you can’t tell the story without them. You have either told the story to family and friends, or you have rehearsed it in your mind a hundred times. Now all you have to do is write it down.

This story may be as short or as long as it takes to tell it. There is no minimum or maximum length that your memoir needs to meet. You can start on the Lesson 5 Worksheet and move on to additional sheets of paper, the back of the worksheet, or your journal. Where and how you choose to write this part is up to you. Just remember that you only have to tell this one story right now. Connect your great opening line with your pithy close and enjoy telling your story!