Your opening sentence from the previous worksheet (#3), put one arm around your memoir. Let’s put the other arm around it with a great closing sentence. Remember worksheet #2, on which you wrote a title, six bullet points, and what you’d learned from the experience? We will work with the last item in this post – the moral of the story.

We can learn something about how to write memoirs from the ancient storyteller Aesop, whose fables offer morals of the story that are still a part of our everyday vocabulary. Consider these lessons:

• Appearances are deceptive
• One good turn deserves another
• Misfortune tests the sincerity of friends

What are the common elements? First, each is concise. Would we remember the moral if Aesop had written, “What looks good on the outside may not be all that it appears on the inside?” Probably not. Second, Aesop doesn’t lecture. Aesop did not say, “You shouldn’t determine what people are really like based on what they look like.” He let people make up their own minds. Third, Aesop doesn’t dwell on his own progress as a human being. Imagine how forgettable his lessons would be if he had said, “I became a better person by learning not to judge people based on the way they look, and I hope you learn that, too!”

Let’s apply this to your memoir. Print a copy of Remembers When Lesson 4 Worksheet, “The Moral of the Story.” At the top of the page write the title of the memoir you are working on. In the first box, write the sentence from your Lesson 2 Worksheet you wrote in the “Moral” box. Keeping Aesop’s techniques in mind, try reducing your moral to a simple sentence that expresses the life lesson you learned. This will help you distill your main point down to its simplest ingredient. When you write memoirs, you’ll find it is easier to tell the story if you have your main point firmly in mind.

Warning: Don’t make it sound too much like Aesop! Keep it personal, or you run the risk of sounding like a cliché.
If you’ve been inspired by Aesop’s Fables, here is an excellent on-line collection with text and audio files.