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.