THE WRITE COACH EXPLAINS
How can I tell my story without losing my own voice?
Perhaps you want to write some of your life down.
And immediately, the size of the job becomes overwhelming.
Where do you start? How much do you include? Do you need to begin with your childhood? Should you write chronologically? What if you can't remember exactly what happened? And how do you make it sound like you, rather than some strange, formal version of yourself who has suddenly decided to Write A Memoir?
My first suggestion is much simpler.
Start with what you remember.
Not necessarily the important things. Not necessarily the beginning.
Start with whatever occurs to you..
You don't have to start at the beginning
A life is enormous.
Trying to write it from beginning to end can very quickly turn memoir into a record:
I was born here. Then we moved there. I went to this school. After that I…
All of those things might be true. But they aren't necessarily where the interesting writing is.
Instead, try working in small scenes and vignettes.
A kitchen you remember.
The first day of a new job.
A disastrous family holiday.
The way your father answered the telephone.
A conversation you didn't understand until years later.
The afternoon you learnt something you wish you hadn't.
You don't need to know where these pieces will eventually fit.
For now, write the one that wants to be written.
Your senses remember things too
Memory isn't only a collection of facts.
Sometimes a smell can take you somewhere faster than conscious thought can.
My grandmother Morris's house is connected in my mind with roses and jasmine. Both grew near the drive, so even now those smells can take me straight back to Nana's house.
Music can do the same thing. The Police's Don't Stand So Close to Me takes me to 1980 and my first year living in an accommodation hall at Otago University.
The interesting thing for a memoir writer is that you don't have to wait for these memories to arrive accidentally.
You can provoke them.
Look at photographs. Find a perfume you remember. Cook something your family used to eat. Look up the Top 40 from a particular year and play some of the songs.
Then notice what happens.
TRY THIS
Choose a year or period of your life you'd like to write about.
Don't start writing yet.
Instead, spend ten minutes looking for things that might unlock the memory.
What music were you listening to?
What did you wear?
What did the places you spent time in smell like?
What did you eat?
What objects did you use every day?
What could you hear around you?
Then choose the detail that produces the strongest response.
Start there.
Don't describe everything
Once a memory starts opening up, there's another temptation: trying to capture absolutely everything.
You don't need to.
If you're describing a person, you don't need to give us their complete physical appearance.
Give us the detail that brings them to life.
Perhaps it's the lipstick your auntie always wore. The coins your grandfather jingled in his pocket. The way somebody pushed their glasses back up their nose. The handbag that was always beside your mother's chair.
A small detail can tell us much more about a person than a complete description.
The same is true of places.
You don't need to reconstruct a room as though you're drawing a floor plan.
Think instead about what it felt like to be there.
If the room frightened you as a child, which details made it frightening?
If it felt safe, what made it safe?
You are allowed to select.
In fact, you have to.
Memoir isn't everything that happened. It's what you choose to show us.
Don't worry too much about finding your voice
People sometimes become self-conscious when they start writing about their lives.
Should I write this in my child's voice because I was eight when it happened?
Should I sound like the person I was then, or the person I am now?
Does this sound sufficiently literary?
I'd put those questions aside, at least at first.
Write in the voice that comes naturally to you now.
If you're funny, let yourself be funny. If you're uncertain about something, you can say you're uncertain. If your memory is incomplete, you don't have to pretend otherwise.
There may be interesting decisions to make later about the relationship between the person who experienced something and the person looking back on it.
That's what editing is for.
First, you need something to edit.
THE SHIFT
Stop trying to write your life
Here's the shift I'd like you to make.
Don't sit down thinking:
I'm going to write my life story.
That's an enormous task, and it can make every decision feel important.
Think instead:
I'm going to write one memory.
One scene.
One person.
One place.
One conversation.
One afternoon.
You aren't committing yourself to writing a book. You don't need a chapter plan. And you certainly don't need to know how the story ends before you begin.
A life story can be built from small pieces.
And some of those pieces may turn out to matter much more than you expected.
Other people's memories can unlock your own
There's another reason I particularly like writing memoir in groups.
Memory is surprisingly sociable.
Someone starts talking about the milk bottles that used to be left at the gate, and somebody else suddenly remembers the milk money.
Someone mentions school lunches, Sunday drives, record players, first flats, grandparents, clothes, smells, cars, holidays or the things parents used to say.
And suddenly another memory appears.
That's one of the pleasures of writing your memories alongside other people. You aren't all writing the same story. You're prompting each other's stories.
A group also gives you something that's difficult to create when you're sitting alone with a blank page: a reason to write.
There's a prompt. There's a limited amount of time. Other people are writing too.
So you write.
And then, if you want to, you share what you've discovered.
TRY THIS
Don't choose one of the “big moments” of your life.
Choose something small.
A smell from childhood.
Something that was always in your grandparents' house.
A song that takes you somewhere.
A piece of clothing you can still picture.
Something somebody always carried.
Give yourself ten minutes.
Don't explain your whole life around it. Don't worry about whether it belongs in a memoir. Don't worry about making it polished.
Just write the scene that comes back.
Then stop.
Get the writing down first
There are all sorts of things you can think about when writing memoir.
Structure. Voice. Perspective. Truth. Memory. Ethics. Other people's stories. What to include. What to leave out.
Those things matter.
But they don't all have to matter on day one.
If you're beginning to write about your life, the most important thing is to start producing small pieces of writing that sound and feel like yours.
That's why I enjoy working with memoir groups.
We're not sitting down together to write books from beginning to end. We're using prompts, discussion and practical writing techniques to see what memories we can uncover — and what happens when we put them into words.
You don't need to arrive with your life story planned.
Bring a memory.
We'll start there.