Who Wants To Read Your Memoirs
By Sharzi Avins (c) 2001
How many times have you thought about writing your memoirs, but asked yourself, "Who would want to read about me?" The answer is easy... anyone who can relate to the normal emotions and experiences of life. A memoir isn't about the horrendous facts of your life, but more, the poignant ones... moments that helped you learn something about yourself. Publishers are looking for stories that get away from the horrible events of ones life, and relate more to human nature. This is not to say that those kinds of stories are not wanted, but they must revolve around the emotion, yours and the person who may have committed an act against you.
When writing about your life, it is important that you convey your own truths. By this I mean, you will write from your own point of view. There may be family or friends who do not agree that life happened in the way you have written it. What matters is not that anyone else agrees. What matters is how YOU remember YOUR life. Your feelings, your emotions and your remembrances are what make you who you are. It does not matter if someone tells you how it really was. You came from a place where your own truths molded your future perspective on life.
Most writers believe that every detail has to be correct, but when writing your memoirs the rules are a bit different. Remember that the emotions you felt at the cruel hand of a grade school teacher, will outweigh the necessity to be sure you have every detail of the room or the teacher exactly as it was.
There are ways to research your past for the facts, but you will want to stay closer to the emotional realities than anything else. To jar your memory of how you felt, try to remember how people and things looked. See if you can find pictures or
mementoes. Even curlers, jewelry, or the football you used to throw can trigger memory. A lot of emotion can be found from these.
Your memoirs should bring the reader along your journey. We must take them with us as if it is happening now. They must feel as if they are standing there as the scene unfolds at the same place in time it happened to us. If you are standing in front of a whole class of students while a teacher humiliates you, the reader should feel your humiliation as if they are in your skin.
Do not use your memoirs as a vendetta. Do not use it as a way to get a family to see what they have done wrong or to bring about changes in those around you. If that is your intention, the reader will sense it immediately and you will lose them.
If you do decide to write about the alcoholic father or abusive mother for instance, then you must also write about their own emotional truths and do so with a sense of empathy. What made them the kind of person they are? No one wants to read about how horrible your father was to you, how he hurt you, how he left you feeling forever unsure of yourself, but we do want to read about why he drank. Perhaps he could not deal with something he had once done, or a particular incident in his life, or his own father drank, etc. The reader wants to know the deep-seeded reasons, or your take on the reasons, why a man would turn out the way he did. It must be poignant. It must make the reader feel something for that person as well as for you.
Convey a scent, the taste of food, the colors, sounds and feelings associated with those. If grandma's old country kitchen was warm and inviting, the smell of oiled wood and apple pie baking in the wood-burning stove were memories, then make sure the reader feels they are sitting in the kitchen at the old wobbly table with you.
The reader does not want to know each event that happened as if you had made a list of them. Instead, they want to know who you are and why you are who you are. Take them on that journey. Show them things in your life that were new and exciting and strange... the first time a kitten licked your hand and you thought it would be soft, but it felt like sandpaper; the feel of warm rain when it first soaked through your shirt and made you feel cold; hot cocoa on a freezing winter day that burned the roof of your mouth; a schoolmate who smiled as he punched you in the face. Tell us about all those little contradictions and ironies in your life.
Next time you question "Who would want to read about me?" know that we do. We want to relate to the emotions and feelings of life that we all know so well and feel so deeply.
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2001
The contents of this article may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, or with intent to republish, without written permission from the author,
Sharzi Avins.
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