Writing your Memoir

One night during the recent reunion, we presented "TED Talks".  I was hesitant to participate as I;ve never listened to them, or worried about them.  However, everyone else seemed to be excited about it and I decided to give one about How to write your Memoir.

I started by pointing out that I had just given them copies of Volume 1 of my memoir, which covers growing up in a small, Mormon town.  The project had taken me 15-20 years, and was a lot of work, but I learned some things as I went.

• You need to decide on your purpose for writing it.  Some examples:
• You might just want to tell your story.  I found it very difficult to pin down the sequence of events that happened in my life.  It might not be terribly important, but a story is most often told as a sequence of events leading to a conclusion.  Since I couldn't do that to my satisfaction, I gave up on a strict sequence and instead told my story by subject.  But you may want to use this approach, and many people do.
• You might want to teach lessons, based on lessons you've learned during your life.  I heard a talk recently expounding this approach.  The man giving the talk had decided to leave a book of stories from his life that could be told to children.  So his stories were fairly short and simple, and each story was followed by a lesson like you might teach in primary class.
• You might want to publish your memoir and make a million dollars.  If that is your goal you will need to apply some strict rules to your work, including making sure dates are correct, perhaps referencing them, and be very strict in getting it right.  You will need permissions from people you describe, especially if you name them.  I was having enough trouble just getting my story down on paper, so I didn't want that kind of  restrictions.
• You may be describing how your life fits into history.  In that case, what I just said about making money is even more true.
• Or you might just want your family to understand your life.  That is what I decided to do.  I wrote what I remember, knowing that my memories might not be the same as other people's memories.  That is the difference between a memoir and a history.  A memoir is what you, personally, remember.  A history is written with less passion and more academic rigidity.

• How to write a story (of any kind)
• Start!  The rule of thumb is:  Writer's write.  People who don't write aren't writers.  So get started.  When you are writing, don't worry about spelling, grammar, sentence structure, or anything like that.  Just start putting down your thoughts, gathering your stories.  I found that as I wrote I thought of other things to write, so I put what I had into an outline form and added ideas into the outline before continuing with what I was writing.  Later I expanded the ideas into the story.
• Write every day.  I've heard that advice often.  I try, but I fail most days.  They say set apart a time of day and spend some time writing every day.   I'm not that disciplined, so I decided to not have any guilt over it.  I wrote when I could and felt like it.  That's part of the reason it took me 15-20 years.
• Don't wait!  I had an interesting experience as I was editing and preparing my memoir for publishing.  I read things I'd written early on, and I had no memories of the story I was reading.  I still knew they had happened, but the actual memory was gone.  So when I do volume 2 of my memoir I won't have as much material to work with as I'd like.
• It helps to have a theme for your memoir - something to give it a structure so it doesn't become a bunch of random events.  I used a couple of gimmicks for this:  Early in the book I told about a horse who started stepping on my toe when I was saddling it.  I found ways to refer back to that several times during the memoir.  And the title came from that story.  Another recurring theme was what we called our animals.  That theme led to the ending for my memoir - another important thing to have.
• Get help when you need it.  I wasted a lot of time trying to find someone to edit my story.  Some were willing to do it if I paid them for their time.  The ones who didn't expect to make their fortune didn't have the time.  In the end, my overworked wife was my savior.  I couldn't have finished it without her help.

• Editing
• As I said before, when you write just get the story down.  But in the end you absolutely have to edit your story.  I edited my story over and over, and over again.  My spelling is pretty good, but my typing has deteriorated as I've gotten older, so that has to be fixed.  Sentence structure also has to be adjusted.  I write the way I think, which is also the way I talk.  Written things need to be written so your meaning is clear without voice inflection and body language.  So you use a different part of your brain when editing.  If you think of something to add to your story as you are editing, stop editing and switch into writing mode.  Just get it down and edit it later.
• Things to address during editing:
• Spelling - it's amazing that if you mis-spell a word you tend to not see it afterwards.  You need a fresh pair of eyes.  It took me a year or more for me to see spelling errors after I'd made them.
• Sentence structure -  I tend to write very long sentences.  I spent a lot of time getting a single thought into each sentence.
• Paragraphs 
• Grammar
• Get someone to go through it for you if you can, other people can be great helps.  But the final decision is yours.  Don't let anybody else write your story.  Stick to your guns and make the way you want it to be.

• Publishing your memoir
• You can use web-based tools to get your book into final form.  They will give you a book that looks professional.  They will also cost you the most to get it published.
• If you are going for the million dollars, and your work is actually valuable, you'll need to submit it to a publisher, get it accepted, and edit, edit, edit.  They'll have you traveling, doing book signings and other publicity stuff.  You might make a million dollars, but it will cost you a LOT of time and effort.
• You can use a word processor to format your own book.  You make all the decisions about how it looks, but it will be YOURS!  This is the approach I took.
• I wrote it using WORD.  I put the page breaks where I wanted them.  I added photos where they made sense.  I put in white space if I felt it helped with the story.
• When I was happy with the final product, I saved it as a PDF file.  That works pretty well, but it changed some of my page breaks, so I had to adjust and try again.
• I took the PDF file to Staples (just because they are near by) and had one copy printed on heavy paper with a coiled wire binding and clear, plastic covers.  I read through it and used a red pencil to do another editing round.
• I took my revised PDF file back to Staples and had them bind it into hard covers (a stock item) with color printing on pages with photos.  I also brought a file with a photo I hadn't included in the book for the front cover which had a recessed area for a cover page.  They cut the photo down to fit the space and glued it onto the hard cover.  I had them make 7 copies.  One for me and one for each of my children.  That is all the copies I intend to make.  It looks good and everybody was happy to get one.