INTRODUCTION:
You are singularly unique and no one in the past or in the future was or will be exactly the same as you. This philosophy can be extended to your life and the experiences that make it up, in terms of circumstances, time, other people’s involvement, your point of view, strengths, weaknesses, reactions, feelings, emotions, and conclusions. There is nothing more selfless than using that life, or at least parts of it, to improve, inspire, or benefit others. The number of experiences, when viewed in retrospect, must be staggering and this was expressed in the name of a writing course once offered at Hofstra University on Long Island called “Everybody’s Got a Story to Tell”. “. Start thinking, as you read this, what could be yours.
Who do you know more than yourself? Even if you think there are parts and aspects of yourself that you’ve lost touch with, or never knew, writing short or long memoirs can remedy that. When Oprah Winfrey tried to determine what was most important to a human being, the consensus she received was “That I matter!” Writing a memoir is a way of showing that you do.
“To have a voice is to have a self, and to have a self is powerful,” wrote Bill Roorbach in “Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature” (Writer’s Digest Books, 2008, p. .18).
And Socrates wrote: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
THE MEMORY ANALYZED:
Depending on whether you’re writing for yourself or for a larger audience, what matters most in a memoir isn’t necessarily what happened, but what it meant to you.
“What happened to the memoirist is not what matters,” according to Jane Taylor McDonnell in her book “Living to Tell the Tale” (Penguin Books, 1998, p. viii); “It only matters what the memoirist makes of what happened.”
This may not make the subtle difference you initially notice.
Take a look at the following two lines to compare this concept:
1). What Happened: Walking along the beach on a sweltering late-summer day, I gazed out at the ocean.
two). It makes it happen: Walking along the beach on a sweltering late summer day, I looked out at the ocean and realized the infinity of the world and with that infinity, for the first time, I saw God.
After taking your readers on a journey you’ve already taken yourself, you need to take them to the same destination as yours. This is not necessarily physical. Instead, it is a destination of learning, insight, new perspective, understanding, and wisdom, allowing both memoirist and reader to interpret, order, and conclude what happened to him. The journey itself can be intensely pleasurable or intensely painful.
In essence, a memoir illustrates “I learned this by experiencing that.”
“The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world because engagement breeds experience (and) experience breeds wisdom…” continues McDonnell (p. viii).
Writing a memoir recovers lost memories, captures events, and releases emotions, allowing the author to go deeper into himself and achieve a degree of therapeutic value. Ultimately, you can heal.
“We… all aspire to become meaning makers,” according to Eric Maisel in his book “Deep Writing: 7 Principles That Bring Ideas to Life” (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999, p. 5). “The more we want to ‘shape our destiny’, as Albert Camus said, the more we are concerned with the meaning we make or fail to make. A meaning maker is a person who takes their humanity and experiences and tries to put them together in a coherent way, witty, beautiful, but at least somehow, for its own sake and for the sake of others. That product may or may not change the world, or even reach the world. But a meaning maker can do nothing less than fight to make sense, because making sense is a moral imperative”.
You, expressed in the first person singular (“I”), are both the person experiencing and the narrator, thus directly engaging the reader.
“A memoir is a true story, a narrative work built directly from the writer’s memory, with an additional element of creative inquiry…” Roorbach also wrote, (p. 13). “The writer is also the protagonist, the person to whom the events of the story happen… (He) arises and exists only through the first person singular: the me remembering.”
“…The reader shares two names with the writer: I and I,” he later wrote (p. 158). “And while the identification process is largely subconscious, a powerful connection is forged between reader and writer in the continual invocation of the first person self,” creating that soul-to-soul bond.
MECHANICS OF MEMORY:
Therefore, the memories must contain the following elements.
1), a memoir must be written in the first person singular, that is, say “I”,
two). It must be a container for the perception of the author.
It should take the reader on a journey. The author’s work must have a specific beginning, middle, and end.
3). The theme must be universal.
4). The author’s life is interesting to him, because it is about him. However, the memory of him should attract others.
5). A memoir must impart some knowledge, understanding or insight at the end of the reader’s journey, ie I learned this by experiencing that.
Article sources:
Maisel, Eric. “Deep Writing: 7 Principles That Bring Ideas to Life.” New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999.
McDonnell, Jane Taylor. “Live to tell the story”. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
Roorbach, Bill, with Kristen Keckler, PhD. “Writing Life Stories: How to Turn Memories into Memories, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature.” Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2008.
