Memoir Week Day Two: Things To Think About Before You Write a Memoir

Storytelling requires distance and objectivity. Memoir writing offers neither. When you’re telling your own story, you’re at a disadvantage every time you recall what happened in your brain during the experiences you’re describing. You can achieve objectivity, but it will require a lot of extra work. Ask me. I’ve been there.

In a way, you could say I’ve been writing memoirs all my life. In days of yore, I only wrote poetry from my own perspective. I had to become a stranger to my own life, and that required a level of mind-fuckery I didn’t always have.

After my first collection came out, I asked myself why the hell I was building such a massive barrier into my writing. If I was writing the truth, I was limited to that truth. If a poem could have been finished better as fiction, I didn’t give myself the option. My poems suffered, so for my second collection, I decided I was done with such a pointless exercise. If I had the option of writing whatever I damn well liked, I could create better poems.

And I did create better poems because the imagination is often more powerful than the truth. Sometimes fiction tells more truth than nonfiction. This is one excellent reason so many writers fictionalise their work. If you’re not familiar with the concept, fictionalization entails borrowing from the truth but adding fiction where it serves you. There is no reason on this green earth to limit yourself to nonfiction unless you feel committed to sharing your story. Just present it as a novel. Simple.

If you’re still determined to write a memoir in its strictest sense, I won’t blame you, but I will ask you to consider the drawbacks. And I have another one for you. When you write a memoir, you include people who might not agree with your interpretation of their lives. This could make you quite a few enemies. I was relatively lucky in that my family felt comfortable with their presence in my work. They said as long as I was writing the truth, they saw no reason to be removed from the poems.

You might not get so lucky. This can get you into a lot of trouble. It’s a fair solution to fictionalise your characters enough to get the story out, but that’s yet another barrier where none are needed.

So tell me: Do you really want to write a memoir? Give it some thought.