![]() Colin Clark, for instance, wrote a portraiture memoir about dating Marilyn Monroe, which has been adapted into a movie. Portraiture MemoirĪs the author, you're writing about your experiences when dealing with the subject of the memoir. Every individual has such events, which can become an infinite well for inspiration. This can be a childhood or a coming-of-age memoir, or it revolves around a significant personal event, like divorce, illness, coping with abuse, coping with grief, or living as an expat. Here are the most common: Personal Event Memoir In other words, this form of memoir allows readers to take a peek at the author's reasons for making certain decisions and better understand them. You share your views about spirituality, relationship, religion, art, science, and other ideas that shape who you are. Personal EssayĪ personal essay focuses on the inner life of the author. Whatever your purpose is, a short memoir is a good way to share a specific part or period of life for informational, educational, or entertaining purposes. Thus, it's ideal as a "teaser" for a longer body of work, whenever you have it available. You can have it published as an eBook of 10,000 to 30,000 words. This is ideal for capturing distinct periods of life without worrying how to tie them together. The author can write one story at a time, which saves time as each can be written as the muse comes. ![]() The sequencing can be chronological or through recurring references. This is a collection of short stories about facets of life, which are grouped around a theme. Each form is distinctive and comes with its unique characteristics. I will save that explanation for another blog post.In general, there are three forms of memoirs: an anthology of life stories, a short book, and a personal essay. * If you are writing personal stories and memories, but you don’t have a transformation, that can be written as an essay. If anyone is just beginning to write memoir, these four characteristics will get them off to a good start. But these four characteristics are major considerations and always need to be present. But even she is pulling it all together, telling readers what it meant to receive an education at age 17 when she had never stepped foot in a school before.įrom here I could dive deeper and come up with other characteristics as well. Westover has a dramatic story for sure, and many, many, unbelievable scenes. What does it all mean? That’s the tricky part to capture. Memoir can’t be all scene, it can’t be all stories. An inner story that ties to something universal.She’s sitting in her college classroom, learning about events she had never heard of, and you can almost see the lights going off in her head as she questions the way she was raised. You can see this transformation beautifully in Tara Westover’s Educated. It can be quiet, as simple as a shift in a thought process. But the change doesn’t need to be huge or outwardly noticeable. ![]() Big events tend to produce a transformation. Something needs to change, otherwise why will people read it? This ties closely into the second bullet point. Look at published memoirs and you’ll see what I mean. This is why coming-of-age stories are perfect for memoir, or a year of traveling abroad, or the few months after a major life event like a loved one’s death, accident, divorce, etc. A memoir needs to focus on a particular theme or period of time. A hodgepodge of unrelated anecdotes, or a litany of life events from birth to present day isn’t a memoir. You can know the truth, and then choose to report something different and still call it memoir. I believe that you shouldn’t knowingly make something up. I’m of the opinion that anything that can be verified should be, but not all memoirists subscribe to that. Now, there’s a lot of debate in nonfiction circles (and life in general) of what constitutes “the truth.” If you believe an event happened one way, and a relative believes it happened another way, who’s right? What’s “the truth”? In that case, what the writer believes to be the truth is the truth. I’m just going to work from off the top of my head here, letting my own experience as a writer and reader inform my definition.įor a work to be considered a memoir, it needs… ![]() I have a lot of writing-guide books, all with numerous definitions of memoir. ![]()
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