Good Memoir: Focused, well paced narrative.

Go to any bookstore and look at the shelves of books about people, many of which were written by the person pictured on the cover.

I find a well written memoir or biography fascinating. Well, if the story or the life is fascinating.

As a young girl I pulled much of my reading from the biography shelf in our small school library. I thought I could get through all of them before I left the school, but I discovered other genres along the way and must be labeled a dabbler.

I think it was from reading about interesting lives and journeys and courageous exploits that gave me the courage to think outside the box a bit myself. Interesting things happen to ordinary people, often just because they had their eyes open and inclined to say yes before they ever thought of saying no.

I've read some biographies and autobiographies that were not well written. Yet the life of the person was inspiring. Hmm.

Thomas Larson's Memoir Writing Workshops explains the bones of the process.

First, some definitions. Memoir (or autobiography) contains stories about one’s life, usually on a very particular focus—a pivotal year after college; an affair and its aftermath; a relationship between mother and daughter. It’s impossible to write one’s whole life story; instead writers find a focus and then tell stories about people, events, or phases within that focus. Narrative refers to telling a story, the temporal sequence of how events are related to one another in time. Pacing is the technique by which we vary the passage of time, that is how slow or how fast we make the time pass dependent on the particular element of narrative writing we use, page by page.

In Autobiography: A Reader for Writers, Robert Lyons says that autobiographers and memoir writers choose from a spectrum of possible ways to represent the passage of time when writing about experience. The spectrum has two poles which are far removed from each other: "narratives that comment extensively on experience and narratives that present experience directly." This is a good definition for our purposes here in discussing memoir and narrative time. It says basically that all memoir writers in order to tell about their experience must use narrative but they can use it in different ways.

For more on the subject of writing memoir, go to Thomas Larson's website and read on.

Thinking of writing your memoirs?
Why?
What would be your focus?
What do you leave in or skip over?
Who would benefit most?