Writing Memoir and the Personal Story
How to be a Compelling Character in Your Own Life Stories
Jan 12, 2009
For memoir to be successful, the author cannot compromise on honesty. He opens himself up to the world for all to see, analyze, and judge. If the reader doesn’t like the story, isn’t that an indictment of one’s life? Author Philip Gerard, in his book Creative Nonfiction, insists that in memoir the narrator must “put himself on the line.” He writes that the author of memoir “has no buffer, no illusion of narrative distance, between himself and his subject.” Clearly, writing memoir, takes guts.
Creating the “I” Character in Memoir
Much like the fiction writer, the author of personal memoir must develop convincing and compelling characters, and that means the memoir’s narrator must also be a believable character with a tangible persona. In fiction, writers develop characters they hope the reader can see as authentic, but they can make up details of a life to meet the needs of the narrative, change entire personas to make the storyline work. You can’t do this in memoir.
However, you still must reveal elements of the narrator’s character. The storyteller, the “I” in the story, must have a persona and the reader needs to know intimate details about that narrator for the memoir to be successful. Philip Lopate, in the book Writing Creative Nonfictio, writes: “In order to turn ourselves into characters, we need to dramatize ourselves. I don’t mean inventing or adding colorful traits that aren’t true; I mean positioning those that are already in us under the most clearly focused, sharply defined light.”
Writing Compelling Memoir
Everyone has life stories to tell, ones with emotion and drama, ones of revelation and regret, and ones with compelling relevance to the reader. It’s just a matter of choosing the essential elements of those stories in order to say what the writer most wants to say, most wants to reveal.
But without the essential elements of character development, especially for the narrator of memoir, the story can be without important elements of engagement. It loses its inner truth. The writing the truth doesn’t mean writing about everything from every angle. In his book On Writing Well, author William Zinsser writes, “Remember that you are the protagonist in your own memoir, the tour guide. You must find a narrative trajectory for the story you want to tell and never relinquish control. This means leaving out of your memoir many people who don't need to be there.”
This essentially means picking and choosing only the parts of the past that further the narrative, that add to the story you want to tell. Mixing these ingredients with a keenly developed persona for the narrator is the beginning of strong storytelling.
The Story Below the Surface
Writing the memoir certainly can be difficult on the personal psyche. The author must dig deep into personal places that may not be willing to accept the examination, and then must reveal to the reader the aspects of what is discovered. Although the work is not memoir, but fiction, a quote from the short story “A Painful Case” by James Joyce can be a lesson to the writer of memoir. In describing the character Mr. Duffy, Joyce writes, “He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself.”
The fiction writer must create a persona for a make-believe character, but in a work of memoir revealing the true self within the context of the most difficult and vulnerable personal moments may be a far more difficult art.
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