HOW TO WRITE A PERSONAL MEMOIR
PERSONAL MEMOIR DEFINED
A personal memoir is a piece of autobiographical writing, usually shorter in nature than a comprehensive autobiography. The memoir often tries to capture specific highlights or meaningful moments in one’s past, often including a contemplation of the meaning of that event at the time of the writing of the memoir. The memoir may be more emotional and concerned with capturing particular scenes, or a series of events, rather than documenting every fact of a person’s life (Zuwiyya, N. 200). The following are some of the various genres that are considered to be autobiographical: autobiography, confessional, credo, diary, journal, letter, log, memoir, personal essay.
When you write about remembered events in your life, you write autobiography/memoir. Autobiography is so popular because reading as well as writing it leads people to reflect deeply on their own lives. When you reflect on the meaning of experience, you examine the forces within yourself and within society that have shaped you into the person you have become.
Writing about your life for others to read is not the same as writing for yourself. As a writer, you must remember that autobiography is public, not private. While it requires self-presentation, it does not require you to make unwanted self-disclosures. You choose the event to write about and decide how you will portray yourself. You should use narration and description as writing strategies.
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MEMOIR FORM and SELECTING A TOPIC
-Focus on a brief period of time or series of related events
-Narrative structure, including many of the usual elements of storytelling such as setting, plot development, imagery, conflict, characterization, foreshadowing and flashback, and irony and symbolism
-The writer’s contemplation of the meaning of these events in retrospect
-A fictional quality even though the story is true
-Higher emotional level
-More personal reconstruction of the events and their impact
-Therapeutic experience for the memoirist, especially when the memoir is of the crisis or survival type of memoir
-Centers on a problem/situation/event or focuses on a conflict and its resolution and o the understanding of why and how the resolution is significant in your life.
Although this is a writing assignment, decide on the reason for writing a memoir:
Determine which time of your life you want to write about. A timeline can bookend the beginning and ending of your story. These timeline might encompass:
FIND A THEME
What is your story about? What is the main theme? What is the main lesson you have learned from your experiences? Your theme may be one of the following:
You do not have to know the theme to begin writing your memoir. Often, it will emerge in the writing itself. But at some point, you will want to choose the main theme of your memoir and organize the details of the story around this theme.
