Definition of a Memoir:
Writers look to the past to make sense of it, figure out who they were and who they have become, and what it means to them and the lives of others. A memoir puts the events of a life in perspective for the writer and for those who read it. It is a way to explain to others the events of our lives - our choices, perspectives, decisions, and responses.
Please write an essay in which you tell a story drawn from experience, where language plays some part in the story. Your paper should include both narration and reflection - the story itself and your thoughts exploring the significance of the story.
Your genre of your essay will be a short memoir. The main purpose of a memoir is to entertain: in other words, your first priority is to find a good story. But the memoir has other purposes too. The fact that they entertain does not mean memoirs can't be very serious. Some memoirs make us laugh out loud, but some of the best also tell us about experiences like living through war, the Holocaust, or slavery. What makes them "entertainment" is that they are personal stories, not academic studies. Their main purpose is to help us understand one single other person, not to explain history, economics, sociology - or even language. Some aspect of language will be explored in your memoir, but you are not responsible to support your ideas about language the way you would in a research paper. We can learn a lot from memoirs, but before we learn about "big subjects" from them, we learn about the person speaking.
Memoirs also do more than just tell the story. They reflect on the story. You need to include your thoughts about the story. Why did it come to mind? What interest does your audience have in your story? Talk about the reasons this story is interesting, relevant, entertaining, profound, or whatever it is that makes it worth telling.
Writing about yourself sounds simple. It may also be the hardest essay I will assign. Unlike more formal genres of the essay where the format is already given, in a memoir you must develop your own structure. Unlike academic essays where a formal voice is appropriate, here you must find a voice that suits your personality and your story. Here are some guidelines for those who aren't sure what topic to choose, or what structure to give their essay:
Choosing a topic:
• This is a short essay, so you need a narrow focus. Write about one, specific thing that has been important to you: a person, place, idea, belief, experience, event, day, moment, action, relationship, work of art, or another specific thing. Explore a conflict between people. Show a moment in which you have to make a choice. Show how you change or don't change.
• After finding a focal point that interests you, find a use of language - either written or spoken or both - that in involved in the story. Include it somewhere in the story, and if you can make it a major theme.
• In fiction, the main character is usually more interesting if s/he changes during the story. The same is true in a personal narrative. Choose a focal point which was also a turning point: how did this thing help make you who you are now? What were you like before, and after this thing entered your life? Make it clear that someone in the story wants to take the reader on a journey that arrives at success or failure.
• Personal topics are stories you feel comfortable telling in public. Private topics are stories you do not want to share in public. Do not write a story for this class that leaves you feeling highly embarrassed, panicked, scared, or so on. You may need or want to write about that topic, but not in public.
Structuring your Memoir:
• Just as a research paper has an introduction, body, and conclusion, you might find it easiest to have a "before" section (introduction), a detailed story, and an "after" section that reflects on the story and concludes.
• You are free, however, to jump right into the story and explain the background later; to use flashbacks and flashforwards; to use other techniques of fiction.
• Make sure you include both narration (the story itself), and reflection (your thoughts and feelings about the story). Reflection helps readers find personal connections to your story - you can use this section to answer the eternal question that haunts writing: "so what?"
• You can organize by time: what happened in chronological order.
• You can organize by space: a story about each different room in a house, for instance.
You can organize other ways: a list of the meanings a thing had for me, with a story about each one, for instance.
Details in your Memoir:
• All writing needs details. The kinds of details you need are determined by the type of writing, which is in turn determined by your purpose, audience, self-presentation, and topic. Research tries to inform and argue based on evidence; the details it needs are authoritative pieces of evidence and your logical interpretation. Memoir, on the other hand, is meant to bring a story alive in the reader's mind; the details memoir needs are the same as you will find in fiction.
• Characters come more alive when we see them do things, not just hear that they did something; when you quote dialogue instead of just telling us what the conversation was about; when we see images of them instead of just hearing their names.
• Setting can be made more real for the reader by using imagery (appealing to any of the five senses), by describing the physical location, the social world, the time of your life that is involved, the time in history that is involved. Show us objects, sights, sounds, aromas, textures, and flavors that are part of this world.
How to tell your story:
First, write as much as you can without letting the Inner Editor (Inner Critic) speak. WHen you are finished, ask yourself what you think the story is trying to say. How is the narrator (you) different at the end of the story than at the beginning? What are the most important moments? What moments should be shown in scenes? What should be deleted, tightened, or summarized? Would the story be enriched with dialogue? Is the setting clear? Have you woven in necessary background information? Are the characters' personalities made clear by how they speak, what they are doing, what they are wearing, or how they move? Does the story the begin and end in the most effective place?