Is It Time to Write Your Memoir?

Having her AHA moment!

By mingling on social media with potential memoirists, I often hear it said that they need to get their stories out to the world; they’ve been through pain, trauma, and loss and they want to share their journeys. Things have been difficult. Life has sucked. Time to write a memoir.

But I want you to ask yourself, why? Why do you want to share your story? If this question seems flippant or insulting, I apologize. Let me explain.

The main point of this article is to help you determine if you are ready—mentally and emotionally—to write a memoir. I have touched on this briefly in two of my blog posts, Writing About Trauma: What Memoir Is and Isn’t and Heal and Grow: The Power of Journaling.

As I said in Writing About Trauma, memoir gets a bad rap as the Trauma Olympics. Death and grief. Physical or sexual abuse. Addiction. Mental illness. Incarceration. These are topics commonly identified as memoir themes. The publishing market is saturated with these kinds of memoir and publishers don’t want anymore.

Every adult has experienced some kind of loss, pain, grief, heartache, or disease. I personally can put a check mark in front of each of these. Having had pain or trauma in your life does not automatically demand that you produce a memoir about it.

Memoir is about transcendence. It’s not about what you went through but what you learned as a result of what you went through.

I can't emphasize this enough! If you are still in the midst of a traumatic experience (an ugly divorce, child custody battle, rehab, disease treatment) or if you are still processing and coming to terms with what you experienced, I contend you are not ready to write this story. Good memoir requires time and distance so you can be as objective and honest as possible about yourself and what you experienced.

I will repeat this quote from my article Writing About Trauma:

The now perspective is what makes memoir different from fiction; you explain how the story shaped you by weaving together the then and now. ~~Cindi Michael, December 2016, Writer’s Digest. Cindi is the author of The Sportscaster’s Daughter: A Memoir.

Memoir writing is not therapy. A memoir is not a therapeutic journal. If you can’t produce a “then and now” perspective, if you are not at a point from which you can reflect on your experience and impart a lesson of growth and revelation for your readers, it’s not time for a memoir. Your readers deserve a payoff—they should read your story and come away with a moral, lesson, revelation, answers to questions, a strategy for them to mirror. If not, what was the point?

Continue to write because writing is a fantastically healing endeavor. Journal. Blog. See a therapist who employs writing as part of the healing regimen. Join a support group and share your writings with group members.

But a memoir? Only when you have your aha moment—a moment of sudden realization, inspiration, insight, recognition, or comprehension—are you finally ready.

Best Writing and Editing Resources

Trish's favorite books on writing

This should really be titled "Trish's Favorite Writing and Editing Resources." There are scores, maybe hundreds, of similar articles online. These are what I consider the essentials for being a writer or editor. And I've only scratched the surface.

I start with the basics, for those needing guidance with grammar rules and language mechanics. I then list several more advanced resources for those who need help with developing their writing style, tone, and presentation. Finally, I offer a short list of essential online tools.

The Basics: Grammar, Punctuation, Mechanics

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. If you buy only one grammar and composition guide (but why would you do that?), this is the one. What hasn’t been said about this little gem? First published in 1959, The Elements of Style is a perennial bestseller, available in a variety of versions, such as an annotated edition, an edition with a study guide, a 4th edition published in 1999, and a new inexpensive e-book version published in October 2020.

On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Here’s another classic owned by almost every writer and editor. The 30th Anniversary Edition was published in May 2006. Zinsser is a superstar journalist, magazine contributor, book author, editor, and university teacher.

100 Ways to Improve Your Writing by Gary Provost. This book is chockful of grammar rules. But it is more than just a grammar guide. You’ll find chapters on how to write an awesome beginning, overcome writer’s block, and ten ways to develop your style. A little powerhouse of a book. First published in 1972, an affordable mass market edition was published in May 2019.

Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer. This book appears on many lists of “must have” writing reference guides. Dreyer’s English is notable for its humor and occasional tongue-in-cheek approach to the material. It is best appreciated by reading it in its entirety rather than thumbing through it as you might with other reference guides. Random House published a trade paperback edition in August 2020.

I’m also a fan of Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O’Conner. Informative but witty and lighthearted. Grab a copy if you get the chance. The 4th edition was published in February 2019.

Now, my personal choices for the absolute most basic grammar books you should add to your reference library.

Hodges Harbrace Handbook/ The Writer’s Harbrace Handbook. During his tenure as a University of Tennessee (Knoxville) English professor in the 1930s, John C. Hodges obtained federal funding to support his study of the frequency of errors in college students’ essays. He collected 20,000 student papers, analyzed the errors in those papers, and used those findings to create the original Harbrace Handbook of English. When Hodges died in 1967, the textbook was in its sixth edition and was renamed Hodges Harbrace College Handbook. I owned a copy during my high school years in the 1970s and took it with me as my writer’s bible to my first professional writing job in 1979. I kept that edition for years. Since then, I’ve owned as many as three different editions at one time, because you can pick them up inexpensively in used bookstores. And I couldn’t help myself.

This handbook is so solid and complete, it did not undergo a significant revision until the 13th edition in 1990.

Now called The Writer’s Harbrace Handbook, written by Cheryl Glenn and Loretta Gray, this version is in its 5th edition, last published in 2012. The new 6th Edition Writer’s Harbrace Handbook (with APA 7e Updates) will be available December 16, 2020. This book is still compiled with student writers in mind. In addition to grammar, punctuation, spelling, and language mechanics, it features sections on rhetorical reading and writing, essays, research, managing academic writing, and composing arguments. It can be purchased in hardcover, paperback, and purchased or rented as an e-textbook.

Advanced Writing Resources

If you have a handle on the basic rules of English grammar, you should fill your library with books that help you develop your personal style and make you a writer of quality prose. Here are a few of the books almost all authors and editors recommend.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. A favorite among writers of fiction and nonfiction, it’s loaded with great advice and makes for an entertaining read. “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner. Another fun, pleasant read that’s brimming with tons of priceless mentoring from a famous literary agent and acclaimed editor.

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg. Guidelines for creativity and story development are told in an entertaining style. Writing Down the Bones offers hints of memoir, personal essay, and humor. Another great book for your library.

On Writing by Stephen King. It’s Stephen King, right? He’s a darn good writer. But my experience with this book is that King’s advice on creating a daily writing schedule can be a bit daunting. If you have a full-time job, school, and/or a home and family, his daily goals can be tough to achieve and many readers have gotten discouraged. If you read this book while acknowledging that you are not trying to be Stephen King, you’ll be fine.

Online Writing and Editing Resources

There are hundreds of online tools to guide, assist, and mentor writers and editors. So many, that I've chosen only three that offer basic but genuinely helpful writing assistance.

Grammarly is a helpful resource for grammar rules. It is free and wildly popular. But beware—at times, Grammarly is just plain wrong about the changes it suggests. Sometimes it flags words and phrases it doesn’t like but that are not necessarily incorrect. As a writer, you should know grammar rules—but as you grow as a writer, you will decide how and when to break those rules for a desired effect. Don’t let Grammarly cramp your style.

Hemingway Editor is popular as a free online writing and editing resource. It’s good and, in general, will help you streamline and tighten up your prose. But I don’t always agree with it. If you don’t understand Ernest Hemingway’s style and why so many strive to emulate it, I’ve talked about it in a couple of my blog posts: Overwriting, The Death of Clarity and A Work of Fiction is Not a Fill-in-the-blank Game.

A readability score roughly estimates the level of education someone would need to easily read a passage of text and comprehend it. A readability score of your work is more important than you might realize. Your prose readability score should align with your intended audience; you don't want to talk down to or over the head of your readers. There are numerous readability score tools online; I recommend Readability Test Tool as an easy-to-use, free option. Copy and paste chunks of your writing into this tool to receive your score.

Many Microsoft Word users don’t know that Word can give you a readability score and grade level of your documents. Open an existing document and try it out now. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to File > Options.

2. Select Proofing.

3. Under When correcting spelling and grammar in Word, make sure the Check grammar with spelling check box is selected.

4. Select Show readability statistics.

After you enable this feature, open a file that you want to check, and check the spelling by pressing F7 or going to Review > Spelling & Grammar. When Word finishes checking the spelling and grammar, it displays information about the reading and grade levels of the document.

Deciding what to include for this post was difficult. As I said, this barely scratches the surface of books and online tools available to help you improve your writing and editing skills. I'd like to know what resources you rely on. Drop your favorites in the comment box.

Don't Get Mired Down in Your Memoir

Mired down in your writing? Get unstuck.

I want to begin this post with a heartfelt congratulations to anyone who is not a writer by training or profession but who is attempting to write a book—any kind of book. Writing is hard. That’s not an original thought; it is a well-known fact that writing is a difficult process, even for those who have an education that focused on writing or who have written throughout their career. Simply being comfortable with good grammar and having excelled in school with book reports and the infamous five-paragraph essay are just the most basic building blocks for creating book-length prose.

Fortunately, I had a knack for stringing together interesting sentences and compelling paragraphs at a relatively young age. Math and science? Meh. My university majors of Mass Communications and English were the only two tracks that made any sense to me, at least at that time.

But for the last three months or so, I have been tasked with ghostwriting a memoir for a man with whom I have nothing in common; a middle-aged man of color, a retired Army veteran with twenty-one years of service, three deployments to Iraq, a traumatic brain injury and severe PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). I cannot personally relate to any aspect of who he is or what he’s been through. But I’m determined to do his service and sacrifice justice, tell his story with empathy, and let his experiences produce a survival guide for others in similar circumstances. That is my promise to him and to myself.

I have a habit of starting my blog posts with a personal story that in my mind is connected to the true topic of the post. I’m doing it here again. I am struggling with this ghostwriting in a way I’m unfamiliar with. I spend an hour at a time staring at pages of notes I’ve transcribed from this man’s audio recordings, trying to make sense of his war experiences, timelines, injuries, and challenges in retirement so I can organize them in a way that will make an inspiring read.

Recently, I asked a social media memoir-writing group why it has taken some of them years to write their memoirs. I will add, the way in which I worded the question put some of them on the defensive, because they felt I was implying that a memoir is something they should be able to crank out in a few months. Even though it was a misreading of my intent, I apologized. But I do believe that if all aspects of the writing process are perfectly in place, they could produce a good first draft in a matter of months, not years. In other words, in a perfect world, they could. But few of them are writing in a perfect world.

My post garnered about eighty original comments plus comments about comments. From these, I identified four issues at play for those who say they have been writing their memoirs for anywhere from two to ten years. These are the recurring obstacles:

• The writers are creating book-length prose for the first time and have no formal training or career experience with extensive writing projects, so they are learning how to write as they go. And the struggle is taking time.

• The memoir is dealing with traumatic events in their lives, such as disease, abuse (physical and sexual), addiction, suicide attempts, and mental illness, causing the writer to unpack this baggage slowly and painfully.

• Other aspects of life are interfering with their writing: full-time jobs, children, school, or family issues such as caring for elderly parents.

• They have no support or are facing active resistance (including threats) from ex-partners, spouses, family members, or others who might appear in the memoir.

The other issue that emerged is that some of them are frustrated and unhappy about how long it’s taking to finish, while others don’t care and have an “it takes as long as it takes” attitude. I’m trying to formulate a process that will help the ones who really want to get their memoirs finished, either because they just want to be done with it or because, more importantly I think, they have a story to tell that they know will be helpful to others in similar situations. They desire to “do good” for others with their memoirs. I want to produce a formula that will guide those who are already writing as well as those who are still thinking about it.

Looking at the list of challenges for these folks, I plan to write a series of blog articles that will address each one, with the hope of helping writers make progress and get off the fence about starting their personal stories. My agenda looks like this:

• Resources to provide training and guidance with writing skills. I can’t teach talent, but a collection of books, websites, and online courses to improve your writing are achievable tasks.

• Determining if you are ready to write your memoir. This might sound contrary to helping someone produce a memoir, but I feel strongly that the writer must be able to determine if they are truly ready to write about trauma. Or if it’s just too soon.

• Learning to manage your time to make writing a habit in your life. Many authors have documented their techniques for making the writing process part of their daily routine. I’ll share them.

• Dealing with the ramifications of resistance to your writing. I cannot fix personal problems and I will not disregard your fears, but I’ll collect some personal and basic legal advice that might give you comfort.

Like many of you, I will write these blog articles as I can after my work and personal obligations are complete. Let’s see how I do.