Memoir: A Balance of Curated Recounting and Meaning-making Reflection

Meaning-making Reflection is the key to memoir

A memoir must offer a balance of curated recounting and meaning-making reflection.

Reflection is the aspect of memoir that writers struggle to grasp. Memoirs that fail usually lack reflection.

With memoir, you must find the unique within the universal. The stories recounted by the writer of a memoir can be thought of as universal in nature. These are struggles, obstacles, challenges that most people can relate to—personal trauma, illness, loss of a loved one, addiction, and so on. Where memoir excels is when it offers a unique perspective of triumph and transformation. A well-written memoir is often compared to the classic hero’s journey: you are faced with a challenge; you go on a journey (literal or figurative) to seek solutions; you triumph over your challenge; you learn, grow, and transform. You become wiser. But this is only accomplished through reflection. Without it, a memoir is just a collection of related stories.

Let's dig more deeply and discover how to write a memoir that offers the reader a gift of your wisdom and growth using these techniques:

• Unaware voice and aware voice

• Conscious desires and unconscious desires

• External conflict and internal conflict

Unaware and Aware Voices

The unaware voice in memoir represents how the writer recounts stories from an unknowing point of view. These are the incidents that happened before the writer had the big picture of their situation and knew where things were going and what ultimately would happen.

Compare that to the aware voice. This is the voice used to write the all-important reflections (the musings, observations, and realizations), a voice from a mature and now-experienced point of view. The writer looks back on their own story from a place of omniscience.

Conscious and Unconscious Desires

Conscious desires involve trying to overcome the surface-level struggles the writer is dealing with: survive a cancer diagnosis, find peace after a divorce, seek success after crashing out of a career, reconcile with an estranged family member, etc.

The unconscious desires are the deeper feelings and beliefs that the writer uncovers during their own transformative journey. These are the entrenched, true motivations of their behavior that they might have been blind to while in the midst of the challenge. The anger the writer feels about a divorce isn’t rooted in losing a spouse to a lover but in losing the moral support and financial security the spouse offered and fearing a future of loneliness.

External and Internal Conflicts

External conflict is demonstrated by the stories about the inciting incidents that the writer is recounting. It’s the stories about the bad stuff that happened.

But internal conflict is the personal exploration of the struggle the writer has faced, and what long-held beliefs, deep feelings, and old relationships changed as a result.

Recounting and Reflection: A Balance

A clearly defined theme in memoir is essential. And new memoir writers struggle like mad to define a one- or two-sentence theme for me when we start to work together. And here's why.

A memoir theme comes from the writer’s reflections, not the recounting of stuff that happened.

The theme is the consolidation of what the memoir writer learned from their experiences—a clear, concise understanding of who they were at the start of the memoir and who they are now at its conclusion.

A memoir writer who has not taken the time to make meaning from their own challenges and outcomes has not found the heart of their memoir. And this requires personal reflection.

It is meaning-making that is crucial to a quality memoir, and this meaning-making is the most difficult job to be done by a memoir writer.

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Trish Lockard is a freelance editor and writing coach. She has written or been mentioned in articles for Brevity Blog, Reader’s Digest online, Boomer Magazine online, Life At The Intersection, Baby Boomers Magazine online, Ed Cal Media, and the blog of the National Alliance on Mental Health. She is the co-author (with Dr. Terri Lyon) of Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism. In addition to her website, she can be found on LinkedIn and Facebook.