INTRODUCTION:
You are singularly unique and no one in the past or future was or will be exactly the same as you. This philosophy can be extended to your life and the experiences that compose it, in terms of circumstances, time, participation of other people, your point of view, strengths, weaknesses, reactions, feelings, emotions and conclusions. There is nothing more selfless than using that life, or at least parts of it, to improve, inspire, or benefit others. The number of experiences, when considered in hindsight, must be staggering and this was expressed in the name of a writing course once offered at Hofstra University on Long Island called “Everyone Has a Story to Tell.” Start thinking, as you read this, what could be yours.
Who do you know more than yourself? Even if you think there are parts and aspects of yourself that you have lost touch with, or never knew about, writing short or long memoirs can remedy that. When Oprah Winfrey tried to determine what was most important to a human being, the consensus she received was “That I Matter!” Writing a memoir is a way to show that you do.
“To have a voice is to have a self, and to have a self is powerful,” Bill Roorbach wrote in “Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature” (Writer’s Digest Books, 2008, p. 18).
And Socrates wrote: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
THE REPORT ANALYZED:
Depending on whether you’re writing for yourself or a larger audience, what matters most in a memoir isn’t necessarily what happened, but what it meant to you.
“What happened to the memoirist is not what matters,” according to Jane Taylor McDonnell in her book “Living to Tell the Tale” (Penguin Books, 1998, p. viii); “It only matters what the memoirist makes of what happened.”
This may not make the subtle difference you initially perceive.
Take a look at the following two lines to compare this concept:
1). What happened: Walking along the beach on a sweltering late summer day, I looked out at the ocean.
2). Makes It Happen: Walking on the beach on a sweltering late-summer day, I looked out over the ocean and realized the infinity of the world, and with that infinity, for the first time, I saw God.
After taking your readers on a journey that you’ve already taken yourself, you need to take them to the same destination as yours. This is not necessarily physical. Instead, it is a destination of learning, insight, new perspective, understanding, and wisdom, allowing both memoirist and reader to interpret, order, and conclude what happened to them. The journey itself can be intensely pleasurable or intensely painful.
In essence, a memory illustrates “I learned this by experiencing that.”
“The memoirist, like the poet and novelist, must engage with the world because engagement breeds experience (and) experience breeds wisdom…” McDonnell continues (p. viii).
Writing a memoir recovers lost memories, captures events, and releases emotions, allowing the author to go deeper into himself and achieve some degree of therapeutic value. Ultimately, you can heal.
“We…all aspire to become meaning makers,” according to Eric Maisel in his book “Deep Writing: 7 Principles That Bring Ideas to Life” (Jeremy P. Tarcher/ Putnam, 1999, p. 5). “The more we want to ‘shape our destiny’, as Albert Camus said, the more we are concerned with the meaning we create or fail to make. A meaning maker is a person who takes their humanity and their experiences and tries to put them together coherently, artfully, beautifully, but at least in some way, for themselves and for the good of others. That product may or may not change the world, or even reach the world.
You, expressed in the first person singular (“I”), are both the experiencer and the narrator, and therefore directly involve the reader.
“A memoir is a true story, a narrative work built directly from the writer’s memory, with an added element of creative inquiry…” Roorbach also wrote (p. 13). “The writer is also the protagonist, the person to whom the events of the story happen… (He) arises and exists only through the first person singular: the remembering self”.
“…The reader shares two names with the writer: I and I,” he later wrote (p. 158). “And while the identification process is largely subconscious, a powerful connection is forged between reader and writer in the continual invocation of one’s first person self,” creating that soul-to-soul bond.
MECHANICS OF MEMORY:
Therefore, the reports must contain the following elements.
1), a memory must be written in the first person singular, that is, say “I”,
2). It must be a container for the author’s perception.
It should take the reader on a journey. The author’s work must have a specific beginning, middle, and end.
3). The theme must be universal.
4). The author’s life is interesting to him, because it is about him. However, the memory of him should attract others.
5). A memory must impart some knowledge, understanding, or perception at the end of the reader’s journey, that is, I learned this by experiencing that.
Article Sources:
Maisel, Eric. “Deep Writing: 7 Principles That Bring Ideas to Life.” New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999.
McDonnell, Jane Taylor. “Live to tell the story”. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
Roorbach, Bill, with Kristen Keckler, PhD. “Writing life stories: how to turn memories into memories, ideas into essays, and life into literature.” Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2008.