If I'd Only Known--How to Write Your Memoir by Joe Ryan

If I’d Known My Life Was So Interesting, I Would Have Written This Earlier:
How to Write Your Life Story for the Widest Possible Audience


"A memoir is not what happens, but the person to whom things happen."

—Virginia Woolf

Foreword

My mother taught me to love the memoir form. So many of her stories recalled scenes from her family’s life. Hers was a poor family that wouldn’t have made a blip on anyone’s radar. Still, my mother’s tales of my grandfather the cop who was the school crossing guard for her elementary school pulsate in my blood and persist in my memory. Memoirs are about the blood and the bone as well as the memory.

One thing that I always urge writers to do is to be mindful of the audience. Help us understand your life by letting us participate in the story itself. This is a really important feature of memoir. We want to relive your life with you. So… much of this book is going to be about the process of writing, how to bring your memories alive. But perhaps the most important point is that you don’t forget your audience doesn’t know who you are, where you come from, how you think, feel, experience, and love.

My mother also loved to read biographies of the famous and infamous. My father, on the other hand, liked true crime stories. We grew up on Long Island, and my father would bring home the paper every night—sometimes as many as four or five that were discarded by passengers on his commuter train from New York City. We would have the Journal American, Newsday, the Long Island Press, the Daily News, the Post and, occasionally, the New York Times. We were all literate back then, not literary. My mother did push me in the literary direction, however, by urging me to read the classics, by giving me and all my brothers and sisters the opportunity to ditch household chores by reading the classics instead. So while my brothers and sisters scrubbed the bathroom, defrosted the refrigerator, oiled the wooden closet doors, and vacuumed all the rugs in our little house, I sat on the porch, in winter bundled under blankets, in summer in shorts and tee shirt, reading upon a book, as Hamlet had done. George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy were my companions and they afforded me the opportunity to escape from the world of Ajax cleanser, Brite Shine ammonia, and Jubilee kitchen wax.

This book contains a distillation not of ideals but of real writing by people who had something meaningful to say, and who took some of my Memoir Writing classes. Some of the writing I quote here is sublime, some is pedestrian, and some is not very good, but all of it is designed so that you will learn how to write a good memoir, your memoir. Certainly, there were times when my responses weren’t that accurate, helpful, or discerning. My verbal critiques were often better than my written ones because they were off-the-cuff, because they often followed up on another point made by someone in the class, and because there is a quality of genius in public expression. In other words, when I heard an author read her material out loud in class, and gauged my own reaction to the way others reacted to the reading, I was often inspired to say something new and exciting as I had seen something fresh and new in the work.
Those of you who follow the precepts and lessons, read the examples in this book, and take the time needed to write your memoir, will be rewarded with something extraordinary. It is impossible to predict what that something will be. Works of writing art—the only form of art that I am truly familiar with creating—come about through times of sitting, thinking, doodling, typing, and saving nothing that you have written. Ultimately they become a memoir in the act of writing: You write, you shape, you revise, you write some more. And before long, if you don’t give up, a fine work aboutr your life will be found in your pages. Believe me, anyone can write a memoir. It only takes some sitting still and some remembering. If this is done, with desire and love, then there is no way you can’t get to the end. .

A memoir is your story. No one else knows it as well as you. No one else can write it as well as you can. And there is so much to write about. It is my belief that it is not the lack of something to say that is the hardest part. It is usually that people have much too much to say. It is overwhelming.

I had a student several years ago who didn’t produce anything for the class. Weeks, months went by, she came to every class, critiqued most of her classmates’ offerings, and still produced zilch. At a party, she drew me aside and told me for the umpteenth time that nothing ever happened to her, and that she had nothing to say. I am one of those people who reject that notion. I think everyone has a faucet full of words that are just waiting to burst forth. After a couple of minutes of her lamenting, I asked her, “Didn’t anything ever happen to you?” She was an alert, inquisitive, sparkling person, with a lot to offer. Every time she opened her mouth in class, wonderful words of encouragement and wisdom and good spirit came out.

Finally, she said to me that she had been addicted to cocaine for about ten years of her adult life. Well, you could have knocked me down with a rotatini. When I recovered, I said, “Why don’t you write about that?” And I outlined how she could write about getting involved in drugs, how she felt, her daily routines, and how she made it back to the world of the living. Because, believe me, she belonged to this world, not the world of drugs and addiction. Anyway, she struggled with her writing, and never did submit anything. But it wasn’t for lack of a story. It was only for lack of confidence and for not giving herself the license to write.

If you don’t write your memoir, it won’t be for a lack of story either. It might be for myriad reasons. But let me tell you right now, you have a license to write. It’s valid in every state and in every country. Use it. Seriously. Or comically, if that is your life’s bent.

This book won’t write your memoir. You will. But this book will help you see how to go about it. Hopefully, it will give you some techniques that will help you get started and it will give you some pointers about how to proceed. If it doesn’t do that, then I haven’t helped you, and I feel bad about that. But take heart. Everyone gets there who gives it a go.


Chapter One: Getting Started Writing Your Memoir

From long experience, I have learned not to put much pressure on myself when I sit down to write. Whether I am writing an e-mail, a birthday card, an assignment for my students, a model essay, or even a book like this one, I am always grateful for anything that I get written, no matter the length, no matter the quality. I know I can discard, fix, or keep whatever I start with, so that’s freeing. And I know that just the process of sitting down to write gets me closer to my goal. I realize writing isn’t easy for everyone. As a matter of fact, when I was an undergraduate, I dreaded having to write essays for English courses. Besides having nothing to say, I didn’t know anything about proper essay form, and the idea of spending days in the musty stacks of our library turning over pages and pages of material I would never use and forget instantly, didn’t interest me in the least. I just researched and researched while sitting in a dark carrel surrounded by books, hoping that the paper-writing elves would soon show up, and do their bright magic. Unfortunately, they didn’t know where I was cooped up, so I was left to my own devices. This consisted of pages of scribble on yellow legal pad pages. At the end of this part of the process, I always had lots of indecipherable notes. Not only that, I was so disorganized and scared that I even forgot to write down a proper bibliography, to keep notes of where I had gotten my ideas. And to top it off, I was the world’s worst typist. In those days, before electric typerwriters, no less computers, my paper and I were both messes.

Even in graduate school, because I wanted to appear brilliant, I had trouble starting essays. Invariably, once I committed myself to sit down and write, good things happened, and I began to see the way to go. It was my willingness to try—and fail, if need be--that was the secret to any success I had as a writer. People who try to accomplish important things, even though they are hard, are the winners in this world. Those who never try are destined to be left behind with regrets.

Having spoken to, worked with, and read through the opinions of hundreds of writers over the years, both amateur and professional, I am struck by one fact: just sitting down to work was the number one way they got things done. Universally, they say that good ideas come in the very process of writing. I believe this is absolutely true. Once you prime the pump, the ideas and the language to express them begin to flow. Soon, most people find they have to stop themselves from writing. And once you have trust in your ability to put words together, writing becomes much easier. It is something to look forward to, to take pleasure in.
When I start to write, if I am even a little nervous about what I am going to say, I try to stay very relaxed and open. I always make a pot of tea or coffee, and I have a bottle of water beside me. Often, I put on some soothing classical or jazz music (sans vocals) and look up something on the Internet. I just copy and paste a phrase or a sentence from it as my “Thought for the Day”:
Make a schedule to write at least one page every day and stick to it!
I copied this sentence from a web-page called “How to Start Writing Your Memoir.” It gives good, relevant advice: Write one page a day, and you will have 365 pages at the end of a year. Not necessarily good pages. But at least there will be a record of your work, and perhaps even of your progress in writing, and that’s not bad.

By the way, I keep a journal for my nearly-ten year-old daughter, Jaya, every day. I started this a couple of months after she was born, and I have written about her every day of her life since then. I don’t pressure myself to be fully accurate to what she did each day, nor do I worry if I can’t remember everything. This is an expressionistic journal, not an exacting, scientific one. I put down the mundane and the, um, dane. There are some days when I just want to praise her or note a special accomplishment, or I focus on just one event in the day. If I miss a day (which happens occasionally), I just write about it the following day. Even though I have no assurances my daughter will ever read this journal, I write as if she will. By the way, the journal comprises ten books so far, one for each year of her life. I find it a very centering part of my life, and something I almost always look forward to doing.

Time Your Writing. I have always enjoyed writing under pressure. I like to know that there is an end to the day. Right now, I am writing this piece in half-hour increments. If I want to quit at the end of half-an-hour, I can. If I want to continue, I will. You would be surprised at how often I do continue. You will also be surprised by how much writing I can accomplish in half-an-hour. Miles. I suggest you never sit down to write for more than a half-hour at a time, but do it several times each day. So, instead of writing in a three-hour block, use four to six half-hour sessions. By this I mean from the moment you open the document to the moment you save it for the last time, with no futzing around. If you don’t have a half-hour, give it fifteen minutes. Keep at it.
So What If You Have Nothing to Say? My students think I am a windbag, but they don’t realize that I have little to say outside the classroom. I can hold up my end of a conversation at a party, and I have no trouble talking to my daughter and her ten-year-old friends. They can make a big deal out of anything--what they are eating, a television show, or a dog that happens to cross the path. So my suggestion is that you don’t worry about what you are going to say, just start with the most basic thing: I am sitting at my computer, and I hear birds singing. I am looking at the other people sitting at this coffee shop. I am going to write about my life. Did something significant ever happen to me at a coffee shop? Hmmm… there was the Crystal Tea Room in Johnson City, New York. I used to go there when I had money. Great eggs. Pictures of all the students from the local high schools who had worked there. Maybe a hundred black and white pictures of smiling young women in the white uniforms, with the dates they worked at the Tea Room. Lots of dark wood, and…” Do you get the picture? A story may develop out of these observations and memories. Once I sniff it out, I will cut all of the extraneous stuff.
Start Small. Of all the writing I have ever done—and I have written millions of words—my proudest moment was finishing a graduate school paper on a novel called The Public Burning, by Robert Coover. The teacher was a fairly famous critic of postmodernist writing, and he clearly favored other students in my class. I can’t blame him for that, as I had trouble keeping up with the reading (a novel a week and most—including authors John Barth, Robert Berger, and Thomas Pynchon—not my cup of tea) and there were some really brilliant people in the class. I took an Incomplete as a final grade because I couldn’t finish the term paper. I had chosen Coover’s book because I remembered there was a lot of buzz about it when it first appeared in 1978. Anyway, I was stymied for the longest time.

The following summer I decided to get the Incomplete finished, so that I could go on to more pressing things—like finding a job to have money to live on. And so I sat on my bed and tried to write the paper with the novel in front of me and surrounded with a bunch of critical articles and reviews. I sat there day and night, unable to get past the note-taking stage. I decided I had to say something—immediately. So I tried to write a one-paragraph essay explaining all my thoughts on The Public Burning, and this is what I wrote:

I read every page of this book and was perplexed. I kept wondering why it was so famous when it seemed to me a smear on President Nixon, who was easy to sneer at, jeer at, and make fun of. To say that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were electrocuted for passing on nuclear secrets, it was hard to see them as heroes. But Coover must have known this. So he is playing with us. What else is he playing with? How about the whole idea of public spectacles, and most importantly what about the public spectacle known as theater? He is clearly saying something about the beginnings of that. In English theater, that starts with medieval play forms: the interlude, the passion play, and the miracle play. I want to write about how he uses those three forms.

Suddenly, it hit me that Coover’s book was a parody of those three forms of plays, which started a long time ago in England. This thought of mine was the beginning of something great, I could tell. And all it took was a desire to sum up all I had to say, all the confusion, fear, and thoughtfulness I had inside of me, in one little paragraph. So, start small.

Write It In a Letter. I like to think of my audience as I write. For example, I am thinking of you writers as I write this sentence. I wonder what you need from me right now to help you write your memoir. You inspire me to do my best, and I appreciate our taking the time to read what I have to say. When I write a letter, I keep in mind who my audience is, and this helps me to focus on what I want to say and how I want to say it. So focus on your audience by writing them a letter. If you have a specific person in mind, great. If not, then think of someone you know who would like to hear what you have to say. It might be a parent, a teacher, or a close friend. It might be your children or your mate. Remember to use this potential reader both as an inspiration and as an audience. Draw strength from their energy, and tell them what you want to say in the most meaningful way you can. And like most letters, let it be ephemeral. By this, I mean don’t worry whether it’s a good or bad letter. Your friends just want to feel connected, and they don’t care how well you write, just as long as you communicate something.

Look at Photos from the Past. One of the great pleasures I remember from growing up was my father and mother getting out the Bell & Howell 8 mm projector and showing home movies from times past. We would do it in the living room over a big bowl of popcorn and orange soda, projecting the movies against a white sheet tacked up to a wall. Of course, we’d comment on every scene, howling with laughter at the way we looked and acted when we were kids. My father would thrill us by putting the images in reverse, so we could be seen diving into the water, then sailing out in a graceful arch backwards. What a great time we would have together, even when the films were not particularly well photographed or the memories particularly pleasant.
You might want to get out the old videos or the still photos of times gone by, and just look at them. They can jog memories and be a source of inspiration. There is a great poem by Sharon Olds, “I Go Back to May 1937,” in which she describes two photos, one of her dad, one of her mom, on the day they graduated from college:

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch,
the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head,
I see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks
with the wrought-iron gate still open behind her,
its sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb,
all they know is they arei nnocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop, don't do it--
she's the wrong woman, he's the wrong man,
you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die.

Hopefully, your photos won’t be as bone-chilling as Olds’ were. I remember one photo of me, looking like an ugly monkey, wearing a white suit with white shorts, which brought me back to the night I got lost at the rodeo in Madison Square Garden, only to be found by my mother long after I had stopped crying, stopped needing her to come and get me. After all, I truly believed that Roy Rogers (who had given a cameo appearance at the beginning of the rodeo) would gallop me home on his golden palomino Trigger. One of the ushers gave me two nickels, another, on my request, was going to go speak with the great Roy Rogers himself (even though he had probably exited the building two minutes after his performance as a trick rider two hours earlier). “Roy knows who I am and where I live,” I told the usher, “He and Trigger come to my house every Saturday morning.” Of course, it was only through the medium of television that I thought I knew him. The usher, who wanted to make me feel better, was in the midst of promising me that he would personally go get Roy to take me home, when my mother showed up. In the hubbub of the rodeo and the mess of cousins and siblings who were stuffed into the station wagon, she had lost track of me. When I saw her, I was both elated and disappointed. My ride on Trigger would have to be postponed.

Write about a Meaningful Object. I am only slightly sentimental, so I don’t measure out my life in objects I have received. Mostly I file things I get away in a closet or on a shelf, and it takes me awhile to get around to using them. For example, I just today opened an I-Pod I received for Christmas—I think it was actually two Christmases ago, now. I might use it sometime later this week, or maybe later this year. But there are things I do not have now that I wish I still did have.

One of these things was the history medal I won in the eighth grade, a medal for excellence in that subject. Now, before you start thinking I am full of myself, listen up. I found that medal bitterly ironic. Here’s why: I was not the best history student at St. Christopher’s, my elementary school. I was great in history, but there was a boy, tall and lanky and a little bit disheveled most of the time—Thomas McGinty—who could run rings around me in history and was a wizard on current events. He could explain the causes of the Civil War, for sure, but he could also describe the battles at Antietem, the burning of Atlanta, and the various Union and Confederate infantry attacks and counterattacks at Gettysburg. He was conversant on German, Irish, English, in fact, all European history. He read history books like I read the Sunday comics. He knew history like I knew the various colors and tastes of popular breakfast cereals like Trix, Sugar Puffs, and Rice Krispies. Why didn’t he get the history medal? Because he was truculent, difficult, and not particularly motivated to do well in grammar school. I, on the other hand, was a hard worker. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in “The Windhover”: “Sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine,” and so did I. So if I were to write about that medal, which I lost swimming in the freezing-cold, salt water pool at Jones Beach while racing Christine Johnston, my first true love (and losing to her), it would be a story of ironic proportions.
So, if you are stuck, write about objects that mean something to you.

I could tell you many other ways to get started, and all would be helpful to those who know how to use the help I am offering. But here is the best piece of advice I have ever heard. It came from one of my favorite teachers, the author of Midnight Cowboy (the novel, not the movie), James Leo Herlihy. He said, “Don’t try to write a masterpiece. They come when you least expect it, and they only come to those who write, not to those who wish to write masterpieces.” Fail on!

English 78: Memoir Class

English 78: Memoir Writing Fall 2009 Joe Ryan

Course Description:

Welcome to the Memoir Writing course. We are embarking on an exciting journey together—basically, reading about others’ lives and composing our own individualized histories so that others can see how we have lived and what we value. To many people, this is the height of writing—revealing the truth about ourselves and also compiling a record of our lives that others can experience.

The style of the course is workshop. That is, people will submit their material in advance, and we will read the work of our classmates before we critique it in the classroom. How much writing must we submit? At least twenty pages per person this semester, and I mean finished pages, not journal pages or rough drafts. Polished drafts of chapters from the memoir you are writing, submitted as if they were an actual book excerpt. These pages should have been critiqued in the class during the semester-and rewritten by you.

Critiques: In semesters past, writers have been very helpful to one another. It can go beyond the classroom, of course. In class, be prepared to say something constructive about each other’s work. I am encouraging you all to write a short critique and send it to each of the writers whose work you critique.

Note: Because it helps to have a deadline and an incentive, this semester, every writer must submit at least one piece of their memoir by the sixth week of this course (October 8), and a second offering by the twelfth week (November 21). Writers can be excluded if they do not meet these two deadlines.

Of course, all writers read. Here are the books for the class:

Zousmer, Steve. You Don’t Have to Be Famous: How to Write Your Life Story. F & W Media, Inc.

Coste, Chris, The 33-Year-Old Rookie. Random House.

Lopez, Steve. The Soloist. Penguin Group.

Monette, Paul. Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Reading is required. It will help you to write better. It will show you how to shape scenes, write dialogue, and choose details to include in your work. I will give a partial calendar at the end of this description, and we’ll follow it until I supply the next version.

Course Website:

Since I never much used it, we are going to do all the submissions via a class e-mail list.

You will submit your materials online, via e-mail. You will be sent a distribution list, so it will be very simple for all. In addition, I will send you some class lectures to read. If you are the writer on board for the week, you must submit your material to all of us via e-mail no later than Monday night at midnight. All of us must download these submissions, read them before class, and critique them in a full class discussion. If you make comments on the submissions—and you should—please give them to the writer. They might help. Please make sure to include that you are submitting material for the Memoir (English 78) class somewhere in your Subject line. (Note: Learning how to submit is an essential part of the course, so the faster you learn it the better.)

Attendance:

Attendance at all classes is mandatory (this means required). You may miss only one class without penalty. The second class you miss—for any reason—will lower your grade. I am strict about attendance for the following reasons: workshop classes require participation, and participation demands that you come to class prepared to help your classmates write better; people respect each other more if they can count on seeing each other every week; workshops demand you expose your innermost thoughts and feelings and even reveal important things about who you are; workshops demand courage because they entail critiquing your own and others’ work. Since you will receive credit, and you can use this credit to earn a college degree, then I will use your grade in this class to enforce this important, simple rule.


Lateness:

Late students lower the morale of all the members of the class. Therefore, you will be warned once and start acquiring absences for each subsequent late arrival. In addition, if you have not done the reading for the day’s class, you will be considered absent for the day. If you do not have the written material with you on the day it is due, it goes without saying that you should drop the class. Leaving class early will be treated as an absence.

Grading:

Quality of the work, quantity of work (reaching a required minimum), attendance, keeping up with the reading, critiquing what you’ve read, website work, all of these and more factors, will go into determining your grade for this semester. No extra credit will be available for this class.


September 3: Course Introduction and Introduction to Memoir Writing

September 10: First Student Submissions. Read Chapters I Blog or Send to You.

September 17: Read The Soloist, pp. 1 – 140 (Read Class Submissions before class)

September 24. Read A Moveable Feast, pp. 141 - end (Read Class Submissions before class)