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Preserving Our Legacy
With the recent availability of DNA kits used to research one’s ancestry, there’s been a resurgence of interest in finding out who our forebears were and where they came from. There are several companies that provide these kits with emphasis on different aspects of our history – some deal with the likelihood of our contracting particular medical conditions, while others focus on cultural migrations and the various parts of the world where our ancestors lived. This type of DNA research, while it doesn’t focus on specific individuals, has made researching our roots a good deal more accurate and provides a lot of information not previously available to us. The Old…
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Organizing Your Memoir
One of the students in my class this week was bemoaning the fact that she didn’t know how to incorporate into her memoir all the material she’d saved over the years. She had, as most of us do, boxes and boxes of old photos, letters, correspondence, keepsakes and masses of other trivia that she wanted to include, but she couldn’t make any kind of sense of it all. What was relevant and what wasn’t? What was valuable information and what had only sentimental value? I blush to admit, I tend to be a bit of a pack-rat. I can’t bear to let go of the things my parents and grandparents…
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Whose Story Are You Writing?
A common question that crops up when writing your memoir is: “What if my sister, my mother, my weird uncle, or whoever else I mention in my story, objects to something I’ve written?” Ask yourself two questions: 1. Is it my story to tell? 2. Is it relevant to my own life’s story that I do want to tell? If episodes of the story centre around someone else’s actions, the second question becomes the deciding factor. Problems arise when you include information that reveals things about other people – things they may not want others to know about. Perhaps your younger sister did something hilariously embarrassing as a six-year-old, but…
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All Memory Is False
Memory. You can’t write your memoir without it. It’s the one aspect that defines who you are. Most of us take it for granted – that is, until it starts to show gaps or fails us at critical moments. But what is it and how does it work? When we think of memory, we tend to see it as a series of video images or computer files – the clarity of our recollection being dependent on how important the specific event was and how good we believe our memory to be, but this is false reasoning. When we recall an incident, our brain rewires the neural connections each time we…
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Emotional Charge in Memoir
In every story, both fiction and non-fiction, all the best writing teachers tell us there has to be a main goal, an overarching question, a deep desire or an obsession. This powerful thread throughout the story keeps a reader engaged and committed to reaching the story’s end in order to find out what happens. It’s an accepted rule in creative writing. What About Memoir? What if you’re writing your life story in a series of isolated events – events which may have been important to you in some way but which don’t seem to adhere to a specific overall mystery to be revealed by the end of the book? What…
