So You Want to Write a Memoir?

I was in high school and my dad came home one day full of big ideas, saying he was going to write a detective novel. Oh, he never did it, at least not yet, but who hasn't had an idea like this? So many of us have a novel or memoir in us. My Granddad was a big storyteller too, and before he died, he wrote a collection of his tales of growing up in rural Tennessee, back in the day where you had to bang out each word on a typewriter, with a bottle or two of correction fluid waiting by your side. Writing a memoir is a way of leaving a legacy. A lot of people have had fascinating lives and love to tell the stories. What they are essentially doing is giving their family members an oral memoir. But for many, it somehow never comes out right. The pieces are disjointed and out of order, and the storytelling style rambles on and on and on. Your grandkids wait patiently for you to finish the endless one about the year you spent in the Merchant Marines, the tedious one about the blizzard of '76, the wierd one about the summer you made ten thousand bucks and blew it on cheap wine and . . . well, maybe you wouldn't tell that one to your grandkids.

You should tell these stories, and you should leave them as a legacy, but you shouldn't torture people. What you need is a ghostwriter. The point I want to make here is that this is an easy and a painless process. You don't have to go through an extensive interview process, get to know your writer, have lunch, give notes, detail your childhood, get psychoanalyzed, and agonize about your book's "theme" or "intent" or "story arc." All you have to do is sit down and tell one chapter of your story, and record it on a tape. It can help to have a friend or family member nearby, reminding you to "tell the one about the time . . ."

It will be an anecdote: one of your adventures, one of your revelations, one of your crazy nights in Burbank. You send this recording to a ghost writer, such as myself, and they do the rest. The more chapters you record for your memoir, the more the ghostwriter will begin to get an idea of where the holes are in the story, what areas need to be fleshed out to create the complete picture of your life. Then she may start giving you instructions as to specific information she recommends you add to the book. For instance, if you haven't talked about your teen years yet, a little meditation on the subject might bring out some stories that have been hidden away for years.  I'm trying to impress you with how private the whole experience is. You can work directly with your writer if you like, but if not, it is also easy to do it by yourself or with a trusted family member present, just telling your stories as you always have done. You could even instruct a family member to keep a tape recorder handy and secretly record you next time you start telling one of your anecdotes.

The writer takes what you have given her and organizes it in a way that reads better in print. That is her expertise, so once you hand the tape over, you can relax. And in the end, you won't present your family and friends with a sheaf of crumpled onionskin pages stuck in a three-ring binder, like my granddad did. You will have the book self published very affordably. So get ready to pose for the photo on your book cover. Your memoir is practically written already.