Writing a Memoir for Publication: Amplifying Your College Resume Sarah O'Neill Chester County Teacher Supreme Editing

 Sarah O’Neill Chester County Supreme Editing

What is Self-Writing?

A memoir, or self-writing, involves YOU — the human behind the writer — as the protagonist and/or narrator of the piece you will produce. Stories in this genre come from YOU, your point of view, not a fictional character you can hide behind. It’s a fragment from your life that draws exclusively from your experience and not the rabbit hole into a wonderland of fantastical subject matter.

Write What You Know!

The truth is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be first-hand knowledge, it can be “what you know” from second or third-hand experience, sensory stimulation, subjective memory, lies, or knowledge from imagination. Can you think of any examples from your life where this would be applicable? You could dig deeper into some of the pieces of knowledge which you have begun to identify into a short self-contained piece of prose.

More on Writing the Self

You could work from reminiscences, infuse subjective memories with elementary research in the development of short autobiographical work, choose parts of your life to write about which will engage your readers, and write honestly about your experiences.

Memoir Versus Autobiography

A memoir is thought of as being literary in its values, whereas an autobiography is not (more about factual events even chronologically driven for the purpose of information conveyance).

The difference between the two?

Literary texts (like memoirs) seek to work as something free from the crutches of true life, even when true life is the INSPIRATION behind the text to a GREAT extent. In memoirs, different than an autobiography, writers do not get trapped in the confines of reality while trying to tell a story. Just because something LOOKS a certain way in real life doesn’t mean we can’t make it sound must more interesting in our writing by LAYERING the memory of observation with our subjective reflections and creative responses.

As a LITERARY form of self-writing, a memoir is not written MERELY to RECORD a series of real events from the author’s life for the purpose of informing the reader of an objective history. Instead, memoirs might be written to explore the personal or existential significance of certain events, to illuminate the poetry of the every day, and TURN something that is necessarily real into something that is engaging. It wants more than to record the past, it wants to recreate it.

Retell instead of just record…how does this excerpt from The New Yorker memoir capture that theory?

Tricks of the Trade

1. You have an opportunity to turn your past into an adventure story without the readers having to get bogged down with the frustrating nuisance that is the reality of somebody’s life story.
2. Tell stories that don’t go anywhere.
3. Again, a memoir aims to be literary, autobiography does not.

The memoir writer needs to take A STORY from her real life and find a way to apply literary conventions (like the fire) like metaphor, figurative language, and foreshadowing to the life story to make it more compelling in its own right. Moreover, the memoirist has something to say, a theme to examine, a world to build above and beyond the process of historical factoids.

Reflective Writing

Reflective writing is another form of writing the self (just like a memoir). Reflective Writing extends BEYOND the realm of the stories which make up our personal histories and enters into our unique responses to the KNOWLEDGE we have acquired. Like the college admissions essay! The point of memoir is to tell our life stories, but reflective writing HINGES on our thoughts and thought processes, the way we learn, the way knowledge CHANGES us, and our emotional and intellectual responses to the things we bear witness to.

Reflective writing can be a journal you use for academics to write down what you learned or the processes you took in your research papers after you wrote them — these are the less creative brands but they are reflective nonetheless. (they are practical!)

Idea = Take RAW data and think about what it means both subjectively and objectively, what is signifies, what aspects of life it MIRRORS, what it is in opposition to, what all its elements do individually and how they function together, and finally what it represents to YOU.

The content of reflective writing merges LITERAL representations of real life with the author’s imagination inspired by the subject of the reflection and speculations about what might be entailed by the subject. The point of reflection is to EXPLORE possibilities and to be mindful of your personal responses.

When you are writing, the trick is to get the MOST out of what you are writing — to try not to censor yourself right away. Allow your writing to take tangents. What does that mean to you? Don’t get too distracted right away by the central point or theme of your subject. Don’t restrict yourself to retelling what you ALREADY know about the subject at hand, but to use your writing process as a way into new knowledge, and new understandings! This could later turn into an admissions essay for college or just a reflection essay about life!

A Writing Exercise

• Choose a painting or sculpture that reminds you of something from your past. Do 10 minutes of stream of consciousness first — anything that comes to mind — write it (use later). Stare at it for five minutes, just observe it. Look for things you didn’t necessarily notice at first glance. Consider the kind of mood it evokes through its shapes and colors. Identify its major and minor subjects and they work in unison.
• •Begin to think about how all these elements happened to elicit a particular memory for you. How do you relate your memory to the contents of the artwork? What was the first part of the memory that came to mind when you witnessed the artwork? Which parts of the artwork are akin to your memory and which parts of it are unexpected?
• •After observation and thinking, start writing a reflection which somehow connects your memory of something from your past with the artwork. You might describe your memories using cues from within the artwork. Merge the two stimuli.

Lastly, your challenge is to find new meaning through the memoir or reflective writing process. Try to work out what your relationship with that past memory is now, and why it might have resurfaced today. What is its relevance? How does it make you feel? What new perspectives do you have on that memory?

Let the world know just who you are and what you’ve been through, and an interesting story is worth telling and leaves a legacy!

Thank you for reading!

Sarah O’Neill Chester County Teacher Supreme Editing