Memoir Workshop: Follow Your Themes, Be Open to Detours

One question I get often is about culling through the scenes that all seem essential to the author of a memoir. How to decide what to keep in and what to leave out? That, my fine writerly friends, is the essence of the work. Having been exactly in that space, I can say it is a difficult task and one that needs a steady hand, possibly one with a glass of bourbon.

Easy to say to kill your darlings, but not so easy to do the murdering. Also, many times you don’t know if a scene fits your book until you completely write it out. There are so many surprises hiding in our own lives, unrealized until you dive in to what actually happened and how it impacted you. The more I wrote, the more I felt that I had no idea what was happening as it happened and only in the remembering—and of course the remembering is flawed—did I see the reality.

All we can do is to try to focus our memoir on a specific time in our lives, whether we may flash back or forward within that time frame. One tool is to write a sentence to describe exactly what the memoir is about. Not to say that may not change, but it is a starting point to decide what to include.

For my book Replacement Child – a memoir, I decided it was about growing up as a replacement for my sister who was killed. But that is only part of the story. Your statement will also be a partial truth that may change as you write. For my second book, White Flag, my focus was on understanding trauma and the relationship to substance use disorder for my niece. Also, a partial truth. In any good memoir (I pray mine are), there are layers of story that coalesce like any good novel.