![]() Of course, you want your memoir to reflect that to a certain extent, but you also want it to be readable. Life doesn’t work in story arcs - things are messy, beginnings aren’t really beginnings and ends aren’t really ends. It might all be true, but the “why” will have left the building. But if you feel the need to inform the reader of every detail of the story, it’s going to become a pretty dull read. There’s no one way to find the beginning and end points of your memoir, but primarily, this should be rooted in the first piece of advice: have you achieved the “why”? If so, end it. The nature of a memoir means that there is going to be a story before and after the memoir ends. It may seem obvious, but this fundamental rule of storytelling can be tricky when writing a memoir. Or maybe you’re the founder of Dairy Queen, and this is a glimpse into how it all started. Maybe the story is filled with drama: she broke up with you by pushing you into a vat of soft serve extract, and you spent months trying to get the solution out of your hair. Maybe your story in a larger sense is about young love and big dreams - we can all relate to that. There are many reasons a reader might care. But if someone doesn’t know you, why should they care that your sophomore year girlfriend broke up with you because she didn’t believe in your dream of becoming the premiere soft serve ice cream provider of Illinois? This personal story may mean a lot to you (and if it doesn't, why are you writing it down at all?). The most important question to ask yourself when you’re about to write the next great memoir is, “Why will people care about this?” If you don’t have a good answer, you may be writing a journal entry - which is totally fine journaling is great and important in its own right.īut with a memoir, it’s crucial to have a greater purpose. In this memoir, an author tackles a formative, personal experience from their life. ![]() When you think of a memoir, this is probably the type that comes to mind. Over the years, a few categories for the genre have cropped up, though there are various schools of thought on the subject. Memoir Examples Types of Memoirsīecause “memoir” is a pretty general term, there are many different ways the writing style can manifest. While they’re distinct in definition, the two terms occasionally overlap since their qualifications are a bit subjective. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule sometimes an autobiography has some elements that aren’t totally truthful, but that’s usually frowned upon. An autobiography, meanwhile, is the writer’s entire life (up until writing, of course).Īutobiographies also tend to be more rigorously fact-checked, while a memoir can be a bit more fast and loose with the facts as the writer weaves a story. A memoir is a look at a specific period from the writer’s life, or a sequence of specific periods that have thematic links. ![]() Both are just chatting about yourself, right?īoth forms may indeed be chatting about oneself, but there is a difference between a memoir and an autobiography. Reading the memoir definition, you may be wondering what exactly makes it different from an autobiography. You can learn more about who Thoreau was in the video below. These include living on your own to identifying plant life around him, among many other things. Focusing on the two years, two months, and two days the author spent in a cabin, the memoir has Thoreau cover many subjects. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is one of the most popular and well-known memoir examples in literature. While these centuries were full of memoirs written by privileged politicians or aristocrats, there was at least one that broke the mold a bit. The 18th and 19th centuries brought us closer to what we could consider more modern examples of memoirs. Some of these included Sarashina Nikki of the Japanese Heian period (8th to 12th century) there were also several European memoir examples from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Thus, in these early examples, we can see both the personal and historical reasons for jotting down one’s specific memories.Īs time went on, other people, be them important politicians or simply chroniclers of their era, were writing memoirs. ![]() While serving as memoirs, they also serve as historical records, which is something many other memoirs end up being.
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