So, You Want to Write Your Memoir?

After reading the draft of his book, I asked whether I could add my two cents to every essay, and he said sure, but that “add my two cents” was a cliché. (Men!)

For example: after his explanation and examples for “Use strong verbs,” I wrote, “A verb describes what the subject of your sentence is doing: ‘The dog ate our Thanksgiving turkey.’ (This really happened 10 years ago.) But Bodhi did not ‘eat’ the turkey. He devoured, gobbled, wolfed down and inhaled our Thanksgiving turkey. Bad dog.”

This is how Neal created memoirs for his clients, using rules we integrated into our new book as guides for writing memoirs, and, in fact, anything, even business memos. He’d begin with a tape recorder, though now everyone uses a cell phone to record.

He reinforced what I knew to be true in my own writing, that the art of the interview is about asking open questions that inspire deep-dive answers. I would overhear him asking his clients to drill down into anecdotes about their childhoods with questions like: “Who was your favorite teacher in elementary school? What did you watch on TV? (You only had four channels?) Tell me about the farm, San Francisco after the war, the pool or pond where you learned how to swim.”

Writer Anne Lamott and husband Neal Allen

Courtesy Anne Lamott

I’ve been asking drill-down questions since I wrote my first novel, Hard Laughter, nearly 50 years ago, interviewing family, friends and experts for detailed descriptions, impressions and facts. Memoirs that chronicle the ordinary stuff of life, memories of youth and recent years are magical and chilling and compelling to readers.

I repeat: four TV channels?

After transcribing the tapes (speech-to-text apps are now accurate and often free), it’s time to organize the manuscript, usually chronologically, then edit it and finally arrive at a bad first draft. Victory!

As you begin your second draft, editing can turn into a game, like searching for shells at the beach. Read your work sentence by sentence and seek out flabby verbs. Take out all the lines you think make you sound so erudite. Neal writes in Rule 7, “If it sounds literary, it isn’t.” Above all, as Rule 14 advises, “Take out the boring stuff.”

 Find a time when you can sit down for an hour most days, undisturbed. Commit to this. As I tell my writing students, no one cares if you write or not, so you’d better. Stop not writing: It’s going to break your heart if you’ve always wanted to write a memoir or novel but never got around to it.

Establish the habit of writing by creating a long list of every early memory you have, starting with your first holidays, extended family, kindergarten, elementary school and then move onward.

Now, write up these memories for us or speak them into a recording device. Later, you can go through and take out extraneous words and the boring stuff. You can seize upon each verb and decide whether there might be a stronger one. Strike out the excess adverbs and adjectives as if they are tsetse flies. But trust me: Simply start writing down your history and the rest will flow.

It’s about time. Quit putting it off. Make that list of all your brightest, strangest, sweetest, silliest, heartfelt and altogether most memorable times of your life. Then write or tell us one. Then write or tell another. Think of each memory as a pearl on a necklace. Your pearls. Your necklace.

Anne Lamott is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Somehow: Thoughts on Love. Neal Allen is the author of Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic. Their new book is Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences