Memoir Writing Resolutions. Number 3: Ask Amy.

ONE OF MY early jobs at The New York Times was to write the weather “ear” for the front page, as well as the daily weather page, listing the exact highs and lows of the major cities of the world. Remarkably—or not—someone would call nearly every day to tell me that no, the high in Buenos Aires was not 57 degrees, but 58 on Wednesday, or that it had not rained the previous day in London, it had merely misted. People do love their weather. How has this helped me to learn to write memoir? Read on. 

Those calls were agonizing, but it was that weather ear that tortured me, coming on the heels of my former job as metropolitan desk clerk, with duties that included writing what’s known as “refers,” also for the front page. Weather ears and refers were never more than four lines, sixteen words total, one telling the weather and the other referring to news that would have been for page one on a slower news day, but instead would be found inside. At the time, those sixteen words were the hardest assignment of my writing life. Nothing cute, not an extra word; it was the start of a life of learning that no single word, no matter how adorable, didn’t deserve to die. This is an ethic you need to adopt.

To do so? Here’s my advice, and it’s about advice itself. In fact, it leads you straight to the queen of good advice: Ask Amy, as in Ask Amy, as in Amy Dickinson, the syndicated advice columnist whose work appears in more than 200 newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday and the Washington Post. Why read Amy? Because when you do, you will watch her shrink huge, life-engulfing problems into one or two lines of advice. Reading her is a great way to learn to write memoir. Take a cue from that when you think your own life-engulfing issues need lots and lots of paragraphs to explain before getting to that transcendence, that moment of change, or aha!, or movement forward that all good memoir requires.

Did you know that Amy Dickinson is also a fine memoirist? You will, when you read The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, A Daughter, and the Town that Raised Them, one of my all-time favorite contemporary memoirs. Read that, and let her provide you with even more tips on how to learn to write memoir.

Did you miss New Year memoir resolutions numbers one and two? No need. They are on the blog, along with my own early resolution, which is to provide you with news you can use.