How to Write Your Truth

WHOSE STORY ARE YOU? Are you the tale told to you by the person who belittled you? Are you the story of your accomplishments? Are you burdened by a version of yourself that was handed down, like a measly inheritance, from your family of origin? Have you built a new you, one mantra or encouraging phrase at a time, or are you some combination of the story you tell yourself and the way the world perceives you? And for goodness’ sake, under the weight of all those questions, how to write your truth?

As a memoir coach and memoir teacher, I have the great, remarkable honor of witnessing other people’s stories all day, and recently, after a memoir coaching session, I sifted through what a brave, new client had just revealed on the page. The storytelling this writer was doing was so powerful that I found myself rereading some of her lines out loud to myself and, as I did, I realized that what she had just revealed to me was her evolution of self, one scene at a time.

How to Write Your Truth

As I pondered this, I realized that what I had really been privy to was witnessing someone report on how to build a new version of oneself through ideas. Yup: Ideas. And after all, what else is there? Over the many years of editing essays, op-eds and books from writers, I’ve thought a lot about whether we can choose what to do with the inheritances offered to us, particularly if those inheritances are in the form of the ideas we harbor about ourselves. Her recitation of change reinforced my belief that we can.

This, of course, is where memoir begins to sound like therapy, but I always leave the therapy to therapists and instead concentrate on how to annotate, report and write on our progress as humans. But first, let me give a nod to how therapeutic this all is. Yes, absolutely: Memoir is the single greatest portal to self-discovery. But for our purposes here, let’s take this on as a pure writing assignment.

It’s Hard to Tally Up All These Tales

Let’s start with the story you carry. I’ve written before about what I refer to as clever damage, that result of serious family dysfunction. You can see my thoughts in a post on writing memoir about family abuse and in a recent update to my book on how to write memoir, where I include new pages on what I’ve witnessed thus far in the #MeToo movement. Go see those for tips specific to stories of abuse. What I want to take on here is this very question of whose story are you and how you show that to us.

Maybe your family of origin people told you that you are the smart one; perhaps your second-grade teacher brought you lunch when there was nothing to eat at home, but your sixth grade coach made you feel inferior in all things on the field; perhaps there was longtime sexual abuse; maybe shaming was the currency and language of your family. Some people are raised in religions that restrict behavior by condemning it; others are raised in cults or amid some kind of herd mentality that others everyone else. Some people come from relentlessly happy families and, as a result, are expected to be, well, relentlessly happy all the time.

From all of these come story, specifically story about ourselves and our place in the earth, and even if the story you have of yourself is confident, secure and liberated from shame, it is still a quilted patchwork of both tales you were told and others you tell yourself. In other words, this tale has evolved under many influences.

Show Your Transcendence When Writing Memoir

What are those influences?

With some work you can palpate back and almost touch the versions of yourself you have lived with, tried on, abandoned, moved into and inhabited. Those are the goods we want on the page.

Not to go all woo-woo on you, but have you ever considered how much of your inheritance you have already turned down? What ideas, suggestions of who you are, and plans others had for you have you already put aside? I ask this question of my students all the time, and when I do, it almost always provokes the recognition that they have, in fact, put aside at least some of what they were told about themselves.

Many of us take only so much of the inheritance of our home lives and leave the rest behind, evolving under the influence of other, outside forces – teachers, friends, lovers, book, movies, mantras and these days, even memes found online. Novels change lives, as sometimes does the very least encouragement from an outside source. What were your influences? Some of these influences are good, of course, though not all. I mean, your grandmother’s silver tea pot is one thing, but saying yes to a ravaging version of yourself that someone told to control you is another.

What did you do to evolve out of that version of yourself? That’s the story we want you to show us on the page.

Add it Up

How?

As you may know, my definition of memoir is what you know after what you’ve been through, and when I work as a memoir coach, and teach people how to choose scenes for a memoir, I always illustrate this idea with an abacus. Your scenes are like beads on an abacus which must add up to your argument: This scene plus this scene plus this scene must show us your transcendence from when you could not do something to when you could, or from when you did not know something until when you did. It’s as simple — and as complicated — as that.

Get out your abacus and add up the tale of what you were offered, what you took with you, what you left behind and what you gained along the way.

We cannot wait to read it.

Want more help? I am a memoir coach, memoir teacher and memoir editor. Come see me in any one of my online classes.

Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.

Memoirama 2. Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book.

How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary: Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world.

And keep in mind that we now take rolling admissions for the upcoming Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. It’s live, once a month, and limited to seven writers who are determined to get a first draft of their book-length memoir finished in six months.

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