“How do I write the last chapter of a memoir?” coaching and editing clients will sometimes ask me, wondering how to end a memoir.
It is a good question because the last chapter of a memoir is your final shot at affirming your theme and at creating a satisfying and meaningful ending to the story the reader has been engaged in for perhaps 200 or 300 pages—or even more.
Revising the last chapter is something I worked on carefully with on my childhood memoir—French Boy/A 1950s Franco-American Childhood.
As I wrote my memoir
For a long while, I had contributed to the text of the second half of my memoir, and the text had become a bit rambling. Without much awareness that I was doing this, I filled it with vignettes—my “little darlings” as many writers refer to these vignettes—I had forgotten to include elsewhere. Some of them are going to have to submit the fate that writers refer to as “killing their little darlings.”
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A guest post
Three Stages of Writing a Memoir: Own Your Truth, Find Your Voice and Tell Your Story
In December 2011, I decided to take a trip to my home country, Azerbaijan. I had a property to sell and family to visit there. More importantly, I was on a mission to find my father’s grave. My parents were divorced when I was a mere two-week-old baby. I had never met him. Despite trying to heal this open wound for years, nothing helped. Perhaps finding his grave could bring some closure. (In the process, I followed what I knew to be stages of writing a memoir.)
All I knew about my dad’s side of the family was that I had an auntie called Tahira who lived near the city centre of my hometown Ganja. On an impulse, I went knocking at people’s gates. Eventually, I found the right door. I was in for a surprise. Not only did my auntie receive me with open arms, I turned up at her 58th birthday celebration. Her four children, grandchildren, brothers and a legion of other relatives showered me with so much love, I returned to England transformed and healed. For days, I walked in the cloud of memories, and I soon decided I had to write it all up while it was still fresh in my memory. Once I started writing, there was no stopping me.
I’ve recently completed a draft manuscript about my experience of growing up in Azerbaijan. I am currently working on my next book.[Clicke here to see Galura Vincent’s books on Amazon.)
For me, there are three distinct stages of writing a memoir, though not linear, stages in writing a memoir.
My high school memoir (My Nineteenth-Century Life) was waylaid by a narrator challenge. I could not find the right voice in which to tell my story. Was I writing the right memoir?
There was a hard incident. in this story that I was challenged to tell in the right voice—and to tell, period. If I opted for the neutral voice, was I not abandoning the adolescent I was then, an adolescent who needed an ally? If I wrote in a cynical voice, wasn’t attributing a point of view from my adult self but which was not shared by the “I” character who had little perspective other than feeling his hurt?
The result of this questioning was that I stopped writing—for a while. I knew that one day, I would pick this book up again and I would write it to the end. But that time was in the future.
To my surprise, when I returned to the manuscript, the book presented another writing challenge which brought me to a standstill. (more…)
There used to be one and not several memoir types.
The one kind of memoir genre was that written by famous people about the important events in history that they had taken part in. Mostly, these accounts were about how wonderful they were and how important their roles in history had been. Oftentimes, these memoirs were about excoriating their political or business rivals and actually provided little emotional or psychological insight into the protagonist other than s/he was a “good guy.”
Today, we have more kinds of memoir types—or genres—than we could have imagined even only several generations ago. The Memoir Writer’s Blog has a whole category devoted to types of memoirs.
Today’s memoir types include the following:
1. The first of the memoir types: the traditional memoir.
Stories fascinate us all our lives. As children, we loved to be told fairy tales and to hear, time after time, the tales our parents told us about what we did and said when we were babies, as well as the stories about their own childhoods. As soon as we were old enough, we told stories about ourselves for our parents and for our friends.
As adults, we speak in stories at work, at family get-togethers, at class reunions, at town meetings, at the post office when we meet our neighbors. In fact, stories are such an important medium for us that even the numerous stories we tell and hear daily are not enough to satisfy our enormous appetites—we consume additional stories by reading novels, seeing movies, and watching dramas on television.
Stories Are About Meaning
My Mother Passes
On this blog, I have frequently offered excerpts of my mother’s memoir, We Were Not Spoiled. It has been such a satisfaction for me to have written her story and to have been able to hand her a copy. One day, after I had presented her with the hard copy of We Were Not Spoiled, […]
How to Write the Last Chapter of a Memoir
“How do I write the last chapter of a memoir?” coaching and editing clients will sometimes ask me, wondering how to end a memoir. It is a good question because the last chapter of a memoir is your final shot at affirming your theme and at creating a satisfying and meaningful ending to the story […]
3 Stages of Writing a Memoir
A guest post Three Stages of Writing a Memoir: Own Your Truth, Find Your Voice and Tell Your Story In December 2011, I decided to take a trip to my home country, Azerbaijan. I had a property to sell and family to visit there. More importantly, I was on a mission to find my father’s […]
Clichés in your memoir—you need them like you need a hole in the head.
You can avoid cliches and stereotypes. If you do not avoid cliches and stereotypes, you will undermine the unique and personal feel of your memoir. Cliches and stereotypes place people in often erroneous and certainly indefensible categories. (more…)
Writing the right memoir
not writing the right memoir can constrict your writing. The person who has put down one memoir a number of weeks, or months or even years ago, may not be able to pick it up again because the energy that had initially informed it is gone. The memoir has become the wrong memoir to be […]
Develop Your Website: It’s A Prime Interface with Your Audience.
Develop Your Website Whether you have already written a book and are reaching for an audience or are still writing your first book, develop your website if you do not have a proprietary one. Why develop your website? ___ On the Third Thursday of every month (at 1 PM/ET, 12 CT, 11 MT, 10 PT), […]
There Can’t Be That Many Types of Memoir!
There used to be one memoir type. The one kind of memoir genre was that written by famous people about the important events in history that they had taken part in. Mostly, these accounts were about how wonderful they were and how important their roles in history had been. Oftentimes, these memoirs were about excoriating […]
Your Memoir’s “BIG WHY”—A Foundational Concept
What is your memoir’s BIG WHY? Without a BIG WHY, your memoir will not shine. You story will be smaller than it needs to be. (more…)
Why we write stories
Why we write stories. Stories fascinate us all our lives. What is the meaning of telling (and listening to) all of these stories? Obviously, stories entertain us, but our need to be entertained doesn’t fully explain our great hunger for stories. (more…)