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Writing for Posterity

7-part series, originally published in Focus on Seniors/55 & Better Magazine,
Last update Feb 2006

This series of 7 short articles guides you through a step-by-step process for creating personal memoirs that are interesting, lively, and unique.

Part One: Getting Started

Were you there in the Roaring Twenties? The Dirty Thirties? Did you witness the heartbreak of a World War — and the courageous rebuilding of nations and families that followed? Do you want your grandchildren to know what their mom or dad was like as a child?

More and more seniors are writing their memoirs. You can too. It's easier than you think! So if you have the urge to lay pen to paper and let the memories flow, this column will help you get started.

We'll show you how to plan your writing project and gather your stories. You will find out how to break up the writing into manageable bits, and how to do any historical research that you need.

Once you have captured your stories on paper, we'll help you polish them to give your words that special individual outlook that can only come from you.

The first step in writing your memoirs is to get organized. You need to decide what you want to say. Writers who plunge right in without any planning are usually the writers who wind up suffering from writer's block!

A little organization also helps clear away any fears you might feel about starting such a big project. If you break your writing down into specific steps, then you can enjoy one step at a time.

Instead of thinking: “What a HUGE project! How do I start?”, you can think: ”This week I need to write about Suzy having appendicitis.” A little organization makes your writing project manageable and much, much more fun.

There are many ways to organize stories and memories. There is no right and wrong in organizing your memoirs. How you organize the stories depends on what you think is important. In the next column, we'll explore how to organize your memoirs so they reflect what you really want to say.

Between now and the next column, spend some time jotting down brief notes on the stories and events you want to write about. Every time you think, “Oh, I have to tell them about...”, write yourself a brief note about it. Don't start writing any full stories yet, just jot down ideas as they come. In the next column, we'll start exploring how to shape your notes into a memoir that will reflect your unique personality.

If you can, do your writing on a computer. When you write on a computer, it's much easier to change and rearrange things. Many seniors' centers have computers. You will need to learn the kind of computer program called a “word processor”.

If you do not use a computer, the advice in this column will still work for you. But if you can, find a seniors' center that offers a basic course in word processing, and take it. Or ask your grandchildren for help. They'll probably be delighted to teach you about computers!

In the meanwhile, start jotting down your story ideas.

Writing for Posterity, Part Two: Choosing Your Focus

Now that you've spent some time jotting down the stories and events that you want to put in your memoirs, let's look at the different ways you can organize these stories.

Organizing is deciding what order to tell your stories in, to best say what you want to say. Look over your notes and see what you've decided to write about.

Are most of the stories about your children? Or about your own childhood? Are they about what you did — or what you thought? Are they about world events you witnessed, or life-lessons you learned in your own home-town? Will the stories mostly focus on the details of what happened? Or are you more interested in communicating your ideas, feelings, and insights?

There is no right and wrong in choosing what to write about. But different approaches need different kinds of organization.

If you are most interested in writing about the events of your life, you will probably organize your stories in chronological order. First tell the stories from your childhood, then from your teens, then your twenties, and so on.

If your stories are mainly about your children, you might group all the stories about your first child into one chapter, the stories about your second child into the next chapter, and so on.

If you want to write about the life-lessons you learned, you might make one chapter out of all the stories that taught you integrity, another chapter about the stories that taught you thrift, and so on.

The ways to organize your stories are endless. One man wrote his grandchildren a fascinating book entitled “Grandpa's Book of Wisdom”. The book didn't deal with the man's own life at all. Instead, it was filled with his ideas about where the negative influences in society come from, and how his grandchildren might keep their minds free of destructive thoughts.

Another man I know is a consulting engineer who has traveled the globe. He's writing his memoirs one country at a time. He puts his stories of Russia into one chapter, his stories about Chile into another chapter, and so on. His memoirs will give his great-grandchildren a priceless look at what his life was really like.

No matter how you decide to organize your stories, please, please, do NOT skip the organization step. This is the single biggest mistake that beginning writers make.

Yes, organizing takes time and care. You have to really think about what you want to say. But you will finish your memoirs faster and more easily if you develop a game plan first.

Your life is unique. If you take the time to really think about how you want to present your stories, then your memoirs will be unique, too.

Keep jotting down ideas for good stories, and decide what order you'll tell them in. In Part 3, we'll explore how to tell a story to get across the elements that are important to you.

Writing for Posterity, Part Three: Telling a Good Story (First of Two Parts)

By now, you should have lots of notes for stories to go into your memoirs. But what makes a good story? Vivid words? Compelling sentences?

That's what most of us were taught in English class, but the truth is, if you want to write good stories, you'll need to know a couple of simple, fundamental principles that have nothing to do with words or sentence structure.

In the next two columns, we'll look at how professional writers construct a good story.

Whether a story is fact or fiction, if you want your words to be truly interesting, you can write about only one thing. And that one thing is.... the unfamiliar.

Would you write about the hundred times you went grocery shopping and absolutely nothing unusual happened? Probably not.

But would you write about the time you went grocery shopping, and the cat got caught in the bumper, and then the policeman drove by, and....

You see the difference? A story becomes truly interesting as soon as something unfamiliar or unexpected happens - in other words, as soon as something changes from ordinary life.

Screenwriters call this event the “disturbance”, or the “inciting incident.”

A disturbance doesn't have to be a negative thing. Suppose you were posted overseas and went to live in a tropical paradise. Would this be a disturbance? Absolutely! Even if the experience was wonderful, your world was changed. Immediately, we want to know how you made out. What were the challenges? How did you cope?

A disturbance can be a real, physical event, like getting posted overseas, or a thought or feeling, like realizing that you've lost touch with your closest friend. It just means that something has changed in your world.

Chances are, if an event has stuck in your mind enough that you want to write about it, it must have changed or disturbed your world in some way.

Identify that change. Identify how you felt about it, and what you did. That's the backbone of your real, personal story.

Sometimes the disturbance isn't obvious. Suppose you went to college, worked hard, and graduated with honors. It may seem as if there was no disturbance.

But what about the time you had to make a moral decision about turning in a cheater? What about the time a classmate challenged you to attend a political rally, but it was against your parents' wishes?

All these events pique our curiosity, because they make us want to know “how things came out”. That's the main reason we read stories — to know “how things come out”. But unless a story begins with a disturbance, there is nothing to “come out” one way or another.

This is why every good story, whether fact or fiction, must begin with some kind of disturbance. The story ends when the disturbance is resolved.

Go through your notes and make the following outline for each of your stories:

First write down the disturbance.

Then add a list of the things that you (or anyone in the story) did to try to cope with the disturbance.

Then write down how the disturbance was finally resolved. A typical outline might look like this:

husband drafted (disturbance)
wife takes factory job to make ends meet; wife sells car; wife takes boarder to help pay rent (all coping)
husband returns from war, wife leaves factory job (resolution)

Next, we'll take these bare-bones outlines and personalize them into the first drafts of your stories.

Writing for Posterity, Part Four: Telling a Good Story (Second of Two Parts)

By now, you should have an outline for each story in your memoirs. The outline should identify the disturbance (the unfamiliar or unexpected event that sets the story moving), the efforts made to cope with the disturbance, and the final outcome.

(You may wonder how this approach compares with the more widely-taught method of dividing a story into beginning, middle, and end. The two approaches are really quite similar. The beginning is everything that happens up to, and including, the disturbance. The middle of the story is about coping with the disturbance. The end tells how the disturbance was resolved.

The reason that using the disturbance/coping/resolution model will give you stronger stories is that this method tells you, in very specific terms, what BELONGS in the beginning, middle, and end.)

Now, consider our outline from last month:

husband drafted (disturbance)
wife takes factory job to make ends meet; wife sells car; wife takes boarder to help pay rent (coping attempts)
husband returns from war, wife leaves factory (resolution)

Not much spirit or individuality to it, is there? This brings us to the second principle of good writing: truly good writing has a meaning that reaches above and beyond the facts of the story.

In the case above, two women might have lived the same events, yet had very different reactions to them. One might have been happy to leave the factory, while the other missed the challenge and responsibility of the work.

In the first case, the meaning of the story has to do with triumph over adversity. In the second case, the story is really about a woman whose opportunity for self-fulfillment was snatched away by the return of her beloved husband. Do you see that the whole tone of the two stories should be different? Identical events, but very different stories.

The key to telling really good stories in your memoirs is to always let your reader know what the events meant to you, and why. Go past the facts of the story. It's what you felt and thought about the events of your life that makes them a unique reflection of you.

Once you have a strong sense of the story you want to tell, and of what that story means to you, you have an ironclad rule for deciding what belongs in each story.

You must include everything that is necessary to describe:

Anything else, you must leave out. For example, if the story is about your son's desire for a pet, then does your brother's tank of tropical fish belong in the story?

Yes, if seeing the fish was what made your son want a pet, or if you used the fish to try and take his mind off the dog he wanted.

But if your son never desired the fish, and/or you did not use the fish in some way to try and resolve the situation, then the fish play no part in the story, and do not belong in the story.

Keeping this rule in mind, use your outline as a guide to write the first draft of your story. Don't worry about trying to write finished work, just let the story pour out. DO NOT spend any time polishing or revising your sentences right now — we still have some structural rewriting to do.

Writing for Posterity, Part Five: Researching the Past

Good stories are full of detail. Yet when you write your memoirs, it's natural that some details may have faded from your memory.

What year, exactly, did your parents come to Canada? What was the name of the village they settled in? How many tons capacity was the warship your brother served on?

If you need this kind of detail for your memoirs, this column will give you some hints on how to locate the information.

First, call or visit the Edmonton Public Library. Librarians are trained in the art of locating information. Most are very helpful. Be sure to ask if it's quiet enough that the librarian has lots of time to talk to you.

If the librarian is busy, ask when would be a good, quiet time to call or drop by. Explain that you're writing your memoirs, then describe the kind of information you're looking for. Most librarians will be happy to help get you started.

A second source of information is the Provincial Archives, part of the Provincial Museum. Again, call to find out what their quiet times are.

A third source of information is the internet. Before you protest that you don't have a computer, or aren't computer-literate, ask yourself this question: do I have grandchildren? If you do, you probably have an internet expert right a t your fingertips.

Tell your grandkids what you're up to. Sit with them while they do the internet search for you. It's a great way to see a part of their world, and show them a bit of yours.

Unfortunately, we don't have space for a full discussion of the internet here. Ask your grandkids, or check out your local seniors' center for computer classes. Sophia Street, a local senior who's researching her family's genealogy, offers the following tips for people looking for information:

when you're browsing through a book and find information you want to keep, either bookmark the page or jot down the page number right away. If you don't, you may find it hard or even impossible to find that page again later.
don't automatically assume that the information you find is accurate. For example, compiled lists were all re-typed from original documents and can therefore contain errors. Always try to see copies of the original documents.
keep a list of the books and documents you have looked at, even if you didn't find anything in them. After you've looked at one or two dozen books, it gets hard to remember whether you've looked at a particular book or not. Keeping records will save you from looking at things twice and wasting time. Mrs. Street emphasizes that it's just as valuable to know where the information isn't as to know where it is!

Writing for Posterity, Part Six: Rewriting (First of Two Columns)

Professional writers often say that “writing is rewriting”. By now, you should have some first drafts of stories for your memoirs.

The next two columns will give you tips for rewriting these stories so they carry the impact that you want.

We saw earlier that good stories need a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning holds background information about “normal life”, right up until some disturbance happens. The middle of the story is about what the characters do to try to fix the disturbance. The end tells us how the disturbance is resolved - how it all “comes out”.

The biggest mistake that most writers make is in not letting readers know right away where a story is going.

True, the disturbance doesn't happen until the END of the beginning section. Up until then, all you are describing is normal life.

But if readers don't know WHY you're telling them about normal life, they will find it hard to focus, remember, and stay interested. To avoid this, you must give your readers some strong hints, within the first few sentences, as to what the story is about.

Two major tools that professional writers use to help their readers get oriented at the start of a story are curiosity and suspense.

People often confuse these two qualities, but they are quite different. You're curious when you know that “something” is about to happen, but you don't know what.

Suppose a story opens with the words: “The day we went camping at Big Sur turned out to be the worst day of my life.” You know immediately that “something” is going to happen, but you have no clear mental picture of what that “something” is. You have been made curious.

On the other hand, if you have a clear mental picture of what MIGHT happen, but don't know if it WILL happen, then what you feel is suspense.

Suppose the story above had started with: “I didn't believe the ranger when he told us that bears were coming into our campground at night.” This time, you can make a clear mental picture of the problem, and it's a bear. What you feel is not curiosity, but suspense: does a bear attack or not?

Both curiosity and suspense are used to pull a reader into the story. In either example above, the writer can now continue by setting out the beginning details of the story: how the camping trip came about, who was along, and so on. Readers will stay interested because a context has been established by the opening sentence.

Always choose a story opening that emphasizes the same emotional aspects you will emphasize in the story. Look at two more possible openings for this story:

1) The day the bear warning was issued at our campground, I learned what the word “courage” really meant.

2) I really thought my sister was a twerp - until the bear warning was issued at our camp.

See how each opening gives you a different expectation about the kind of story that will follow, without giving away any details?

To start rewriting your stories, first decide how you'll use curiosity and suspense to pull your readers into the story. Then finding beginning sentences that set the proper tone for the emotional journey you want your readers to take.

Writing for Posterity, Part Seven: Rewriting (Second of Two Columns)

In the last article, we saw how curiosity and suspense can be used to pull readers into a story. It's important to remember that all good stories use curiosity and suspense.

Consider Harper Lee's Pulitzer prize-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). In this reflective, deeply insightful story, we're told on page one that the narrator's brother will get “his arm badly broken at the elbow”, and that the story really began when “Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.”

Immediately, we think: Who is Boo Radley? Who is Dill? Where is Boo Radley, that he needs to “come out”? How does the brother's arm get broken? Right on page one, we're drawn into the story.

All good stories - fiction and non-fiction - use curiosity and suspense to give the reader a full experience of the story.

To help build curiosity and/or suspense, your sentences must support the kind of story you're trying to write. This means that plot-based adventure stories must be filled with sentence after sentence of physical detail. In our bear story (last month's column), you'd describe the growling, the snuffling, the breakneck race across the field. Physical details produce curiosity and suspense at the physical level: will the bear catch the boy?

On the other hand, if your bear story is really about burying a grudge, most of the sentences would involve the characters' thoughts and feelings. Curiosity and suspense are shifted to the emotional/mental level: what is the grudge about? Will the boy forgive his cousin or not?

In this type of story, the writer may throw in only the occasional short, factual sentences (“The bear snorted. I ran.”), as needed to re-anchor us in the physical reality of the situation.

The best stories are a blend of action and character. Always check to see if you can combine mental curiosity and suspense (what will the characters decide?) with physical curiosity and suspense (what will the characters do?). Keep refreshing your reader's curiosity or suspense throughout the story by inserting sentences that hint at the outcome.

Another tip for rewriting: concentrate on your verbs.

Verbs are action words. Strong verbs create vivid mental images. Which sentence gives a more vivid image: “He crossed the room quickly” or “He hustled across the room”?

The second sentence is more powerful, because the verb hustled creates such a clear, vital image.

Re-read your story, sentence by sentence, inserting the strongest verbs you can find. Whenever possible, replace an adverb/verb combination, like “ran quickly”, with a single verb like “raced”.

Next, re-read with the focus on your adjectives. Adjectives are words that modify nouns, for example, a big tree.

The strongest adjectives are derived from verbs. Compare these two phrases: “a large, empty plain” and a “windswept, deserted plain”. The second phrase gives a stronger image because the adjectives windswept and deserted are both derived from verbs, and therefore give motion and vitality to the image.

This concludes our series on writing your memoirs. Here's a final tip for rewriting: do it in short stages. When you're reading a story for the twentieth time, you can't possibly see it the same way your reader will: for the first time. Put it away for a while until you can read it with a fresh eye. Best wishes!

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