Tweets, text messages, blog posts, and missives left on forums, in comments and on social networks have become a rich mother lode of raw personal material to mine for authors who are writing memoirs.
It’s the way we communicate now
It’s how we express and absorb information and emotion, in quick short takes, from the trivial to the profound. Even the Library of Congress has taken note, harvesting every single tweet for posterity. You didn’t know that? Look here.
Be prepared to revise
It might not work just to drop in the original unedited posts, tweets, or other jewels you’ve written online and archived yourself. To achieve the highest possible level of literary art, you’ll need to adjust and accommodate the short pieces so they avoid repetition and fit together seamlessly, while at the same time maintaining their ability to be read as individual pieces broken out in the text, or in the context of the entire narrative.
A book-length memoir incorporating short-form pieces still needs to satisfy the conventions of the genre, as a narrative work with a beginning, middle and end. Like any good memoir, it may be focused on a particular turning point, coming of age, or other type of transformational experience in the author’s life.
Here’s an example
I’m working now with a writer whose memoir incorporates an inventory of blog posts, newspaper columns, and other short pieces. The work centers on the loss of the author’s husband after 14 years of marriage. Trained as an illustrator, she had always been a creative, spontaneous, and energetic high achiever. A few years after her husband’s death, she began writing a newspaper column, each about 700 words long, for a local newspaper. The columns were about being what she described as an Irreverent Widow, a young woman raging with anger, and grief, but also dealing daily with the vicissitudes of parenting three small children on her own, managing her budget, and struggling to heal, to build a new life.
Her writing continued unabated and gradually became quite a large collection of these articles, plus posts on her website, essays, and other work. She began to think of putting it all together into a book, a memoir of loss and recovery. She asked me to be her developmental editor on the project.
Conceptualizing and organizing short works into a full-length memoir
We brainstormed and began reorganizing these short form works into a new chronological structure, preserving their original length and exceptional sense of humor, but pouring them into a series of chapters that each had a specific theme. We came up with topics like shock, the funeral, impact on the kids, getting psychological help, early dating, advanced dating, intimacy and sex, both good and not so hot, money, faith and spirituality, building a new personal and professional self.
We’ve sorted out the raw materials for each chapter, including so far several newspaper columns, blog posts, transcriptions of video monologues, fragments of her website and other potential elements.
At this point, the outline is rough and nothing is carved in stone. Some pieces may drop out, others added. The individual texts need to be pruned, since some may ultimately be shorter (300-500 words), some longer (700-1000 words). And the writing itself needs revision, so it creates a coherent narrative impact, showing progress, ups and down, some degree of success and transformation.
Plenty of precedent
The concept of writing a memoir composed of short-form elements has precedent, current and past.
One example is the just published Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman, a semi-fictionalized memoir of the author’s two-year marriage to his young wife Aura and her subsequent tragic death. He has focused his memoir on specific short images, fragments, associations, and memories of their love and life together, producing a personal narrative that the New York Times describes as a beautifully written account of the author’s deep and consuming bereavement.
Other examples include the #1 NYTimes bestselling memoir Lucky by Alice Sebold, which began as a short form narrative about the impact of being raped that originally appeared in the NYTimes Magazine, which publishes such short pieces regularly in its Lives section. The New Yorker also has a regular short form memoir section called Personal History, which has produced eventual memoirs by such luminaries as James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Oliver Sachs and Joan Didion.
And of course, The Diary of a Young Girl was written by an amazingly precocious 13-year-old Anne Frank as a series of dramatic scenes and deeply moving random notes documenting a two-year period when she and her family were hiding from the Nazis but ultimately discovered and sent to the Bergen-Bergen concentration camp, where she died in 1945 at 15.
Do you have untapped source material scattered in the cyber-cosmos?
Are you incorporating your own online words into your memoir or other narrative work? Are you making a point of archiving them for future possible use? Have any advice for fellow writers?
Alan: I recently published “Kvetch: One Bitch of a Life,” a memoir about growing up Jewish and a gifted pianist in South Africa. I started out writing a series of essays embracing facets of my life: being a child prodigy, child abuse, Jewish life under the umbrella of apartheid with its rules and racism; journalism life at a metropolitan daily, the classical music world, etc. Over the years I found a way to unite the pieces/my stories into a cohesive whole I went straight to publishing an e-book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GFI5MO,for Kindle, also Nook. While I appreciate your remark, “a book-length memoir incorporating short-form pieces still needs to satisfy the conventions of the genre…,” I wonder how this structure, albeit a unifying approach, is accepted by agents, publishers and those seeped in tradition.
I’ve been writing a blog for several years. I began by writing about my life, my writing etc. Someone described it as a process (writing) blog. It has been there through writing my memoir, through the frustration of trying to find an agent/editor and now (Woot!) through the pre-publication process. Now that I have a contract with a publisher and a book coming out in November, my writing there is much more focused. I can’t imagine it could ever be a book. But it’s been a great way to track the progress of my writing life.
I have a blog full of posts to update family about a sick spouse, but it’s private now. There is a journal I jot thoughts and information into because I know one day I will use it for a memoir, but I’m not quite ready yet. I save this information for the day I am ready. After posting in both for a while I realized I had a gold mine of information built up. So, yes, one day I will compile the information for future use. Great post, Alan.
It’ll be interesting to see how this trend affects upcoming writers who have only known a texting world. I’m currently a high school English teacher and have noticed a marked difference in the writing my students produce now (tighter, but lacking some of the depth) compared to a decade ago when I began. Even the preferred syntax has shifted ever so slightly. I wonder if the pendulum will swing back or if the race of the text will permanently affect the pacing of the work. Either way, I do love your ideas for turning the small big again. Thanks.
Alan, thanks for writing this post. I’ve been using some of the elements, such as blogging (http://conceivewriting.blogspot.com/), for the memoir I now work on. Thanks for letting us know that others are employing the same steps too. Also, thanks for the developmental edits you suggested for Day Laughs,Night Cries; they are like giving birth to a new book.
Oy. So much to learn and/but someone bright like you needs to develop and describe these new options,ideas and ways to move forward as a memoir writer, so thank you for your work.
Now, I will copy/paste this piece into my own Inbox and throughout the day read a paragraph at a time, until it makes sense. I’m slow. But after I learn, it sticks. Yeah! Yeah for the sticking!
Yes Alan. Thank you.
Sheila Cull
I hadn’t thought about this as a useful tool overall, which is a little silly! I’ve compiled a 90,000-word source document (including tweets around the end of my mom’s life) for use in writing a memoir about my mom’s descent into mental illness, and her kids’ response to that. I just hadn’t thought about it from a broader perspective. ;)
It’s good to bind those past experiences together using the words of today, but what could be more accurate than the thoughts–and exchanges–we shared in the moment? Thanks for this post!
Alan, thanks for this instructive post – I had not realised how literally some authors are using Twitter and Facebook to “write” their books. I would love to hear more about the transformation of so many diverse individual pieces into a book. In my experience a lot of unpublished memoir authors underestimate the work involved in giving shape to their story, as if it were somehow unnecessary to “edit” their story for a reader other than themselves, or to decide what their story is about.
I was happy to hear about the Irreverent Widow and will check her website. My first book, The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement, was a memoir about love, grief and renovation.
I’m looking forward to reading Goldman’s “novel” – a thrilling excerpt appeared in the New Yorker’s “Personal History” column (as memoir) in the last six months.
Yes. Quit writing memoirs if your goal is publication for monetary gain. I certainly won’t take a chance and buy it, because I believe there are very few memoirs(I’ve counted five so far)that haven’t been exaggerated or filled with outright lies for financial gain. Knock, Knock. Who’s there? James Frey. James Frey who?
Plus, memoirs are now spawning at about the same rate as the salmon population, producing copycat ones that try and latch onto the coattails of somebody else’s success. I’m sure in the next few months we will see various versions of the following: I gave birth in Heaven and my baby remembers it all. I died and went to Hell(ok that’s from my never-to-be-published memoir) Diary of A Bully Kid. P**p my Dog says. The Glass Shack.
I do think it’s great that so many people are writing their memoirs, but let’s face it, catharsis doesn’t mean you should try and sell it. Far better to go to therapy and spend the rest of your time writing for posterity’s sake.
Oh, and another thing. Memoirs that come in a ten box set leave me in tears. And not the inspiring kind.
Unless you write like Joan Didion!
Mr. Rinzler, I was thrilled to read your advice this article! I’m writing a group memoir and have been relying heavily on tweets, blog posts, and Facebook chats. Thank you, I now feel that my methods are validated!
OMG, Alan, this is so timely for the “platform”-strengthening work I’m planning to get out–probably just in ebook form–ahead my next novel. Combination of a previous blog, articles previously published, dialogues with others. Gratifying to read that this concept is gaining momentum!