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Editing the memoirs
Use
the writing skills of a novelist. And think about the
difference between autobiography and memoir - an autobiography
is often a chronological |
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narrative, concerned with historical setting and action, whereas a memoir tends to have a more personal, emotional tone.
Find a voice that gives your memoir a sense of vivacity. Think of your children reading it and ask yourself as you write - will this interest them?
"The trouble with life, the novelist feels, is its amorphousness. The novelist is addicted to seeing parallels and making connections. So the ability to stay with a theme and keep a lot of balls in the air - that part of the memoir writing felt novelistic."
Martin Amis
"For me, the memoir is not autobiography. It's very, very distant from that. There's no attempt to give a chronological rendition of one's life. I was looking at the traces of the legacies. I used the novelist's skills of going into the minds of the people you know least - namely my parents before I was born! These are totally mysterious others. You also need to be able to set scenes and to be able create movement in the text and create characters the way a novelist would."
Lisa Appignanesi
What to include
Be selective and carefully lead the reader from one interesting aspect of your life, or family history, to another. And it's possible to include all kinds of material in your memoir - such as letters and poetry, for example.
"Lisa Appignanesi and I may have had peculiar lives but they're also fundamentally universal. The only things that really matter are births and deaths and separations and unions - and we all have them. This is the advice I'd give a prospective memoir writer: the critic leads the reader from quote to quote, but that's also what the memoir writer does - you're quoting from memory, and what stays in your memory is the interesting stuff and that's the stuff you should quote. And if these things hang together at all, you're on to something."
Martin Amis
"I think the first thing to do is to select out. Otherwise you'll have no time to live as you recollect the past - there is a great deal of it! So select out for the moments that have a particular resonance for you. Play with those and see where they take you. They may take you into interesting places and not necessarily the places where you thought you might visit."
Lisa Appignanesi
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