Fran Macilvey

Still writing memoir

Unless we are employed by the media or by those who pay us to write, writing our memoir has very little to do with tangible rewards such as money or fame.

But the intangible rewards are worth a mention… These include

• Re-evaluating the self and everything we think we know about our lives. That daunting idea begins to unfold with the very first words that hit the page, and goes on for the whole period during which we may call our work unfinished, challenging us constantly to reconsider, both the good and the bad.

• The sheer joy in doing something we have thought of doing for years and finally get round to doing. With all the records we’ve been dying to set straight for years, now is our opportunity to finally have our say. How liberating!

• The space to dump emotional garbage we have been carrying around for years. What a joy it has been, to finally discard rubbish that has lain around clogging up my heart for decades. What a joy to admit all the small and larger secrets, the things we loathe, love and can’t be arsed with. What pleasure to find and refine our authentic voice, to speak true. After all the twisting, aching pain, there is a real sense of coming home to something better and more anchored.

• The rearrangement of our perspectives. An inevitable consequence of going into all our memories and back out again, is the awareness that the process itself has altered our perspectives. That process is unavoidable, as we come up close and personal. We meet all our significant others with more love, acceptance that is, of itself, worth all the agony. That knowledge, that coming to terms is not something we can gain, except by writing about it, spending the time which forces us to re-evaluate.

So, with all these good and worthy aims spinning around in our ideas box, next time we take a look at the hows of writing memoir, which is the question this series started with.

Thanks for reading!

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How to write memoir

I have written a memoir. The process was long, surprisingly painful and full of the steepest learning curves imaginable.

But through a period of about seven years, I did realise that, though writing memoir is not necessarily straightforward, there are things to bear in mind. We might start by deciding, first, what we do not need, when embarking on writing our memoir.

We do not need:-

• Any qualification in literature, creative writing or equivalent.
• A law degree or formal adult education to fend off critics or lawsuits.
• To conduct embarrassing interviews with friends and family.

For now, here is a glimpse of what you might find helpful to write memoir

• A work ethic or method to get you started
• A willingness to make time
• An desire to continue, bordering on the obsessive
• Willingness to listen
• Patience to undertake literally hundreds of rewrites
• The willingness to change your understanding when casual conversations with family reveal that you may have got something wrong
• A willingness to come clean and be honest
• Playful optimism and the ability to laugh when it all gets too much and you feel like throwing in the towel.

This is a light-hearted list, incomplete and perhaps even a bit contentious. We each have our own list of what we need. What’s missing? Ah yes, of course.

• The desire to write our story
• Something to write about.

If we start writing, and realise that our work is, well, boring, we can do several things we can do with

We can

• throw out what we have written and start again. Given that, after a million re-writes, nothing in your original MS will remain, this is a perfectly feasible option.
• Go out and live an interesting life, and then come back and write about it. We might be twenty years too early.

Thanks so much for reading.

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