Memoir Writing – Five Tips For Writing Complete and Concise Stories

Many memoir writers have difficulties distinguishing between what it means to write enough, and what it means to write too much. This is one way to go about writing enough, but not too much: You write everything you need to write on a topic (completeness) and then eliminate all that you can without changing the meaning of the story (conciseness). What remains is your story.

As you write, keep looking at your prose as a stranger would. Is there enough information to understand all you are trying to communicate? If not, keep adding details. Unless you are very good, very experienced, don’t edit at this point. Just let your text grow.

Yes, you are likely to repeat yourself and to include irrelevant information. You might even babble on. But don’t hold yourself back. Your writing needs to flow in order to be as complete as it can be. To every thing there is a season… Once you feel you’ve said everything you have to say, then you need to undertake two tasks:

1) Eliminate everything that is redundant. Examine your text. Have you said exactly the same thing before (or something very similar)? Choose the most effective version and delete the rest. Saying it once is usually enough.

2) Don’t forget the redundancy that creeps in when you have your narrative repeat the dialogue. Put meaning into the dialogue, not into a narrative. “She was very hungry. ‘After not having eaten for days, I am starved,’ she said.” Have the dialogue carry the meaning here and eliminate the narrative sentence She was very hungry.

3) Linking phrases can also be redundant. “Our house in Des Moines was a two-story brick building. In comparison, our house in Cincinnati had only one-story and was built of wood.” Here the two sentences are obviously a comparison, and you do not need the words in comparison.

4) A third form of redundancy occurs when an adjective attempts to act as a superlative to a word that is already itself a superlative. Examples of this are: complete silence is not more silent than silence; a dead corpse is not more dead than a corpse; very sincere is not more sincere than sincere; true facts are not more true than facts.

5) Eliminate material (even if interesting) that does not contribute to the overall impact you are aiming for within a story. Writers can find themselves with interesting, well-written material that belongs elsewhere. Sometimes this material can be an excess of description–remember the tip of the iceberg. Other times, you may have written a story within a story, a separate tale with its own beginning, middle, and end, its own set of images and characters. It may even be a lovely tale that will move the reader. Nonetheless, take it out. File the story-within-a-story away for future use. It won’t go away–it’ll be waiting for you later. Perhaps it can fit into the flow of your lifestories–but at a different spot. Or, perhaps you have a lovely description that you need to expand and make into a story of its own.

Michelangelo, when sculpting his statue David, is said to have remarked that he chipped away at the block of stone until the statue emerged. He eliminated all he could and what was left could not bear any more elimination: at last, Michelangelo had the statue that had been waiting for him.

Within the many pages you have written may be your much smaller–and better–memoir. Is the story you want to end up with encrusted in excess prose? Keep chipping away at your text until you can’t chip any more without detracting from your story. That will be your “David” of a memoir.

Good luck writing!