But knowing that no one else should be subjected to this download of our day-to-days is something you and I need to embrace so that we can write good stories. Going over again and again the things we’ve done, the places I’ve been, the appointments you’ve kept can delight us. The tricky part here is that I will never be bored reading my own datebook. But what if you have no context for that person? What if that person is not known to you in some public way that provides a way in which to view the life? Well, that’s when things get snoringly boring. Why? Because you know what role the celebrity plays in your life. While reading some celebrity’s datebook might be fun – knowing who came to lunch, who was a lover, the screen test dates required – reading over mine will be a snore, I promise.
Think of the first as reading someone else’s datebook and you’ll quickly understand what I mean. Reading merely what someone did in his or her life pales in comparison to reading what he or she did with it. Well, look at that last sentence two graphs up. Let’s get you to write what others want to read, and move you away from writing in a way that merely relates what you did in your life. While writing in real time – chronicling a mother’s illness, a child’s development, the decline and death of a spouse – may require some writing during an experience, the length of that experience does not determine the length of your book, at least not if you are writing memoir, a genre which is not about you, but rather is about something universal in which you are illustration.īy contrast, autobiography is about you, but is not a genre for those of us whose work or life story is not already known, and if knowing the difference between memoir and autobiography is the greatest liberation you can experience, writing an essay or book that no one wants to read is the greatest threat of not taking the difference to heart. Are you looking at your shoes? Looking out the window? Did I just tap into something? I bet I did, since every single day in my memoir coaching practice, I speak to people who believe that every single day of their lives extends the length of the book they are currently writing. The first and best reason to learn the difference between memoir and autobiography is so that you can have a writing life and not just write one big book for years and years and never finish. Autobiography: Knowing the Difference Liberates You I find that for all my online memoir classes, as well as for my private memoir coaching clients, this definition instantly and forever liberates the writers from both writing forever without ever finishing a project and from producing essays or books that no one wants to read.
You are not writing autobiography when you write memoir, and while whole academic conferences can be spent howling over the semantic differences of the two, I define memoir as writing from one aspect of your life at a time and autobiography as writing your life story. So let’s get this straight once and for all. KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE between memoir and autobiography is essential to writing successfully in either genre, and yet it is probably the single most misunderstood aspect of both.
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