

In the planning stages, a clearly identified theme will help you decide what to include and what to omit, ensuring a tightly written final product. The theme is the spine of your story and is what distinguishes your memoir from a rambling pile of disconnected anecdotes. Storytellers are a dime a dozen, so what makes a great memoir? The following are characteristics of standout memoirs. Write a Standout: Characteristics of a Memoir No matter your inspiration, the memoir writing process can provide you reflection points and a fresh perspective you may not arrive at on your own after all, hindsight is 20/20.


Memoir characteristics series#
Maybe you’re seeking to understand and process a recent series of life events. Maybe you are searching for your personal identity or peering into the past for answers for the future. Perhaps you are healing from a traumatic experience. Perhaps you want to preserve your family’s legacy or learn about your ancestors. People write personal memoirs for various reasons. The beauty of the personal memoir is its ability to link us together in our shared humanity - the sharing of truths and realizations that may be decades, countries, and cultures apart, but still distinctly human in their vulnerability.

The only requirement is a unique personal story that only you can tell. You don’t need to have lived through a lifetime of harrowing events, either. It may thus be considered that in today’s modern world, a memoir can also be documented in the form of an online blog or journal as it runs on a similar concept and is accessible to a larger number of people, just like a book is.You don’t need to be a celebrity to write a memoir. Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl is a world-famous recollection of memories in the form of Anne Frank’s personal diary that she kept hidden in her attic during the period of the Holocaust.1 Many have even compared the efforts of young child activist Malala Yousufazai’s BBC blog to Frank’s diary. She talks about her memories in the three countries and the journey that she experienced along the way, revitalizing her soul and making her a better person. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love is a popular memoir based on her life in three different settings told in the form of a story, the book talks about her finding love in Bali, spirituality in India and love for the taste of food in Italy. The skill involves sorting out one’s thoughts and memories and prioritizing them in order to write about them and the revelations that they had through them.
Memoir characteristics how to#
Many individuals even take lessons on how to write a memoir meaning how to collect their thoughts together and pen them down based on the many memories that they have. One can thus preserve his memories through a memoir and that is why it is called the personal canvas of a writer where he can paint a picture as he likes and is not subject to any form of literary adherence. A memoir thus is like probing into the life of an individual’s mind as he collects his thoughts and writes about it. The thoughts in the memory may vary from one mood to another and float from one individual to another the setting may be one or many depending upon the wishes of the writer. They are written from the point of view of a first person, much like recounting the events of a person’s diary or a journal. There are many memoirs that have also been written without any information about the author at all, thus talking about the life development process of a human being and sharing the thoughts from one individual to another. Influential people in society that have written their memoirs have most likely put down the events of their careers rather than their personal and private lives however in history, there have been a number of memoirs written talking about the private lives that have shaped people to be who they become. A memoir rightfully is a canvas that allows a writer to portray his feelings and emotions in the manner that he wants, through his choice of setting, style and dialogue.
