Tell Your Story: How to Write Memoirs and Autobiographies

By Paul Lima

Tell Your Story: How to Write Memoirs and Autobiographies is written by successful freelance writer, author, and writing instructor Paul Lima. Tell Your Story is a book about how to write your memoir or autobiography -- in other words, how to tell your story by writing it. It's a simple, practical, straight-foward book that will help you tell your story,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Lima
• Release date: Feb 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781927710418

Book preview

Dedicated to those with stories to tell.

In other words, to a lot of people.

Tell Your Story

Copyright © 2019 by Paul Lima

Published by Paul Lima Presents

www.paullima.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner(s) and the above publisher of the book.

First Edition 2019

ISBN: 978-1-927710-41-8

Contents

Introduction

1 / Memoir versus Autobiography

2 / The Writing Process

3 / Before You Start

4 / Structure of Memoir/Autobiography

5 / Initial Story Research

6 / What Is A Book?

7 / Pre-Writing Exercises

8 / Brainstorming and Clustering

9 / Preparation

10 / Research

11 / Initial Clustering

12 / Focused Clustering

13 / Outlining Your Book

14 / Continuing to Outline

15 / Writing and Editing

16 / Sentences and Paragraphs

17 / A Tale of Self-Publishing

About the Author

Introduction

I’ve done it. I’ve written my memoir, The Accidental Writer. It contains sex. It contains violence (a bit). It contains writing. And there is more in the book that happened more or less by accident in my life—like how I became an accidental dad and accidental dog lover. As the author, I am biased, but I feel I’ve produced an entertaining and engaging book—a fun read with serious overtones.

I had a blast writing it and feel that anybody over 50 should write their memoir, as I told a writer I know. He said something that got me thinking. He said, My memoir would be as boring as watching paint dry. (Yes, writers are allowed to use clichés.)

My reply was immediate: When writing your memoir, or your autobiography, you leave the boring bits out! In other words, you are not writing everything that ever happened to you. If I were to write a truly comprehensive autobiography even I, the writer, would fall asleep before I finished writing chapter one.

With that in mind, the first thing you need to decide is what you a going to write: a memoir or autobiography. Also, figure out why you are going to write it, what you are going to include (and leave out) and who you are going to write it for.

For instance, my memoir, while of interest to family and friends, is aimed at other writers. They would be the ones most interested in how I became a writer, even though I became one accidentally.

That is why this book will help you determine what you should write, why you should write it and who you should write it for. It will also help you conduct internal research—research into you—and get down on paper all that you might want to include in your book. In fact, it will help you discover more about yourself than you will want to include in your book. And that, as any writer will tell you, is a good place to be—with more information in front of you than you need to write about.

Then the book will help you get focused and organized. You will outline the chapters you want to write and create an outline for each chapter. As a professional writer for 40 years, and one with twenty-two books to my name, I can tell you that once I have a detailed outline in front of me, it's all over but the writing. And that is a point anybody writing anything wants to be at before actually writing. It's just that people who are new to writing don't know that they want their book to be all over but the writing before they begin to write.

Then there will be a bit about actual writing too. And in conclusion, there will be a final section on self-publishing—something more and more people are doing to get their books out there.

Unlike many other self-help books, Tell Your Story makes no outlandish promises of riches or mega-success, other than to say that you will produce a solid first draft of your book if you follow that process outlined here and devote a couple of hours a day to the process of writing your book.

If you feel like you've been spinning your wheels, this book will get you grounded and focused. It will show you how to turn who you are into a book about you, which is what I presume you want to do because you have purchased a book entitled Tell Your Story.

Paul Lima

www.paulima.com

1 / Memoir versus Autobiography

Memoir and autobiography are sometimes confused, and that is understandable because a memoir contains autobiographical information. However, a memoir is not an autobiography. Before you can decide which one to write, you need to know the difference between them. And just to confuse you even more before we set you straight, we will start with a quick look at biography.

A biography is a full account of a person's life written by a third party. In other words, if I were to write your life story, I would be writing your biography. However, to muddy the waters even further, if you hired me as a ghostwriter to write about you and you approved what I wrote and took credit as the author of your story, that would be an autobiography.

The word autobiography literally means self (auto), life (bio), writing (graph)—the story of someone's life written by (or otherwise told by) that person. So a biography is the story of a person's life, written by a third party. An autobiography is the true story of a person's life written by the person it is about. Authors write about themselves in autobiographies and memoirs. Hence, they are typically written in the first person: I did this and then I did that. Biographies are written in third person She did this and then she did that."

To be clear, even if I write your story, as told to me by you, it is an autobiography—as long as you are listed as the author. If I am the author of your story, it is a biography. Of course your book could be listed as an autobiography as told to Paul Lima (or whoever the writer of the book is).

For the purpose of this book, we will presume an autobiography is a full account of a person's life written by that person. But you should know that it is not a problem if you get help with the writing of your story, which you might do if you are new to writing.

Before we look at when to write an autobiography versus a memoir, we need to look at what a memoir is and how it differs from an autobiography.

So what exactly is a memoir, which contains autobiographical information? The short version: memoirs are personal accounts of specific memories or stories from your life. In other words, it is not a full account of your life, from start to wherever you are when you write it. Instead, it is a written factual account of an aspect, or thematically-related aspects, of somebody's life. It comes from the French word mémoire, which means memory or reminiscence.

Again, a memoire does not go from birth to however old the writer is when writing. That would be an autobiography.

Take the title and subtitle of my memoir:

The Accidental Writer: A Memoir.

Didn't know rules of grammar; became a writer.

Had a vasectomy; became a dad.

Liked cats; became a dog lover.

Notice the theme of accidental. I could have focused on just the writing aspect, but the other aspects of my life connected by the accidental theme were also interesting and contributed to my life as a writer, as you can see if inclined to read the book (www.paullima.com/books/).

As with an autobiography, the voice of a memoire is in first person singular: I, not we, not one or not you. The memoirist is the main character of the story. The action in the story swirls around one event or thematically related events in the main character's life—her thoughts and feelings, reactions and reflections.

So what you have to do is decide. Do you want to tell your life story, as in an autobiography? Or do you want to focus on a particular aspect of your life—your work, your loves, your hobbies or passions, your success or failure. That is a decision only you can make. So how do you decide which you should write? I can't decide for you, but let me give you a few scenarios and tell you what I would do and why. Being Canadian, I am going to use fictional hockey scenarios.

Scenario 1: You've had a twenty year career with the Toronto Maple Leafs and have won five Stanley Cups. (Told you this was fiction; the Leafs haven't won a championship in over fifty years.) You retire the day after you win your fifth Cup, the end of your twenty years with the Leafs. Memoir or autobiography?

Scenario 2: You are a minor leagues hockey player. The Leafs call