How Long Have You Been Working on Your Memoir?

A year on the first before I trunked it, and six months on the second before I got an agent and subbed it. I've been writing novels since--which is why I haven't been around for a while

Novels? I'll let you know when and if I finish it

Couple years. And only now am really understanding what the focus is! (Kinda like life!)

Three years of having the idea marinate in the back of my head, and about a year of working on it... Still not finished. Or anywhere near it really. Sigh.

I think I get the prize -- 38 years!
I wrote a series of articles in the early 70's which were published in a local newspaper. They have become the foundation of about two thirds of my memoir; didn't need all that much rewriting and certainly I'd never have rememberd some of the details otherwise. And not just that: the whole thing has been marinating in my mind all this time, and I've always known one day there'd be a book.
In actual writing time: since February 2010, with one month to go for a finished first draft.

I've pretty much been working on mine since...oh...tomorrow.

Honestly, I feel compelled to write a memoir, but I am unsettled about the actual writing part. I'm not sure I want to do it, you see.

Had to put my memoir project on the back burner for the past several months, while I focused on completing my degree. I finally graduate this week (3 weeks shy of my 55th birthday) and I am anxious to get my creative juices flowing again.

Good for you.

Sweet Tea said:

Had to put my memoir project on the back burner for the past several months, while I focused on completing my degree. I finally graduate this week (3 weeks shy of my 55th birthday) and I am anxious to get my creative juices flowing again.

Click to expand...

Congratulations, Sweet Tea!!

I started mine in Feb 2009 and I am a few weeks from finishing. (Hallelujah!) So, one year 2 months.

I finished mine about a year ago. It took me two years to write.

I found an agent after being rejected a few times and then we started pitching it to publishers. It has been rejected by the big houses, but I have three houses looking at it right now. One took it grudgingly, one has had it since September (eight months) and keeps saying they'll give us an answer soon, and the last one loves it they said, but wants a few months to make up their mind.
Writing it was easy; at least I was in control.
The sounds you hear are nail-biting and hair-pulling.

semmie said:

I've pretty much been working on mine since...oh...tomorrow.

Honestly, I feel compelled to write a memoir, but I am unsettled about the actual writing part. I'm not sure I want to do it, you see.

Click to expand...

I'm a little bit like this, although I really do want to write it. I'm just scared there are too many gaps in my memory. I have the benefit of newspaper articles, court documents and some scant notes, Some of it was incorporated in a completed novel. But as to this date, that moment, and the details that will allow it to hang together seamlessly, it's not so clear.

However, I feel compelled, I've been gathering the materials and I am about to start. It's time.

Flynn's Boy, best of luck. Being out on sub is no fun.

Congrats, Sweet Tea! That's fantastic!

Eyas, good luck.

Thanks for the good wishes, everyone. It feels so natural to be creatively writing again. But, (and there's always a 'but'), I find myself backtracking and editing the hell out of pages I wrote last year. In fact, I've edited so much, that my story doesn't have quite the same 'feel' to it, and is almost heading into a different direction.

Anyone else every experience this when you edit?

Yes, absolutely. It's happened to me.

Everything needs multiple edits, but I think it comes down to whether your edits have improved it, or you're now editing out your voice. If you've saved your previous version, can you take a fresh look at that, read parts out loud and see how it sounds compared to your new version. Is another direction what you want, after all?

m

brutus, that's fantastic. Both that you finished one and have an agent. May I ask what your memoir is about?

m

Chrisla said:

How about the rest of you? It's a tough genre, and I'm wondering how all of you cope.

Click to expand...

Not well.


It's been about a decade and counting.

When it comes to my fiction, no problem. I can write, I can deal. But this memoir? Omg.

I got upset with myself. Why am I taking long? Why am I trying for perfect? I'm with a great agency-ideal for my memoir. I should finish this, run it past them. So I took the opening to a recent conference and sacrificed it in an Agent Idol to see if I was on track. Omg. Omg.

It was pulled FIRST, and it did great. Really great. And I thought I was going to die. It was the first time I'd ever heard my life read aloud. They were laughing at my life, squirming over my life, and that was me up there.

It was horrible.

It wasn't like my fiction at all. I couldn't divorce myself from my writing. You could try and paint it anyway you wanted but it was intensely and passionately personal. I wasn't ready for that. I thought I was. I wasn't.

So. I'm entering decade number two. I might push number three. We'll see. I will finish it, though. Eventually.

Twizzle, I hope you can power through this extreme discomfort because it sounds like you really have something...and many people really don't. Were they supposed to be laughing at those parts? If so, even better. You may have a winner on your hands! Keep going. Don't let another decade go by, or maybe never finish it.

I think being uncomfortable is the way we should be writing our memoirs. It's not fiction. It's supposed to be the truth - warts and all. I think the bolder we are, the more we expose ourselves, the better chance we have of putting something out there worth reading. Who wants to read about a life that's all perfect and paints us in a perpetually good light? It would be boring.

brutus, thanks for the info. Good luck!

Hi Twizzle,
I know what you mean.
I'm an intensely private person and the very idea of exposing myself to the world fills me with the jitters.
I have to say, though, that the horror of it was far worse before the book was written. That's why I delayed it for so long. I do think my real story is better than all my fiction and that's what I really wanted to write but I couldn't bring myself to write it for years.

As a matter of fact: th every first novel I wrote was completely autobiographical. I used my own story and made myself into a fictional character. The novel actually got taken by an agent who thought it was terrific, but it never sold. But it made me see that I could write fiction (ie, scenes and dialogue, a whole book) and that's what I went on to do.

Only after three failed novels (in that they didn't sell) did I realise it's my own story I have to tell but the idea filled me with such horror it took a while even to get started; because if I do it it has to be done properly, warts and all. Just reading some of the reviews of other memoirs and the horrible things people say about the authors, personal, mean things, makes me want to run a mile because if this get published I'll be getting that too, and I hate the thought of people digging through my life and spewing their venom on it, and it will happen for sure.

However, once I made up my mind to go ahead and actually do it, once I started writing, the horror and fear vainished and now I know I can face it, whatever comes. It means drawing back and seeing myself as a fictional character, I guess. The person I'm writing about is actually long gone; I've stopped thinking about her as me, and writing it as I would a novel, with a main character I know perfectly well!

Inspiring post, Aruna! Thanks for your insight.
I've noticed that in the memoirs I read that I like the most, the parts that probably made the author squirm when he/she wrote them are the parts that make me turn the pages faster. Does that make sense?