​My 96-year-old client has two daughters and a son as well as three grandchildren. As we wrapped up the final draft of her memoir, she provided favorite photos of her earlier years as well as more recent ones of her children and grandchildren. We placed the snapshots from her childhood in France and young adult years in England throughout the narrative, and my graphic designer made a two-page collage of the recent family photos to place near the end of the book.
 
I thought we were just about done, but then my client had another idea. Her son was a studio artist, and she wanted to know if we could use some images from his work as well.
 
We could, of course. The son, with help from his sister, chose some of their favorite examples of his wide range of work: a mural, an illustration,  some paintings. He furnished a photo of himself working in his studio as well.
 
I was struck by what a good idea it was on my client’s part to include these artwork images. Most people who know my client will never visit her son’s studio or see his work in a gallery or on a building exterior. But these few pages in which his work is reproduced will remind them of his talents. The quality of my paperback books certainly doesn’t do justice to full-scale pieces of art the way a real art book with oversized pages and a glossy finish would, but this format makes it accessible to anyone who pages through his mother’s memoir. Not the same as seeing the real artwork, to be sure, but a reminder of what kind of art he makes.
 
It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about the multiple purposes that memoir pages can serve. My primary goal remains to tell people’s stories through narrated text, but so many other images and ideas find their way onto these pages as well. I had one client whose daughter wanted her mother’s distinctive handwriting not to be lost to future generations, so she asked her mother to handwrite a letter for the end of the book which I reproduced as an image. The words and ideas in her letter could have been communicated just as well in regular print, but this approach captured her unique penmanship as well. Another client had a long-deceased father who had written amusing poems about his children as they grew up; my client had me copy several of his poems into her memoir. A client who had kept the toast her husband gave at their wedding decades earlier asked to have the toast reprinted in the memoir. A client who helped smuggle downed military pilots over enemy lines during World War II had images of her secret service identity cards reproduced in her memoir.
 
All of these examples remind me that while from an aesthetic point of view paperback books may not be the best medium for anything but words, books remain arguably the most accessible format we have. People can exhibit artwork, photos, even special documents in frames on their walls, but only visitors who come to their homes will see those mementos. Books make materials of every kind – narratives, yes, but also images and poems and song lyrics – available to anyone who picks up the memoir and pages through it.
 
If you are thinking about a memoir project, consider what other components you might want to include in addition to text. Snapshots, yes, but what else? Images of art, postcards, letters, poems, songs? All of it can be captured in the pages of your memoir – taking the story beyond words on paper and turning a book into something almost like a three-dimensional creation.

If you’ve ever participated in any kind of creative writing class, you have no doubt heard what is perhaps the oldest piece of advice in the realm of writing: “Show, don’t tell.”

But for some reason, sometimes even people who have accepted this advice in other forms of writing don’t believe that it applies to memoir. When I was speaking about memoir writing, and specifically about my work helping people to write and self-publish their memoirs, to a large group at a retirement community a year or so ago, one woman relentlessly pushed this point with me, asking how I, as a ghost writer, could possibly communicate the innermost feelings that her memoir would surely be expected to reflect. I explained once again my process of interviewing my clients, walking them meticulously through the stages and events of their lives, uncovering memories and anecdotes and details in order to commit their story to paper.

“But I don’t see how your retelling of what I did could possibly show how I was feeling,” she insisted.

I would argue the opposite. When clients are telling me about their lives, their actions tend to communicate how they were feeling far more accurately than any emotive adjectives or adverbs would – and my job as memoir ghost writer is to ensure that I faithfully re-create those scenes from their lives in order to reflect their emotions and moods, their moments of fear or concern or anxiety or excitement or anticipation or joy, as fully as possible.

And so when a client tells me how he or she was feeling at a particular moment and I don’t feel as if their narrative has brought us sufficiently to that emotion, I ask them to back up a step or two, describe what was going on. A client recently told me that the moment she glimpsed the man who would later become her husband, “there was a sense of immediate attraction.”

“And what happened at the moment you had that sense?” I asked her.

“We were in an art gallery when we spotted one another across the room. He ran across the floor, lifted me up and spun me in a circle. Everyone else in the room burst into applause.”

That’s a show-don’t-tell moment: the action reflects exuberance, passion, excitement and a sense of promise.

I thought of this again when a different client told me that even as a young girl attending Catholic school in France in the 1930s, she had a mischievous and slightly rebellious streak.

“What’s something you remember from that time?” I asked her.

She laughed. “The girl who sat in front of me in the classroom had long braids. Once I tied her braids to the back of her chair without her noticing until she tried to stand up.” This same client later helped smuggle downed pilots from the British Royal Air Force across continental Europe to Gibraltar, where they could board ships back to England. A rebellious spirit, indeed – and the actions to bear it out.

I think too of a client who described how as a little boy he spent hours in a grass ravine near his family’s apartment, examining every leaf, rock and insect he could find – this intellectual curiosity led to his earning a Ph.D. in physics. His wife, in turn, told me that she loved living in a tiny apartment full of relatives when she was a little girl because she could listen to the grownups talking over her as she fell asleep – and she grew up to be a lifelong extrovert, exuberant in her enthusiasm for meeting people.
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So indeed, as we look at memoir as a reflection of who we are, we might think of our innermost selves – our souls or spirits or essence – as consisting more of feelings than of actions. But I would argue that this is not the case. “Show, don’t tell” is as relevant in memoir writing as in any other kind of writing. Show me what you did, and in doing so you will find yourself demonstrating who you are and what lies in your heart.