I’ve been working in memoir writing for the past three or four years; I’ve been a journalist specializing in feature stories and personality profiles for over a decade now. Adding the memoirs and the articles together, I’ve written about hundreds of people in my career. Some subjects were assigned by editors; others, in the case of memoirs, stepped forward themselves with a story to tell.

I’ve written about great-grandmothers and professional football players, inventors and entrepreneurs, community activists and politicians, experts and novices, explorers and poets. The one thing they all have in common is perhaps obvious: they all have a story to tell. They are all on a quest to follow a passion, whether that passion is for mapping the far north regions of Alaska or for raising a happy, healthy family.

When I try to draw general conclusions about personal stories based on those I’ve helped to tell, I realize that there are three reasons we tell our stories: to inform, to influence, or to inspire. We inform by explaining how a technology was developed, or how to feed a child with food allergies, or what the most difficult part of pre-season training in the NFL is. We influence by urging people to change their behavior based on a particular issue: why to take children camping, or why to try a paleo diet, or why to become a hospice volunteer. We inspire when we tell a story that makes someone feel that they could be a better person by following our example: I overcame this hardship and you can too; I gave up this habit and you can too; I changed my future by approaching a problem a certain way and you can too.

And when done right, all three of these actions – informing, influencing, and inspiring – also have the additional potential to entertain.

Whatever your particular mission or passion may be, telling the story of how it has shaped your life has the potential to inform, influence, or inspire other people. Everyone has a story to tell – and everyone has the ability to tell a story that will have a profound effect on those who read it. Thus are the tenets of approaching a memoir project.

My favorite client quote this week came from a client who has commissioned a memoir project  in honor of his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.

I’d given the couple as well as the son a first draft about two weeks ago, and at this visit, they showed me their marked-up copy. I wasn’t surprised that they had a lot of edits. Much of the first half of their story involved their childhoods in China; I always look up what I can in hopes of accuracy with names and other proper terms, but I knew I hadn’t copied all of those names of rural villages and rivers correctly.

Moreover, the husband’s career involved development and innovation of complicated high-tech things like semiconductors, which are nearly as foreign to me as rural villages in China. So although I’d learned an enormous amount in the course of interviewing them, I knew they’d have numerous corrections to my work.

But as the couple, their son, and I together gazed over the one hundred or so manuscript pages I’d placed in a loose-leaf binder for them, they didn’t seem to focus on the number of handwritten corrections. Instead, their son said, “We never would have done this.”

His verb choice was what caught my attention. Not “We never could have done this” but “We never would have done this.”

I think he’s right. He didn’t say “We never could have done this” because, of course, they could have. Both his parents as well as his two siblings and himself all have impressive educational backgrounds and advanced degrees, either in engineering or business. Between the five of them, they’ve probably written hundreds if not thousands of pages of text: term papers, research papers, scientific white papers, proposals, contracts, articles.

But they probably would not have found the time to sit down and write the story of their parents’ lives. And this, I am coming to realize, is the authentic value of what I do. It’s not really that I’m a better writer or researcher or even listener than any of my clients. It’s that I’ve made a career out of finding the time to listen to people’s life stories, from their origins or even their ancestry right up to the present.

Last winter I met with a small number of local business leaders to get their feedback and opinions on my new memoir-writing venture. One of them, an entrepreneur in his seventies, said to me, “The main reason most people my age would tell you they’ll never write a memoir is that they can’t find the time.” Not that they can’t find the raw material or the writing aptitude; they just can’t imagine sitting down and doing it.

“We never would have done this,” said the client last week as he looked over the hundred or so pages representing his parents’ lives. They could have, but they probably wouldn’t have. I’m glad he asked me to step in. This is something I can do: write people’s stories. But it’s also something I will do: find the time to get it done.

Do you want your memoir committed to paper, or do you know someone who does? Contact Nancy here.

 

Last week I received an email from the daughter of a 91-year-old client whose memoir is currently under way. The email said:

“Yesterday I called my mom. It was quite apparent to me that she sounded more vibrant and alive than I have heard her in a very long time. I asked what was she doing and she told me about writing a memoir of her life.  What a wonderful thing to do - she has had quite a life!  This appears to have brought new vitality to her.”

It reminded me that the process itself is as worthwhile as the end result. All of my memoir clients have children and other family members who willingly and eagerly listen to their stories, but there’s something different about narrating a life in chronological order. Most families tell sporadic anecdotes, not unbroken narratives, and sometimes children hear their parents’ stories often enough that they stop listening. Having the opportunity to hear a life story from its beginnings gives me a perspective that isolated anecdotes usually lack.

Two years ago, I worked with residents at a nursing home on a community memoir project. A couple of months after the book was published, I saw the obituary of one of the participants in the newspaper. I felt privileged to think that I was probably one of the last people who heard her tell a story about her life. She had loving children and grandchildren; I don’t mean to suggest no one took an interest in her, but I had the privilege of sitting down with her without other distractions to hear exactly the life story she wanted to tell me, a story she was most likely telling for the last time.

Telling our stories matters, but listening to them does too. In my work as a memoir writer, I’ve become a dedicated listener. And I’m grateful anew for every story I have the opportunity to hear.