WRITING TIPS | MEMOIRS | BOOST
How to write memorable memoirs and personal reflections on Medium
Tips from a 9x boosted writer
This week, I’m going to focus on memoirs and personal recollections. As many of you probably know as writers and readers, these are the most popular types of writing (apart, of course, from writing on Medium!).
Because, let’s face it, we’re human beings. We enjoy reading and learning about others — and ultimately, ourselves. In fact, many of us are still actively engaged in learning about life itself, regardless of age.
That’s why we want to know if anyone has encountered events and incidents comparable to our own. We want to know they felt — and at least as importantly, what they learned. It helps us realize that we are not struggling alone. This is so even if the situations and conflicts described are not remotely related to our own.
Since I am not a booster myself, my guesses as to how and why my memoir-type stories got boosted are largely conjectural. Yet, having studied and taught literature for decades, I like to think I have a few clues as to why they were. It’s more than just “vulnerability” and “authenticity,” terms that are bandied about ad nauseam on Medium.
Successful stories — and not just boosted ones — should have at the very minimum:
- A clear narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end.
- Vivid details
- A central theme
- This is more debatable: an uplifting lesson (at least, this is what pub editors keep emphasizing in their guide to submissions)
Here, I’m going to focus on my first boosted story — or rather, the first story I wrote that came to be boosted. (Clarification: It was boosted two days after a later story got boosted. I will discuss the other in another post!)
“Back to my Future” — my first boosted story
This was initially supposed to be a brief story in response to a weekly prompt in Promptly Written: “The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos. Algos means ‘suffering.’ So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
I was planning to focus on my childhood inclinations for looking back on the past — my fondness not only for looking back on my personal past but the historical past. It was going to be at most a 2- or 3-minute piece. As I pondered the idea of nostalgia, however, I realized I could only do justice to the subject by writing a much fuller story about its role throughout my life: I will fully admit that this is when I began hoping for a boost! And since the editor was a boost nominator, why not?
The kindergarten me longing for the past, even if only a year or so earlier, and my interest in centuries-old art, I suddenly realized, were not just childhood traits but a lifelong one; it was and remains a fundamental core of my being. I found myself musing not only on childhood nostalgia while in the Bronx but also my continuing nostalgia for my years there from adolescence through adulthood: not to mention my continuing interest in history in all of its aspects, from art to politics.
So I poured out all the details that made my past memorable: my childhood havens and journeys, favorite songs, adult recollections of my last year with Mom, and later bus rides through my old neighborhood. In fact, rummaging through my memories near and distant felt cathartic at times.
For instance:
I certainly felt the collision of past and present the year I taught in NYC. Tuesdays and Thursdays would begin with a morning cab ride to the bus station where I would pass the hospital where Mom died. “Hi, Mom,” I would whisper to myself. “It’s been three years, but I still miss you.”
But the real nostalgia overload would kick in on the way back home in the evenings as the bus passed the back of my old Bronx neighborhood. I would put my books down just to revel in my childhood. How many times had we cruised this highway, years ago, on the way to the Bronx Zoo and the Botanic Garden? How many times had I watched the stars twinkling amid the lights on the George Washington bridge?
While indulging in my reminiscences and pondering on my proclivity for such, I wondered about the nature of nostalgia. Why do we immerse ourselves in a multitude of memories? Why do we feel such urges — and when? What purpose does it serve in our lives?
As such, I decided to research nostalgia. I learned that it was mostly a longing for distant, more carefree and happier times. Ah, no wonder, as a pressured teenager and adult, I often found myself wanting to climb back to the safety of a womblike past in the Bronx, cradled in my mother’s arms: a time when I enjoyed the security and stability of my parents’ love with greater assurance than I would ever have again.
Nor was I alone in this mecca of my making as I discovered. I thought of the music I grew up with from the 1960s to ’80s — whether it was the Beatles singing about the lost joys of “Yesterday” or Madonna musing on what “used to be my playground.” In fact, I wanted to address American nostalgia for the past found in such popular shows as Happy Days, Wonder Years, or That Seventies Show as the world sped towards “the new millennium,” but knew it would take even more space. With my piece already running 9 minutes long, I nixed the idea: I did not want an unwieldy mess. (Remember, never lose focus!)
Nonetheless, I had an important point to make — that nostalgia is not useless and self-indulgent. There is indeed a purpose for it in our lives! This is where I wove together self-analysis, a knowledge of literature, and research to create an effective conclusion:
That’s when it fully struck me that all the distant, younger me’s did have a role in shaping the adult me–that the child is indeed the mother of the woman, to put a twist on Wordsworth’s famous words. There was the childish me admiring paintings in Mom’s art books, as if pining for a distant past. There was the adolescent me pining for my childhood past while taking a new interest in distant ages…. These were all undeniably me.
This sense of progress–this realization that we have grown–arising from our wistful recollections could well be one of the benefits of nostalgia according to psychologist Dr. Sedikides, who observes that when we focus on the past in an existential way–”what has my life meant?” — we can “potentially benefit.” Dr. Batcho makes similar claims that “Nostalgia is like a measurement. It’s a way we keep track of things, we monitor progress through life.”
Nostalgia then is a home away from home–one that acknowledges our love for a past that can never be retrieved: but one that also reminds us how all that we’ve felt, believed, and longed for along our path of life remain as meaningful as ever even if configured differently through the years.
It is knowing we contain multitudes of our past selves. And that somehow, some way, we’ve managed to weather all the storms we’ve encountered to move onto the next phase of life even when we long for the past.
I recall thinking to myself after writing these paragraphs, with its references to important thinkers across the centuries, that I had knocked it out of the park. It was the first time I had felt something so strongly since writing my senior AP English thesis in high school decades ago — the last time I had written anything remotely resembling a personal essay to be read by others. It was the time that the teacher wrote, “This is the best senior thesis I’ve read in 20 years.”
I should add that the boost did not come immediately. Even as I felt slightly disappointed not to be notified of one the next day, I shrugged it aside. Maybe I may not get one now, I thought to myself, but I’m pretty damn sure I will get one for another piece. I am that good! (This is why I don’t believe in imposter syndrome: you’re either good or you’re not — but I’ll save this for another story!) In fact, the boost came two days after that for the following piece written two weeks later for Middle-Pause.
My next article will address that boost.
© Frances A. Chiu, January 25, 2024. All Rights Reserved.
For my previous writings on boosts, see:
