INK & TEARS | WRITING MATTERS

Memoirs & Personal Essays Are Hot

Make your writing ‘pop’ with images, anecdotes, and plenty of reflection

Look around the Medium platform, and you’ll find all sorts of nonsense. There’s one entrepreneur who — for only $200— will set up a ‘fruit money’ profile and write ‘fruit content’ for you. Oh, cool! Fruit money content. Your investment will pay you big money. Oh, no — it won’t. Don’t fall for that scam.

Don’t let others write your stories. Do it yourself.

And do it well.

To earn money on this platform, your craft has to be compelling, well-paced, and interesting. No one wants to read about fruit, or for that matter, your grandmother’s hat collection (unless you make it more interesting than I’ve made it sound). If you can, by all means, write about Grandma’s hats.

Or you could write something that takes some courage.

I write personal essays and memoir, and because I read them constantly and am an old English teacher (retired, whew), let me help you understand the difference.

Memoir

Memoir — ‘memory’ in French — sucks the marrow out of your bones, as memoir deals with highly charged situations in which you, the writer, learned a hard lesson of some sort. I’ve got a published book about my decade living in Cambodia, along with the total crash of my first marriage. I learned about loss and moving on. That was a hard book to write.

Smaller memoirs are published on the Medium platform every day.

My Ex’s Buddhist Funeral is a memoir — a true (nonfiction) story about an event in the past, in which I reflect on lessons learned. Plenty of introspection and ‘how I felt’ information here. Notice I’m writing about an event ‘in the past’ but processing it with my thoughts ‘in this present time.’ I’m mulling things over, thinking ‘out loud’ on paper. There’s typically a highly emotive aspect to memoir.

Personal essays are a bit different. They can also be about events in the past, and meaningful ones at that. They aren’t as heavy on reflecting, emoting, lessons learned. More about the story.

Here’s a personal essay — The Beautiful Brokenness of People and Japanese Concepts We Love to Learn. It’s chock full of anecdotes. In the essay I write in ‘young me’ voice, and also write about it in my current ‘old lady’ (64, sheesh, old as dirt) voice. Remember — memoir often uses those ‘back and forth in time’ voices. And how confusing. Is it personal essay? Is it memoir? Sometimes the distinctions are minute.

This personal essay is by Kendra Sparkles. She tends to favor humorous personal essays, stories from her younger years she embroiders with hilarious detail. Personal essay doesn’t include all that emotional looking back, weighing decisions, the angst. This one’s great because our Kendra has written something most can relate with — that piece-of-shit college roommate. Or any roommate.

This memoir is by Kim Kelly Stamp.

After a life of denying her sexual orientation, she finds a great woman who she eventually marries. In this memoir, Kim reflects back on how she struggled through a different life, and how she felt when she came out to her old college friends. She’s writing about the ‘angst’ of then in the voice of now, and her lessons included authenticity (accept yourself) along with trusting others when you disclose.

Personal essays can be about anything — your love of birds, your shitty college roommate, the first time you had sex, the last time. Your fight with your sister, your understanding of death, what makes you happy. You might talk about something that happened in the past.

A memoir, on the other hand, is about a time in your life — in your past — when something so striking happened that you learned a lesson from it. You write about the event, reflect on it, and explain what ‘struck’ you with it. Be subtle, of course. You may be writing about what you thought then versus what you know now — -as with memoir, there’s some sort of learning or epiphany. It can be subtle, or it can be drastic.

What’s the difference between memoir and autobiography?

An autobiography is a person’s entire life story, written by that person. If you read an autobiography, it’s because that person’s life is famous or fascinating. Or maybe it’s your great-grandfather. Hint: don’t write autobiographies on Medium. From cradle to (close to) grave is all fair game for auto (self) bio (life) graphy (writing).

A memoir is an incident or a period of time in a person’s life, written by that person. It’s a striking period of time, or a time when the person learned something or endured an event. Hint: these are popular on Medium.

What’s the difference between ‘in memoriam’ and memoir?

A memoir is a story about yourself, written by you, about a striking and meaningful event in your past in which you learned, right?

Okay. ‘In memoriam’ is entirely different. It’s a piece of writing a person shares — usually in a newspaper or at a funeral or memorial service — about a deceased loved one.

That’s one of the reasons I created The Wind Phone, by the way. People often want to write about their loved ones who have passed. Many memoirists write about their deceased loved ones, but if you’re writing about them, focusing on them (not on yourself), it’s an ‘in memoriam’ piece. If you’re writing about what you learned from them, focusing on yourself, it’s a memoir.

Does it matter if it’s ‘personal essay’ or ‘memoir’? Can I use both topics (tags) on my story, because I’m not sure?

On Medium, writers can add ‘topics’ to their stories, as most of you know. I’ve been asked if it matters whether the writer tags a personal essay with the ‘memoir’ tag or visa versa. The answer? Don’t worry about it.

As long as it’s a story about something in the past, written from first person point-of-view, and it’s true — don’t worry too much about the tags/topics. Some people will read your personal essay and notice it’s not a memoir. Most won’t though. All personal essays and memoirs are nonfiction, creative nonfiction. Fine lines, people.

I often use these topics: personal essay, memoir, nonfiction, This happened to me, and then, the pub name.

The only time it’s really not okay to use the ‘memoir’ tag — in my opinion — is when a person’s essay is about the invention of electricity or some such thing.

How long should my personal essays and memoirs be?

If it works better for you, start with shorter content to begin with. As long as you’re doing your best writing, taking risks, and revising (going over, and over, and over your work to make changes), your writing will improve. Also, find people to read your work who will be honest and give you feedback. No one learns with compliments.

I’m ready to give it a try — how should I start?

If you are serious about writing well, read everything you can by the best writers on the platform. If you’re interested in writing memoir and personal essays, go visit those topics and read stories by the top ten writers there.

I look forward to seeing you writers around platform, and huge congrats to Robin Wilding 💎for her exciting new publication. And by the way? This article was greatly improved with her superior editing.

Read more about the difference between memoirs and personal essays with this link.

And I love this Hippocampus essay by Suzanne Farrell Smith about the difference between personal essays and memoirs. I think you will too.

Thanks for reading!