A Turning Memories Into Memoirs®
The MemoryList
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Start your lifestory project with a MemoryList--

1) Make a comprehensive list of the relationships and events which have shaped your life.

These are the things which, had they not occurred, your life-- or your subject's (some lifewriters tell their parents' or mentor's stories)-- would have taken a different turn. This initial list is called the Extended MemoryList. It may be fairly long (as many as five hundred or a thousand different items).

It's not unusual for a writer to spend two or three weeks compiling the Extended MemoryList. You'll find that the MemoryList is a continuing project. The more you write, the more you'll remember. Keeping your MemoryList active will give you a constant source of topics for your writing.

These are the sorts of items that can appear on a MemoryList:

  • an illness or a death in the family.
  • the birth or arrival of a sibling.
  • a fire, flood, tornado, automobile accident.
  • a relationship with an older person, or a peer.
  • a failure or a success at school- scholarships, a decision to go or not to go to the university, a conflict or connection with a teacher, having to leave school for work.
  • boyfriends/girlfriends, deciding to marry or not to marry.
  • marriage.
  • children.
  • career choices.
  • religious, spiritual experiences.

2) Analyze the list you have compiled.

Are there relationships or events that belong together? By being grouped together into one category or heading they may be easier for the reader (which may be just you, of course) to understand? For instance, instead of scattering the names of the men you dated from your eighteenth to your twenty-fourth year over several pages of your MemoryList, you might cluster these relationships under a title like "Getting ready to meet my husband/mate". Under this title, you list the more significant relationships of that time and make notes about how your understanding of what you needed in a husband matured until you were ready to marry.

3) Rework your list.

Put all the items that can be grouped together under their own appropriate titles or headings. This will help you to organize your material early on and to draw clearer conclusions later. Any eventual reader of your finished stories will also find it easier to understand your life if you organize disparate people and events in this way.
Take your time, mull over the list. Add or delete, combine or expand until you are satisfied that you have a list which is not only representative of your life history but which is organized to give a "bird's eye view" of your life.
Your list, of course, would include specific names and dates (e.g., deciding not to marry Roger T. in 1944, the birth of my son David in 1963).
Feel free to add to your list at any time it occurs to you. Placed in your three-ring binder with your accumulating pages of notes and stories, your MemoryList is handy for your constant reference.

4) Now narrow down your MemoryList to a Core List:
the ten most important or interesting relationships or events.

Having compiled the extended MemoryList, now select the most crucial events, the ones without which you would absolutely have become a different person than the one you are. Limiting yourself to ten items forces you to evaluate and select the most significant material to write about first.

copyright © 2002 Denis Ledoux This exercise is available as a worksheet.

A Sample... Based on the sample MemoryList above, here are some crucial items our writer might decide to develop. Notice that each of these items not only mentions a plot-line (the what) but also includes the consequences experienced by her:
  • the 1947 death of Nana Black who had always loved me unconditionally. I now felt alone in my family.
  • the flood that destroyed my father's print shop and thus forced me to reconsider and reduce my career options.
  • Deciding not to marry Roger T. in 1944 because he drank, and deciding instead to go off by myself to be a hairdresser in Toronto which gave me a whole new sense of myself.
The crucial items on your Core Life list are almost never splashy events: not the time you met a movie star briefly and superficially (e.g. Jimmy Stewart kissed you goodbye on the cheek after you bumped into him at a railroad station in 1948!) but something essential like deciding (or deciding not) to move away or marry, or winning a scholarship and going to the university instead of going into the mill (or vice versa).

By identifying these major influences in your life, you can focus on them quickly in your lifewriting. In this way, from the very beginning of your writing process, you will be producing a body of significant stories depicting the person you are and have been. You won't use up your time and energy writing about secondary events in your life's evolution (perhaps you and your friends were impressed at the time by that Jimmy Stewart kiss, but has it really influenced your development as a person?) Later on, if you still have the interest and the time, you can write about those interesting but not so crucial experiences. Otherwise, you may find yourself having "run out of breath" on the unessential stories before committing the most significant ones to paper.

TURNING MEMORIES HANDBOOK

For step by step exercises and support, consult
Turning Memories Into Memoirs, A Handbook for Writing Lifestories
and the
Lifewriter's Memory Binder,
a customized 3-ring workbook/binder. It contains numerous exercises and guidelines to help you to develop your MemoryList notes into full lifestories.

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Your Workshop Assignment

Like swimming, writing is not something you can learn to do without doing it. Reading and thinking about it is not enough. Regular exercise of those writing muscles really will increase your writing flexibility, strength, endurance and confidence. So let's get started! Here's a good warm up exercise to do to enhance your lifewriting:

  • Write at least twenty highlights of your life-- forty would be better, and eighty preferable. This is the beginning of your Extended MemoryList.

  • Having begun, now create categories under which to cluster different items. Some categories may occur to you before the memories themselves do. It's okay to work this list from both ends.

  • Lastly, compile a list of the ten most crucial items on your MemoryList. This is your Core List.


Congratulations! You now have a blue print, a roadmap, a plan of action-- a list of your most important memories that deserve to be recorded. Now, when you are ready, you can sit down to expand the notes on your list into full stories. You're ready to write the story of your life!


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