Brief Thoughts on Memoir Writing by Ross Elliott

Brief Thoughts on Memoir Writing

by Ross Eliot

As a writer immersed in the composition of a personal memoir, recovering the past has created unexpected puzzles.  Examination of diary entries from twelve years before sometimes depict events I can’t remember at all.  Others lie frozen in notebooks as my mind believes occurred, except arrayed in different order.  The static text of diary entries must be accurate, but why should I shuffle certain occurrences around in my head and delete others?  To write a literal account of what these notebooks contain feels like a betrayal of truth.  

But a memoir isn’t a diary, it’s much more than that.  The story of days gone by is always a mixture of faulty memories, skewed perceptions and yes, the scribbled entries in spiral bound notebooks.  For that reason my memoir is a liquor distilled from many ingredients.  I still possess friends and acquaintances who remember those times.  They verify incidents, discount others and add their own.  From all these sources I compose a text that is as real as I can make it, not falsified or fictionalized, but true in essence.

I am fortunate so many sources remain to assist in this project.  My writing is richer for it.    Unfortunately many authors have taken paths which broke the bounds of memoir and entered fantasy.  If a personal story is worth retelling, it shouldn’t require such measures.  A memoir writer should be creative enough to take the past and make it readable for exactly what it is.  Outside perspectives are an invaluable part of keeping on the right track.  If I can’t completely trust my memories, why should any single source be accurate?

Ross Eliot is best known as editor and publisher of the counterculture gun politics magazine American Gun Culture Report.  He is a writer and commercial fisherman who divides his time between Portland, Oregon and Sitka, Alaska.  The website for his memoir project is www.profellsworth.com