Memoir Writing as a Jumping Off Point to Healing
How autobiographical writing can help heal the past.
Posted 9/29/20
Autobiography and memoir can be excellent jumping off points for exploring your authentic writer's voice.
But be aware that I said jumping off places. Using your life as fuel for your writing doesn't mean you have to be slavish to the details. Quite the opposite.
First of all, you're working from memory when writing autobiographically and memory is faulty, at best.
In addition, you're writing the memoir from a particular point of view - yours. If you told the story from someone else's point of view, you might well have a very different story.
Finally, it's good to remember that you're writing the story from the point of view of the person you are now, not the person you were way back when.
You want to put yourself back in time as much as possible, but the story is always filtered through the totality of life experiences that simply weren't available to you when you were a child, a young adult, etc. This, I believe, is what makes memoir writing so exciting.
The Journey of Memoir Writing
- Through the writing of the memoir, you are taken on a journey into the past — one that is, paradoxically, being experienced in the present.
- With the eyes of who you are now, you are being invited to explore the past, not to record it.
- Autobiographical writing brings your present day awareness into experiences that were confusing, challenging, painful, exciting, beautiful, wretched and moving.
As part of this journey, you have the ability to change what happened, to give yourself that which you didn't have in the past.
This is, I believe, a way to heal the past. This can happen only if don't see the journey of writing a memoir as a simple recording your past. Rather, you are returning to explore, to understand, bring resolution and heal.
©2020 Emily Hanlon. All rights reserved.
Emily Hanlon has been a writer all her life and is the author of seven works of fiction and a book on writing and creativity. More
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