Are your memoir’s main characters real enough?

As a reader, you know what it’s like to give up on a book, right?

In one way or another, the author failed to interest you in his story and you aren't willing to waste more time on it. You close the book, toss it in the car, and return it to the library.

Here's the point: We can't force people to read our memoirs.

Like dear Cecil Murphey says, "We have to persuade people to read us and assure them that the time they spend with us will be rewarding."

One way to write a user-friendly memoir is to create realistic main characters.

Think about one of your main characters. Have you included significant physical features and mannerisms?

Include sensory details—details pertaining to the five senses: What was it like to touch, smell, taste, hear, and see him or her?

Today I offer you charming, intriguing examples of details describing people. Settle in, enjoy these jewels, and learn from them. 

The first is an excerpt from Gordon Braun's soon-to-be-published memoir, Paperboy: Dispatches From A Town That Isn't Even A Town. Here, Gorden, age twelve and starting a new job as a paperboy, is impressed with an older boy and his responsibilities:

Finally it’s my turn to get my papers from Mike, the shack manager, a fifteen-year-old sophomore at Shoreline High School with a paper route of his own, a key to the padlock of the shack door and the additional responsibility of carefully counting out and recording the number of papers given to each boy. Mike is a red-headed, gap-toothed, cheerful type who reminds me of a cross between Howdy Doody and a sincere version of wise-cracking Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine. 

“Hi Gordon, how many today?” he asks. I like that he knows my name. In fact, he knows everyone’s name and everyone likes that about him.

This next example is also from Gordon’s memoir:

Jan . . . is one of Mom’s best friends. She used to live next door but still comes by for frequent visits. A short, stout woman, Jan is a devout Catholic with a generous heart and an infectious laugh. As the two of them sit at the dining room table drinking Folgers coffee and smoking cigarettes, Mom’s friend entertains us all as she tells stories about being marooned in France by the stock market crash while visiting her wicked aunt in 1929. Or about salmon fishing with her husband Burt off the Washington coast near Westport. Or her bowling league at the Polynesian-themed Leilani Lanes. Or her children and their piece-of-work Boston Terrier named Barney. Or about Rusty and Lori, the two women who own the dry-cleaning business where she runs a steam press and who live together under suspicious circumstances. 

She smokes unfiltered Pall Malls out of a red pack while Mom smokes filtered Tareytons as they share their time together. There’s something appealing about the way Jan tamps down the tobacco by repeatedly tapping the cigarette against her left wrist before she lights up. Every now and then she’ll stop talking and tilt her head back to delicately remove a bit of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. In these brief instances she looks wistful to me. But I’m twelve, so what do I know? The interlude is momentary and easy to miss because she’s promptly on to another story. (Gordon Braun, Paperboy: Dispatches From a Town That Isn’t Even a Town)

Here's an excerpt from Frederick Buechner’s Wishful Thinking: “The faraway look in his eyes is partly the beer and partly that he’s really far away.”

Here’s another from Frederick Buechner’s Now and Then:

He [James Muilenberg] was an angular man with thinning white hair, staring eyes, and a nose and chin which at times seemed so close to touching that they gave him the face of a good witch. In his introductory Old Testament course, the largest lecture hall that Union had was always packed to hear him. Students brought friends. Friends brought friends. People stood in the back when the chairs ran out. Up and down the whole length of the aisle he would stride as he chanted the war songs, the taunt songs, the dirges of ancient Israel. With his body stiff, his knees bent, his arms scarecrowed far to either side, he never merely taught the Old Testament but was the Old Testament. He would be Adam, wide-eyed and halting as he named the beasts—“You are . . . an elephant . . . a butterfly . . . an ostrich!”—or Eve, trembling and afraid in the garden of her lost innocence, would be David sobbing his great lament as the death of Saul and Jonathan, would be Moses coming down from Sinai. His face uptilted and his eyes aghast, he would be Yahweh himself, creating the heavens and the earth, and then he called out, “Let there be light.” There is no way of putting it other than to say that there would be light, great floods of it reflected in the hundreds of faces watching him in that enormous room. (Frederick Buechner, Now and Then)

And Rachel Hanel writes: “Susan Orlean’s description of John Laroche is one of the most perfect descriptions ever written: ‘John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth.’”

Describe your memoir’s main characters

so that readers can visualize them,

as if they were with you and that person.

Revise and polish your memoir in those places

where your main characters need to come to life.