How to compose your memoir’s Back Matter, Part 3

 

Are you making progress on your memoir’s Back Matter? I hope creating those materials has been a fun project for you. (For help with writing your Acknowledgments and Author Bio, check out How to compose your memoir’s Back Matter. For info about writing your Appendix and Glossary, click on How to compose your memoir’s Back Matter, Part 2.)

 

This week we’ll look at Endnotes (also called Notes), a Chronology, and Illustration Credits.

 

Endnotes:

 

Compiling Endnotes can be a pain in the neck but they’re important, especially for citing your sources—providing copyright information for materials you used or people/books you quoted or paraphrased.

 

The folks at Author Learning Center say this: “A citation is a formal way of giving credit for material used or referenced from another source, such as a book, journal, or website. Understanding citation best practices for nonfiction, including why, when, and how to use such citations, will help you create a book that is ethically and legally sound.”

 

Author Learning Center continues with the following reasons to use citations:

 

• “It’s the law: Copyright law protects people’s work. Using too much of someone’s work without giving them credit violates the law.”
• “It helps your readers: Your readers may want to explore concepts or facts mentioned in your book. By properly using citations, your readers can easily find and read the original material.”
• “It’s the right thing to do: Don’t steal other people’s work. Give credit where it’s due.”

Read more at Citation Best Practices for Nonfiction.

 

Endnotes also allow you to add interesting supplemental information to material you’ve included in the main body of your memoir. For example, in Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir, I wrote about arriving at our remote station in Lomalinda, South America, stepping into the house assigned to us, and discovering an old telephone from Pacific Northwest Bell in our own Seattle neighborhood back home. My dad had worked for decades for PNB in Seattle, and I had worked for them during summers in high school and college. I added this in an Endnote:

 

[13] Recently I learned that the husband of my former high school classmate, Jody Sherin, worked at Pacific Northwest Bell, too, and his department sent those phones to Lomalinda.

 

You can also include Bible verses or other references that pertain to a portion of your memoir. For example, I wrote about my family’s first day in South America and the people who had welcomed us, helped us, and fed us that day. And then I wrote, “Through those people and their gifts, our family experienced Jesus’s words, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’” The endnote for that reads like this:

 

[14] See Matthew 25:35 (ESB).

 

Your publisher will tell you which style guide to use in formatting your Endnotes—perhaps Associated Press Style (AP), Chicago Manual of Style, the Christian Writer’s Manual of Style, Modern Language Association (MLA), or the publisher’s own style guide.

 

For more information about Endnotes, click on:

What Are Endnotes, Why Are They Needed, and How Are They Used?

Chicago Manual of Style’s Notes and Bibliography: Sample Citations

Citation Best Practices for Nonfiction 

How to Cite Sources. . .

 

Chronology:

 

Your memoir’s End Matter can also include a Chronology (Timeline) if your story isn’t in chronological order.

 

Illustration Credits:

 

If not provided in captions or otherwise, Illustration Credits should be included in a page with that information. Some authors put Illustration Credits in their Acknowledgments or Copyright page.   

 

Remember:

Some pros consider Back Matter/End Matter to be optional.

Do what you think is best,

keeping in mind the types of information

your readers would enjoy.

Ask yourself what you like to check out

in a book’s Back Matter,

and then supply that for your readers.

They will thank you.