Tuesday Tidbit: Holding your published memoir in your hands

Picture this: You’re holding your published memoir in your hands for the first time. Just imagine!

What emotions will race through your being?

What will the cover look like?

How will the pages smell?

Imagine opening the cover of your memoir.

Turning the pages.

Reading the words—your words.

How fantastic will that be?!

If you persevere, 

if you never give up, 

if you stick with it, 

your dream can come true:

You can publish your memoir.

And when you do, be sure to tell all of us here at SM 101.

That me, holding Grandma's Letters from Africa.

A memoir is so much more than spinning yarns and passing on tales

Often when people hear the word “memoir,” they don’t know exactly what a memoir is.

At a sign-up for one of my memoir classes, one woman said, “A memoir class! Good—I love journaling!”

But memoir is not journaling. A journal is private—for your eyes only—but you write a memoir for others to read.

A memoir is not an autobiography. An autobiography documents your whole life beginning with the day you were born, but a memoir focuses on one segment of your life—a specific theme or time period, a slice of life.

Let’s look at that more closely:

You can write a memoir based on a theme—for example, the theme of working as a missionary pilot, or an emergency room nurse, or the mother of quintuplets.  You focus on only that theme, leaving out other topics—such as the fact that you directed an award-winning movie or served as mayor of your town. (Those topics could be the stuff of another memoir.)

Or a person can write a memoir based on a time period. My memoir, Grandma’s Letters from Africa, covers a time period—my first four years in Africa. Your time period might be grad school, your years in the Marines, or as a mother of toddlers. You focus only on that slice of your life and leave out other topics—such as an experience you had in middle school or a camping trip with the Boy Scouts.

Include only those details that pertain to your chosen window of time or your memoir’s theme.

Writing is so much more than just telling stories,

spinning yarns,

and passing on tales from the past:

Reflecting, examining, unraveling,

pondering, and musing

are requirements for writing a memoir—

as are untangling, mulling over, sifting through,

analyzing, and sorting out.

Here at SM 101, our memoirs are based on Deuteronomy 4:9, “Always remember what you’ve seen God do for you, and be sure to tell your children and grandchildren!”

With that purpose in mind, ask yourself what God was doing as you see it now, in retrospect. 

Think about turning points, 

defining moments, 

key people, 

disappointments, 

successes, 

failures, 

surprises, 

setbacks, 

achievements, 

detours, 

honors, 

and victories.

Look back on a time God or someone significant 

shook you to your core, 

melted your heart, 

knocked you to your knees, 

changed your mind, 

took your breath away, 

stretched you to the breaking point, 

revised your goals, 

opened your eyes, 

made you cry buckets of tears, 

gave you new perspectives.

Look for deeper lessons and meanings God had for you in the events of your life. (Writing a spiritual memoir does not require that you have supernatural, astonishing stories that would make the evening news and get tweeted around the world.)

Peel back the layers: What did you learn about yourself? How did the experience change your life? What new person did you become?

What patterns in your faith did you discover that you hadn’t noticed before?

What did you learn about God? Do you now have a better understanding of His purpose for your life? How did your experience strengthen your faith for future challenges?

Dig deeply to discover what God has done for you, in you, through you—every day, every step of the way, through the best of times and the worst of times.

Your life’s story is much deeper and higher and wider than the story that’s on the surface. Probing and questioning and reflecting and unraveling will help you discover significance you probably missed earlier—and discovering that can be life-changing for you as well as for your readers.

Jesus said, “Go tell your family everything God has done for you” (Luke 8:39). That means writing a memoir is a holy work. It is a ministry.

Your job is to notice God in the midst of your gatherings and activities and responsibilities and relationships and homes.

As a memoirist, you have the privilege of working with sacred stories—stories which are for the most part stories of day by day events and average people—but nevertheless it’s a holy calling to tell the next generations about God’s involvement in their lives and their families’ lives (Psalm 145:4).

Such stories need not be dry and boring.

They can and should include charm

and humor and adventure and intrigue.

Write stories that are winsome and fascinating to read.

Related posts:

“Look where you have not had the heart to look before”

“Questions we have to ask ourselves…as we write”  

“Who is your Mr. Romero?”   

Book giveaway!

“I realized I wasn’t alone in my suffering, and my wounding wasn’t just for me,” writes Tina Samples.

“I realized that God’s plan to work in my life, and my family’s life, had a broad scope; He wanted to bring healing to others facing the same issues.” (from newly published Wounded Women of the Bible: Finding Hope When Life Hurts; emphasis mine)

David Wolpe says it this way:

“When God, for whatever reason, has wounded you, 

you learn how to minister to others with the same wound…. 

Even the keenest anguish can be, as the poet put it, 

a ‘gauntlet with a gift in it’—

a challenge to use the wisdom to help others in the same pain.”

 David Wolpe

Tina understands David Wolpe’s message: She has both a gift and a challenge to share her story with others who need hope and healing.

Tina’s co-author, Dena Dyer, writes, “We’ve also seen God use excruciating wounds to purify, mold, and shape us into more resilient, hopeful believers.”

Dena, too, knows about the gift and the challenge.

In Wounded Women of the Bible: Finding Hope When Life Hurts, Tina and Dena have woven together stories of women in the Bible and stories of today’s women, and their prayer is that “you would find His peace for your pain, His joy in the midst of your trials, and His hope for your heartache.”

I am humbled and honored that Tina and Dena's book includes a story from my memoir, Grandma's Letters From Africa.

To celebrate Tina’s and Dena’s new book, I’ll give away a free copy to one of you readers!

Here’s how it works:

Between now and October 9, e-mail me a vignette about the ways God (a) helped you heal from a wound, tragedy, or heartache, and (b) in the process, taught you new things about Himself and strengthened your faith, and (c) used the incident for His glory and your good.

By sharing your story, you will be doing what David Wolpe and Tina and Dena encourage: You’ll be offering a gift of hope and healing to others who are suffering their own wounds.

That’s what 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 is all about: “the God of all comfort … comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”

Aim at 800 words. I will publish here the vignette I select (I’ll be happy to edit before publishing) and will send the author a free copy of Wounded Women of the Bible: Finding Hope When Life Hurts.

E-mail your vignette to grandmaletters [@] aol [dot] com (remove the brackets, replace the word "dot" with a period and scrunch everything together) and do me a favor: Write WOUNDED VIGNETTE in the subject line. Otherwise I will probably delete it as spam.

Here are a few quotes from Tina and Dena’s book which, I suspect, will resonate with you and give you story ideas:

“We can’t see what God sees, we don’t know what God knows, and we have no idea how God will deal with any given situation. But we can rest in the assurance of Psalm 56:8, ‘You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book’ (NLT). Psalm 147:3 says, ‘He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.’ God will restore us in due time.”

 “God understands even when things don’t make sense to us: ‘Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit’ (Psalm 147:5).…  He will mend our broken heart so that we can find a way to fully live.”

Oh, how I appreciate those words: He mends and heals so we can “fully live.” Not just limp through life but fully live!

Tina writes: “One day … I came upon John 16:33. I remember weeping as I experienced a sense of the Lord’s presence. At that very moment, God revealed to me that through Him I could have peace in all things, and that although we live in a fallen world, I could have joy through Him—because the world has no power over God. He has overcome the world. He is the conqueror, defeater, and deliverer, and He reigns over all things. That Scripture has carried me through my high school years, until I left home and found healing. God used it to give peace to my heart during my toughest days.”

“God uses everything—even the most undesirable parts of our past—for His, and our, good.”

“…What looks detrimental to us, God, in His mercy, can make beneficial.”

Ready, set, go! Write!

Related post: Wounded Women

If you’re not following SM 101 on Facebook, 

you’re missing a lot of additional resources.

Click on the Facebook link in the right column toward the top.