Writing The Memoir

Around retirement time, there seems a need to write one's memoirs. It is a personal decision because it is doubtful that previous generations care much about their grandparents' past lives since they are wholly wrapped up in their own survival during these trying times. The reason we do it, memoirs,  is mostly for our own selfish reasons same as spending hours on genealogies that are usually a waste of time in the long run because they are pointless and characterless.  But perhaps when our progeny are retired and we are long-gone, they just might want something to do on a long winter's night and dig into the attic jetsam to come up with what we, their elders, have penned. That's the  reason we write memoirs. For that moment. No one wants to be forgotten.  Okay, so you have decided to begin the memoir. How to start it is the first problem and the reason most give up on the idea. First, they say, "the kids'll get the family coffers, so why do they really care about our past lives?". Well kids do and their kids do, too. The past seems to matter mostly to ten and twelve year olds who suddenly realize that their own parents were once kids. They like to make comparisons. Second, many begin their memoirs starting on the day they were born and then launch into long descriptions of parents and grandparents and wheres and whens and ifs and ands and finally in a morass of pages, give up and go play golf or knit a quilt or whatever they do for more fun. In an effort to make the tale readable and writeable, don't begin at the beginning, necessarily. Start by writing scenes taken from anywhere in your memory. They can be short or long. Stack them up as pages in a box. They don't have to be chronological. Just write it down like it happened in that moment. The readers will figure out the time frames, it's not that hard.  If you must put them in order, do it another day. Simply go with the memories just as if you were there and write them down with scribbles, notes and all. Name names and tell places and don't fret about long explanations. Think of it as a movie about yourself full of short clips that say who you are and what you did or thought or both at that time. And stick them in the box, messy or not. You can edit later. When the box of YOU is found one day, the bits of crossings out and scribbles will be adored. You might even have a book in the end that you can actually self publish and your off-spring can load it with formal covers, onto their book shelves, literary or not, and your people will love you for it. Well, love you more for it. If you are estranged from your family, do it anyway and tell it like it was - on your side of the fence. It's your chance to give your reasons. What you were as a child and the impressions you had are all valid whether you think so now or not. You can even go ahead and be perfectly honest because your impressions are just that - yours. There is no one to judge whether you made sense over it all or were correct or not and no apologies are necessary. Tell those to the priest or someone else and just go ahead with your side of it. When you have finished, I was going to say, but then I realized, you won't finish. You'll go on with this until you are no more. But your words and thoughts, the you that is truly you, will go on and on in the eyes of your readers.