Learning the Styles to Write Your Personal Memoirs and Creative Nonfiction

I'm discovering that writing your personal memoirs can take many different forms--and I'm not focusing on memoirs written by well-known personalities like politicians or entertainers who may have hired ghostwriters.

You can turn what seem like ordinary moments into personal tales that engage a reader by using your personality and some writing flair.

I've read stories before by James Herriot, I'm reading Annie Dillard's An American Life, and I recently saw a play by Amanda Eliasch called As I Like It. The three are quite different but show how keen observation turns a life into a story worth reading.

James Herriot was the pen name for an English veterinarian James Alfred Wight. His stories about his practice in the 1930s and 1940s drew me in completely thanks to his skill in creating the setting, the personalities, and showing how a person was affected by the animals in their lives--whether farmers witnessing the birth of a calf or a gruff, old man pretending he didn't care about his dog.

I've always liked James Herriot's stories and found his writing a style that pulls me in and doesn’t let me go. Here's an excerpt from Moses the Kitten that's also in James Herriot's Treasury for Children.

I stared unbelievably at a large sow stretched comfortably on her side, suckling a litter of about twelve piglets and right in the middle of the long, pink row furry black and incongruous, was Moses. He had a teat in his mouth and was absorbing his nourishment with the same rapt enjoyment as his smooth-skinned fellows on either side.

I just started reading Annie Dillard for the first time and picked up Three by Annie Dillard. My mother read Dillard's essay Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and originally being from western Pennsylvania, my parents knew her parents. I started reading An American childhood to see how she wrote about her childhood in Pittsburgh.

She gives significance to what could pass for everyday and uneventful details, similar to James Herriot. There was nothing inherently dramatic about her life. Her parents had a stable income and they had a stable marriage. But here is one anecdote about trying to go sleep as a five-year-old. Something mysterious entered her bedroom:

"I lay alone and was almost asleep when the damned thing entered the room by flattening itself against the open door and sliding in. It was a transparent, luminous oblong" (p291).

She wrote a car's headlights from the streets and she had noticed it for the first time in her life. She gave depth to the anecdote and her two-year-old sister was in the same room but asleep. Dillard wrote, "What did she know? She was innocent of evil."

I attended a play written by British photographer Amanda Eliasch titled As I Like It. Eliasch spoke with me before the performance saying that completing the project was itself a noble goal. She had it staged in London and in Los Angeles. She had written it over a weekend. The play lasted for just over an hour. She revealed a provocative detail about being tied up by the gardener in a shed and yet she added a comic twist about the gardener giving her money for it. She gave the money to her friends and they were more excited about that than they were worried about what had happened to her.

The play featured operatic numbers since the love of opera ran through her mother who had been a trained opera singer.