DID YOU KNOW? . . .
Googling "memoir" brings up an astounding 25,100,000 references.
In 2002, 24 million people in the U.S. described themselves as writers. Today, there are plenty more, and many of them have blogs.
Technorati is currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and more than 250 million pieces of tagged social media.
There are over 175,000 new blogs every day. Bloggers update their blogs with more than one-and-a-half million posts each day, or 18 each second.
Wikipedia has over 10 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a total of over 1.74 billion words for all Wikipedias, as of March 2008. Just in English, Wikipedia passed the 2,000,000 article mark and those consist of over 1,002,000,000 words.
The numbers are overwhelming. It seems everyone has a story to tell, whether in a published memoir of a Facebook page. What is a story? What is a memoir? Here are 50 handy little ways I've come up with to answer today’s most-discussed literary question.
• Storytelling is art.
• Memoir is storytelling.
• Memoir is art.
• In just the past few months memoirs by newsmakers and celebrities like Barack Obama, Augusten Burroughs, Barbara Walters, Julie Andrews, Ted Sorenson, Leslie Jordan, Valerie Bertinelli, Jim Nantz, Suze Rotolo, Jessica Queller, Barack Obama, Scott McClellan and David Sheff have topped bestseller lists joining earlier memoirs that captured the imagination of the American reading public—A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah; Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin; Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert; The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls; and Marley & Me by John Grogan. The list goes on.
• This is the Age of Memoir
• The Wall Street Journal recently noted that memoirs were once used mainly by retired political figures to burnish their reputations and relate a few moldy anecdotes of the self-serving "and then I telephoned the White House on the hotline" variety. But the times they are a changin’ and memoir is now the form of the masses.
• Writing your personal stories can transform the life you are living.
• Memoir is a story you shape about your life.
• Memoir is an agent of change.
• Memoir is a story of some slim segment of your life.
There are 779 million references for “story” on Google.
Amazon.com offers 956,494 results for story, 291,772 for autobiography, and 218,833 for memoir.
• "Shimmering Images" are the basis of memoir.
• "Shimmering Images" are flickering memory pictures—like an image of your mother peeling potatoes at the sink—that you’ve remembered forever and that hang around in your mind waiting to bring meaning in your life.
• "Shimmering Images" are doorways to your most powerful personal stories.
• You use your "Shimmering Images" to construct meaning.
• Writing stories is a way to order chaos.
• Story heals the soul in an elemental way.
• Memoir closes a story around life experience and in the process “closes” that experience in the past.
• You make stories to take yourself and others to a new realm where the spirit can be repaired.
• A recent National Education Association study found 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing for personal fulfillment.
• People read memoir to learn how to live a better life by witnessing mistakes, victories, wisdom, and humility displayed by fellow human beings.
• People read memoir to find heroes of everyday life.
• People want to be shown examples of how to live a better life.
• Each person has a story he tells about his life. Writing memoir is about transforming that story.
• Everything is a story.
• The job of the memoirist is to claim your own truth, accept responsibility for your actions, and make sense of other people’s actions in the context of a story.
• Every person remembers dozens of "Shimmering Images" every day.
• Life wouldn’t be recognizable without your "Shimmering Images."
• People remember "Shimmering Images" because memories wait for you to pay attention to them and see the wisdom they have to share.
• Writing a personal story helps you make sense of the chaos of life events and attach meaning to them.
• People use words to make meaning in their lives.
• If you do not write your hardest stories they remain confused inside of you and you never get on to other things in your life.
• Writing life stories borders on they mystical because you become the master of your own reality.
• Writing a personal story is a kind of art that soothes the soul.
• When you write down your "Shimmering Images" and find the wisdom that’s inside them, you change.
• When you use the wisdom of your "Shimmering Images" to make a truth about the past, a new future dawns.
• Writing "Shimmering Images" gives people the opportunity to break free of old storylines and move on to bigger, more compassionate selves.
• "Shimmering Images" are key to understanding your life.
• If you write with balance, honesty, and compassion, you don’t hurt people with your memoir.
• You must voice your stories to get beyond them.
• Being honest in memoir has to do with compassion for self and others.
• You can’t be truly honest if you aren’t being compassionate.
• Getting honest in memoir means learning compassion for the people in your life you would rather demonize.
• Getting honest in memoir means coming to terms with shared humanness, seeing all the players with empathy, including yourself.
• Compassion transforms memoir.
• You have the right to speak. You have the right to tell your stories. Your have the right to be heard. The book Shimmering Images helps you do all that.
• The book Shimmering Images helps you believe the stories you tell are important.
• The book Shimmering Images refuses to let naysayers silence the storyteller in each person.
• The book Shimmering Images helps you rip away the illusion of what you’ve
always told yourself—the negative storylines—and construct a new, more positive way of seeing life experience.
• Narrative heals.
• The book Shimmering Images gives writers a way to use wisdom to touch hearts and changes lives.
The Library of Congress has more than 130 million items, including more than 29 million cataloged books and other print materials, more than 59 million manuscripts, and they are still collecting.
Lisa Dale Norton is the author of SHIMMERING IMAGES: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir (St. Martin's Press, August 2008). She teaches memoir and creative nonfiction classes for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.
