Write the way you talk—your family will thank you
One reason that life story books that derive from personal history interviews are often so compelling is that they reveal the subject’s true voice.
Picture it: An interviewer and a subject settle in for some reminiscing. Perhaps the story sharing is stilted at first. Then a comfort level is established and a rhythm is found and stories flow—and the storyteller, free of pretenses, sounds just like they always do. Maybe a little more animated (it’s exciting sharing all those memories!) or a little more sentimental (again, those memories!!), but like them.
If that same individual sat down to write their stories, though, all too often their voice would get lost. Even the most seasoned writers can spend too much time focusing on making things sound “writerly” at the expense of sounding natural.
Reading work that is written with a disregard for one’s own voice can feel labored—but mostly, it can feel like we’re hearing from someone we’ve never met. Where is the Aunt Ida you know and love amidst all those flowery adjectives and semi-coloned sentences? What happened to Grandmom’s penchant for punctuating her thoughts with cuss words? How about the southern idioms that Pop usually wields—without them it’s as if he’s speaking a different language altogether.
William Zinsser (who wrote my all-time favorite book about autobiographical writing, Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past) put it this way when describing a life story book his father left to him:
“Not being a writer, my father never worried about finding his ‘style.’ He just wrote the way he talked, and now, when I read his sentences, I hear his personality and his humor, his idioms and his usages, many of them an echo of his college years in the early 1900s. I also hear his honesty. He wasn’t sentimental about blood ties, and I smile at his terse appraisals of Uncle X, ‘a second-rater,’ or Cousin Y, who ‘never amounted to much.’”
He just wrote the way he talked.
When drafting your own life stories, write the way you talk, I implore you. Let your loved ones hear you when they read your memoir. Give them the gift not only of your memories, but of your voice, too.
3 ways to know your memoir voice is your authentic voice
Read a few paragraphs aloud without getting tripped up.
If you stumble over pronunciation or find the rhythm wonky (too many commas? too many long sentences?) then you’ve lost your voice. “If you’ve gone wrong, tried in print to be something you are not in life, the phrases feel like marbles in your mouth,” Anna Quindlen says in her book Write for Your Life. “But if you’ve gotten your own voice down on the page, you will read aloud and think: ‘Yep, that’s it. That’s me.’”
Leave your thesaurus in another room.
If you’re constantly looking up ‘better’ words, chances are they’re not words that would normally come out of your mouth. You’re not trying to impress your audience (most often, your family and descendants); you are trying to reveal yourself to them in new—honest—ways.
3 - Edit for clarity and impact only.
Don’t rewrite your sentences to make them sound overly polished or ornate. Don’t edit with an editor or teacher in mind, but with an audience of loved ones: Read your stories and ask yourself, Is this how I talk? Is my personality there? Is the STORY compelling/interesting/funny/engaging/memorable? Edit your work so the answers to those questions are, ‘yes!!’.
Oh, and the easiest hack to writing life stories that maintain your true voice? Speak your stories into a recorder, then transcribe (and lightly edit) them later.
If you write with an authentic voice, your readers will be captivated by you—your words, your stories, you.
Here’s one time I gave in to my client’s preferences that still haunts me: Why we did not identify people in any of the photos in their family history book.