I was about to turn 60. Thrust into an early retirement by my former employer, I suddenly found myself with time on my hands and a burning urge to do something.
What I did was re-write my resume.
It was a real pain. I had to capture 40 years of experience and still look like I was young and vital. And I had to get it down to two pages. I can scarcely list my jobs in two pages having been in an industry that encouraged consolidations, mergers, and buyouts. Technically, I could say I’d had several careers.
I should write a book, I mused.
Now that was a good idea. My life experiences could certainly fill a book and I love to tell (and write) stories, so writing my memoirs seemed like a really good idea. The only problem was I had no idea how to write memoirs.
I used to spend days in the library researching new subjects, but now we have the Internet. A quick search brought over 15 million results on writing memoirs. That was going to go nowhere fast. So I next searched for books on writing memoirs and there were a quite a few of those as well. What inspired me most, however, was to read a few of the published memoirs that were in the market. I pulled out an old favorite, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, and was struck by the first paragraph.
All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand; but they ought not to attempt so fine an enterprise till they have passed the age of forty. This duty occurs to my own mind now that I am travelling beyond the term of fifty-eight years, and am in Florence, the city of my birth. Many untoward things can I remember, such as happen to all who live upon our earth; and from those adversities I am now more free than at any previous period of my career – nay, it seems to me that I enjoy greater content of soul and health of body than ever I did in bygone years. I can also bring to mind some pleasant goods and some inestimable evils, which, when I turn my thoughts backward, strike terror in me, and astonishment that I should have reached this age of fifty-eight, wherein, thanks be to God, I am still travelling prosperously forward.
Well, I’m certainly not of the caliber of the great Renaissance artist, but I have amassed some interesting stories. And it didn’t take long before I’d amassed a huge amount of advice on how to write memoirs—most of it bad.
The first piece of bad advice was to wait until I retired to start writing. I was already regretting not having jotted down stories told me by my mother or father before their deaths, and I simply didn’t want my daughter to have lingering questions about her parents when we are no longer around.
Second, I was told that to start writing memoirs, I should list all the important dates and events in my life and organize them chronologically. But the more I looked at memoirs and saw the ones that were really good, the more I realized there was a difference between a memoir and an autobiography or any other kind of history. Memoirs are not about events and dates. They are about memories and experiences.
Third, I was told that sharing my memoirs with other people before they were finished was a bad idea. Well, that was bad advice. First off, there aren’t many people with lives so interesting that someone will spend days reading about them. But almost anyone will spend fifteen minutes reading an interesting story from your life experiences.
And finally, I was told you could really make it big if you published your memoirs. Just look at the advances and sales of memoirs in the news. Well, what I found was that if you aren’t a former President of the United States, a famous personality, or an embezzler of several billion dollars, there really wasn’t much market for memoirs. There are exceptions, of course but the real market for memoirs is the family and friends who care about you enough to be interested in what you say.
These were such liberating discoveries that I started writing my memoirs at once, and started writing to others about how to write memoirs. I didn’t need to wait. I could start with any experience I wanted to. I could share them with family and friends as I wrote them because no publisher was going to make a major motion picture out of my life anyway.
The results are a growing body of works at Wait! I have another great idea.
But the big discovery in this process has been that everyone has a story to tell. Maybe it’s time to tell yours.
