I have edited several memoirs over the years, and the trap that many writers fall into, time and time again, is writing from the perspective of hindsight. Interspersed in the story of their childhoods are insights that have been learned over the course of decades. Your aim should be to transport readers to a different time and place in your life. If you inject into your writing information that you could only have learned as you became older and wiser, you are cheating your readers. You need to erase from your database all nuggets of wisdom, and, as hard as this may be, write from the perspective of THEN, and not NOW.
Recent Comments