Allen Shen Journal 3

Memoir writing was mostly just a strange experience to me. Not particularly painful or frustrating, but also not very rewarding or satisfying. In terms of difficulty, I honestly had and still have no idea how hard writing memoirs was.

In general, I am fairly confident in my writing ability and academic ability. I have what most people would consider a fairly high gpa, the majority of which were from classes that were writing intensive. That being said, those writing intensive classes all focused on academic writing, not creative writing: lab reports, essays for a given prompt, analyzing a given poem or reading, what you would expect from your average student. When given a memoir prompt, I was somewhat unsure of what I was even supposed to write about or why I was even writing it. My first draft for the first memoir went through significant revisions, more so than I ever had to do for an academic paper. 

Even now I’m still not sure why I’m writing memoirs, aside from the fact that it was an assignment for class. My current impression of memoirs so far, given what I have been given as reading material, is that it uses personal experiences and narrative as the method to drive a point or share ideas. While the purpose of all writing is to share ideas, memoirs differentiate themselves in that they’re technically nonfiction, but expressly don’t come with the academic rigor of a research paper or even a news article, making them easier to digest and generally more enjoyable. In any case, throughout the entirety of memoir writing, I didn’t understand what I was writing for, aside from fulfilling the assignment requirements, so it feels as if my memoirs are just random stories I just happened to remember from my life and decided to ramble about. Fortunately, rambling is much easier than writing academic papers, so even though it felt very aimless, there was little frustration as I slapped my thoughts on the digital paper. I am of the opinion that, in order for memoir writing to be more fulfilling, I have to want to talk about something, which is difficult to force if I just feel indifferent about sharing my thoughts. 

I will note that reading other people’s memoirs, from professionals or from classmates, was interesting; probably the most enjoyable part of the memoir writing experience. I could probably spend an entire day reading random memoirs if I really wanted to, though most of the time doing so would be occupied finding memoirs I’d care to read about. That being said, memoirs almost feel dangerous to me in the context of misinformation. Memoirs, as I discussed a bit earlier, fit into this weird middle ground between entertainment writing and educational writing. They aren’t fictional writing, so you cannot dismiss them easily, but they also have little objectivity compared to informative literature. What you learn after reading the memoir was the personal experiences of one person, which can fairly easily skew your perception of reality because of survivorship bias. For example, I remarked after reading a classmate’s memoir that “I forgot how common divorces were.” In hindsight, while divorces are actually alarmingly common to me(about a third of marriages end in divorce, and about sixth of children have divorced parents, those numbers were not double-checked), it is incorrect to make that assumption, or even change your perception, simply based on one memoir. The flip side of that issue, and why I enjoyed reading other people’s memoirs, was that it gave me perspectives on other people’s experiences. I would have never learned about watches with remote control functions, about the nature of aviation mechanics tests, or even the experience of working in a crappy retail job to pay bills. It was somewhat enlightening, particularly to someone who has fairly narrow experiences. I just have to be careful to remember that they are singular, personal experiences, a subset of a population of billions of people and countless stories.