A Memoir Manifesto
by Grant Faulkner
Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
That’s the challenge, right? We’ve lived a life and like the storytelling creatures all humans are, we want to find our story, write our story, and finish our story.
How can we be creative—how can we tell our stories—every day?
That’s the question Memoir Nation wants to help you answer. And it’s an important one, right? I know you feel story ideas and memories beckoning you to give them voice. You’ve felt the wondrous, magical rushes of writing. You know how writing can change the way you wake up, how you approach your work, how you connect with other people.
You’ve begun to deepen your commitment to your writing simply by signing up for Memoir Nation. You know one thing: This. Is. Your. Time. To. Write. Your. Story.
Approaching the world with a creative mindset is wildly transforming—because suddenly you’re not accepting the world as it’s delivered to you, but living through your vision of life.
But so often we are essentially kidnapped by life. We have to deal with work challenges, parental duties, studying for finals, or cleaning the mayhem of our house. (Creativity gives the world many things, but it rarely provides a tidy house.)
It’s challenging to muster creative energy each day—and write! Urgent items on your to-do lists clamor for attention, and tackling those items is important, necessary work—so, really, how could you keep doing something so trivial as write your story?
No one assigns us to write our story. And, what’s more, society usually doesn’t reward us for nourishing our creative selves, at least not unless your work makes it to the shelves of a bookstore.
You might not think you’re a creative type, but to be human is to be a creative type, so one of the shoulds in your life should be to make sure creativity is not only at the top of your to-do list but that you put your creativity into action every day.
If you put off writing your story today, you create the momentum to put it off all the way to your deathbed.
We yearn to touch life’s mysteries, to understand where we come from, how we are the person we are today. Each story is a gift, a door that opens a new way to see and relate with others. Stories are the oxygen our souls breathe, a way to bring the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable to life.
Our creative lives shouldn’t be a hall pass from the stiff and forbidding demands of our lives. Writing our stories takes us beyond the grueling grind that life can unfortunately become, beyond the constraints of the roles we find ourselves in each day, to make the world a bigger place.
Stories remind us that we’re alive, and what being alive means.
Leslie Marmon Silko says that stories are “all we have to fight off illness and death.” Jacqueline Woodson says writers are “the ones who are bearing witness to what’s going on in the world.”
For a writer, life hasn’t really been lived until one’s stories find their way onto the page. We exist in the flickers of a rift with the world, searching for words that will sew the fissure, heal it. A rupture, a wound, finds the salve of your story. The signature of yourself is formed by the work you put into your story.
So it’s your duty as a writer, as a person, to build a world through your words and believe in your story as a beautiful work of incarnation, to see it as a gift to yourself and others, as something that elevates life with new meaning—your meaning.
Writing a story is many things: a quest, a prayer, a hunger, a tantrum, a flight of the imagination, a revolt, a daring escape that ironically leads you back to yourself. Our stories are the candles that light up the darkness that life can become, so we must live in the warm hues of our imaginative life.
We become the things we do, and I can promise you, if you excavate your life to make room for your imagination, if you open up time to keep writing, you won’t just finish your memoir, you’ll change, because once you realize yourself as a creator, you create worlds on and off the page.
“The days are long, but the years are short,” some wise person once said. Your story can’t wait. It needs you.
Writing your manifesto
Take your writing commitment one step further by writing a manifesto for yourself—a declaration of your intentions to yourself, if not the world, because a manifesto will fortify your commitment.
Your manifesto can be 10 pages or it can be a simple paragraph or a list. The important thing is to write why writing your memoir is important to you and how you’re going to make it a priority.
K.M. Weiland’s Manifesto is a good example of a simple manifesto that is similar to a vision board, but with text. Another good example is Jeff Goins’ The Writers Manifesto, which goes into more depth but in a simple, engaging way. You could also write a letter to your future self telling how and why you’re going to write your story.