Writing about your life has incredible power. In this episode, Chris Valdheims shares his experiences of writing a memoir. He describes the process of collecting material, shaping it, and receiving feedback.

Writing about your life means taking ownership of one's story and finding meaning in what feels like confusing and disconnecting events.

Finally, we talk about how writing about your life helps anyone to find common ground, especially with people who don't share our life experiences.

Takeaways

• Writing about one's life can be valuable for personal growth and self-knowledge.
• Memoir writing involves finding meaning in events and taking ownership of one's story.
• Sharing and receiving feedback from others can help improve the writing and provide new perspectives.
• Personal stories have the power to connect people and foster understanding.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

03:17 Starting the Writing Process

05:14 Writing Raw and Collecting Material

07:32 Learning about Memoir Writing

09:53 Sharing and Receiving Feedback

12:47 Objective and Subjective Truth

15:10 Finding Meaning in Events

17:06 Taking Ownership of Your Story

18:33 Themes and Connections

21:24 The Hero's Journey

22:19 Room for Invention and Interpretation

24:08 Finding Common Ground

26:01 The Value of Personal Stories

27:56 Writing as a Tool for Self-Knowledge

28:25 Conclusion

If you want to learn more about how to tell your personal story, join our mailing list: https://hypermemoir.beehiiv.com/subscribe

So I've mentioned a few times on this podcast that one of the things I've done over the past decade or so is write a book about my life. So it's actually not even a book about my entire life. It's actually about a specific incident and I'll explain why that distinction matters. And it's because I had a story. I have a story to tell and I've talked about it on this podcast. It involves my grandfather, it involves my adoption, it involves a lot of other elements that I wanted to bring together.

into a single package. So I figured, let's write a book. And this podcast is actually an adjunct to that. This podcast sort of delves into a lot of the same themes and issues that the book does. Now, the book isn't published. I'm in the process of talking to publishers, talking to agents, figuring out exactly how to do that. So that's an ongoing project and it's kind of the second phase. So you write a book and then you put it out to the world and there's a lot of ways to do that. So doing that now. But I think the point of this episode is really about...

the value of writing about your life. And this episode is going to be helpful for anyone who is struggling with a creative project that involves personal narrative or wants to write a personal narrative, which is another way to kind of talk about this, where you're talking about events that have taken place in your own life. And I would say this is doubly true when we're talking about things that might have an emotional charge or are challenging. Because for me, writing this book, it had to deal with a lot of material.

that was challenging for me personally and difficult. And writing it actually helped me to grow and understand those things better. So I wanted to share with you what I've learned from writing about my life so that you, if you choose to do it, can do it. And I would actually say that it's important for anyone. So even if you haven't had the kind of convoluted, weirdo experiences that I've had, everybody has some kind of experience, whether it's a job or a relationship or family history or single event that happened in your life.

We all have something that happened in our lives that we can write about. So I do feel like writing about my life has been a fast track to self-knowledge and I wanna share what I've learned about that with you. So my name is Chris Waldheims. This is the HyperMemory podcast where we're talking about a lot of different things, but typically we're talking about how to find a creative voice, how to build a creative practice, how to tell your story. And that's what I've been doing on.

this podcast for the last half a year. And I appreciate everybody who's been listening and sending me messages and sharing their thoughts with me because it helps me to make more stuff and make better stuff that's gonna help you. And if you really like this podcast, I'd really love it if you could leave a review on Spotify or Apple or wherever you leave podcasts, or sorry, wherever you listen to podcasts. And we also have a newsletter, it's linked in the show notes. So...

That's when I decided to start writing about what I was doing. So I was discovering my grandfather, who is this artist named Xanis Valtimes. I've mentioned him in previous episodes. I even have an episode, I think two or three episodes ago, where I talked about him and his work. I encourage you to listen to it because it's fascinating and he's an unknown artist who's actually becoming known. So if you go listen to that episode, you're going to be ahead of the curve in knowing about a new artist or an old artist that is now coming to awareness in the art world. So check that one out.

But this was more intentional because as I started writing in 2012, I knew that I wanted to tell a story and I knew that I was going to write a book about this. But at the time I didn't actually have any sense of what the book was going to be about. As I said, I had just embarked on this journey of learning about my grandfather and kind of learning about where he had come from and where my family had come from. This was all information I didn't know as a child and didn't know growing up and even well into adulthood. I didn't know anything about it. So it was all new to me and I wanted a way to process it and pull it all together.

So I started writing out longhand. I remember I would go to work, I'd come back from work, I think I'd make it back from work before the kids got home or I had to make dinner or whatever. So I would actually spend like 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour writing out longhand, anything I could remember. So that could be things from my time in foster care, that could be things that happened to me as an adult, that could be things that happened to me as a child. I was just kind of getting stuff out there because I knew that this was going to be the fodder, this was going to be the material.

that I would then later shape into a book. So phase one for me was writing raw, just getting stream of consciousness, random access. There was no pattern. It was really just, what am I thinking about today? What am I remembering today? It wasn't even to tell a story. It was just to write down the facts as best I remembered it. And sometimes I'd get creative. Sometimes I'd get a mode where I'm like, okay, I'm gonna actually try to invent something or tell a story or whatever.

But ultimately, I ended up with this big pile of yellow notepads, which I should probably put on social media just so you can actually see what I'm talking about. I think I ended up with eight of them. And I labeled them A through G. And so it's a big stack of notepads. I don't know how many pages that is. But it was all handwritten that I was going to then sculpt later. And that was the initial process. Because as I started writing, a lot of stuff that I'd forgotten started to come to the surface. And I looked at it like,

the process of actually doing that initial writing wasn't, again, about anything for public consumption, but what it did do is it kind of opened up the archives. It opened up my memory where, from writing about one event that happened to me, let's say in foster care when I was six years old, all of a sudden, as I was driving later or in the grocery store or watching a movie, I'd get kind of these flashes of other things that were around that maybe I hadn't thought about. And that would come to the surface.

So during that time, a lot of stuff started surfacing and I was just trying to catch it, just trying to write it down. Because again, I knew it was gonna become a narrative at some point. It wasn't a narrative at that time. It was just a series of scattered events. Now over time I did that in 2012. And then over the next couple of years, I started learning about the, I guess you could say the art or the practice of writing memoirs. I took a class, I think initially at UCLA Extension. Again, this was in 2012 when I started the process.

And I found that really helpful because I learned, okay, I'd heard about memoirs and I really kind of didn't think much of the genre of writing. I thought, okay, this is just people kind of being navel gazing like who think, okay, I'm so great. And I tell my biography, which isn't what it is. And I'll actually explain the difference between like a biography and a memoir. And actually I'll tell you right now, which when you talk about a memoir, we're not talking about, here's my biography. I was born on this day. I did things. I had this illustrious career. I got married.

join the army and all this stuff and blah, until I was 70 or 80 or 90 years old and then I died. That's a biography. There's not really a single story in there. It's a lot of stories and biographies are cool, especially if someone's had a really rich life. It's great to hear about how that arc of life went, but a memoir is different. And a memoir is really about sort of an episode in someone's life. And the episode can be a day, the episode can be

years. And so, and it can kind of track a biography a little bit. And there are biographical elements, but really what it is, it's about an experience. So, you know, if you think of some of the most famous memoirs, and by the way, I haven't read all of them, but like, you know, I think there's the one Eat, Pray, Love memoir. It's a first person account of somebody traveling the world, discovering themselves. So yes, there's going to be background information about that person's life, about who they are, where they came from, what their life was like before.

But ultimately, it's about that one experience. You can have an experience where, and I think the guy who got trapped, his arm got trapped under a boulder. I think he wrote a book about how it was to be trapped under that boulder and have to remove his own arm with a pocket knife. I think that was the story. But anyway, point is, this isn't a long story. This is like, hey, one story from my life. And so for me, I wanted to tell the story of discovering my grandfather. And as I was writing, I was actually experiencing it at the same time.

So I discovered my grandfather and the events around that were happening at the same time. So as things were occurring in my life, as I started learning more about my grandfather's story or traveling, I mentioned in other Pacific travel to Latvia and Lithuania and Germany and other countries to find out about my family and my family history, I wrote things down. I took notes because what I was going to do is take all of those journeys, take all of that.

but then also personally. And I think that really tracked with the process of writing about my life. So it wasn't just about writing the events, but it was also about the personal transformation that I was engaged in at the time. And what I found helpful, what was really cool, I found helpful in that journey is as you're doing that, you find there's a lot of other people who are doing that. And I found that community of people who are writing about their lives through writing workshops, there used to be this really great.

series of writers workshops in Los Angeles called Writing Workshops Los Angeles. And they had really good courses on memoir. A lot of the authors, or sorry, a lot of the teachers for those courses were published authors who had written memoirs. And I'm still in touch with a few of them actually. Um, but what was really cool is then that got me on the path of, okay, so I've written all this stuff down for my own consumption on my legal pads and it's kind of this ratty pile of legal pads. Now we're a few years in. And at that point I started typing it up.

So I bring it into my computer, I bring it into the piece of software, Scrivener, anybody who's written any kind of long form stuff knows what that is. It's a really good platform for just putting in chunks of writing and then organizing it later, which is where I was. So I started doing that. But then what that really got me to a point of is now I can start to share bits and pieces with other people. So the writing workshops with what are great is you write something, let's say two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 page document, and you share it with other

people and they do the same with you and you give each other feedback. And so for me, it was nice to not only write something, but then start the process of other people seeing it and sharing it with other people. And what that does is A, you learn about what people like and how they respond to what you write. But then it forces you to write in a way that you realize, okay, so if I'm going to turn this into a book, it's not just about me. This has to be valuable for the reader and there has to be a lesson for the reader. So it kind of got me to dig. And it also has to be enjoyable to read. So that means

Obviously things like form and grammar and craft matter, but then events matter. And what am I writing about? Why am I writing about it? Why would somebody care? And so sharing it really helps you do that self reflection on your own life. If you're telling your story of your life, then presenting it to other people who don't know you by the way. So this is a room full of strangers who don't know me. They don't know anything about my story. So you kind of got to put it in a way that's interesting and succinct and really to the point, but giving enough background. So that's what it is.

In those workshops, I'm also learning about the form of memoir and kind of the theories behind it. So again, it's not just autobiography, but it's really a document of memory. So as I mentioned on my legal pad, I'm writing about things that happened to me in the past. And I don't know all the details. I don't know everything that happened, but there's things I could guess at and there's places where you're forced to do what I forget who the author was who said this.

do what's called perhaps and where you're like, well, perhaps this happened, I don't recall, or maybe this was happening. So you kind of learn to write in that manner because what you wanna do is you wanna play with the memory of events and distill it into something deeper, but you don't wanna lie. You don't wanna be unethical. So it's kind of an interesting form. And there are authors who have lied. There are authors who are like, oh yeah, I was in a gang or I got arrested for drug trafficking. And it turns out like they got like, you know.

going through that process, it really helped me to interpret what I was learning. And this is learning about my grandfather, this is learning about my family. And what was interesting about that is the process of writing about my life, it actually took me from just simply talking about the facts to talking about things like my feelings about the facts, which actually became more interesting and I think a lot more compelling for myself as a writer.

because then I'm forced to confront, well, okay, I have this whole complicated family history where my grandfather is this artist who I didn't know anything about growing up, and now I'm discovering him. So what are my feelings about that? What do I think about that? How do I respond to that? And I think getting into those subjective realms is where things get super interesting. And that's super interesting, but also super challenging because that's emotional. And even in the kind of, I think the theme in my book is really kind of going from that.

that mode of I'm going to try to get all the facts and look at it as an impartial observer, good luck, to I'm going to talk about my feelings about the facts. I'm going to talk about my subjective experience that I've lived and turn it into a story. And I think when you turn this series of events, when you take the pile of material and you start to turn it into a story, you give things meaning. The meaning is malleable and it's up to you, but when it starts to have meaning...

I think that's when we can start to process the events that have happened to us. So if what you're writing about is something that is challenging or difficult or has a real emotional charge for some reason, these emotions are going to kind of come up and it's going to help you to process it. And I really do credit writing about my life as helping me to process a lot of my feelings around my adoption and foster care, which even if I never published a book about it, benefit, there's a lot of benefit there because

makes me a better husband, makes me a better father, a better friend, more empathetic, more understanding of other people because the more you know about yourself, the more you can know about others and the more you can be compassionate to others. And the other thing it kind of tells you is that you learn that you have a right to your experience of events. So of course we have objective truth and we should really stick to that as much as we can, but you do have a lot of freedom in sharing the subjective elements of your experience. And I think what really happens is you start to get a

sense of ownership around your particular telling of events. So you don't have to go by someone else's story. I mean, you might know someone who experienced the same thing or had the same sort of objective experience as you. Maybe they're sitting right next to you when it happened or in the same family and they've always told a story and you're like, ah, doesn't really, that's not what I remember. That's not what I experienced. That's not how I felt. So as you write about your experience, you begin to take ownership. And for me, that was a way of kind of getting power over this thing that up until then.

I felt very victimized by it. I felt like, you know, why me? Why did I have to be the one who was adopted? Why did I have to be in foster care? Why did I have to lose my family? And, you know, I still have a lot of those feelings, but I think I do have a different relationship with it, where it goes from being, I'm a victim and I'm subject to all this, to I'm someone who actually has agency and a voice. So there's always that transformation. So even if you don't publish it, you start to, I guess, metabolize.

your story. And there is a magic to the story that takes these disparate events and gives it context. If you've read about stories and storytelling, you know that humans are hardwired for story. Like we can learn a lot by like just looking at the raw data and or reading the facts. But when you turn things into a story, that's when it starts to have resonance. That's when it starts to have electricity. And we all know that intuitively. But I think once you start to take your story and write about it,

then you can actually give, how do I put this, your own experience an extra resonance because you have created a record for yourself of what your life was like or what your experience has been like. And it's interesting when you start to take things that are kind of disconnected, I guess you could say, and either time and space and start to connect them, you start to see themes. So as I'm writing, I start to see themes. I start to see...

I started to see themes between my being placed in foster care, so in a strange environment, and my family coming to the United States from Latvia after World War II, again, being placed in a strange environment. And so you start to see these places where you can relate events, and it becomes kind of a way of seeing things deeper. So I like that about it. Another thing that happens as you write your story is, as I kind of alluded to before,

is you start to separate the objective and the subjective. As you write, you're forced to confront, is what I remember the objective truth or is it my subjective interpretation? And I think once you can make that distinction, you can have more control over the subjective part. The objective part is kind of set in stone. So when I talk about objective and subjective, what I'm actually talking about is like, objective would be, he wore a red shirt. Subjective would be, I always hated that red shirt. So making that separation, you can tweak this objective.

You can maybe go deeper into what this objective aspect was. You might not be able to change the fact that he wore a red shirt when you saw him last, but you can talk about, here's my feelings about it. Here's what I don't like about that color, or here's why that shirt has meaning to me, because that's what we're really talking about in memoir, the meaning of the objective event. So writing about your life is about finding meaning in the objective. Yeah, I think that's what I'm trying to say, got it. And there's really a lot of ways that you can actually tell your story. So, as you kind of...

I guess a template or format that I really liked where, you know, you have life as it is, and then you have something that kind of comes called the call to adventure. You have a guide that shows up. You have reversal and all these other things. I don't remember all the elements, but as I was writing it, I was trying to take, okay, I have this massive material. How can I kind of attach that massive material or this event or that event or these events and attach it to a part of that story arc? If you want to know more about that arc that I'm talking about.

Look up the book, A Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. He talks about it and he says that pretty much every story follows this pattern of like internal transformation and that's what it really is about because at the end what you end up with is you learn something and usually that learning comes from the internal transformation of the hero as they confront the external world. So that kind of again talks about the objective and subjective nature of things. Hopefully that wasn't too esoteric but I think you all can follow me.

You might have a different way of telling the story, but I found for my first book, for the first time I was doing this, I wanted to be direct. I mean, yes, I would like to fancy myself as some writer who can play with form and kind of tweak things and do things with weird flashbacks and all this. And I do some of that, but I really try to stick to the script. I mean, and that was just me. You might have a different feeling or be a better writer or whatever and do it your own way, but ultimately we're all kind of playing with that same form.

And one of the other things, so one of the final kind of, you know, things I experienced as I was writing about my life and that you might experience as you're writing about your life, is that even though you're writing about real events and trying to maintain fidelity with the actual experience, there's room for invention and interpretation. So for me, I felt that there's a lot of growth that came when I was able to play and weave stories.

to fill the gaps where otherwise I had a hole in my memory. So I might not know what my family experienced after World War II. I had nobody to talk with about it. I had a lot of information, but I had nobody I could have a conversation with about it. So I invented stories. I invented stories that would kind of connect things. What's a plausible thing that could have happened here as I tried to interpret the facts and make them something that I could then use and turn into a story. So there's a lot of room for invention and creativity.

And even when you forget things, you can be like, well, I don't know what this person was wearing at that meal, I really don't remember. Make it up. Now, of course, we get to the thing of like, okay, well, I don't wanna lie. Well, yeah, you don't wanna lie. So don't lie about major things, but ultimately we're trying to tell a story. And so getting everything exactly right isn't the point. I think things that are gonna speak to truth, that are gonna be like truthful matter. So...

You know, if I lied about being adopted, that would be a bad thing. That would be something that isn't gonna help anybody because who wants to read a book that's a lie? Like really the whole point of memoir is we wanna hear from someone and we wanna hear about their actual lived experience. So I don't lie. But at the same time, you can fill in the gaps and you can create stories. I mean, even in my book, I create like these kind of imagined passages because I don't know what happened. And I just need something to go there. I need something for myself to fill in the gaps.

And I think it's good stuff that's gonna enlighten anybody who reads it, so there we go. And then finally, I think the last thing I learned with memoir, and I learned this a lot through the workshops that I was doing as I shared what I wrote with other people and pulled from other people or heard from their stories is we start to find common ground. So I think the more we understand our stories and understand kind of the underlying themes, we can find common ground, which I think is really needed in today's world. I think a lot of people kind of like to separate themselves like, oh, I had this experience or I'm...

you know, I have this particular identity or I grew up in this place. And unless you have that experience, you can't understand that. I really don't agree with that position. I think that we can really do a lot better at understanding one another. And I think the first step is to all of us tell our stories. I mean, that's the reason why I'm doing this podcast or even talking about this kind of stuff, because I really do think everybody, including you listening right now, has a story that if you told it, it would have resonance with somebody else and probably someone you don't expect.

And it could be someone who didn't have the experience you had at all. I mean, I've written about my family issues and I've had people who have contacted me, like, you know, either because of the show or something else. They're like, I was not adopted. I don't really know anything about that. But, you know, I had a grandfather who I loved, who was alcoholic and something that you said resonated with me. And so we start to find common ground as we share our stories. So I think that's the other kind of magical thing that happens here.

is we start to find common ground with other people. And I think for myself, being able to make connections with new people is awesome. So that's why I write it. That's why I'm doing it. And that's kind of why I hope you'll do it. I hope you'll have a chance to do that. And even if what you write isn't book length, I think if you write short stories or if you write small things about your experiences, you can just essays. I see people who write on Medium or who write on other kind of writing platforms or LinkedIn or wherever. I mean, even like in Twitter, people telling stories.

that resonates with so many people. People love to hear personal stories. And like I said, I think it was in episode five of this podcast, one of the things that's gonna become a lot more, and this is my prediction, but I really believe it to be true, one of the things that's gonna become a lot more popular and a lot more valuable as we go into this era of AI-created content is people telling personal stories. So like you could have an AI that generates a fantasy world or a sci-fi world that is just, you know, like the best sci-fi writers of the 20th century, it's on that level. Let's just say that happens.

Okay, that's cool. And that's cool for that genre. But what a lot of people are gonna be thirsty for is, well, I wanna know what other people are up to. I wanna know what other people are experiencing and what I can learn from those experiences and put towards my life. So I think that if you're listening to this and you're like, well, I'm kind of worried about AI content and all this other stuff, learning to write your own story and tell your own story is gonna be something that can never be replicated. Because even though an AI could replicate the form and make up a story like yours, the reader knows it's not true.

hopefully, and you know, no one's putting something over on them. But you know, if it's like a general, a general, genuine, yeah, genuine lived experience, people really care about that. And I found that to be true. And as I share stuff with people, as I share my book with the people close to me, and as I'm beginning to share it with the wider world through publishing and all that kind of stuff, I'm really seeing that people resonate with that. So take what you will of all that. And, um, the final thing I'll say is that.

It's a tool for self-knowledge. So I've really learned a lot about myself as I write about myself. That shouldn't be that surprising, but I didn't know it going into it. Like it's been a personal development tool. So even as I said, a lot of the stuff I talk about in my book is very challenging personally and emotionally. So writing that, I start to learn, okay, these are my triggers. These are the kinds of things that upset me, or these are the kinds of things that have kind of been holding me back or.

This is a limiting belief I have because I had this experience in my life. When you bring those to the surface, now you can start dealing with them. And I'm not a therapist or anything like that, but I do think therapy kind of works the same way we're bringing stuff to the surface so that it can be dealt with. And I think if we don't bring it to the surface, it kind of stays underneath the surface and lives in the unconscious causes us to do things we don't want to do or don't like to do. And we're like, why is my life this way? So personal development is always about, um, self-knowledge. And I really do think that's real power. So.

If that's something that you're into, try writing about your life. And it doesn't need to be published, doesn't need to be a book, but the more that you can kind of go look at events that happen in your life, turn them into a story, and maybe share them with others, I think the more you can get to know yourself and the more you can kind of take ownership of your story. So that's what I have today. My name is Chris Waldheims. This is the HyperMemoir podcast where we talk about telling your story creatively.

voice, create a vision, how do we actually create something new and get it out there? That's what we're talking about. And that's what we're talking about in the newsletter that I send out. So again, link in the show notes. And then finally, if you're listening to this, I'd really appreciate a review on any of the podcast platforms because I want other people to find this. And when you have a review, I guess more people can find your thing. So that's where I'm going to stop. Thank you for listening and I'll see you on the next episode.