Samuel clemens autobiography of malcolm

TL;DR Version:

Memoir is already a tough enough genre to market. So make it easier on yourself by avoiding these 3 common mistakes I see in memoir:

#1. Trying to Write an Autobiography. Memoir ≠ Autobiography.

#2. Bragging—Accidental or Otherwise. Don’t just namedrop. Find ways to be relatable.

#3. Failing to Find Your Unique Angle. What are you going to say/show that no one else has yet?

Regular Version:

Story time…

The very first paid project I ever worked on was a collection of memoirs, so the genre will always hold a special place in my heart. And even in the nonfiction business work I’ve done, memoir tends to seep in. It’s nearly impossible to share business insights without also giving readers a sense for who you are as a human being.

And cluing in your audience to your story is one of the best ways to establish rapport and bolster trust. People want to like you. When you’re a new author, it’s triply-important they like you or they won’t finish the book … no matter how many accolades you may have.

But time after time, I see similar mistakes crop up in memoir, so let’s talk about what the three biggest are, and more importantly, how you can avoid them like my toddler avoiding putting on a nighttime diaper after getting out of the bath.

This mistake right here is the most common I see. And it makes a ton of sense because it can be difficult to understand what distinguishes an autobiography from a memoir. So let’s break down the difference:

Biography: A book about someone’s life. Examples: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, or a book I’m currently reading The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston by Marquis James.

Autobiography: A book about someone’s life written firsthand by the subject. Examples: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain by Samuel Clemens (aka, Mark Twain). Just wa

Mark Twain is surely America's best-known author. It is tempting to say he is also the country's favorite writer, but that can't be true. Too many grandparents have given too many copies of The Adventures of Tom Sawyeror The Prince and the Pauper to too many grandchildren, who then went about for the rest of childhood under a cloud of undischarged obligation while those books sat on numberless shelves, unread. If that didn't finish off any appetite for Twain, there was always the high-school ritual of force-feeding The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Lucky the adolescent who lives in a school district that has banned Huck. There is nothing like a banned book to turn a teenager into a devoted reader.

All that pales, however, beside the worst crime ever committed against children in the name of Twain: the Claymation version of No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. In this 1986 film, Twain's nihilistic little novel gets boiled down to a brief episode in a movie that also extracts material from several other Twain works, including Tom Sawyer and Letters From the Earth. But The Mysterious Stranger outdoes them all. In less than five minutes a Claymation Satan visits with Tom, Becky Thatcher, and Huck; builds them a village; then destroys it with lightning and an earthquake that swallows up all the cute little clay villagers, farmers, soldiers, and one particularly pitiful cow. It is altogether terrifying. One can only shudder at the thought of countless impressionable, unsuspecting children curled up in front of the television and being scarred for life after blithely stumbling across this ink-dark work. Anyone who thinks that there is no such thing as too much Twain has not seen it. Sometimes you truly can take a good thing too far.

The Claymation Stranger doesn't have much in common with Twain's story except for its nihilism. But it's the best possible proof that you shouldn't foist Twain off on the young just because he wrote books with children in

1.

“My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water,” Mark Twain observed, in a note. Was he bragging or complaining? Did he realize that two of his books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, were among the richest word-wines ever vinted in America? Long before the nineteenth century ended Mark Twain was a world figure—in the field of letters our only world figure. His white suit and white hair were recognized everywhere. He traveled widely and even had an honorary degree from Oxford, not to mention Yale and the University of Missouri. His cranky, abstemious admirer George Bernard Shaw went so far as to say that it was Mark Twain who taught him that “telling the truth was the funniest joke in the world.” But did Twain’s enormous success have much to do with truth-telling, or did he, like Shaw, treat truth like a bicycle that could be abruptly kicked aside when the author couldn’t make it go as fast or far as he wanted it to go?

A huge herd of scholars, critics, and biographers have long been attempting to answer these and all other questions pertaining to Samuel Clemens/ Mark Twain. A walk past the Twain shelves in my bookshop or virtually any large bookshop is an experience likely to give even stout readers a sudden case of the languors: here’s W.D. Howells, Albert Bigelow Paine, Van Wyck Brooks, Bernard DeVoto, Dixon Wecter, Henry Nash Smith, Maxwell Geismar—all these from the rapidly dimming past—plus a new wave cresting, I guess, with Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1968, Pulitzer) and surging on through many short studies, the Clemens family memoirs, Twain’s Letters (at last), monographs and critiques galore; and now the present bounty, which, besides Fred Kaplan’s big biography and Karen Lystra’s look at Twain’s last years, include a very welcom