Lost in Los Angeles

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XIV

My penchant for overthinking spilled onto the page, but guessing games don’t make the cut.

By page 193 of my essay collection, I’m still making the same mistakes: starting essays with backstory instead of scenes; writing lengthy origin stories about how I met certain people—and often sharing what happened to them after they were no longer in my life; including every detail about every experience without curating the sparkly bits; and speculating about what other people are thinking and why they’re acting the way they are.

No one knows what a person is thinking and what that person’s motives are, especially when the writer barely knows them, so why hypothesize?