Mary DeVries
1 min readJan 8, 2025

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These kind of thoughts are exactly why I started writing on Medium. But I learned something interesting along the way. Exact factual details bog down memoir and make a tough sell to an outside audience. At some point you have to decide, am I writing precise family history or an I writing memoir to connect with the wider world. I'm not saying lie but more than once in memoir I have to change small details to make things flow. Sometimes there were too many people in a room so you write a conversation as if it's between two people instead of many. Or the fight happened in a Days Inn in Tulsa but the reason you were in Tulsa is convoluted and contradicts earlier parts of the story unless you go into derailing detail so you say it happened in Tampa. Small changes for flow make sense but I've started keeping a file of personal fact checks for family members for the limited number of times I've needed to do this in my writing.

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Mary DeVries
Mary DeVries

Written by Mary DeVries

I delight, despair and write about a life lived around the world. Fueled by Yorkshire Gold tea.

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