As you unwind and write the story of another person you need to figure out if, where, and exactly how to include yourself in the work.
Inherent in this is the person of the narrative. By that I mean, you must carefully choose between first person and third person for you your writing of another’s story. Personally, I find it difficult to write such stories in the first person. To do so is true ghost-writing and to do that, you must nail the voice of the person you are writing for. And I mean dead-on. That is what a commercial ghostwriter gets paid the big bucks for, after all.
But apart from that squishy voice stuff, there is a very real and important reason I prefer to write in the third person: It is much easier to describe your writing partner.
In the third person, you can not only describe your partner’s physical self, but you can also take brief excursions into their psyche. I say “brief” because you should not want your writing to be about your observations, but about their story. To do otherwise is to be writing your own story in which the your partner is but a supporting character.
This is a fine line to walk–to provide enough of your observations to give the reader the most vivid picture of your writing partner yet not overshadow your partner’s story with your own. But I still think it is worth the effort if you want the teller to be as real as what they are telling to the reader.
None the less, I have run across situations in my writing for hospice patients that have forced me into the first person. I always ask my writing partner who they want to talk to in their story and just what they want to say. They are not always able to succinctly answer these two important questions of audience and topic, but sometimes they are. And when what they want to do is to give advice or guidance, it simply gets too sticky to write in the third person. It sounds hollow to describe the advice of one person to another. It is then that I am forced to use the first person in the memoir I am creating. But what about my personal observations?
As a way to set these apart, I create both a prologue and an epilogue to my partner’s stories. In the prologue, I can set the scene and describe my partner so that no matter the person the main text is in, the reader will have some grounding about my partner. I know that the memoir may be a legacy read far in the future by people never having know my partner.
Then, in the epilogue, I can set out what the project of working with a particular partner meant to me. My personal takeaways from the whole project of working with particular person at this particular time of their life.
So you can see that that you probably should give serious consideration about just how and where to include any observaion that you personally want to make about your partner or the writing project you both have embarked on. But most importantly, you really need to consider why you need to include your own observations at all.