Often, aspiring memoirists come to me with a dilemma: “I have a story to tell and I want to write a memoir. But, I have no idea where to start!”
It’s one thing to decide to spotlight a part of your personal life journey in a book. It’s an entirely different animal to know how to tell your story effectively. For writers I meet who are passionate about sharing their tale — whether it’s a monumental, life-changing trip, a period when they endured hardship, trauma, or abuse, a witness to a historical event, or anything in between — the prospect of fitting their life experience into the package of a book is utterly overwhelming.
How do you even get started on writing a memoir, from focusing your lens to deciding what details to include or exclude?
Below are my steps for beginning the memoir-writing process with authors.
3 ways to start a memoir:
1. Think about the key moments in your life.
One big mistake first-time authors make when trying to start a memoir is including way too much. I’ve read so many first drafts of memoirs that ramble, or cover too expansive a swath of an author’s life experience. They read more like a dense autobiography than a memoir. It’s vital to drill down to the story.
I often teach my authors the 6 Key Moments of a novel — watch the tutorial here. For memoirs, this isn’t any different, even if events are based in real life. Often, for memoir writing, it helps to start with The Happening — the thing that sets the rest of the “plot” (in your case, the events that led to your journey) in motion. From there, you can work backward to pinpoint the current reality, and then expand, looking at what happened after, down to the final confrontation.
Try this: Grab a large piece of paper. Think of the moment in your life when things changed forever — The Happening. Place that at the center of your page. Mind map from there: jot down events right before and right after. Think of the Current Reality. Where were you at the beginning of “your story”? What was The Choice you had to make? What was the Final Confrontation? And, what is the New Reality you transitioned to at the end?
Examining the key moments of your life can also be a great litmus test for determining if your story is memoir-worthy to begin with. If you don’t find yourself seeing a final confrontation, maybe your story isn’t worthy of an entire book-length manuscript.
2. Mine your Journals
You probably already guessed this one. Especially if you’re drawing from a time in your life where you turned to your journal as both archive and receptacle for your emotions, leafing through old journal entries can be a goldmine for the memoir process. I recommend to writers of any genre that they view their journals as sponges for their thoughts, reflections and emotions. Using this as a vessel for raw emotion, in particular, can be incredibly helpful in crafting a memoir that resonates with people on a universal human level.
This is exactly what author Andrew Singer did to begin work on his coming-of-age memoir China Sings to Me. Consulting his journals allowed him to tap into the mindset, emotions, and beliefs of his college-aged self — who, unsurprisingly, was much different than the author today.
Try this: Inspect your journal entries from the time of your life that you want to chronicle. Circle, note, or highlight entries, moments, or phrases that jump out at you as significant turning points in reflecting on your journey. Also look for phrases or beliefs that capture who you were in the past. These can be “Ah-ha” moments where you finally moved on from a relationship, where you finally understood something in a clearer way, or when you reached any other similar turning point.
Once you’ve outlined the big beats of your memoir in step one, looking through journals can be a powerful way to remember the emotions and bigger themes of this experience.
3. Interview Others
A successful memoir doesn’t just tell a story from your perspective. It narrates an era of your life from a viewpoint of you looking backward, in more objective terms, at your past. Thus, it can be helpful to gather others’ POV of your situation to supplement your perspective. This can keep a memoir from sinking into something more one-sided, such as a rant or pity party.
Try this: Sit down and interview your friends or family. Ask them about their experiences during this time, how you behaved, or other details or key anecdotes you may not remember. If you want to be very vulnerable, you can dig deeper and ask meatier questions, like, “What do you think I should have done differently?” Or “What wounds do you carry from this time?”
Are you working on a memoir? Perhaps I can help you develop it. Find more information on how we can help you with your memoir career.
