Writing a memoir can be incredibly fulfilling for you and for readers, but it can also be overwhelming. Where do you start? How long is a memoir, anyway? What should the writing style be like? What if you can’t remember all the details?
Recently, I’ve been coaching a few memoirists who want to tell their stories, but don’t know how to start. In this post, I’ll break down some of the common advice I share with them.
- Consider why you are writing. If you want to be famous, or want oodles of money, you are probably going to be sorely disappointed. It’s hard to get a memoir published unless you already have some kind of platform: an existing audience. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to publish a memoir, or build a platform, but it’s going to be a long, hard road that will likely end in disappointment if you’re in it for fame and money. Here are some good reasons to write a memoir, reasons that will keep you going when you’d rather sleep than write, when you get rejections, when you have to revise that draft you thought was perfect: because you love writing and find it personally fulfilling; because you think your story will help your readers lead better lives; because you want to document your story for friends and family members.
- Read books like yours. Read famous memoirs, and read memoirs by people with similar stories to yours. Even if you’ve already read many memoirs, reading them now that you’re thinking about writing a memoir will be a different experience. Pay attention to the style of writing. See how they take a memory and turn it into a scene? See how living people are portrayed in all their detail and complexity, stranger but truer than fiction? See how tension keeps you turning the page?
- Read craft books. Unlike trade or prescriptive non-fiction, memoirs share many narrative qualities with fiction. Mary Karr’s “The Art of Memoir” is a great place to start, but I would also recommend Jessica Brody’s “Save the Cat Writes a Novel” for thinking about structure, and “Self-Editing for Fiction Writers” for help bringing a scene to life with vivid prose (affiliate links). When it comes to structure, you will be constrained by real life events, but studying how novels are structured will help you choose when to start, when to finish, what to include, and when to include it.
- Start small. Do you even like writing about your own life experiences? Give it a try by writing personal essays before you dive into a memoir head first. Think about the small yet significant moments in your life. The moments that changed you. As a friend of mine, essayist Mia White, says, “Each time you write an essay, you’ll get a better sense of whether that area of your life has something deeper to explore. I personally always found it surprising that moments that felt really big turned out not to have as much weight or power as some smaller ones.” Writing smaller essays can help you figure out how to focus a larger work, and give you practice with the writing and revision process that will serve you well when you start on a larger project. Plus, publishing essays can help you build that platform I talked about in the first step.
- Map out your internal and external arcs. Just like a fictional character, when you portray yourself in a memoir, you should have both an internal and external arc. Internally, you should show how you changed and grew. Externally, the arc will come from the conflict in your life. Most memoirists I talk to start out thinking too internally or too externally. A memoir that is too internally driven and lacks external conflict will come off like reading a counseling session, with no story. A memoir that is too externally driven with no internal arc could be a great skeleton of a story, but like the tin man, will have no heart. For example, in Stephen King’s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” (affiliate link), externally, we root for King to succeed as a writer, and to recover after a terrible accident in 1999. Internally, we root for King to build resilience in the face of rejection, and tragedy.
- Narrow your story down. Most memoir is relatively narrow in focus. Trying to cover too much territory could mean you don’t spend enough time developing any one part of your story. For example, while King’s “On Writing” ranges several decades, and includes writing advice, it is focused on one main area of his life: writing. The story of his accident is framed by how it affects his writing. Tobias Wolff’s “This Boy’s Life” (affiliate link) focuses solely on his childhood, and brings us into his early life as if he’s a character in a novel. Wolff wrote other memoirs covering different parts of his life. Memoirs are not autobiographies. They’re narrower, telling only a certain slice of your life story. Thinking about what external and internal conflict you want to show can help you figure out what slice of your life you’d like to write about. For the rest, you can always write another book.
- Get ready to work. Writing a first draft is a lot of work, and that’s just the beginning. If you want to pursue publication, prepare to revise upwards of 10-15 times, and even do some complete rewrites. Even if you hire a ghostwriter or an editor, you will still have to spend many hours in interviews, or making the final decisions about changes to your prose. Are you prepared to make the time? This ties back to my first suggestion: make sure you are writing this memoir for the right reason.
While writing a memoir is a much larger process than I can describe in a blog post, walking through these strategies will get you on track. What other questions do you have about writing a memoir? Share them in the comments, and perhaps I’ll write another post to answer them. And of course (shameless plug), you can always hire an editor like me to help you along the way.
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