A memoir is a narrative written from the author’s perspective, focusing on a specific moment or theme of their life. However, when you embark on writing a memoir, you will find that it is so much more.
If you are interested, I dig deeper into what a memoir is and how it differs from an autobiography here. For now, I will focus on the how of writing a memoir. In this article, I will reveal how to get around the first hurdle, explain the structure of a memoir, and offer you a Story Weapon to help you get to the heart of your story.
A memoir focuses on a transformative moment or theme in your life, using storytelling craft to shape raw experience into a meaningful narrative. By embracing honesty, selecting only the most essential memories, and writing from a place of understanding, you uncover the deeper truth of your journey and the transformation at its heart.
Why write a memoir?
We all have a story to tell.
And your story is valid. But sometimes the act of committing it to paper is required to discover this fundamental truth.
The facts of your life are indisputable. However, the interpretation of those facts and the meaning you attach to them are often skewed. The dilemma is that your story lives fully and completely within you, and yet your idea of your story is never the whole story.
This is why we write memoir, to claim a coherent narrative of our lives. In this search for truth we find freedom, an absence of shame, and a deeper connection to ourselves and the world.
Consider this: You are not the author, you are the channel.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
– Maya Angelou
The first hurdle
To begin writing a memoir, you must find a pivotal moment in your life or a theme throughout your life to write about.
Start by gathering experiences or creating a timeline of your experiences and feelings throughout the events of your life.
As you begin to do this, you may hit your first hurdle: guilt.
Telling the truth often feels like betrayal. Betrayal to your family, friends, or circumstances. Perhaps you tell yourself that it wasn’t that bad, or that the pain isn’t real, or you might even question your memory of the events. Yet your heart is begging to be heard.
But the truth is that the disloyalty we feel is to something that wasn’t working properly to begin with. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a story to write. The irony in giving yourself permission to tell your truth, or maybe admit it to yourself for the first time, is that you begin to have compassion for yourself and others.
“The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.”
– Gloria Steinem
The truth will set you free, but you have to be willing to let go of the result and journey to places within yourself that might you may not have otherwise explored.
This can be thrilling, and while it is not always a comfortable experience, it is ultimately a rewarding and transformative one.
Writing the memoir
To begin, try recalling a pivotal or transformative time in your life. You may already have one in mind if you have made your way to this article, but if not, just take five minutes to write, beginning with: ”My story is about . . .”
Yes, I know you have no idea what it is about! But if you set a timer for five minutes and just keep writing, you will instinctively move in the direction of exploring something you may not even realize held meaning for you.
Once you have an idea of what you want to write about, it’s time to dig deeper. Write down the memories associated with that time. Don’t just write the facts, write the experiences and meanings you attached to them. Hold nothing back.
The structure of the memoir itself should read like a novel.
There is a difference between journaling and memoir. Journaling is an attempt to understand, while memoir is written from a place of understanding. With yourself as the protagonist, you are going to find creative ways to dramatize to your readers the desire you held, the obstacles you overcame, a moment of surrender, and ultimately the transformation you experienced.
Read more about outlining and structuring your memoir with my free Story Structure guide here.
Whether it is about a specific moment in your life or an invisible thread tying multiple moments together, there is a journey that was experienced that leads to your transformed state.
You don’t have to include everything.
Just because something happened in your life does not mean it needs to be in the memoir. You don’t need to show us every blade of grass for us to know that it is a lawn. Instead, find the parts of your life that highlight the struggles you endured and reveal how you survived. Your story is a series of turning points.
You are the Wise One on the Hill.
Your memoir is a search for the truth. It is not a polemic. It is not about righting wrongs. It is about the completion of a theme through the resolution of your protagonist’s dilemma. It’s not your job to justify and explain other people’s actions.
You are writing your memoir as ‘the wise one on the hill,’ the person who understands the whole story. You are writing it from a place of transformation because this allows you to see the truth of the story as opposed to the appearance of the story. Writing from this perspective does not mean you are omniscient, it simply means that your story begins with a dramatic question which gets resolved by the story’s end. As memoirists, we are not playing God. Story is not about right and wrong, or good and bad — it is about cause and effect, action and consequence.
If you feel yourself struggling to decide what to include, ask yourself: “What do I want to express through this event?”
Get to the heart of what you are trying to say. You’ll realize it doesn’t matter that Uncle Todd lives in a single-story broken down farm in the plains of Iowa if what you really want to show is the complicated relationship between him and your mother. What happens is less important than why it happens.
Embrace the messy first draft.
When you feel stuck, give yourself permission to write poorly so you can reach the end of your first draft. The first draft isn’t meant to be a polished work. It is getting your story down and being surprised by what reveals itself. There is an editing process for a reason. For now, keep digging deeper.
Your story weapon: Stream-of-consciousness writing
Remember this: you are uniquely qualified to tell your story. Your transformation has the power to impact your readers in a way you never could have imagined.
For the next seven days, write for 20 minutes each day and simply scribble down memories from your life. Do this in point form. Don’t concern yourself with grammar or spelling. Don’t concern yourself with chronology. Just get these memories down.
At the end of the week you will have amassed a number of pages of disparate events from your life. Now here’s what I want you to notice. Do you see a connection between these events? Probably not at first, but as you read them over you will begin to notice that many of these events are connected by a similar primal desire. It could be the desire to succeed, or be free, or connect, or belong, or to be seen, or to survive, or to find meaning, or purpose.
On the seventh day, take a few minutes, get quiet and ask yourself what your story is about. See if you can distill it to a word or a phrase.
Write down that word.
And now, notice the dilemma of that word. (A dilemma is a problem that can’t be solved without creating a new problem.) When you connect to the dilemma, you are connecting to the source of your memoir. You can read more about dilemma here:
Welcome to the wonderful world of memoir!
For free resources in writing your memoir, such as videos, story structure worksheets, and outline examples from famous memoirs, check out my memoir resources page.
You know your story better than anyone, and you’re the most qualified person to tell it! Find out more in The 90-Day Memoir workbook or join my next 90-day workshop here.
