Your Life Has a Story Worth Telling: Here's How to Write a Memoir

Our life experiences are often filled with many stories worth telling. We live through different phases that change us and carry those stories in our hearts for years. How best to keep those stories alive than to write about them?

Many people think writing a memoir is something reserved for certain people. You may think you’re not interesting enough or charismatic enough to have your story immortalized in writing. But that’s not true. Your story deserves to be told, and telling it is much easier than you might have imagined.

So, how do you write a memoir worth reading with little or no writing experience?

First, What Is a Memoir?

The word memoir derives from the French word mémoire, meaning "memory" or "written record." It is a true story about your actual lived experience written from your perspective.

The memoir genre uses truth and storytelling. It is an interesting narrative shaped by your feelings, how you see life, and what your personal experiences have taught you.

People often mix up memoir and autobiography. They are both real stories told by the person who experienced them, but an autobiography covers a wider scope.

Why Is Writing a Memoir Important?

People write memoirs for various reasons, often personal to them. But often, it is to remind themselves of a hurdle they crossed or how they worked towards a goal they achieved.

Many people assume memoirs are only for celebrities or people who've had dramatic lives. That's not true. Every life has a good story in it, and that’s what makes memoirs so powerful - you make your story and experiences available for people to see how your life experiences have shaped you.

Many authors also write memoirs to make sense of their own story. Writing a memoir forces you to reflect and look at your own life again. You start to remember memories buried over the years, you see the mistakes you made and the lessons learned.

A personal memoir can also be a keepsake for your generations to come. Your children, grandchildren, and their own grandchildren can have the invaluable gift of having your life story in a book.

How to Start Writing a Memoir: Finding Your Focus

As we’ve established, a memoir focuses on a specific chapter of the writer’s life. Your first job is to find your focus.

Pick Your Central Theme

The best memoirs have a central theme that can be easily identified. It can be grief, survival, identity, love, addiction, freedom, and second chances.

A significant event can anchor this central theme. It could be your college days, life after getting married, or losing a loved one.

You may need to ask yourself some questions to determine what your memoir should be about.

• Why did this happen to me?
• What does it mean that it happened?
• How has this experience shaped my life?
• What lessons did I learn?

These questions help you pull in the key events that led to the central theme or followed from it.

Know Your Ideal Reader

Who you are writing for shapes everything in your book. It determines your tone, how much context you give, and how personal you go.

Are you writing primarily for your family? For the public? For people who've been through something similar?

Your answer will guide the decisions you'll make throughout the entire writing process.

Memoir Topics: What Can You Actually Write About?

You can write a memoir about any significant event that has happened to you. Here are some areas that tend to make the richest memoir ideas:

• Loss and grief
• Addiction and recovery
• Immigration and displacement
• Illness, your own, or caring for someone else's
• Coming of age
• Career and ambition
• Family dynamics

The best memoir topics come from those life experiences we can’t stop thinking about, even years later.

The Elements of a Memoir

Once you know your focus, you can start putting things together for the book to take shape. Here are the common elements of a memoir:

• A compelling narrative voice: A memoir should feel personal. The readers should be able to feel you, your emotions, how you talk, how you see the world, and why you make certain decisions. Don't try to write like your favorite author. Write like yourself, like you’re narrating a story to your loved one.
• A clear central theme: Every scene, every character, every memory you include should connect back to this theme. If a part of the memoir doesn’t serve the story, it doesn't belong, no matter how interesting it might be on its own.
• Emotional honesty: You have to be raw and vulnerable with your readers. Readers can tell when you're holding back. This doesn't mean you have to air every private detail, but you mustn’t flinch from the emotional truth.
• Real people and scenes: Strong memoirs put real people on the page as fully realized characters. Give the readers people they can picture. Let them see their quirks and their impact on you.
• Reflection and insight: A memoir is a series of things that happened, filtered through what you now understand. You need to add insights as your older self looking back at your younger self. Show how you’ve changed, what you’ve learnt, and how you know better than before.

How to Write a Memoir Outline Before You Write a Single Chapter

Just like most other types of writing, it’s best to start your memoir with an outline. Even if you’re not naturally inclined to plan, having a kind of loose outline can save you a lot of frustration later.

A rough map can look something like this:

• Beginning: Where does your story start? This does not have to be the earliest chronological event. It should be a scene or moment that pulls the reader in.
• Middle: If you didn’t start with the very beginning of the story you’re narrating in your memoir, the middle part can be a flashback that gives readers context for the peak you began with. Otherwise, it can track your struggle, the emotional highs, the setbacks, and the turning points.
• End: Where does the story land? What were the lessons you learned? How did you proceed? The end should be a logical conclusion.

Your memoir structure is a reminder that the story should always be moving somewhere. Each scene should push the reader to the next one.

How to Start a Memoir: Your Opening Scene

Your opening sets the tone for your memoir and tells the reader whether the story is worth their time. Here are some ways you can start strongly:

• Drop into a scene: Start in the middle of something happening. This is a common way writers hook attention from the start. Throw them into something interesting, make them curious, and let them figure out the context as they go.
• Start with a question you can't answer yet: This creates tension from page one. The reader wants to know how you found the answer.
• Use a specific sensory detail: Use vivid descriptions of senses like sound or smell to pull readers into your world immediately.

Avoid opening with cliches like "I was born in..." or "From a very young age...". They can lead the reader to believe that you haven't quite figured out where your story starts yet.

Memoir Structure: How to Shape the Full Arc

You can choose to structure your memoir using the life timelines or event lists methods. The life timelines method arranges your story chronologically, while the event lists method focuses on key moments and themes without a specific order.

It doesn’t matter if you structure chronologically or not. What your story does need is an arc. Something has to change. The writer at the end of the memoir should be different from the writer at the beginning. They could be wiser, sadder, freer, more broken, more whole.

Memoir structure typically follows this shape:

• Introduction: Introduce readers to your world and your central tension
• Rising action: The series of events that build toward a crisis point
• Climax: The moment of greatest intensity or change
• Falling action: The aftermath of the climax
• Resolution: The result of the experience. It could be a resting place, a moment of reflection, or a new understanding

You don’t have to take this as a rigid template. You can take it as a rough frame to see if your story has a logical arrangement and if it’s going somewhere.

How to Make an Autobiography About Myself Feel Like a Page-Turner

You may be anxious that your story isn’t interesting enough or that nobody wants to read about you. The truth is that you can make even the most mundane experience interesting with compelling storytelling.

Think of the best memoir you've ever read. The story isn’t gripping because the writer had a more interesting life than you. The story stayed with you because they told it well.

And that is what you should aim to do with your story.

Here are a few tricks from seasoned memoir writers:

• Let your readers inside your head: The moment you decide to write a memoir, know that you have chosen to be vulnerable with your readers. Share your thoughts honestly and let the readers feel like they know you.
• Don't make yourself the hero of every scene: Memoirs where the writer is always right and always noble tend to tick readers off. Be honest about your flaws. Show where you made a mistake and how you grew from it.
• Use dialogue: Many readers prefer books that bring characters to life with real conversations. You don't have to quote people word for word. Just recreate conversations honestly.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you begin a memoir?

Start with finding your focus or central theme. This is the significant event your memoir orbits around. Memowrite simplifies the process by providing pre-planned questions. Once you have that, drop into a specific scene that shows the emotional core of your story. From there, set a realistic writing schedule, a loose outline, and permit yourself to write a messy first draft. You can always shape the first draft later.

What are common memoir mistakes?

The most common mistakes in writing a memoir include:

• being too vague,
• not giving enough context to events and characters, and
• holding back emotionally instead of sharing your personal truth.

What is a memoir and an example?

A memoir is a true personal account of your life, shaped around a central theme. Unlike an autobiography that covers your entire life up to the point you are now, a memoir tells the story of an important chapter. A classic example of memoir is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, which covers the writer growing up with wildly unconventional, often neglectful parents. Educated by Tara Westover is another well-known example. The author narrates her journey from a survivalist Mormon childhood to academic achievement at Cambridge.