These days, as COVID-19 sweeps the globe, our days seem to be melting into an undifferentiated fog of worry and waiting. Still, this season of fear can be the perfect time to think back on the stories that make us who we are.
It might seem strange, looking to the past to make sense of a disorienting present and an uncertain future. But it can help us remember our resilience and capacity for joy. In the end, it’s our old triumphs (and traumas) that have given us the resources to weather this new terror.
Dig deeply enough, and you might find yourself excavating a powerful story from the material in your memory, a narrative even you couldn’t discern before. Why not fashion that story into a memoir and share it with the world? Here are ten tips for writing a memoir that resonates with readers — because we could all use a nourishing dose of inspiration right now.
1. Start in the middle
A memoir isn’t an autobiography. You’re not beholden to the tyranny of chronology, so you shouldn’t feel obligated to start at the very beginning. The occasional memoir might open with an exhaustive account of the author’s birth. But most of our origin stories aren’t very gripping.
Feel free to skip ahead to the interesting parts, lest you lose your readers as they yawn their way through your earliest hours. Instead, start in the middle with a vivid scene that promises to stick in their memory. Speaking of which….
2. Write in scenes
You might be writing nonfiction, but the fruit of your labors will bear a striking resemblance to a novel. It may sound strange, but a strong memoir has more in common, stylistically and structurally, with an epic fantasy than with a history textbook.
Memoirs, like novels, are written in scenes — not inert streams of fact, but vivid set-pieces animated by concrete details and immediate action. Instead of telling your readers about what you experienced, show them your most powerful experiences in real time. Set the scene with description and bring the people involved on-stage as characters, with gestures to make and lines to speak.
3. Treat the people in your memoir as autonomous characters
Fiction writers invest a lot into making sure their heroes and villains read like real people, but memoirists aren’t exempt from the work of character development. Because the people populating your memoir have real-life analogues, you don’t have to craft their characterization out of whole cloth — you can rely on memory, observation, and even interviews to refine their physical descriptions and tease out their motives.
The key is to make sure the “characters” in your memoir are as finely drawn as any literary characters — that they behave like people instead of plot devices in your story. The reader should be able to imagine them living their lives off the page, not winking out of existence the second they leave your side.
4. Show emotional growth
Of course the most important character you’ll be developing is the protagonist — you. Most readers want their protagonists to emerge from the other side of the narrative somehow changed by their experiences. Whether they’re more confident and independent or more selfless and serene, that sense of evolution makes the reading experience feel worthwhile.
As you write your memoir, make sure you’ve sketched out an arc for your growth as a character. Can you pinpoint how you’ve changed — and link that transformation to the experiences you write about?
5. Show off your imperfections
Turning yourself into a compelling protagonist is an act of radical vulnerability. You’re allowing readers an unflinching glimpse into your character — warts and all.
Even the most self-aware memoirist can find themselves lapsing into PR mode, quietly shaping their account of events to justify a mistake or airbrush a character flaw. Watch out for those self-aggrandizing tendencies as you write, and remember: memoir readers don’t want to read about saints. Your imperfections will make them root for you all the more.
6. Arrange events according to a clear narrative arc
Shaping your characterization around an arc of emotional growth will give your memoir a crucial sense of dynamism. By the same token, the individual scenes you write should build on each other in a way that suggests the story you’re telling is going somewhere.
To put it differently, your memoir should have a plot. That means the scenes you write can’t just shine individually — they have to make sense together, bound by a clear causal logic and a sense of change over time.
7. Don’t let your message overshadow your story
As your memoir comes together, you’ll continue to grapple with what inspired you to tell your story in the first place. Your motivations might evolve over the writing process, as long-buried memories emerge, and once-insignificant pieces of your past take on a breathtaking new clarity. But maybe there’s an impetus you’ll carry with you from the beginning: a message you need to get across.
Let that message seep into your writing. But don’t allow it overtake the story you’re telling, replacing evocative detail with sloganeering. Say you want to demonstrate, for instance, that grief can’t be rushed. You don’t want to fill each chapter with too many point-blank statements to that effect. Instead, craft scenes that show what happened when you tried to “progress” through your grief according to a normative timeline rather than listening to your own needs.
8. Tell all the truth but tell it slant
You might remember James Frey, whose Oprah-touted memoir turned out to be, upon extensive fact-checking, a novel. The revelation that he fabricated his haunting account of addiction ignited a media firestorm. Memoirists have presumably been on their best behavior ever since.
Needless to say, pulling a Frey is a non-starter. But that doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice the emotional truth of your story on the altar of newsprint facticity. Take inspiration from the ever-wise Emily Dickinson, who spoke of telling the truth at a slant.
In practical terms, that means you can reconstruct dialogue you can’t remember word-for-word, and cut out details that bog down your narrative. Just don’t make up events with the freewheeling panache of a fantasist.
9. Fact-check yourself
This tip might sound like it contradicts the last point, but it’s crucial to ensuring that minor memory lapses don’t jolt your readers out of your story. Say you write about singing along to Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” on your iPod as you make nachos, your cat winding furry figure-eights around your feet and your TV humming in the background. You look up to check if your oven is preheated, but the TV screen catches your eye: you see smoke billowing off the Twin Towers as the news breaks on 9-11.
This could be a striking scene — ordinary domestic joys pierced by national tragedy. But some of your readers may remember that “Beautiful” came out a year after 9-11. Suddenly they’re closing your book to confirm their suspicions on Wikipedia.
To make sure you don’t lose your readers at a pivotal point, verify any of the details that can be verified. Memory plays tricks on us all, but you can outsmart it with some careful research.
10. Don’t try to sound like anyone else
We all know most celebrity memoirs are ghostwritten. But their outsourced tell-alls only work because the hired pens involved manage to capture this politician’s folksy charisma or that actress’s wry charm.
If you don’t opt for the red carpet route and instead write your own memoir, it’s important to hang onto your greatest asset: your inimitable literary voice. If you blindfold your best friend and read your memoir aloud through a voice changer, they should still recognize you.
Allow room for the expressions that naturally flavor your speech, and above all, don’t try to sound like someone you’re not. If you find yourself reaching for haute-literary language that feels unnatural, or dumbing down your prose to sound more accessible, give yourself permission to stop. No one else, after all, can tell your story. And it should sound like it’s coming from you.
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Lucia is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book world’s best editors, illustrators, and book marketers. In Lucia’s spare time, she enjoys drinking iced coffee and reading comedienne memoirs.
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