9 Things I Learned How to Write a Memoir

To be honest, I thought a memoir would be easier. I’m starting my third book, the memoir I will do better– about the first two years of raising my daughter after her mother died – I thought I could write the book quite quickly, because I had written two complex novels and had an idea of ​​the content of this memoir.

(5 Unconventional Ways to Structure Your Memoir.)

Of course I was wrong, and I had to learn how to write the memoir through trial and error. Here are some things I learned.

A memoir is essentially a fairy tale, but a story that happened. A hero or heroine. A journey. Complications arise, monsters are challenged and the difficulty increases. The main character will appear happily ever after. The reader wants a story of success against all odds, through events actually happened.

Make sure you don’t get in the way of your fairy tale. Write with your eyes on the central storyline:this incredible thing happened to me. That simple sentence can act as your compass, helping you focus on the through line the reader wants.

A reader wants to care about you. To let your reader know what happened to you, you need context. You need to set things up – establish the landscape in which the story takes place, fill in any backstory – while also remembering the previous tip (more on that soon).

Find the right language. Again, we read memoirs for the experience of what happened to the author. Getting your reader to connect with your voice is a big deal. You have to connect with your true self. Your writing voice—your sense of humor, your strange perspective, your connection to language—should be as distilled, smart, funny, and best as you are.

You want to develop, cultivate, maintain, and prune the language and sentences that will lodge in your reader’s brain, but this doesn’t mean your authorial voice should be so self-conscious or graceful that it distracts from events and plot, shouting look at me, look at me. Your voice may be more minimalist.

For my memoir, I had to work toward a voice that was flexible, emotional, and funny, but that also burned the language and sentences (which could be ornate) to their essence. Finding a balance between a specific voice and a compelling reading experience meant a lot of trial and error, listening and rewriting.

Don’t get in your way. Two weeks after my wife died, while I was playing with the toddler and killing time before putting her to bed, I had a freak accident in the lobby of our apartment, shattering my elbow and breaking my hip. When writing the memoir, I could have easily delved into the immediate aftermath: the struggle to get back into our apartment, the paramedics and the ER… If I was writing a streaming series, this would have had a full episode could be. But the larger concern of my memoir is with the little girl’s upbringing.

I ended up taking advantage of the accident and then introducing an authorial voice with a distant authority (more on that later) to talk about, the big picture, what bad situation me and my daughter were in at that moment. Then the story leaves the stage. When the story comes back to me and the little girl, I’m already back from the hospital, confined to an apartment, rehabbing, dealing with grief and the toddler and my shattered body.

Skipping some of the granular details about the accident kept things on track.

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There is a difference between your narrator and the character You, who is experiencing the experience. In my memoir, there were two memoirs. One: the narrator who speaks to the reader – that is, all the things I understand now, many years after the event, looking back and writing. Two: the character I, who moves through the experience as described, and whose mentality is also depicted as it was during the events of the story.

These knives have different voices. They have different roles and purposes.

Fully understanding what this meant was a major technical problem for yours truly (hello, third me!). I ended up writing passages where the narrator intervened and added perspective from all these years later. This helped. It kept the book from being limited to what I knew when I was going through it all. But it also kept the integrity of the character I was at the time.

It’s worth admitting: it took me years to understand the seismic importance of it all. The technical challenges were their own beast.

Does my memoir have to be completely true? I changed names. I have condensed and merged and made composites. I have changed identification information. Actually, I wrote fiction, yes? No! I didn’t! I have tried to portray the truth of the events while paying attention to what the book needs to do to be an excellent reading experience. These are not mutually exclusive.

A memoir is also not your personal therapy diary; new names that come up all the time while playing similar roles in the story will cause a reader to unsubscribe. This is one reason to make composites. Likewise, too many similar events will cause the story to lose narrative momentum.

In the meantime, I can look at every passage in my finished memoir and take notes, and tell you: this happened and this happened and this happened, and I used them all together to convey

I believe this is artistically sound and morally acceptable when working in the memoir form.

What responsibilities do I have to the people I write about? It is your story, your voice, your experience, your primary loyalty should be focused on that. At the same time, you consciously choose to refer to real people with real lives. In an earlier passage (see: “Don’t Get in the Way”) it was mentioned that you won’t be able to report every detail of what happened; But what if certain omissions—leaving out details that might have added context to a disagreement with a former best friend, for example—make you look better and your friend look worse? What happens to your credibility when people find out that you made the decision to leave something out, not for the sake of the story, but for the sake of how people might perceive you in real life? You are not legally liable for this, but you may be aesthetically and morally compromised.

Or suppose your memoir concerns your grandfather, a former football player. He babysat you while your mother worked. He took you to strip clubs and biker bars and involved you in a kidnapping. Much of a reader’s time will be spent wondering: What on earth was Grandpa thinking? Fine. But you should probably also mention the discovery, which occurred after Grandpa’s death, that his brain had long been damaged by CTE. This provides important context for his actions.

I would argue that the temptation to withhold important details increases the more contentious the relationships are. But moral and artistic integrity virtually require you to include important contextual information.

In any case, it makes for a better book.

With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos readily available, we have writing tutorials on everything from improving your craft to publishing to finding an audience. New videos are added every month!

Two sentences a day. If you don’t write, you know what happens to your memoir. But who can say if you continue with it? Fact: Your book will never be as important to another reader as it is to you. Another fact: you are the only one who can write this book. Give yourself a chance every day.

Schedule writing time as if it were your job. Maybe it’s a part-time job: Today you work two hours (wifi off). Maybe you can’t even give it that. By writing just two good sentences a day – twisting sentences, burning away adjectives and adding a surprising twist – you stay actively connected to your work. It’s specific enough to engage your thoughts with the memoir. In my experience, engagement is super key. So much comes from dealing with language and subject matter, both on a conscious and unconscious level.

Okay, I hope some of this is helpful. Know that I’m on your team. I look forward to reading your book.

Charles Bock