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One of the genres I love reading most is memoir. I love the way someone’s story – even a story very different than my own – resonates within me, the way it reflects my own life while it also introduces me to experiences I have never known myself. Memoir done well is so powerful for both writer and reader.
But it’s also a genre that is very difficult to write for a lot of reasons but two really difficult ones are:
- we are often so close to our own stories that we can’t even see them as stories, and
- we often want to write about things that are traumatic or painful and have to navigate the process by which we do that.
Still, there are a few guidelines that I think are helpful if we want to write memoir, and if we heed these guides, we can find the process of making text for our experience simpler, if not necessarily easier.
Pick A Thread
This suggestion is the most foundational because is guides everything else: you must pick a single throughline of your life to tend in your memoir. In other words, you can’t write about everything that has ever happened to you and tell an effective (and readable) story. That kind of comprehensive reporting is more the work of an autobiography, where you recall the history of your life, but in memoir, you’re looking for the story told through a single throughline – a single thread – of your life.
Maybe you want to tell the story of how you came to tend the grief of your life through caring for animals (See H Is For Hawk by Helen MacDonald). Or maybe you want to approach your relationship to your mother’s mental illness (SeeThe Art Of Misdiagnosis by Gayle Brandeis). Or maybe you want to explore your history with contemporary Christian music and your faith (See My CCM Soundtracked Life by Jamie Kocur). Or maybe you want to recall the story of how you came to fight for racial justice (See Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson).
All of these writers chose one thread of their stories and followed it, even when it meant leaving out things that were (often equally) important in the actual lived experience of their lives. Memoir is an art, not a recreation. You are crafting the story of your experience of one particular aspect of your unique life, and when you craft it well, the reader will feel the truth of your story as complete . . . and so will you, even if you left out some of the big, big moments.
Write Characters
Because your memoir is a work of art, the people on its pages are characters. That means you write them honestly and accurately, but you are also crafting them. You will never be able to capture everything about any person, yourself included, on the page. That’s simply not possible. But you can get close, and close is good. Close is art.
To write these characters, you need to think about them the same way fiction writers think about the people they create. You need to write them just as you would the protagonist of a novel, which means the reader needs to know what they sound like, look like, move like. And the reader also needs to know whatever aspects of the characters’ backstories are relevant to the book you are writing.
For example, if you are writing your year where you tried to follow every rule in the Bible (See The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs), then we might need to know a bit about your experience with grand experiments or your relationship to religion. We probably don’t need to know about your third grade teacher or your deep affinity for honey. We need to know the parts of you, as the main character, that are relevant to the thread you have chosen, and we need to know the same things about the other characters (i.e. your friends and family) but nothing more.
Use the Voice of Then and the Voice of Now
By definition, memoirs reflect back; they are telling about past events. But for a memoir to work, we also need your voice as the narrator who makes sense of those events from your perspective of now. The voice of then recounts experiences; the voice of now interprets them. We need both voices for a memoir to be effective.
Think, for example, of writing about your experience of adapting to a new culture (See Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris). For that story to be compelling, we need, as readers, to have perspective on the experience. We need to see how you might make sense of that experience from some distance. Thus, we need to see the experience (the voice of then), and we need to have someone interpret that experience (the voice of now). Without the voice of then, you have journalism, and without the voice of now, you have nostalgia. True, strong memoir has both voices.
Write Only What You Can Bear People To Critique
Perhaps, this guide is the most important one because it is about your health as a person, so please hear this. Just because something is a powerful story, just because it shaped you fundamentally, just because it will sell doesn’t mean you need to write it. Please, only write when you can bear the ugly personas on the internet to critique. Readers can be harsh, and they don’t owe you respect or even courtesy (although I wish all readers would give it). So if you’re not ready to have a part of your life thrashed online (or in book clubs or in some college freshman’s comp paper) don’t write it publicly.
Some people talk about this as writing from your scars, not your wounds, but sometimes, I think writing wounded is powerful . . . we just have to be ready for the response. If we’re not ready to hear what people have to say about what we write, we’re not ready to share it . . . yet. Similarly, if writing something – if the act of recalling something from your life is going to cause you trauma again – you have no obligation to write it. If you do decide to write hard things though, do it well. There’s no value in writing a story you can’t tell well – at least not publicly. (Journaling for the win!)
So there you have it, my four guiding principles for writing memoir drawn from my educational experience, my writing experience, and my editing experience. I hope you find those helpful, and if you’d like to discuss, please comment below. I’d love to hear what you think about these ideas and what you might add as guides for people wanting to write memoir.
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