Writer's Blog: Tips and Inspiration

You’ve had a truly impactful experience. Or you’ve lived an exceptional life. And you’re thinking maybe you should write a memoir (or everyone tells you that you should!). But … but … but…. Could it be too soon to write your memoir? And how can you tell?

Journaling as a beginning to write your memoir

When something painful or otherwise life-changing happens, your first instinct might be to write it down in your journal. Getting the events and your feelings onto the page can be a steadying alternative to carrying the experience around unprocessed inside. When you journal, you also create a record you can return to when you’re ready to review what’s happened and how it affected you.

Also, if you’re considering writing a memoir about what you’ve been through, your journal entries are great at preserving the moments you’ve lived through before memory smooths it over.

Perspective over time

We humans are growing, developing beings. What we first record in our journals is usually quite raw. We haven’t had time yet to reflect on our experience. Reflection is a different task altogether. We learn from the perspective time affords us. Time allows us to make meaning of our experiences. And the layers of meaning that underlie the events we’ve undergone are the foundational strata of any memoir we want to write.

I’ve worked with writers who felt compelled to start their memoir while they were still deep inside the experience they wanted to write about. The divorce hadn’t been finalized. Their loved one was buried only a month ago. The estrangement with their sister was ongoing—the writer still hoping this might be the year they could speak again.

In some way, the situation or relationship remained unresolved. As of yet, these writers hadn’t gotten the perspective—and perhaps closure—that time could eventually provide. And their writing showed it. Not because they lacked talent. But because you can’t see the full extent of the mountain range while you’re still climbing. All you can see from partway up is rock and fog and the next few feet of trail.

You need to get some distance, gain some elevation, before the entirety of the prospect becomes visible.

Not calendar time

It’s not really about months or even years elapsing. It’s about whether the experience you want to write about has finished its work. Are you able to recognize and name the change that you’ve undergone because of that experience? A woman writing about her divorce while she’s still negotiating custody arrangements will tell a different story than she’ll be able to tell in three years. After the dust has settled and she can see what the marriage actually meant, not just what it cost her this week, her writing will be wiser.

Knowing where you are with your story—is it finished or still-forming?—is an important judgment call. Start too early, and while you’ll definitely still be processing your experience, you’re unlikely to be able to get to the vein of gold underlying the events and the emotional landscape you had to traverse because of them.

I understand that the urge to write feels like proof it’s time to start drafting your memoir. But that isn’t always the case. It may just be time to journal faithfully and trust that the process will take you to the top of that mountain where you can finally see the whole story—one that you can deliver to the readers you’re hoping to reach with it.

Hemingway knew it was too soon to write his Paris memoir

Hemingway was sitting in a Paris café one cold, rainy day, writing. But not about Paris. He famously wrote that it was “too early for that.” Because he realized he wouldn’t be able to write about Paris while he lived there. He didn’t have the distance. The perspective.

Sure, he was living in Paris, walking its streets, eating in its cafés. He was drinking with the writers and painters who filled his world there: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald. By any ordinary measure, he knew the city intimately. But that wasn’t enough for him to write about his experience there. He didn’t yet have the long view on himself—the writer he was still becoming, the marriage he was still living through, the ambitions and rivalries and daily disciplines that were still shaping him.

He understood that he couldn’t describe what that chapter of his life meant while he was still living it.

Not a travel guide

And sure enough, when Hemingway finally did write about Paris, it wasn’t a guidebook. It wasn’t about cafés and monuments—nor even primarily about the famous writers he hung out with. What he actually wrote about, decades later, was his own story: the discipline and hunger of learning to write; his first, fiercely poor, fiercely happy marriage; and the tangled friendships and literary rivalries of his expat circle. And, importantly, the recognition of how that entire chapter of innocence eventually ended.

He needed not only to have lived Paris; he also needed to have left it and gained enough distance to see what, ultimately, it had given him.

A Moveable Feast

His Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, points to that understanding. Hemingway’s Paris wasn’t really a place at all. It was an experience, a state of being that became a permanent part of him. He carried that Paris with him for the rest of his life.

It was so wise of him to declare, then, at that café table, that he couldn’t write about Paris while he was engaged with making a life there. In that moment, he was simply living his twenties: poor, married, ambitious, surrounded by people whose talent and egos he was still learning to navigate.

It was only decades later that he could look back and recognize what that Paris actually meant to him. It was not a city he’d lived in, but a version of himself he’d lived out. He couldn’t title his memoir A Moveable Feast until his Paris life had, in fact, stopped moving and started settling into memory.

When Hemingway was ready

In fact, Hemingway didn’t write about Paris until thirty years later, in Ketchum, Idaho, and Havana, Cuba, near the very end of his life. Thousands of miles and half a lifetime separated him from the Left Bank of his twenties. A Moveable Feast was published after his death. In the end, it took decades for him to truly see the shape of what those Paris years had meant.

So, is it too soon to write your memoir?

While we’re in the midst of an experience—a teetering marriage, a hard diagnosis, a grievous loss—we’re still being shaped by it. What we don’t have yet is a vantage point that will let us say what it means. That vantage point exists on the other side of the experience—once we’ve had time to digest and reflect.

We certainly don’t need to wait thirty years. But we likely do need some version of what Hemingway gave himself: enough distance for our experience to stop being the thing we’re in and become a thing we are able to look back at.

Unfortunately, few experiences ever fully resolve in a neat, tidy way. Our grief may not end but become muted. And some relationships stay complicated forever. But if we can give ourselves the time and space we need to look at the questions raised by the events and consider them from a few different angles, we’re likely to get to the heart of the memoir we want to write. Not just tell about the cafés and monuments.

Questions to help you know if it’s too soon to write your memoir

This isn’t a test! But these questions may help you know where you are in your memoir-writing process:

1. Can I describe what this experience meant to me, not just what happened?
2. Do I feel curiosity about this time in my life now, or only pain?
3. Can I imagine a reader reading my story and understanding the growth I’ve experienced by living it?
4. Am I writing to process the experience, or to share what I’ve already processed?
5. If I read this draft in a year, do I think I’d feel I’ve explored the nuances of the events and the meaning they held?

Consider these questions a mirror. A way of checking  whether you’re still inside your story or whether you’ve stepped back far enough to tell it. If most of your answers point toward not yet, give yourself more time. When you’re ready, you’ll know.

The process is … a process

And if you decide it is too soon to write your memoir? Keep journaling! Draft scenes while they’re fresh—and a little raw. Say how you feel—and track how that changes.  The process has real value, both for you and for the memoir in your future. What you write today, while you’re still deeply inside your experience, can be some of the truest material you’ll ever have access to. A future version of you, shaping the memoir from your journals will be grateful you captured these moments while they were fresh.

Is it too soon to write your memoir? I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. If you’re wondering if you’re ready to write your story—or have already begun!—I can help you start (or finish) your book. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. 

If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

You may be someone who, for better or worse, has lived through something dramatic—a sudden loss, a hard diagnosis, a family secret that finally came to light. If that’s you, a memoir may already feel like the obvious next step. But maybe your life looks “ordinary” from the outside. No big scandals, no life-threatening crises, nothing you’d really call a “story”? But you’re still feeling a nudge to write about your experiences? No worries! If that’s you, this post will help you see that your life is interesting enough to write a memoir.

The Comparison Trap

People often put off writing their memoir because of doubt. They may be measuring the dramatic value of their own life against that of someone else. Usually they’re comparing themselves to already-famous memoirists—particularly those whose stories arrived pre-shaped by trauma or fame. But that’s unfair. Sure, trauma and fame, while difficult to live through, are interesting to read about. And those experiences certainly offer a writer a core to their story those with more unremarkable lives have to go looking for.

But, obviously, most of our lives don’t come with that built-in center—and they don’t need to. Remember, whatever the level of drama a memoirist brings to the writing of their book, by the time we pick it up on Amazon, that story has been through years of drafting and professional editing to make it a compelling read.

The benchmark for a worthwhile memoir, in a reader’s eyes, isn’t really the intensity of experiences it covers. To a large degree it’s how well the story—ordinary or extraordinary—is told. Your life, at this stage, is still raw material. It hasn’t failed a comparison test; it just hasn’t been shaped yet.

Interesting vs. Universal

It also helps to separate two things you might lump together: being interesting and being universal. Again, a memoir doesn’t need to deliver drama. The telling of a more straightforward life just needs to share a truth that other people can recognize in themselves. Readers aren’t necessarily drawn to a memoir because the story is unusual. They are equally as likely to be drawn to a book in which the author has put language to feelings the reader may have had but never quite named.

That feeling may be quite ordinary, something we’ve all experienced. The ache of not being chosen, the dull realization that a marriage has gone quiet, the guilt of feeling relief after a loss. These emotions are not produced only by an extraordinary life. Those of us living ordinary lives feel these things as deeply. But no matter the details of the  life we’re writing about, we will capture our readers’ hearts if we share the truths that lie beneath the events we’ve lived.

Then, readers will finish our memoir thinking not “what a rare life.” They’ll finish it thinking “I’ve felt that too, and I didn’t know anyone else had.” That recognition is “interesting”—and it’s available to any life, examined closely enough.

Showing Your Life Is Interesting Enough to Write a Memoir

An ordinary moment, told with honesty and sensory detail, can land hard. Compare  “my mother was sick for a long time” to a description of the weight of the spoon in your hand as you fed her on the last morning she could still eat. The first is an objective observation. The second is a scene: personal, subjective. It’s a moment that invites your reader into the room and experience what you experienced.

This is an example of the writing advice “show, don’t tell.” Telling (“my mother was sick”) is an observation. No matter how sad or complicated the situation you’re naming, telling asks readers to take your word for it. Showing (the weight of the spoon, the angle of light, the words your mother said) lets them arrive at sad or hard or complicated on their own. A reader trusts a feeling they arrived at themselves far more than one they were asked to take your word for.

What Readers Actually Want

Readers pick up a memoir to feel less alone. To learn more about what it means to be human. That means the goal isn’t to present your most impressive moments, polished to a high shine. It’s to offer your most honest understanding of those moments—or the arc of the portion of your life you’re sharing. A polished, yet emotionally guarded account of even the most extraordinary events will move readers less than an open, truthful account of the course of more ordinary events. Readers can feel honesty from the first page. And no amount of drama can substitute for that.

Test: Is Your Life Interesting Enough to Write a Memoir?

One useful way to check whether you have enough for a memoir is this. Can you say what your story is really about? Do you know what underlies the events themselves? The growth you experienced through the experiences you had? So, not “my divorce” but what the divorce revealed about how you’d disappeared inside the relationship. Not “my mother’s illness” but what caring for her taught you about duty. If you can find that underneath layer, you have enough to write your memoir. Regardless of how quiet the surface of the story looks.

Small Life, Big Feeling

Some of the most beloved memoirs explore the interior of the lives they cover. H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald is a deep but quiet telling of the relationship between the author and a goshawk she trains after her father’s death. The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke, which explores her mother’s illness and death, takes place almost entirely inside one house. Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal is written as an A-to-Z of small daily moments—without plot.

Even if you happen to be famous, you can focus on the smaller aspects that make up an important portion of your life. Patti Smith is about as well known as a memoirist gets, but her book M Train is mostly her drinking black coffee in the same cafe, watching detective shows, and missing her late husband.

Rest assured though, you don’t need fame! Self-published South Island Tiny House by Corianne Holmes covers a single season in Holmes’s life during which she moves into a new country and a tiny home.

None of these books needed a big life—or loud moments. They just needed a close look at small moments that carried quiet impact on their authors’ lives.

The “Who Cares” Voice

Almost everyone who sits down to write a memoir hears some version of the same voice: who cares about this? It’s a first cousin to the question “is your life interesting enough to write a memoir?” Truthfully? You don’t know yet. You need to write your story to find your way to the answer. That “who cares” voice is loudest before there’s anything written to prove it wrong.

How do you prove it wrong? Write. Then share with a reader—even one reader—who can tell you about a specific moment that moved them.

Proving Your Life Is Interesting Enough to Write a Memoir

Still asking, “Is my life interesting enough?” Try this.

Set a timer for ten minutes and write five ordinary moments you still remember clearly. Not milestones, just moments. A moment in a cafe. A kitchen table. A car ride. A phone call you took standing in a doorway. Write without editing yourself. And don’t explain why they matter yet. Just list them.

Then pick one moment from your list and write for another ten minutes about what was actually happening underneath the obvious. What you wanted, what you were afraid of, what you couldn’t name at the time. If writing that made you feel something, or made you remember more than you expected to, you’ve found your way in.

Do this a few more times, on a few more mornings, with a few more moments. You’re not looking for your one big story yet. You’re looking for the pull: the moment that, once you start writing it, compels you to keep writing.

That’s your material. And that pull tells you your life is interesting enough.

I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. If you’re wondering if your life is interesting enough to write a memoir, I can help you find the pivot points that will help you tell your story and engage readers. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. 

If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

Have you been looking for a memoir class or workshop? I’m happy to tell you there are great options available to you! Some folks thrive in weekly workshops with deadlines and feedback. Others bloom in writing groups focused less on critique and more on being heard. And some just want a single weekend to help fuel their tank. Below you’ll find memoir writing classes, programs, and communities worth considering, whatever kind of support works best for you.

Memoir Writing Classes

Gotham Writers Workshop
Gotham has been teaching creative writing since 1993. Their ten-week Memoir Writing I course is a solid starting point. In it, you’ll receive excellent instruction, engaging exercises, and real workshopping experience. Classes are offered in-person and online.

UCLA Extension Writers’ Program
If you’d benefit from a more comprehensive approach, UCLA offers a full memoir sequence. During their three-part program, you’ll be guided from the basics through a substantial portion of your manuscript. Classes are conducted online.

Interlochen Online
Interlochen, a well known Michigan arts school, offers Writing Your Memoir online. Classes include weekly instruction, inspiring reading, and feedback on your own short memoir pieces. This is a particularly useful approach when you’re still developing your voice or finding the shape of your story.

Community and Memoir Writing Workshops

Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA)
I trained in the AWA method myself. AWA workshops are built on the belief that every writer has a voice worth hearing. The workshops emphasize the creation of new work, with less focus on critique. This makes them a deeply encouraging space for new memoir writers.

Story Circle Network
Since 1997, Story Circle Network has supported women writing memoir and personal essay. They offer a wide range of instruction. You’ll find ninety-minute webinars and multi-week courses listed on their site. They also provide small writing circles where members can trade work and receive encouragement rather than critique.

The Memoir Writing Club
Led by memoir coach Irene Graham, this program pairs a workbook of right-brain and left-brain exercises with live meetings and instructor feedback. There’s also an in-person retreat option for writers who want to go deeper. It’s especially good for writers who respond to visual and associative memory prompts rather than straight outlining.

Low-Commitment Options

Gotham’s Memoir Writing Intensive
If a ten-week course feels like too much too soon, Gotham also offers a Memoir Writing Intensive—one day in NYC or two days on Zoom. It’s a mix of lectures and exercises open to writers at any level. It’s a good way to test whether memoir writing classes are the right fit for you.

HippoCamp Online
Produced by Hippocampus Magazine, the online conference “HippoCamp” is built specifically for creative nonfiction and memoir writers. You can attend craft sessions and author-platform discussions without travel or a multi-day commitment.

The Loft Literary Center
The Loft is a well-regarded nonprofit literary center based in Minneapolis, though nearly everything they offer is available online. Their memoir and personal essay classes range from single-session workshops to multi-week courses, so you can dip a toe in or commit to something longer.

Your Local Library or Community College
Many libraries and community colleges offer free or low-cost memoir and life-writing classes, often taught by writers in your area. They can be a great way to get workshopping experience without a big commitment.

I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Whether you’ve taken ten memoir writing classes or are just getting started, if you feel you could use more support, I can help Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. 

If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

If you’ve kept a journal for any considerable amount of time, you may have wondered whether somewhere in all those notebooks there’s a book waiting to be discovered. If that sounds like you, this blog post can help you learn a bit about how to turn your journals into a memoir.

Journaling vs. Memoir

Journaling and memoir are similar—sort of. They’re both ways of writing about your own life, but they serve different purposes. You write your  journal for yourself. It’s where you think out loud, work through a hard week, or capture a feeling before it slips away. Nobody else needs to understand what you’ve written because nobody else is going to read it. That creates a freedom no other writing offers.

On the other hand, a memoir is meant to be read by others. Writing a memoir asks you to consider the needs of those readers. These are (mostly) people who weren’t there, who don’t know your history, and who want to engage with your story, but have to be drawn in by your literary skill.

Where your journal might say “Rough day with Mom again,” in recounting that day for readers, you’ll need to show what happened: the kitchen, the tone of your mom’s voice, what you didn’t say back.

Journaling records that something happened. Memoir has to make a stranger feel it.

How to turn your journals into a memoir

We keep our journals in a different way than we shape our memoirs. Our journals unfold in real time, day by day. When we’re writing on Monday, we don’t know what will happen on Tuesday until we live it.

Memoirist Patricia Hampl has written about this, the difference between dumping raw, undigested material into our journals and the memoir writer’s job of finding the pattern in the events that have concluded.

In a memoir, we’re looking back and choosing a throughline, finding the story that took shape over time. When we write about those moments in our journal, we don’t yet know what larger story each experience is part of.

So how do you actually get from a shelf of notebooks to a manuscript? Author Louisa Deasey wrote two memoirs from years of keeping a daily journal. Once you have a sense of the story you’re telling, Deasey suggests going back through your journal entries for moments—specific days, scenes, conversations—that still have heat when you read them back. Develop those moments into full scenes, she says, and they become the bones of your memoir.

Mine your journals for gold

As Deasey shows, your journals are gold! They’re your raw material, an emotional record you’ve kept perhaps for decades. They’re also proof that you can stay the course of a long writing project—because you’ve already been showing up on the page for years.

What will help is to think about which story (among the many you’ve lived) you want to tell—what you’re writing about. And also who you’re writing for—the particular reader you want to engage. Then mine your journals for scenes, and shape what may feel like a sprawl into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Try this: turn one journal entry into a scene. Pull out an old journal entry. Then rewrite it in three rounds:

1. Ground it. Add the physical details you may have skipped when recording the situation: capture the room, the weather, what you were wearing, what time of day it was.
2. What happened? Who was there? If anyone else was there, what did they say or do? If no one else was part of that moment, what happened? And how did you react?
3. Step back and ask how it fits the story you’re creating. When you made your journal entry, you just needed to get down the truth. But to turn that truth into a scene, you’ll want to understand how that moment works in your larger story. Is it revealing something? Shifting something? Costing you something? What does that moment change?

Here’s what this might look like in practice. Say your journal entry reads:

Rough day with Mom again.

After Round 1, grounded in the physical world:

Rough day with Mom again. That stuffy kitchen, radio turned up too loud so we wouldn’t have to talk.

After Round 3, once you’ve asked how the moment fits the story you’re writing:

You realize this isn’t just a hard afternoon. It’s the pattern the whole book is circling: the volume of the radio as a stand-in for everything neither of you would say.

That’s the shift. A journal entry records what happened. A scene gives the readers an immediate experience of what happened—and tells them why it matters.

Foundations

If you’ve been journaling for years, congratulations. You have much of the material you need. Of course, there’s more to memoir writing than creating scenes. But this technique will be a foundational one. Now, if you’re ready, go forth and turn those journals into a memoir!

You can turn your journals into a memoir!

I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Digging through your old personal writing is exciting. I can help you understand how to turn your journals into a memoir. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. 

If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

If you’ve been putting off writing your memoir because you worry your memory is not accurate, you’re not alone. This is such a valid concern! And it stops a lot of writers before they even get going. But really, you don’t need an exact chronological record of your life to start writing. So, how much do you need to remember to write your memoir?

Memory won’t necessarily hand you the whole story

We may wish our memories would play back our life like a movie, scene by scene. But it doesn’t usually work like that. Instead, when we give ourselves time and space to think about our past, what we receive comes in fragments. The sound of a screen door slamming, the summer smell of cut grass, the way your father’s voice cracked on one word. These flashes illuminate paths into parts of your story—they’re the raw material you develop.

If you expect your mind to offer you complete scenes, with meaning intact, you’re likely to come up empty-handed. But if you follow one sensory detail with your pen, chances are good it will lead you back into a complete and important moment.

Memories that keep coming back are trying to tell you something

Most of us experience moments that resurface again and again—replaying themselves at odd times for no clear reason. It’s tempting to dismiss these as random, or to feel like we should be “over” them by now. But memories that keep returning may be circling something that still matters, even if we  can’t say why.

Trust what comes around repeatedly. It may have something valuable to offer you about your story. And don’t feel you have to understand your recurring memories before writing about them. Start writing from whatever you remember. That’s how you find out what these moments have been trying to tell you all along.

What it feels like to misremember

Sometimes, we have the feeling that a memory we’ve carried for years might not be accurate. Your sister insists you weren’t in the kitchen when that life-changing phone call came. A friend remembers you crying about a significant slight, while you swear you laughed it off. The marriage-ending fight may not have happened in the theater lobby, as you remember.

Whether you’re doubting how you’ve recalled an important moment or a minor one, the uncertainty alone can be disorienting. It’s a little like reaching for a stair that isn’t there. And it can shake your confidence in everything else you think you know.

But memory is a human function—and that, by definition, makes it subjective. How much, then, do you need to remember to write your memoir with confidence? Fortunately for us humans, a memoir isn’t a deposition. Getting a detail wrong doesn’t disqualify the emotional truth underneath it. The theater lobby or the car on the drive home matters less than what the dispute cost you.

Still, it’s worth telling the reader honestly when you’re not certain of a detail. Your simple admission that “I remember being in the kitchen, although my sister swears I was raking leaves in the yard” weaves itself into the story without risking reader trust.

Remembering too well

What happens when you remember something with startling, unwelcome clarity? For example, the exact, cutting words your teacher said about you in front of the whole class—and the haughty look on her face as she humiliated you. There are moments that have been burned so precisely into our minds that it would be self-betrayal to pretend we aren’t sure they happened as we remember.

These moments can feel less like a gift of memory and more like a burden. Especially when the other person is still alive, may read your story, or is someone you love despite what they did. For sure, writing it down risks being corrected, contradicted, or confronted by someone who remembers it differently—or who would simply rather you didn’t remember it at all.

This is one of the real costs of memoir: sometimes the truest passages are the ones most likely to cause you trouble, and you have to decide, with open eyes, whether to write them anyway.

Holding steady

We might be tempted to respond to both kinds of memory, the uncertain and the too-certain, with a quick fix. Maybe, we think, I can present an uncertain memory as something safely vague, without letting my reader know that that moment, although important, remains fuzzy in my mind. On the other hand, maybe we want to soften a too-clear memory so it’s unlikely to trigger a reaction from the person I’m showing in a negative light.

But some of the richest memoir writing happens when we writer resist both impulses. We can hold both not-knowing and knowing-too-well, without forcing either into false resolution. Readers actually don’t need us to have it all figured out. What they do need is for us to be honest about what remembering actually feels like. It can be messy, uneven, sometimes even scary. And, in the midst of all that, we have the right to claim our version of our own story.

Memory isn’t a filing cabinet

Once we’ve made peace with memory’s unevenness—its gaps, its unreliable edges, its occasional pointed clarity—we may wonder, how do we find more of what’s actually there?

Almost no one’s memory works like an archive. We can’t rely on being able to access dates and details at the push of a button. Memory has its own agenda. It keeps what matters emotionally and lets the rest fade. That’s not a flaw in our recall. It’s actually useful information, because the scenes that have stuck with us usually carry the most meaning. If you remember the kind of ice cream sundae you shared with your grandmother, but not what you talked about at the table on particular day, the hot fudge may be the story.

Trust what surfaces and follow where it leads.

You’re allowed to write around the memory gaps

A memoir doesn’t require you to provide wall-to-wall detail. So, how much do you need to remember to write your memoir? Many memoirists write in fragments, scenes that jump across time, leaving spaces empty rather than inventing what belongs there.

Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse
In this memoir about the aftermath of her mother’s murder, Perry shares aspects of the story she can’t fully remember. Instead of narrating straight through hours she can’t clearly recall, she calls memory “a hospital-white mist, an inconsistent curtain that rolls over the hours.” She makes the “fog” part of the texture of the writing.

Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Flynn’s memoir has a raw, fragmentary style that mirrors the disjointed nature of memory. He stitches together parts of his childhood, his father’s life, and his own adulthood, rather than moving in a straight line. In a 2005 Project MUSE review, the reviewer says it has a “dreamy, fragmented feel” that propels readers “from one episode to the next the way a poet uses line breaks.”

Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club
Instead of letting fragmentation carry her whole book, Karr names a specific gap directly: “I don’t remember who we got farmed out to or for how long,” then continues. It’s a small, exposed moment, and it works precisely because she doesn’t try to cover for it.

You, too, can be direct: “I don’t remember what she said next, only how the temperature in the room fell after she said it.” That honesty can make a scene feel more powerful, not less. Readers don’t need a forensic account. They need your truth, told as clearly as you can tell it.

Other people’s memories can help, but …

If you want to fill in some of the places where your own memory isn’t holding steady, talking with family or old friends can help. But (and this is a big but!), remember that they’re human, too. Which means that their recall is maybe no better than yours. And it’s pretty obvious that different people remember the same event a little differently. Their observations and memory are shaped by their perspective: where they were standing, literally and figuratively, in relation to the events unfolding.

Psychologists who study memory explain this by saying that memory is reconstructive, not recorded. Each time we recall an event, our brains rebuild it rather than replaying a fixed copy. That rebuild is shaped by whatever we were feeling or attending to in the moment. That’s why two people can witness the same car accident and walk away with two different memories. Not because one person is wrong, but because they weren’t actually encoding identical experiences to begin with.

There’s also another effect worth considering: the more a story gets retold (at family gatherings, for example) the more it can drift from what actually happened, until even “incorrect” details feel like settled fact.

None of this means our memories are untrustworthy. It means memory was never designed to work like a recording in the first place. Which, of course, complicates the question of how much we need to remember to write a memoir. And it’s also why, while it can be really useful to refer to others’ memories for context, your memoir is your version.

And at the end of the day, that’s the version only you can truthfully write.

Let research jog your memory

In Memoir Writing for Dummies, Ryan G. Van Cleave devotes a chapter to gathering material  that can help you recall some aspects of the past:

• Look through photo albums, home movies, and videos.
• Review newspapers and magazines published at key moments in your life—knowing what the world was concerned with can help you contextualize your own story.
• Flip through school yearbooks: remembrance pages, class songs, and event calendars can unlock memories of a mostly forgotten year.
• Check vital records: report cards, licenses, bills, transcripts, even estate papers.

If you want the fuller list and Van Cleave’s approach to using it, Memoir Writing for Dummies is a genuinely comprehensive resource worth having on your shelf.

Try this

To help you remember more to write your memoir, try this: Pick one year from the period you’re writing about. Find one artifact from it—a photo, a report card, a newspaper headline—and write for ten minutes about what it brings back, even if it’s not the “important” memory you thought you’d write about.

You may be surprised what shows up on the page once you give your memory something to hold onto.

You can write your memoir!

I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Knowing how much you need to remember to write you memoir is part of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. 

If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

There are plenty of memoirs out there competing for readers’ time and attention. Perhaps you worry that your story isn’t compelling enough to earn its place among them. But you don’t need a particularly dramatic life to write a memoir people want to read. Instead, dig deep, tell your truth about what you lived through as honestly as you can. Write a memoir people want to read because, beyond anything else, it tells them more about what it means to be human than they knew before they opened your book.

What Memoir Readers Want to Read

What really moves memoir readers, whether they’d put it this way or not, is a writer willing to tell them the truth of what something cost.  Someone who can convey how it felt before they knew how it would turn out.

You might be asking, “Why would anyone want to read my story?” You might say, “It’s really not interesting enough. Nothing truly tragic happened to me.” But maybe you have other fears riding beneath those thoughts. Maybe you sense that if you excavate enough of the truth of your story, you’ll see something clearly—perhaps too clearly. That you might not like what you discover. Or that someone you love will read what you wrote and feel betrayed by it.

This is the memoirist’s dilemma: Fears like these can mean you’re getting close to the parts of the story that matter most. And those are exactly the parts that move readers the most.

When you’re willing to go to those places, open those long-closed doors, you’re offering your reader a kind of generosity. You’re sharing a version of your life that includes parts you were unsure about, parts that took a long time to understand, parts you may still not fully understand.

And somehow that’s the version people trust. Not because it’s impressive, but because it’s true.

Which Memoirs Have Moved You?

It might help to think about which memoirs have meant the most to you. Which have changed you in some way? Stayed with you? Left you understanding something more about being human—about your own life—than you realized before.

That’s what honesty creates. It doesn’t only tell your story. It hands your reader something they can turn back toward their own life and see a little more clearly by.

These three memoirs carry the weight of truth beautifully.

• Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon. Unsparing about his relationship with his mother, his body, and addiction, Laymon never smooths anything into a lesson before he’s actually earned it.
• Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick. A mother-daughter memoir that stays inside the discomfort of their bond rather than resolving it neatly. Gornick creates a close, uncomfortable honesty rather than distance.
• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Written about an abusive relationship, formally unusual, but every structural choice serves the same goal: getting at what the experience actually did to her, not just what happened.

Your Truth Is Why People Will Read Your Memoir

Some of the best memoir writing happens while you’re still figuring out what a thing meant. Your reader can feel when you’re finding your way through the meaning of your story, not just reporting its events. Writing like that will make your book feel alive—not just “finished.”

So if you’ve been holding back because you don’t think your life is dramatic enough, or resolved enough, or interesting enough, consider this: What makes a memoir worth reading isn’t drama. It’s about a writer trusting their reader with something real.

You already have that. It’s just a matter of putting it on the page.

Try this: Let a moment come to mind. Not necessarily the most impactful moment, just one you’ve been circling but may not have written yet. Ask yourself two questions: What did this cost me? And what did it teach me? That may be enough to open a door that’s been closed for a while.

And if you read this piece because someone else’s memoir has moved you, told you something about being human you hadn’t known how to say yourself, and you want to do the same? You already understand, better than any craft advice could teach you, exactly how to write a memoir people want to read.

You can write a memoir people want to read!

 I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. 

If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

Your life has been full of people and events—some more impactful, some less so. Now you want to write a memoir. While your life may have unfolded in messy layers and in no particular order, you’ll need to wrangle your story to give your readers a memoir with shape and focus. And exactly how do you find that focus when you’re considering forty years of lived experience? You put on your writer’s hat and decide exactly what to write your memoir about.

Probably the quickest way to accomplish this is to borrow a technique from novelists and screen writers. These pros rely on a focusing tool that can help you, too. It’s called the major dramatic question.

What Is a Major Dramatic Question?

A major dramatic question (MDQ) is the single, central question that keeps a reader reading through an entire book. In a mystery, it might be as simple as “will the detective catch the killer?” In a romance, readers turn pages to learn how the star-crossed lovers finally commit to one another.

A memoir, however, is a different bird altogether. Because it’s based on your real life and real circumstances, naming your MDQ may not be as simple as it is for novelists. But it’s just as important. It’s the question you entice your reader with on the first page—and which you must answer by the final page. It’s the engine that propels your story across 80,000 words.

If your memoir is about surviving a difficult childhood, your MDQ might ask whether you’ll break free of the chains of trauma and engage in healthy relationships. If your memoir is about a loss, the question could be whether you can find a reason to keep living without the person who gave your life its meaning. Whatever your question, it’s the thread around which your whole book is stitched.

The MDQ Gives Focus as You Write Your Memoir

In your memoir, the major dramatic question will ask about your transformation. Readers don’t turn the page because they need to find out whether you survived. (You’re writing the story, so obviously you made it through!) They turn the page because they need to find out how you changed because of what you endured. Or how you became capable of doing what you did.

The MDQ gives you perspective on the events of your life, offering a way to consider what to include (does it help develop or answer the MDQ?) and what to leave out.

With your MDQ as a focusing tool, you’re less likely to allow your memoir to sprawl, to become just a collection of things that happened to you. Instead, you can make sure every scene earns its place by asking, “does this move my reader closer to an answer, or does it just take up space?” A scene might be beautifully written and completely true, and still not belong in the book if it has nothing to do with the question you’re trying to answer.

MDQs in Well-Known Memoirs

Let’s look at eight best-selling memoirs. As you’ll see, each MDQ contains both a concrete question and a more abstract one—because both are important. The concrete question gives a story its forward motion—it’s something we can picture. The abstract, internal question creates emotional stakes—it’s what makes the story matter.

The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls
Will Walls break free of her parents’ chaos without losing her love for them? And will she get herself out of Welch, West Virginia, and to New York?

Wild, by Cheryl Strayed
Can Strayed survive a hike of eleven hundred miles on the Pacific Crest Trail alone? And walk her way back to herself as she does so?

Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert
Will a year of travel from Italy to India and, finally, to Indonesia help Gilbert rebuild her self-worth after her marriage collapses?

Educated, by Tara Westover
Can Westover pass the ACT and get herself into a classroom for the first time at seventeen years old? And can she claim a mind and a life of her own without losing her family entirely?

Night, by Elie Wiesel
Will Wiesel and his father survive the concentration camps? And will Wiesel’s faith and sense of self survive the Holocaust?

Just Kids, by Patti Smith
Will Smith and her lover Robert Mapplethorpe manage to feed and house themselves long enough to make it as artists in New York? And will their bond survive as they each become who they’re meant to be?

H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald
Can Macdonald get her hawk, Mabel, hunting successfully in the field? And will training her wild hawk help her survive her father’s death?

Find Your MDQ and Write a Compelling Memoir

Try this if you’re not sure of your memoir’s major dramatic question:

1. Write one sentence describing who you were on the last page of your story. Compare it to who you were on the first page. What changed?

2. Turn that change into an internal, abstract question. Not “I learned to forgive my father” but “will I be able to forgive my father.” The question should feel open, even though you already know how it resolves.

3. Look for events that show your question. If your MDQ is “will I be able to forgive my father,” you might write about a moment with him you can’t think about without flinching. Or about something he did that you’ve never told anyone.

4. Pick a few scenes to write. For each, ask: does this scene move me closer to an answer to my question? If not, it may not belong in your book.

5. Say it aloud. If you can’t say your major dramatic question in one breath to a friend, it’s probably still tangled up with two or three other questions. Keep narrowing until it’s a single thread.

Take All the Time You Need

Your major dramatic question might not lock into place right away. Let it evolve as you write. Once you find it, you’ll notice your story gets easier to write—because you’ll be sure what every page is for.

Wondering what to write your memoir about? It’s a great question—and one I can help you answer. I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect.

If you’re interested in my general approach to writing narrative, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

Loss seems to be a part of life—an unfair part of life, certainly. A parent dies. A friendship dissolves. Your childhood home is sold. An illness steals a version of you and never brings it back. That’s why loss shows up in almost every memoir. If you’re trying to figure out how to write about a significant loss in your own memoir, you don’t need to know how to tell your whole story, yet. You just need a place to start.

There’s No Calendar to Write About Loss in a Memoir 

We can talk about the stages of grief, for sure. But we also know that our response to a loss doesn’t follow anyone else’s timeline. We might feel relatively fine for months, believing we’re “coping well,” and then be flattened by a song in a grocery store. Our grief is personal and specific to us. It makes us human.

That’s one reason you may find writing about a loss is more difficult than writing about other aspects of your life. When we sit to write into an experience of defeat or bereavement, that loss still lives inside us—even as we’re trying to get it on the page.

To make this easier—possible, even—don’t try to march through the events of your loss in chronological order. Instead, let yourself write about the loss, your grief, in the ways that occur to you. You might write about the funeral, first. Remembering that might remind you of a Tuesday afternoon six years earlier, a moment you now treasure as one of the sacred ordinary. From there, you might find yourself thinking of the first time you laughed again—or the week you simply weren’t able to leave your bed.

However the experiences come to you, let your early writing follow your own emotional logic instead of calendar logic. You can always reorganize these moments to serve your larger story in later revisions.

Don’t Rush the Reader Past the Hard Part

Writing guru Natalie Goldberg tells us to “go for the jugular.” Her rule of thumb is this: “If something uncomfortable, controversial, painful, wild, or surprising pops up while you’re writing, don’t stop! Keep your hand moving … and write it all out.”

We might instinctively try to soften a painful scene, to hurry through it to spare both ourselves and our readers. But rushing through a tough situation tends to flatten the very moment that will benefit the most from depth—depth of feeling, of observation, of clarity. Give yourself permission to slow down exactly where it hurts the most. That may be where your reader relies on you the most, too.

Find an Object to Show the Emotion

Grief can’t really be conveyed by abstractions: “It was devastating,” doesn’t carry as much emotional weight as we might think. Instead of telling your reader about your feelings, try showing them through the concrete and everyday. You might write about a coffee mug still sitting in the drying rack, or a voicemail you haven’t deleted, or a coat that still smells like the person you’ve lost.

Joan Didion does this in The Year of Magical Thinking. After her husband died, she found she couldn’t give away his shoes because some part of her clung to the idea that he would need them when he “returned.” When she shares this in her book, she doesn’t need to explain either the depth of her loss or the fact that grief can make us believe impossible things. The shoes do it for her.

T.S. Eliot named this literary technique the objective correlative. He appreciated the way an object or event can evoke an emotion without the writer needing to name that emotion directly. 

A Small Memoir Exercise About Loss 

When you want to write about the feeling of loss in your memoir, think about a physical object that carried the emotion for you and start there. It might be a coffee mug, a pair of reading glasses, a voicemail. Something you couldn’t bring yourself to give away or delete.

Set a timer for ten minutes and respond to these questions as specifically as you can:

• What did it look like? Not “an old sweater,” but the exact shade of blue, the pilling, that one button that never quite matched.
• Where is it now? A drawer, a box, still hanging where it always hung?
• What do you do when you see the object—or the blinking light that reminds you that your loved one’s last voicemail message is waiting for you in the limbo of electronic space? Do you touch it? Listen? Avoid it?
• What memory do you have attached to it? Write a scene that shows how the object was present before your loss. (I wrote once about the color blue, and ended up remembering a day with my now-deceased dad in which he took me to a frame shop to frame my college diploma with my alma mater‘s colors: blue and gold.)

Don’t try to explain the loss while you write this. Just stay with your description and your relationship with the object. If feelings show up, let them, but see how much work the object can do on its own.

You Don’t Have to Get It Right the First Time

If you find writing about your loss feels clumsy, or too raw, or not quite true, know that you’re simply finding your way. Your first attempts at writing about your loss might be either overwrought or oddly flat. It’s fine. Just like grief doesn’t move in straight lines, neither does our writing about it.

Eventually, you’ll find that writing about your loss will give it shape—something you can hold, revisit, and eventually share. Start with one object, one scene, one Tuesday. The rest will follow.

Writing a memoir can be a deeply rewarding journey—but also a tricky one. This article offers guidance for shaping your story in a way that honors both your truth and your readers: “How to Write a Memoir.”   

Wondering how to write about loss in your memoir? I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect.

If you’re interested in my general approach to writing narrative, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

How much can you shape your story before it stops being memoir? Every memoirist asks this question sooner or later. Maybe you’re tempted to conflate two friends into one character to streamline your story. Or create more tension by presenting a string of events over one (fictionalized) summer rather than three (lived) years. Or you want to write a conversation you never got to have with someone before they died. So, when should you fictionalize your memoir?

What does it mean to “fictionalize a memoir”?

As the examples above show, fictionalizing your memoir means changing what actually happened. Fictionalization is not a technique; it’s a departure from what actually occurred. And the question it raises is this: When do you stop calling what you’ve written “memoir” and disclose the changes you’ve made. Some well-known memoir writers have handled this question in a variety of ways. Looking at the choices they’ve made can help you decide how to proceed with your own story.

Memoirists who’ve traveled the road before you

Mary Karr
In The Liars’ Club, Karr leans hard on the truth of her Texas childhood, letting real people and real dialogue carry the story without much reshaping. Her approach reminds us that the truest version of events can also be the most compelling one. We don’t necessarily need to invent situations when what actually happened is unforgettable.

Augusten Burroughs
Burroughs’s Dry opens with an author’s note, in which he explains that names were changed, characters combined, and some scenes recreated. Yes, Burroughs used composite characters and reshaped the timeline, but he told readers exactly what he was doing before they invested in his story. That transparency is what keeps his book in memoir territory.

James Frey
Frey has become a poster boy for fictionalizing without disclosing. His A Million Little Pieces was sold as memoir. It even became an Oprah’s Book Club pick. But then large portions were discovered to have been fabricated, rather than reasonably reconstructed. The scandal wasn’t about whether Frey shaped his story—every memoirist does that. It was about the gap between how much he invented and the claim he made that it was all exactly as he’d lived it.

Alice Sebold
Sebold wrote the same story in two different forms. Her memoir, Lucky, recounts her rape in college in unflinching, factual detail. Her novel The Lovely Bones, about a girl who is raped and murdered, draws directly on Sebold’s experience, but it’s presented with a different (and impossible) narrator and a tragically altered outcome.

Sebold has said she wrote Lucky for herself, to get her own story down in plain, truthful terms. She wrote The Lovely Bones for her fictional character Susie Salmon, who she said, needed to go somewhere Sebold’s real life hadn’t.

So, when should you fictionalize your memoir?

Where your own memoir falls depends on, among other considerations,

• craft concerns: what does the story actually need in order to work on the page?
• creative opportunities: how much freedom do you want as a writer?
• and ethical and legal issues: how do you protect the people named in your story—and keep yourself safe as well? (I’ve written a post that looks at some of the ethical and legal aspects of this issue.)

Here are some questions worth sitting with as you decide:

• How many moments do you feel need to be compressed or reshaped to serve the story? At what point do you think you’re crossing into fiction?
• How would writing a novel based on your life experiences serve you differently than writing the lived memoir version?
• Would you be willing to list, specifically, every place you’ve changed something? Or is there a change you’d rather keep vague? And if so, why?
• Are you changing details to protect someone’s privacy? Or are you avoiding a truth that’s just simply hard to write?
• Have you asked, or could you ask, the people involved how they feel about how they’re being portrayed?
• Are the changes you’re making small enough that they would hold up against someone else’s memory of the same events? Or are you more completely rewriting what actually happened?
• Are you fictionalizing—making changes—to reduce legal exposure, or to avoid a conflict you’re not ready to have?
• If you call your book a “memoir,” could you defend every scene it contains if you were challenged about its accuracy?

No hard and fast rules—but reader trust matters

There’s no universal rule about fictionalizing your memoir. What matters is being clear about your choices and being honest with your reader about the book they have in their hands. Writers don’t get in trouble because they’ve reshaped their material; they get caught out when they let their readers believe something other than what actually happened.

Are you wondering whether to fictionalize your memoir? I work with memoir writers—and novelists—at all stages of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect.

If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might take a look at my books, Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.