Writer's Blog: Tips and Inspiration

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.

Should you write your memoir in chronological order? Great question. Maybe—but not necessarily. Below, you’ll find five ways to structure your story, including the dramatic way Cheryl Strayed breaks the “rule” of chronology in her memoir, Wild.

Here are five structural approaches for you to consider as you draft your memoir.

1. Write your memoir in chronological order

Yes, most memoirs are written in chronological order. It’s a classic structure: Your story opens where it actually began, and moves forward from there. This works beautifully when your arc is the point—when the reader wants to see the you change, step by step.

Further, there’s inherent tension in following a person’s story as they lived it, without any foreknowledge or conveniently added hindsight. And tension is what keeps readers turning pages.

2. Open at a moment of high tension, then circle back

On the other hand, Cheryl Strayed starts Wild at the halfway point of her story. Her opening scene drops the reader into her “all is lost” moment on the Pacific Crest Trail. Then Strayed circles back through several years of back story, before returning to the head of the trail where, arguably, her story begins.

To try this method with your own memoir, identify a moment of high drama in your story. Starting there engages your reader emotionally—and likely compels them to keep reading to find out how you arrived at that powerful point. This approach also “earns” whatever backstory you need to support that moment because your reader is already so invested in your journey.

3. Braid two timelines together

Instead of including flashback on an as-needed basis as most narratives do, a braided memoir alternates between two timelines all the way through the book—a present-day chapter, followed by a past chapter, then present-day again—with both threads moving forward and developing on their own until they meet near the end.

Say you’re writing about caring for your father at the end of his life. You might start in the present with a chapter in his hospital room and follow that with a chapter from your childhood, decades ago, then alternating hospital scenes with memories the hospital scenes stir up.

Neither timeline interrupts the other—they’re running in parallel, each with its own arc. While this structure is more complex than a single timeline, it’s probably close to how memory actually works: the present constantly pulling the past to the surface.

Melissa Cistaro’s Pieces of My Mother and Susan Morris’s The Sensitive One are examples of the braided-memoir structure.

4. Let a recurring touchstone anchor every chapter

In Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses, Claire Dederer titles each chapter for a yoga pose, and her actual yoga practice develops chronologically as its own throughline in the book. But while each chapter discusses the pose named, the poses also become doorways into the unfolding story of her life. For example, in her “Child’s Pose” chapters, she revisits moments from her unconventional childhood.

If you have a practice you return to regularly—running, gardening, a weekly phone call, church, therapy—each occasion can become a chapter frame. Open a chapter there, then continue into the scene you’ve prepared for that chapter. You might even close the chapter back where you started, practice still going.

5. Anchor chapters to place instead of time

Mary Cantwell’s Manhattan, When I Was Young takes her through her twenties and thirties by way of five apartments, each one reflecting the experiences she had while she lived there.

This structure invites you to organize chapters by place. It’s a natural fit if you’ve experienced different settings—homes, schools, cities, or periods of travel—and each one came with its own cast of characters and its own version of the self you were becoming.

How do you decide whether you should write your memoir in chronological order?

Any one of these approaches might serve your memoir well. Each one makes a different promise to your reader. Chronological order promises a journey worth taking. Opening at a high-tension moment promises a big payoff. Braiding two timelines promises two stories that rely on each other to create meaning. A recurring practice promises the reader a steady place to stand while the past wavers in and out. And anchoring your story to the places you’ve been promises a varied world your reader can walk through with you (one that also does some of the emotional work for you). Which you choose depends on what you actually want the reader feeling on page one.

Are you wondering if you should write your memoir in chronological order? There may be other options that would serve your story just as well! 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.

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.”   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.

How to Build an Author Platform Before Your Memoir Is Published

Most memoir writers assume the real work is the writing itself. And there is plenty to do in that regard: remembering, drafting, shaping your life into a story! But many writers miss something that needs to happen at the same time as the writing—creating an audience for your book. This article focuses on that task, showing you how to build an author platform before your memoir is published.

A writer came to me a while back with a finished manuscript—eighteen months of early mornings before work and weekends of missed evenings with friends. She was proud of it, and she should have been. “What do I do next,” she asked.

Start Building Your Audience Early

Had she come to me early in her memoir-writing project, I’d have told her to begin building her audience right away: a blog about her book’s central theme, maybe, or creating a social media presence related her story. Of course, her manuscript was the priority, but an audience takes as long to build as a book does to write—and those are the people who are going to receive your book and give it a home in the world.

Your audience, then, is a group of people who know you’re writing your book and are waiting to read it. They’re people who follow you somewhere on social media, open your emails, and will preorder your book the day it’s available.

If you’re hoping to publish traditionally, agents and editors will look at your audience as evidence that readers will actually buy your book. In fact, a robust platform is often what gets a memoir taken seriously, especially for a first-time author. If you’re planning to self-publish, the effect of an audience is even more direct: It’s the difference between a book that sells a handful of copies to family and friends and one with a wider reach—because those readers are already waiting for your book to come out.

How to Build an Author Platform Before Your Memoir Is Published

1. Speak about your theme: Your memoir has a central theme—perhaps grief, reinvention, addiction, faith, or walking away. Talk about that theme publicly while you’re drafting your memoir.

2. Start a blog: You need a place where the people who will eventually care about your book can find you and see what you have to say. (Take a look at my post on blogging and memoir writing.)

3. Pick a platform: Instagram, Substack, a Facebook group—any one of these might be a good fit for you to share ideas about your memoir theme or topic. What matters most is that you show up to a platform with consistency.

4. Share ideas your topic, not your manuscript, itself: You don’t have to share pages from your memoir to build an audience. Write about your subject, what you’re learning, noticing, and wrestling with. Keep your book private until it’s ready for publication.

5. Find communities interested in your topic: If your memoir is about caregiving, find caregivers online—in forums, Facebook groups, or by following hashtags.

6. Collect emails, not just followers

To build an email list, offer a bonus for signing up: a few pages from your book’s opening, an essay on your theme, even a short checklist based on your subject—something like “5 Things No One Tells You About Coming Home From Deployment” for a memoir about military service.

Invite people to join your email list from the same place every time. For instance, include a single line at the end of your posts, like “Want the first chapter when it’s ready? Join the list.” People need to see the offer more than once before they act on it.

Use a simple tool to collect and hold your list. Mailchimp and ConvertKit are both great. Then, actually write to folks on your list! Even a few lines every month or two—what you’re working on, a small update, a short story—keeps the relationship alive so that when the book is ready, they remember why they’re interested.

7. Tell stories: An audience is built from sharing small, relatable moments—memories, images, insights. Share these regularly so people start to recognize your voice.

8. Show yourself before the book is done: Building an audience may mean sharing before you feel ready. But audience-building doesn’t have to wait until you feel confident. In fact, it might help you develop confidence and your platform at the same time.

9. Talk with your early readers: Answer comments. Ask questions. The relationship that becomes an audience is built in the back-and-forth. Likewise, follow like-minded others and comment on their posts. Engagement builds community—and community = audience.

10. Track what resonates: Which posts get a real response—comments, replies, shared stories of your readers’ own? Those responses tell you what your readers are hungry for.

How to Build an Author Platform Before Your Memoir Is Published—Starting Today

One small step to take today: Write a paragraph about the theme at the heart of your memoir. Then share it where someone who might be interested in the same theme can find it: write a Facebook post, create a Notes app screenshot and share on Instagram, or write an email to five people you already know who’d care that you’re talking about this subject.

It’s a small step, but it will create the foundation of interest (and courage) that you’ll build your audience upon.

Could you use some support as you build your author platform before your memoir is published? 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.

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.”   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.

How honest should a memoir be? The answer is more nuanced than you might think. Not because memoir writers are dishonest people—actually, my clients are more deeply honest than many folks I know. But memoir asks something specific of us: to tell our story in a way that invites a reader’s trust. And that trust comes from our readers believing we aren’t hiding from them—or from ourselves.

“Factual” and “Honest” Aren’t the Same Thing

Your memoir does need to be factual. The events in your book have to have actually happened, in the order and manner you say they did. Unlike fiction writers, memoirists can’t invent scenes to add drama or combine two arguments into one because it’s tidier. If it didn’t happen, it doesn’t belong in a memoir. It’s what separates memoir from fiction.

On the other hand, no one expects you to reconstruct dialogue word for word, or to remember exactly what the weather was like the day your father left. Memory doesn’t necessarily store detail in that way, and readers know it. You’re allowed to write, “He said something like …” and render the spirit of the conversation, even if you can’t quote it exactly.

So, factual means the events you share are real. Honest means you’re not shaping those real events to make yourself or anyone else look better or worse than they were. Where writers actually get into trouble isn’t with the fuzzy memory of a detail—it’s when they invent something that didn’t happen, or leave out a part of your story that would complicate how they want to come across to readers.

Writing About Other People

Once you start writing about your own life, other people show up in the pages. It’s unavoidable, and it brings up two very different kinds of worry.

One is a personal issue: Is writing about someone important to you likely to hurt them or jeopardize your relationship with them? Are you willing to face the consequences of that type of honesty? Unfortunately, there’s no formula to help you evaluate the risk. It’s not a legal question; it’s a “what am I willing to live with” question—and only you can answer it.

The other issue is legal. As you write your memoir, questions about privacy, identifiability, and legal risk arise. I’ve written about one aspect of this topic in my post titled “Should You Use Real Names When Writing a Memoir?,” which discusses what changing someone’s name actually does and doesn’t protect you from. But I always advise memoirists to research legalities before publishing.

Writing About Yourself

It’s not especially hard to write honestly about someone who hurt us. What can be hard is writing honestly about choices we’ve made that we’re not proud of. The small cruelty. The moments we weren’t brave. How we hurt other people.

Of course, we don’t have to disclose everything. Privacy is not the same as dishonesty, and we’re allowed to decide what stays out of our book entirely. But we are not perfect—and no one expects us to have been. So, as we write our story, we can ask ourselves gently, “Is this the version of me that I actually displayed at the time—or is it the version I’d feel better showing to someone else?”

A Small Exercise in Facts and Honesty

Pick a moment from your life that you haven’t written about yet. First, write it as plainly as you can, like you’re filing a report. Just tell what happened, in order, without emotion or interpretation.

Next, write about the situation again. This time, add the emotion, saying what you actually felt —including anything you might be tempted to soften, whether that’s your own behavior or someone else’s.

Read both versions back. The first is factual. The second is where honesty lives.

How Honest Should Your Memoir Be?

A memoir where the writer is willing to be seen clearly—flaws included—makes the reader feel they’ve been entrusted with something real. And that, more than any dramatic confession, is what keeps them rooting for you—and turning the page.

Ready to write your story? As you’re considering writing your memoir, you might find my article “How to Write a Memoir” useful. And 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.

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.