How Blogging Can Help You Write a Better Memoir

How Blogging Can Help You Write a Better Memoir

From a distance, a stained glass window presents a seamless, beautiful image. Up close, it reveals itself as hundreds of jewel-like pieces held together to create the larger picture. Likewise, when we read a memoir, we experience it as one continuous story. But when we write a memoir, we construct it one vivid moment at a time. Because of this, some writers find blogging can help them write a better memoir.

Blogging Helps You Craft the Moments That Become Your Memoir

A blog offers an intimate space to explore your memories, reflect on your experiences, and discover what moments contain enough emotional energy to impact the story you’re telling. On your blog, you can create single posts that develop these moments—which are fragments that ultimately lend themselves to the telling of the whole.

You can write about:

• an elusive memory or a long-held secret
• a scene that still keeps you up at night
• a reflection on a significant choice you made
• a person who altered your trajectory
• or a single emotionally charged experience

Over time, these smaller pieces will reveal patterns and themes that you can use to help shape and sharpen the larger story of your memoir.

Blogging Helps You Write a Better Memoir by Developing Your Voice

Voice develops through use, through discernment: what sounds right, feels right, feels awkward, feels closer, feels further away. Voice is a game of warmer/colder. We hone it through practice and experimentation.

Because blogging is such a short form, in each post, we can explore the nuances of important moments, how to express them, how to develop them fully. They are little gems that we can polish and enjoy—knowing there’s always time to edit them when we begin to frame out the larger story they serve.

This pleasure and polishing can encourage us to find and refine the voice of our memoir.

Blogging Helps You Write a Better Memoir by Creating a Record of Your Thinking

Memoir is not just about what happened. It’s also about reflection, perspective, and emotional understanding. What do you remember? What do you feel about what you remember? What is your opinion? Your understanding?

Maybe you hold what seem to be mutually exclusive ideas about what your remember. That’s natural; it’s human. Writing into these dichotomies helps you find resolution—and shaping that resolution into a blog post creates a living record of the process you underwent to get there.

A blog, therefore, is a place where you can think more deeply into your experiences—looking for the meaning they hold for you and that you want to share with your readers.

Blogging Helps Writers Build Momentum

A memoir project is a long, long road. The sheer length of the journey can feel intimidating. Blogging, however, creates opportunities for smaller completions. Way stations. Places to stop and observe the landscape. Explore a moment. Learn how the fog rises and why it dissipates.

Finishing shorter pieces can help a writer:

• build confidence
• maintain momentum
• and stay emotionally connected to the process

A completed blog post may not feel as conclusive as, say, a finished chapter—but, scene by scene, idea by developed idea, momentum gathers.

A Final Thought: You Don’t Have to Blog Publicly

Of course, not every memoir writer wants to publish personal material online. Thank heaven “blog” isn’t synonymous with “public.” That’s why some writers keep their blogs private or have password-protected posts. While they may write on a platform that “publishes” their work, the point of their blogging is not (necessarily) public exposure. The point is to inhabit a space in which they can develop an ever-deeper understanding—moment by illuminated moment—of the story they want to tell.

Writing a memoir is a sensitive endeavor. But there are guardrails to help! This article will give you some insight into the basics: “How to Write a Memoir.”