Are you writing a memoir? If so, is the process stirring things up? You may have thought you’d be ready for what the remembering brought with it. But if your emotions are rising, you could be wondering if writing a memoir is, inherently, a therapeutic process—and what that means for you.
The Early Stages of Memoir Writing Are Likely to Feel “Therapeutic”
In your earliest drafts, your job is to just get your experiences—the raw material of your memoir—on the page. If your writing feels messy and emotional at first, great! Give yourself all the permission you need to explore. Revisit events, re-evaluate relationships, and reconsider the perhaps shadowy aspects of your life in your own way and your own time.
Of course, this process is likely to be a bit of an emotional ride. It may be clarifying—but it can also be unsettling.
When You’re Writing a Memoir, Therapeutic Support Can Make a Real Difference
Writing a memoir can bring things to the surface that might be hard to navigate on your own. So having support—a therapist, a trusted friend, a writing community—can help a lot. Good support means you don’t have to carry everything that comes up all by yourself.
But Is Your Memoir-Writing Just Therapeutic? Or Are You Writing a Book?
Of course, your writing doesn’t have to become a book. For some people, the experience of writing their memoir is absolutely therapeutic, and that’s enough. (Especially if they’ve had help working through their feelings during the process.)
But if you do want to take it further, if you you want to publish your memoir and have readers travel the life path you’ve written about, eventually you’ll start to shape the material you’ve written. That shift—from personal expression to narrative craft—is what will turn your exploratory, therapeutic writing into a book.
Distance Matters
When you swing the door open between writing for yourself and writing for your readers, you’ll shift from being the person who lived the experience to being the writer who shapes it. You’ll suss out the narrative arc and develop the characters in your story. You’ll refine and define, discovering what you want to include and what’s okay to leave out.
All of that begins with learning to look at your own material with an objective eye. Here’s a simple exercise to practice that skill.
Writing Prompt: From Raw to Cooked
Think of a situation from your life that was difficult: painful, confusing, charged, or just never resolved. Write it out for yourself first. Don’t worry how it sounds. Be awkward, be whiny, be angry, be wobbly, uncertain, inconsistent. This writing isn’t for anyone else’s eyes.
Once you’re done, let that piece cool on the counter of your laptop for a few days.
When you come back to it, see how you can shape the piece into something another person would be engaged by, could relate to. Here are some ways to approach this revision that might help:
- Make it a scene: Put the reader in the room. Where were you? What did you see, hear, feel physically? Sensory details like these make the experience you had available to the reader.
- Add context: What do you know that the reader doesn’t? Is there a detail, an element of backstory, or a relationship dynamic that you could name that would orient the reader? A single sentence can do a lot of work in this regard.
- Find the shape: Even a tiny scene can have an arc! Can you offer the reader a full experience with a beginning, a turn, and an ending? (Our raw writing often spirals; when we shape that writing for a reader, they arrive somewhere.)
The Raw …
Here’s a raw journal entry, one that you might write in the aftermath of an unexpected, triggering experience:
I can’t. I just can’t. He was THERE and I saw him and he saw me and he just—I don’t even know. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what I felt. I don’t know why I’m writing this. I hate him. No. I don’t hate him. I just want him to know that I—what? That I’m in pain? That it mattered? That I mattered? God. I’m so tired of feeling like this. Why am I still feeling like this?
… And the Cooked
Now here’s that same moment, after a few days on the counter (and some crafting):
We hadn’t spoken in almost a year. I saw him across the lobby. I think he saw me too—but he just kept walking. No nod, no anything. I stood there for a minute, not really sure what to do. I’m still not sure what I was hoping would happen.
In the raw version there was no location, no time, no context—just feeling. In the cooked version, there’s a shape baked in to what we felt:
- Scene: We’re in a lobby. The reader can see it.
- Context: “We hadn’t spoken in almost a year.” That one sentence that tells the reader enough about the relationship to orient them without dissipating the immediacy of the moment.
- Shape: It has a beginning (the narrator sees him), a turn (he keeps walking), and an ending (the narrator’s still standing there, still not sure what they wanted).
That’s a complete little story. That’s what you’re working toward.
Be Where You Are
But if you’re still in the early stages, still just getting it out, still letting it be hot and wild and unruly, good. That’s the work, the first work. Don’t rush yourself to the next stage. That writing, the words you spill on the page just for yourself, will be the solid foundation of every iteration of your story that comes after it.
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.
Could you use some support as you write 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.