July 2026 archive

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.

Memoir Writing Prompts: What Your Stuff Remembers

If you’re looking for memoir writing prompts that are personal and specific to you and your life, you don’t need to look far. What you need is probably sitting on a book shelf or tucked in the back of a closet. The objects you live with every day are quietly holding your memories—you just need to ask them to speak.

After Joan Didion’s husband died, she couldn’t bring herself to give away his shoes. As she says in her memoir, Because somewhere in the back of her grief-stricken mind, she writes in her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, a part of her believed he might still come back—and he would need them.

Objects remember differently than photographs

Photos are wonderful memory triggers. If you’ve ever tried writing snapshot memoir, you know the magic of dropping into a moment captured by an image. But objects can have a different, maybe more immediate, impact.

Your grandmother’s mixing bowl, for instance, can conjure an entire experience:  Sunday mornings, flour on a dark countertop, the sound of your cousins’ laughter. Your father’s old toolbox can carry his whole philosophy of life: Fix what’s broken, make it last, do it yourself.

Objects carry sensory memory: weight, smell, texture, the specific way something felt in your hands. And that kind of memory goes deep.

For memoir writers, this is gold.

Your home is a memoir waiting to be written

Think about the objects around you that you’ve kept, the things that have followed you from apartment to apartment, relationship to relationship, decade to decade. What memories do they hold that you can mine?

Maybe you have a piece of jewelry you never wear but can’t part with. Or a book with someone else’s handwriting in the margins. Or a coffee mug from a place you used to love. These aren’t just things. They’re memoir writing prompts, hiding in plain sight.

You may not even know what an object means to you until you start writing about it. You think you’re writing about a mug, and then suddenly you’re writing about loneliness, or belonging, or a summer that changed everything.

A memoir writing prompt for you

Set a timer for ten minutes. Look around the room—or close your eyes and let an object come to mind. It might be something ordinary. It might be something you’ve stopped seeing because it’s so familiar.

Pick it up or picture it clearly. Now ask it some questions: Where did you come from? Who held you before me? What were you there for? What do you know about my life that I’ve never put into words?

Then write. Don’t edit, don’t overthink. Just follow the object wherever it leads. You may be surprised where you end up.

Ready to write your story?

If you’re feeling the pull toward memoir, toward getting your own story onto the page, I’d love to support you. Sometimes all it takes is the right question, and the right person to help you find your way.

As you’re considering writing your memoir, you might find my article “How to Write a Memoir” useful, as well as 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.

First-time memoir writers know they have a story to tell, but they’re not necessarily sure where that story starts, where it ends, or what to include in the telling of it. Most “memoir writing tips for beginners” hand you a bullet list of principles—show, don’t tell; find your theme; write with honesty. These are all important points. But just reading those principles may not help you get your book off the ground.

So instead of another list of principles, the “memoir writing tips for beginners” here are actually given in the form of an exercise with six steps—sort of like a treasure hunt!

Do all the steps over a weekend, or take them one at a time over a few weeks. Either way, when you’ve finished the exercise, you won’t just understand memoir writing better. You’ll have the actual beginnings of your book.

Step One: Exploring What Your Story’s About 

Start by spending some time with this question: What is your memoir actually about? You might think you already know: It’s about what happened to me! Which is true. But your memoir also carries the meaning of what happened.

For instance, maybe your story is about your time as a professional swimmer: the competitions you attended or injuries you may have sustained. But if you dig deeper, you might discover your swimming career was about belonging—or about what happens when your whole identity is built around what your body can do.

Good news: This is only the first part of the exercise! You don’t need to know the answer yet. You just need a thread to start pulling.

Exercise: Finish this sentence ten different ways: My memoir is about…

Step Two: Make a Timeline

Once you have a possible thread—what happened and the possible meaning of it—break your life into five-year chunks: birth to five years old, five to ten, and so on. For each period, jot down the basics: where you lived, the people who mattered to you, what you were doing.

Then ask one more question of each chunk: Do I see any threads of my story here? 

Step Three: Pull the Thread

Go back over what you discovered on your timeline and pull out anything connected to your thread(s). You might end up with a list of moments, conversations, people, events, or turning points. For instance, the swimmer might notice entries that touch on the theme of  belonging: a coach who made the team feel like family; a roommate at a meet who became a lifelong friend; the isolation of training alone before dawn.

This is where the shape of your memoir usually starts to show itself. Not in any single event, but in what the events have in common. One moment is just a memory. A pattern of moments can become a book.

Step Four: Write the Scenes

Pick a few moments from your list and just write them. Not chronologically. Not for a first draft. Just dive into the moment and write. What happened? Who was there? What did you notice? And, getting back to meaning making, what do you understand now that you didn’t then?

Write as many scenes as you like. Don’t worry yet about how they connect.

Step Five: What Got Clearer?

Consider this your book’s discovery phase. After writing those scenes, notice whether anything became clearer while you were writing. Did your sense of focus—the meaning of the scene—shift, sharpen, or get more complicated? What did your scene-writing tell you that your time line didn’t?

Eventually, most memoirists realize they’re not writing exactly the book they originally thought they were. That’s exciting! Allow the process to show you more about the story you’re telling.

Step Six: Write a “Synopsis”

You’ve done a lot already. This step is about consolidating what you’ve accomplished so far—not about creating marketing copy! It might take a few tries, but try to write just one paragraph that describes the version of your story you’ve discovered so far.

Include how you changed because of what happened to you, and what you hope to convey to a reader (the meaning). This is a way to catch up with your own thinking, and it’s a step that can be repeated as your story shifts shape on its way to becoming its truest self.

The Best Memoir Writing Tips for Beginners Are Not Rules

Notice what you learned about writing a memoir by doing this: You didn’t just read a definition of theme—you found your own, by asking what your story means rather than simply what happened. You didn’t just read about how to choose which events matter—you homed in on moments from your life that you feel belong in your book. You didn’t just read the phrase “show, don’t tell”—you wrote fully fleshed, engaging scenes. You didn’t just read about memoirists understanding more of their story as they write—you watched your own theme shift, right there in Step Five.

What a writing guide would hand you as a rule, you arrived at as an experience—that will stick. That’s why what you’ve got now isn’t just a stronger grasp of memoir. It’s the actual start of yours.

A Final Thought on Writing Memoir 

This may be counterintuitive, but “starting” your memoir isn’t really about writing your first chapter. It’s about digging in to discover exactly what story you want to tell. The best “memoir writing tip for beginners” I can offer is this: Give yourself permission to gather all that you’ll need to tell the whole story—events, ideas, remembered moments—before you begin your first draft. Your memoir will be all the richer if you allow your story to reveal itself one scene, one memory, and one honest question at a time.

Writing a memoir can be a deeply rewarding journey—but also a tricky one. Use the memoir writing tips for beginners above to get you started. Then you might find my article “How to Write a Memoir”useful as well. 

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.