You’ve had a truly impactful experience. Or you’ve lived an exceptional life. And you’re thinking maybe you should write a memoir (or everyone tells you that you should!). But … but … but…. Could it be too soon to write your memoir? And how can you tell?
Journaling as a beginning to write your memoir
When something painful or otherwise life-changing happens, your first instinct might be to write it down in your journal. Getting the events and your feelings onto the page can be a steadying alternative to carrying the experience around unprocessed inside. When you journal, you also create a record you can return to when you’re ready to review what’s happened and how it affected you.
Also, if you’re considering writing a memoir about what you’ve been through, your journal entries are great at preserving the moments you’ve lived through before memory smooths it over.
Perspective over time
We humans are growing, developing beings. What we first record in our journals is usually quite raw. We haven’t had time yet to reflect on our experience. Reflection is a different task altogether. We learn from the perspective time affords us. Time allows us to make meaning of our experiences. And the layers of meaning that underlie the events we’ve undergone are the foundational strata of any memoir we want to write.
I’ve worked with writers who felt compelled to start their memoir while they were still deep inside the experience they wanted to write about. The divorce hadn’t been finalized. Their loved one was buried only a month ago. The estrangement with their sister was ongoing—the writer still hoping this might be the year they could speak again.
In some way, the situation or relationship remained unresolved. As of yet, these writers hadn’t gotten the perspective—and perhaps closure—that time could eventually provide. And their writing showed it. Not because they lacked talent. But because you can’t see the full extent of the mountain range while you’re still climbing. All you can see from partway up is rock and fog and the next few feet of trail.
You need to get some distance, gain some elevation, before the entirety of the prospect becomes visible.
Not calendar time
It’s not really about months or even years elapsing. It’s about whether the experience you want to write about has finished its work. Are you able to recognize and name the change that you’ve undergone because of that experience? A woman writing about her divorce while she’s still negotiating custody arrangements will tell a different story than she’ll be able to tell in three years. After the dust has settled and she can see what the marriage actually meant, not just what it cost her this week, her writing will be wiser.
Knowing where you are with your story—is it finished or still-forming?—is an important judgment call. Start too early, and while you’ll definitely still be processing your experience, you’re unlikely to be able to get to the vein of gold underlying the events and the emotional landscape you had to traverse because of them.
I understand that the urge to write feels like proof it’s time to start drafting your memoir. But that isn’t always the case. It may just be time to journal faithfully and trust that the process will take you to the top of that mountain where you can finally see the whole story—one that you can deliver to the readers you’re hoping to reach with it.
Hemingway knew it was too soon to write his Paris memoir
Hemingway was sitting in a Paris café one cold, rainy day, writing. But not about Paris. He famously wrote that it was “too early for that.” Because he realized he wouldn’t be able to write about Paris while he lived there. He didn’t have the distance. The perspective.
Sure, he was living in Paris, walking its streets, eating in its cafés. He was drinking with the writers and painters who filled his world there: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald. By any ordinary measure, he knew the city intimately. But that wasn’t enough for him to write about his experience there. He didn’t yet have the long view on himself—the writer he was still becoming, the marriage he was still living through, the ambitions and rivalries and daily disciplines that were still shaping him.
He understood that he couldn’t describe what that chapter of his life meant while he was still living it.
Not a travel guide
And sure enough, when Hemingway finally did write about Paris, it wasn’t a guidebook. It wasn’t about cafés and monuments—nor even primarily about the famous writers he hung out with. What he actually wrote about, decades later, was his own story: the discipline and hunger of learning to write; his first, fiercely poor, fiercely happy marriage; and the tangled friendships and literary rivalries of his expat circle. And, importantly, the recognition of how that entire chapter of innocence eventually ended.
He needed not only to have lived Paris; he also needed to have left it and gained enough distance to see what, ultimately, it had given him.
A Moveable Feast
His Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, points to that understanding. Hemingway’s Paris wasn’t really a place at all. It was an experience, a state of being that became a permanent part of him. He carried that Paris with him for the rest of his life.
It was so wise of him to declare, then, at that café table, that he couldn’t write about Paris while he was engaged with making a life there. In that moment, he was simply living his twenties: poor, married, ambitious, surrounded by people whose talent and egos he was still learning to navigate.
It was only decades later that he could look back and recognize what that Paris actually meant to him. It was not a city he’d lived in, but a version of himself he’d lived out. He couldn’t title his memoir A Moveable Feast until his Paris life had, in fact, stopped moving and started settling into memory.
When Hemingway was ready
In fact, Hemingway didn’t write about Paris until thirty years later, in Ketchum, Idaho, and Havana, Cuba, near the very end of his life. Thousands of miles and half a lifetime separated him from the Left Bank of his twenties. A Moveable Feast was published after his death. In the end, it took decades for him to truly see the shape of what those Paris years had meant.
So, is it too soon to write your memoir?
While we’re in the midst of an experience—a teetering marriage, a hard diagnosis, a grievous loss—we’re still being shaped by it. What we don’t have yet is a vantage point that will let us say what it means. That vantage point exists on the other side of the experience—once we’ve had time to digest and reflect.
We certainly don’t need to wait thirty years. But we likely do need some version of what Hemingway gave himself: enough distance for our experience to stop being the thing we’re in and become a thing we are able to look back at.
Unfortunately, few experiences ever fully resolve in a neat, tidy way. Our grief may not end but become muted. And some relationships stay complicated forever. But if we can give ourselves the time and space we need to look at the questions raised by the events and consider them from a few different angles, we’re likely to get to the heart of the memoir we want to write. Not just tell about the cafés and monuments.
Questions to help you know if it’s too soon to write your memoir
This isn’t a test! But these questions may help you know where you are in your memoir-writing process:
- Can I describe what this experience meant to me, not just what happened?
- Do I feel curiosity about this time in my life now, or only pain?
- Can I imagine a reader reading my story and understanding the growth I’ve experienced by living it?
- Am I writing to process the experience, or to share what I’ve already processed?
- If I read this draft in a year, do I think I’d feel I’ve explored the nuances of the events and the meaning they held?
Consider these questions a mirror. A way of checking whether you’re still inside your story or whether you’ve stepped back far enough to tell it. If most of your answers point toward not yet, give yourself more time. When you’re ready, you’ll know.
The process is … a process
And if you decide it is too soon to write your memoir? Keep journaling! Draft scenes while they’re fresh—and a little raw. Say how you feel—and track how that changes. The process has real value, both for you and for the memoir in your future. What you write today, while you’re still deeply inside your experience, can be some of the truest material you’ll ever have access to. A future version of you, shaping the memoir from your journals will be grateful you captured these moments while they were fresh.
Is it too soon to write your memoir? I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. If you’re wondering if you’re ready to write your story—or have already begun!—I can help you start (or finish) your book. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect.
If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.