How to Write a Memoir: 3 Ways to Tell Your Life Story
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Writing a memoir can be an exciting and challenging venture — especially if you’re new to the task. Many of us are familiar with the genre, but until you sit down and contemplate how to write your memoir, you might not have considered the various and diverse ways there are to communicate your life story. As a ghostwriter who has written close to a dozen memoirs, I have learned that people’s stories can be presented in more ways than one.
You might wonder why it is important to select the best approach to write your memoir. Recently, I read Canadian writer Harrison Mooney’s new memoir, Invisible Boy, which includes a simple, yet profound subtitle: “a memoir of self-discovery.” This concise phrase perfectly encapsulates the rich unearthing of memory you, as a writer, will experience when deciding what to tell in your memoir. Once you know what aspect of yourself or your life you wish to share, you can determine how best to tell your story. And while there is no single perfect way to craft your memoir, here are 3 strong contenders for how to write a great memoir that will be read for generations to come.
Option #1: Your Greatest Moments — with Purpose
Most of us have been subjected to a third cousin or great aunt who, at someone’s wedding or funeral, drones on at an open mic with an armoury of stories only vaguely connected to the central person or couple for whom the audience is gathered. Very quickly these stories become tedious. They do not celebrate a key virtue, characteristic, or revelation about the person (or persons) in the spotlight and so we lose interest. When writing your own memoir, this is the kind of storytelling you must avoid.
Many engaging memoirs that are hard to put down are — unlike the never-ending speech — a carefully selected and crafted collection of the greatest moments of a person’s life. Most memoir writers feel burdened to remember dates and details, so as to pass down an exact timeline built on the foundation of facts. However, it can be freeing to understand that these nitty gritty details don’t really hold a lot of meaning for the reader if they’re just there for the sake of thoroughness. Most people want a great story (or series of stories) that paint an overarching picture of the author’s life.
Likely, you can readily brainstorm the best moments of your childhood, teenage years, young adulthood, romances, and/or career highlights. On the flip side, not all stories have to be positive and upbeat. In fact, most readers are drawn to stories that reveal the storyteller’s humanity: that show periods of hardship or grief, accompanied by successes gained through struggle. Those experiences are relatable to everyone. But how do you connect them?
The first option for how to write a memoir is to consider the themes that connect the stories in your life. Look for the moments that best serve your message or theme. Your “life story” is really about your character qualities, principles, or virtues. Seek out the best anecdotes that serve these select few traits. By connecting these greatest moments on this common theme, your narrative will carry through from the first page until the last.
There are unlimited themes a memoir writer could potentially choose from, though each life story usually can be narrowed down to two or three common threads. Don’t overreach with what you try to portray. For one writer, their theme could be family togetherness: the changes of family over time, and how one grapples with those alterations. Another memoir writer might confront childhood trauma while showing the resilience they developed to cope with those difficult life events. Many writers might have vivid cultural or religious experiences that provided the foundation for their life. Whichever theme you choose, give yourself the liberty to let go of stories that don’t fit your chosen narrative. If you do this, your memoir will grip the reader’s attention through to its conclusion.
Option #2: Organized Time Travel
The 2000 film Memento, starring Guy Pearce, drops the viewer into a fast-moving scene with no understanding of place or time. At first, it is aggravating and baffling to be tossed snippets of seemingly unrelated segments in the story, but the reward when the pieces begin to fall into place in the second half is an exhilarating thrill. This style of storytelling employs in media res, meaning “in the midst of things.” When you start off with a shocking or profound moment in your life, then back up to a more serene time and work your way forward, a reader will be hooked. They’ll wonder, “What happened to this person? What series of events led them to that awful (or wonderful) moment?” And they’ll want to find out if all turns out okay in the end.
In a sense, this kind of memoir writing evokes the ripples in a pond after a stone is tossed in. Each ripple echoes and is in response to the original kerplunk of the rock — or in the case of a memoir, the inciting event — around which all the other experiences revolve and speak to.
This second great option for how to write your memoir involves a retrospective approach, not unlike (but possibly less confusing than) Memento. This style of storytelling describes “scenes” from your life — not in sequence of how they happened but in a back-and-forth, then-and-now pattern. This option for how to write your memoir is effective for several reasons.
First, consider the experiences of a writer who grew up in a war zone. They very well could just start at the beginning and march forward, describing scene after scene of loss, terror, displacement, or suffering. That strategy has its merits: it builds and shows cause and effect. But leap-frogging into the future periodically, where the writer gives hints (through stories) that they have overcome the “current” hardship connects the event with the aftermath. Or, when writing about what happened to thestm as a child, periodically reminding the reader about the deep resilience they’ve developed, carries a reader forward on a swell of hope. These nuggets of future promise are tantalising for an audience hungry to know how a story turned out.
Second, a benefit of a back-and-forth retrospective is allowing grace for you, the writer, in how you portray your life. Most people’s memories are disjointed (or even suspect!) and are wildly open to interpretation. Family members often argue over the circumstances involved in a shared event. But when you write your memoir, this is your moment to tell your truth as you remember it: connect dots, revisit an event with the wisdom of now. Writing scenes of your life in story form allows for some play and imagination when giving life to long-past experiences. And that’s okay. Your memoir is not a testimony of your life in court (thankfully so, since eyewitness testimonies are notoriously unreliable!). This is your experience, told in a creative manner, from your perspective.
Finally, if you save some of the really good moments of your memoir for the end of this back-and-forth journey, your readers will feel great joy in seeing that your life largely turned out okay. Or, if there is hardship toward the end of your story, it will elicit the age-old feeling of catharsis, defined by Aristotle as the release of pity or fear a reader senses when witnessing a tragedy. Either way, this method allows you to end on a dramatic high.
Option #3: Step by Step through Time
I recently attended a 50th wedding anniversary for some family members. Posted around the room were a multitude of highly specific lists detailing each and every year of the married couple's life together. Every car owned, every home ever lived in, each birth and death of those connected to the family, and I was stunned at the intensive organization and documentation before me.
Some prospective memoir writers balk at the idea of embellishing or elaborating creatively on their life stories. Some are driven by the details — a chronological arc. If you are one of those people who read the first two options and weren’t enthused, this final option is for you.
There are merits to this third option if you remember that collating the information need not be dry. Writers who wish to include dates and facts — particularly if they have documented their life consistently through the decades — have an advantage the other two options do not. They have proof of the visceral world in which they lived: the make and model of their first car, specific world events, jobs and how much they earned flipping burgers in 1965. These details can be very interesting because, like a photograph, they provide clues to a particular era. It will be helpful to connect these details to significant life events, such as firsts: first girlfriend, first job, first child, first loss. Alternately, these details might chronicle a period of your life when you encountered and overcame a problem.
A word of warning: despite the potential benefit of this last option: these details must serve the story, not the other way around. Like a journalist who enters an ongoing crisis or powerful historical moment, the context matters. Know that loved ones want, first and foremost, to be left with a clear sense of who you were and how you lived your life. Why did that '56 Ford Belair mean so much? Was it the scene of your first date? If your first child was born August 16, 1967, was it a hot day? Did you have help, or were you alone as strangers in a new community? The details must serve the story. If they do, the story is virtually guaranteed to sing.
Whatever method you employ when writing your memoir, it will no doubt be a journey back through time. You will experience greeting old friends and family, while you simultaneously confront, seek to understand, and ultimately retell past stories in a new form. When you write your memoir, you are telling your truth. It will be a subjective and at times challenging story to tell, but it can be one you are proud to pass on and share with readers. Now, go: put pen to paper and begin your journey down memory lane. You can do it!
Amy Russell-Coutts is a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and researcher, living and working in Delta, B.C. She has ghostwritten upwards of a dozen memoirs, several inspirational business books, and has dabbled in speechwriting when the opportunity arises. She has been privileged to work for Steve Donahue, founder of Storyglu.com. Amy's professional portfolio can be viewed at amyrussellcoutts.com.
