The Memoir Jumpstart Guide
Whether you've just started thinking about your memoir or are sitting on part of a manuscript unsure of what to do with it, the Memoir Jumpstart Guide will revive your writing. Learn how to approach your manuscript as an editor would: find the story, organize the timeline, and make it come alive with narration. Bookmark this post, grab a notebook, and spend a few days working through these exercises.
Define the Story
The first step in writing your memoir is to know what you’re actually writing about. You’ll want to know your focus, transformation, and core message.
Focus
A memoir needs a focus (that's one of the things that makes it different from an autobiography). You want your focus to have three components: an idea, a transformation, and stakes (aka something to lose).
Transformation
How do you change in your story? And how do you want to take your reader through that transformation? Define a Point A and a Point B, and plot out how you can take your reader on that journey.
Core message
What in your story will connect with your reader? What do you want your reader to remember from your story? This core message (the thesis, I call it) will guide your entire writing and editing process.
Travel through Time
Master timeline
Before you do anything else, write out a master timeline. Start from the first chronologically relevant event and go from the there. Your timeline could span decades, and it might cover only a few years.
Narrow in
Find Points A and B in your master timeline, and circle them. Remember that the focus of your memoir doesn't need to cover every moment. Where in your timeline does it make sense to zoom in?
Pull out key events
Go through your timeline and highlight key events that need to be included. These events will likely be within that narrowed timeline we identified. Take a different color and highlight supporting events. Comb through your entire timeline here, because events outside your narrowed timeline can make excellent (and sometimes needed) flashbacks.
Experiment with structure
Formats to consider: straight chronology (A to B), parallel chronologies (A and B together), hybrid (your story with supporting and supplementary content), essay collection, and cliffhangers and flashbacks.
Think like a novelist
Writing devices
All of those devices fiction writers use to craft a compelling story? We get to use them too: characters, setting, dialogue, sensory details. Get creative with your storytelling.
Narrative and exposition
Narrative shows the reader. Exposition tells the reader.
You need both. Narrative will immerse your reader, and exposition will move the story along.
Sensory details
Sometimes memoirists forget that they're here to write a story. You want your reader in your experience with you. And to do that, you need to invite the senses into your writing. Practice by picking any moment from your timeline and describing it as sensually as you can. Sensory details can not only immerse the reader in the physical moment you're writing, but will also bring them into the emotion with you.
What next?
Write, write, write! Pick an event in your timeline and build it out. Follow your intuition on what to write next, and remember that everything can be moved around and reworked later. Keep your core message and your outline handy and reference them frequently. You can't edit a blank page, so start writing!
Having a hard time finding the actual time to write? You’ll love my free guide, Time to Write, where I walk you through the three key elements that go into crafting the perfect (and realistic) writing practice for you.
