Chapter 1

Diving into Memoir Writing: Just the Basics

IN THIS CHAPTER

Recognizing the characteristics of a memoir

Identifying the elements of a memoir

Crafting and refining your memoir

Getting your memoir published

Understanding your memoir’s purpose

Writing a memoir used to be something done only by super-famous celebrities or retirement-home folks — like your great Uncle Fred from Boca Raton. Thanks to an explosion of exciting memoirs written by people of all ages and levels of fame, the memoir as a form has become a viable way for anyone to meaningfully share their story. It makes sense, because there’s something incredibly rewarding to finding the leisure time to think, remember, reflect, and then write about your past. In doing so, you can discover the emotional truths that create the undercurrent of your life and share your wisdom with others.

Memoirs and autobiographies remain quite popular with readers, with almost 50 percent of nonfiction books on the New York Times bestsellers list being biographies or memoirs. Plus, memoirs and biographies are the number-one bestselling nonfiction category in hard-copy books on Amazon and come in second in the e-books category behind religion and spirituality. With numbers like that, it’s clear that memoirs have a hungry audience, which is good news for you.

This chapter serves as your stepping stone to everything you need to know about writing your memoir. I cover the basics — from defining what a memoir is and how it differs from other types of life writing, to identifying the core components of a successful memoir. You find out how to utilize revision and editing techniques to polish your work and how to incorporate impactful storytelling methods, even in the age of social media. And perhaps most important, you explore your motivations for sharing your story. No matter where you are in the writing process, this book will guide you every step of the way.

Understanding the DNA of a Memoir

The short answer for what makes a memoir a memoir is that like a novel, it tells a story, but unlike a novel, a memoir is 100 percent truthful. But that’s an insufficient definition. A memoir also has other obligations that make it unique and distinct from other literary utterances. Understanding those differences is to understand the memoir’s strengths. To know those is to know what areas you should play up when writing your own.

To be considered a memoir, your book needs to:

• Be book length. Generally, a memoir is between 60,000 and 100,000 words.
• Limit what’s included. A memoir is focused on parts or elements of a life, whereas an autobiography strives to include everything about a life, from birth to death.
• Be truthful. You can’t play loose and free with the truth and still be called a memoir. Look up the hubbub around James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (Anchor) or Alice Sebold’s Lucky (Scribner) if you want to see the fallout around a memoir that isn’t truthful.
• Use the elements of narrative. Fiction writers know how to tell a story and make it interesting. See the next section for more on this.
• Show desire. A story gets interesting when the main character wants something — desperately so. Be specific and clear about what your main character wants, and readers will care.
• Have conflict. If a character can just get what they want, who cares? That’s not drama, that’s grocery shopping. It’s when a character can’t get what they desire that things get interesting. Tell that story and you have the makings of a strong memoir.
• Reveal change and growth. Show how your experiences, struggles, and triumphs shape you as a person. Demonstrate the transformation that takes place over the course of your story.

Check out Chapter 2 for more information about the concepts of a memoir in far greater detail.

Identifying the Essential Parts of a Memoir

Like any good work of art, numerous parts comprise a memoir. Getting the best end product comes from knowing and having control over all of those smaller elements. Most of what a memoirist needs are skills borrowed from the world of fiction writing, though those skills are used somewhat differently in the world of nonfiction in general, and memoir specifically. For instance, you can’t generate more conflict to heighten reader interest in a chapter if the scene you’re writing simply didn’t have that level of conflict. You can’t reinvent the past to make a better story. With fiction, you can (and should).

Some of the main elements that make up a memoir include

• Structure: This is the shape of your story on the page. You may assume that the structure of your story has to be chronological to move forward in a very specific order like the days in a week, but you have far more options than that and you need to consider those options before defaulting to a chronological approach. See Chapter 6 to discover all of your structure options.
• Setting:Setting is the where and when that a story takes place. A memoir may have 2, 3, or perhaps even 23 different settings if you traveled or moved around a lot. Setting matters because it has a direct influence on character. See Chapter 7 for details on how to create and utilize setting to best effect.
• Characters:Characters are the people who populate the scenes and settings of your story. Yes, they’re real-life people, but memoirists still call them characters, as novelists do. For more on why as well as how to make them come alive on the page, visit Chapter 8 .
• Dialogue: The conversations that your characters have are called dialogue. This is a particularly tricky thing to use in memoir because memory is imperfect. Who walks around recording all conversations in order to accurately quote people later? (If you actually do that, be careful — it’s illegal in a lot of states.) You can discover more about the challenges and strengths of dialogue use in memoirs in Chapter 9.
• Voice:Voice is the unique manner in which a writer writes. It comes from distinctive decisions, such as word choice, rhythm, and the way a writer says things. Taken together, voice creates a powerful effect on the reader. Interested in knowing more? Chapter 10 covers voice in depth.
• Point of view: The perspective through which the story is seen is called point of view. This in an important choice because it can drastically change how your story is conveyed. Read more about point of view in Chapter 11.
• Theme:Theme is what your memoir is about. It speaks to universal truths, core ideas, and emotional truths through the development of key scenes, moments, and tensions in your story. See more about theme in Chapters 13 and 14.
• Narrator: The narrator is the reflective voice that guides the reader through your story, interpreting the past and revealing the deeper significance of your experiences. Your unique perspective, shaped by time and reflection, transforms your story from a mere recounting of events into a powerful exploration of what it all means.

Making the Necessary Revisions and Edits to Help Your Memoir Shine

A great memoir doesn’t appear by magic, but rather it’s the result of good revision (to get the big stuff under control) and careful editing (to get the little stuff under control). How often in life do you wish you had a Do Over button? With writing, you do. You get a second, a third, or a tenth chance if you require it, which is good news because you can improve the mistakes and poor decisions that you made earlier in the writing process.

After you have a rough draft of either your entire manuscript or even just a chapter, you can begin the revision process. Revision is important because it is the part of the process where you focus on large story elements without worrying much about specific word choices or sentence-level issues.

While revising, you certainly look over all of the essential parts of a memoir (which I discuss in the previous section) to make sure each is functioning well on its own as well as connecting meaningfully to the entire book. You have another obligation, though. You need to think like a reader, not the writer. You handle revision first because you may revise and remove an entire chapter or scene from a book. You don’t need to spend the extra time polishing those sentences that won’t appear in the first edition. Stay efficient by revising first and then editing after. Refer to Chapter 13 for more on making revisions.

Editing asks you to reexamine every word choice, reevaluate sentence structure, and think about how you’re using paragraphs. Editing is a sentence-by-sentence level of attention that can feel tedious, but it’s often the difference between a promising book that gets published or not. Some of the things that occur at this level of editing are adding or improving imagery, cutting clichés, removing most adverbs and adjectives, and tightening language across the board. Refer to Chapter 15 for more on line-by-line editing.

Focusing on the End Goal: Publication

When I was in high...