How to write a memoir

A memoir is not the story of your life. It is a story from your life, told with the tools of fiction: scenes, a shape, a narrator the reader comes to trust. The people who finish one are not usually the people with the most dramatic lives. They are the ones who chose a single thread, followed it from before to after, and were honest about what they could and could not remember. Here is how to do that, from the first decision to a finished draft.

One story, not the whole life

An autobiography starts at birth and ends at the present. A memoir picks a stretch and goes deep: the year you cared for your father, the decade inside a church you later left, the season a diagnosis rearranged everything. Pick the stretch by asking what changed. A memoir is the account of a turning point; everything before it is there to make the turn mean something, and everything after is there to show what it cost and what it gave.

Before you write anything else, write the change in one sentence: I went in believing this and came out believing that. If you cannot fill in both halves you have a subject but not yet a story, and the fix is to narrow, not to widen. The sentence is private and never appears in the book, but it decides what goes in, and most of what you leave out is left out because it does not serve it.

A test: if you could not tell the story in an evening to a stranger who ended up caring, it is probably two stories. Pick one. The other is a second book.

Before, during and after

The oldest shape works: the world as it was, the thing that broke it, the hard stretch, the turn, and what remained. Before is short and specific, a chapter or two and not the whole childhood, there to give the reader something to miss when it goes. During is most of the book: the decision or the event that took you in, what it cost along the way, a lowest point you stay inside rather than summarise, and the turn, which in life is usually slow and partial and should be written that way. After is shorter than you want it to be: the first signs of a new life, the old habits that followed you into it, and what you know now, offered without tidying up the parts that still hurt.

Lay those eight beats out as chapters before you draft, with a line each on what the chapter is for, and let them move as you learn the book. A memoir, unlike a life, is allowed to open in the middle: many good ones begin at the first crack, or at the lowest point, and go back to the before once the reader has a reason to care. Chronology is a tool, not a rule. The one rule is that the reader always knows when they are.

Scenes you remember, summary for the rest

The difference between a memoir people finish and one they put down is mostly the ratio of scene to summary. A scene is a particular moment in a particular place: the kitchen, the phone call, the drive home. It carries the detail that proves you were there (the song that was playing, what he was wearing, the thing you said and wished you had not), and it lets the reader form a judgement before you offer yours. Summary is the years between, compressed: for three years we lived like that. A memoir needs both, but it needs far more scene than most first drafts have, because the writer already knows what it felt like and forgets that the reader does not.

Make a list of the twenty or thirty moments you can still see. Not the important ones; the ones you can see. Those are your scenes, and the surprising thing is how often the moment you can see turns out to be the important one once it is written. Give each a line in the outline and write them first, out of order if you like. The connective tissue comes later, and comes easier once the scenes exist.

Dialogue is reconstructed, and every reader understands that. Write what was said as nearly as you remember it, keep it short, and do not give yourself the clever line you thought of a week later. Readers forgive invented wording. They do not forgive a narrator who always wins the argument.

The two narrators

Every memoir has two narrators: the person it happened to and the person writing it down. The first does not know how it ends; the second does. Most of the book belongs to the first. Let the twenty-five-year-old be wrong, hopeful, unkind or naive on the page without the fifty-year-old stepping in to explain. The reader is intelligent and would rather watch than be told.

The second narrator earns a paragraph now and then, at the ends of chapters and at the turns of the story, to say what the first could not see. That is where a memoir becomes more than a sequence of events, and it is also where it most often goes wrong: too much reflection and the book turns into a lecture about a life instead of a life. A working ratio is a page of reflection for every ten of scene. If you find yourself explaining what a scene meant, cut the explanation and look at the scene; if the meaning is not in it, the scene needs work, not a footnote.

Decide the tense and stay with it. Past tense gives you the second narrator for free; present tense gives you immediacy and makes reflection awkward. Either works. Switching without a reason does not.

Memory, truth and the people in it

You will not remember everything, and you must not make things up. Memoir lives between those two facts. The honest practice is to write what you remember as vividly as you can, check what can be checked (dates, places, who was there; diaries, letters, photographs, the people who were in the room) and tell the reader plainly when memory is all you have. I remember it raining; my sister says it was not. Readers trust that sentence more than a confident paragraph of rain.

Composite characters, invented scenes and rearranged timelines are the choices that have cost memoirists their readers. If you compress two conversations into one or change a name, say so in an author’s note at the front. One sentence is enough, and it buys the reader’s good faith for the rest of the book.

Then there are the people. Everyone in a memoir is a real person who did not ask to be in it. Write them whole, with the reasons they had and the kindnesses alongside the harm; a villain with no inner life makes the reader distrust the narrator, not the villain. Change the names of anyone who is not a public figure, and consider it even for family. Where the book makes a serious claim about a living person (a crime, an addiction, an affair), keep to what you witnessed, check it against whatever record exists, and have a lawyer who knows publishing read the manuscript before it goes out. Those are not reasons not to write it. They are how you write it so that it stays published.

Some writers show the manuscript to the people in it before publication and some do not; both are defensible. If you do, show it when the draft is finished rather than while it is forming, and listen for errors of fact rather than differences of memory. It is your story. It is also theirs, and the book is better when it knows that.

Finishing, and then what

A memoir usually runs sixty to ninety thousand words; the ones that stretch past that tend to be two books, or to carry a childhood the story did not need. Draft it the way you would draft a novel, in a daily hour, without rereading, and through the hard chapters especially: the lowest point is the chapter writers stop at, and the way through is to write it badly first and fix it in the spring. Expect the draft to cost you something. Take a day off after the hard scenes, and keep going.

Then let it rest for a month, longer than a novel needs, because you are too close to it. Read it straight through as a stranger and ask the stranger’s questions: do I know when I am, do I know who these people are, is there a scene where there should be one, does the narrator ever win too easily. Revise in passes, the shape first, then the scenes, then the sentences. Give it to two or three readers who were not there and ask them where they stopped believing you. That is the only question that matters in a memoir, and the people who were there cannot answer it.

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