How to Write a Memoir: The Complete Guide For Beginners
You know the saying “Truth is stranger than fiction”? Plenty of people have astonishing life stories to tell. Some of them even make it onto the shelves!
Memoirs are an increasingly popular literary genre. They blend the best of fiction and nonfiction, novel-worthy stories with the unmistakable stamp of real life. In their best incarnations, memoirs can communicate powerful themes, teach meaningful lessons, and show readers who are struggling that they’re not alone.
If you’ve always wanted to write a memoir but aren’t sure where to start, you’re in the right place. Read on for everything you need to know, including a step-by-step guide for writing your very own life story.
What is a memoir?
A memoir is a personal narrative that explores a particular length of time in the author’s life. It has many elements in common with a novel, including story structure, characterization, and theme. Unlike a novel, a memoir is entirely (or almost entirely) true, and unlike and autobiography, it only focuses on a portion of the author’s life, for example a single eventful year.
Memoirs can help an author communicate an important message or process a difficult experience. Many authors use memoir writing as a way to understand their past and ultimately heal from it. But memoirs can also be humorous and optimistic. Whatever approach you take, it’s all about telling a good story.
Memoir is different from an autobiography, which is an overarching account of the author’s life journey from first breath to present day. A memoir, by contrast, covers a more compact and emotionally resonant chapter of the author’s larger personal experiences.
You can read more about the key differences between memoir and autobiography here.
Characteristics of a memoir
Regardless of which life events you choose to write about, all memoirs have a few distinguishing elements in common.
A memoir is a true story
This is the most important feature of a memoir, and what distinguishes it from a novel: it’s about real events that really happened. This is why memoir writing is sometimes called “creative nonfiction.”
That’s not to say that some memoir writers don’t fudge a detail or two, especially if it makes for a better story. But when a reader picks up a memoir, they’re going into it expecting to read something true. And as the author, it’s your job to offer them your story as authentically as you can.
A memoir is deeply personal
Unlike a historical account, a memoir isn’t just a succession of facts. It’s composed of vivid memories and sensory imagery that make you feel like you’re there.
Memoirs can sometimes be difficult to write, because there’s an intimacy to them that fiction doesn’t have. An author has to be willing to expose their feelings and their emotional journey through the writing process.
A memoir has a narrative, just like a novel
Even though a memoir is true, it still needs to have a cohesive story structure. This is something that often trips up new memoir writers.
This means you start with the inciting incident, take the reader through the rising action, the midpoint, the climax, falling action, denouement, and all the other key plot points of any good story. Occasionally, you might shuffle around the chronology for your story to fit this structure, skipping over gaps in time that might come across as “the boring bits.”
A memoir is rich in literary theme
Memoirs aren’t just about a thing that happened. They’re about why it happened, how the author was affected by it, and what they learned from it. All this comes together to form your theme.
Memoirs are powerful tools for communicating important messages or social critique. That’s why it’s a good idea to get a sense of your theme before you start writing.
A memoir is told from the writer’s perspective
A memoir is always written in the first-person point of view using the pronoun “I.” This is a bit different from biographies and other kinds of nonfiction work, which will often use the third-person pronouns “she,” “he”, and “they.” Because they’re about the author’s own experiences, memoirs are unique in that they’re told through the author’s voice and state of mind. For more on using the second-person point of view, see this detailed guide.
A memoir focuses on one broad formative experience
Unlike an autobiography, a memoir is focused on one chapter or key event in the writer’s life. For this reason, an author will probably only have one autobiography, but they might write several memoirs exploring different experiences.
A memoir might cover something like a period of study, a cross-continental voyage, a medical process, bereavement, adapting to a new workplace or culture, or an experience that caused the writer to change their beliefs or look at an idea in a new way.
How to write a memoir in 10 simple steps
Ready to start writing your very own real life story? We’ve broken it down for you into a manageable step-by-step process. Learn about story writing format to ensure your manuscript meets industry standards.
1. Choose a key experience to focus on
Unlike an autobiography, which covers an entire life, a memoir is more targeted. You may already have an idea for the specific period you want to write about. If not, do some brainstorming and choose a key formative event.
An ideal memoir topic should take place within between a few months and a few years of your life—although you can include a few details from outside that time frame to support the story. For example, if your memoir is about the time your band went on a cross-country tour, you might add a couple scenes from when you first started learning your instrument to give the reader a broader emotional context.
Think about a relatively short period of time that sent your path spinning in a new direction, or taught you important life lessons about yourself, or left you radically changed.
2. Nail your story premise
A premise is a one-sentence summary of a story. This is a useful exercise for fiction and creative nonfiction writers alike. Your premise will help you distill your focus into a single targeted idea, and give you a head start later when you’re looking at publishing opportunities.
It might look something like this:
A 21-year-old wannabe rocker goes on tour and gets more than he bargained for.
A terminally ill businesswoman undergoes a new, experimental treatment that might just save her life.
After receiving a small inheritance, a young family takes a leap and opens an island inn.
The character in this instance, of course, is you. By condensing your idea into this one concrete premise, you’ll be able to create a more focused, cohesive story.
3. Brainstorm which events and episodes to include
Now that you have your premise, it’s time to decide which scenes you’re going to explore. For a memoir, the more specific you can be, the better. It’s better to show one scene happening in real time, jump ahead, and then show another scene in real time than it is to summarize what happened in a vague overview.
You’re not writing out these scenes yet (that’s in the next step). Instead, just make a bullet point list of all the moments and experiences you want to share with your reader. Don’t worry about putting them in any kind of order yet. By the end, you should have a long list of memories (aka plot points) on which to hang your story.
4. Turn those events into vivid scenes
Now, look at your list. Separate them into headings, and under each heading, write out the memory as if it was a scene in a novel. You can do this in first person or third person, past tense or present tense.
Your goal is to make the reader feel like they’re really there in the scene beside you. Try to utilize all the senses, and don’t rush through the moment. Remember what it felt like to live these experiences.
Don’t worry about polishing them into a complete story right now. At this point you’re free writing and exploring your memories on the page.
5. Assemble your key events into a narrative arc
You have before you the bones of a story. It’s time to order them into a cohesive narrative.
Your scenes should be in roughly chronological order, although you might decide to include a few early scenes later on as flashbacks. The idea is that they should be presented in a way that creates a beginning, middle, and end. If your memoir explores a personal transformation, the scenes should build on each other to shape that transformation.
Consider using a narrative structure like the three-act structure, the five-act structure, or the eight-point arc as a guide. Even though this is a work of nonfiction, it should still hook the reader and lead to a satisfying conclusion, just like a novel. The only difference is that all your essential plot points are drawn from real life.
6. Examine your theme
Every best selling memoir is only as good as its themes. Theme can be summed up as the core emotional truth of a story. This might have to do with mental health, politics and culture, family dynamics, and other life lessons you want your reader to come away with.
Remember our premises?
A 21-year-old wannabe rocker goes on tour and gets more than he bargained for.
A terminally ill businesswoman undergoes a new, experimental treatment that might just save her life.
After receiving a small inheritance, a young family takes a leap and opens an island inn.
These memoirs could all have themes of living life to its fullest, trusting in oneself, giving back to the community, the false promises of capitalism, or the ethics of innovation. It depends on the kind of story you’re trying to tell.
Spend a few moments thinking about the theme of your story, and how you can emphasize that message throughout the narrative.
7. Fill out any gaps
By now you should have a loose outline of your memoir. All you have to do now is look for places when additional scenes or details are needed to give the story a cohesive flow.
It’s important to step outside yourself and examine your work as it would appear to an external reader (more on external readers in a bit). You already know what happens and what happened to create this story, but not everybody does. This means that a story can become confusing if it’s lacking important connective tissue. If anything doesn’t quite fit together, decide what you’ll need to include so that everything makes sense to someone who’s not you.
8. Write your first draft
It’s time for the fun part: writing your first draft! This is where all your work comes together into a completed memoir.
Some of your scenes will be already written in the exercise above. You can copy and paste these as you go, though you may find you want to expand them with more detail or introspection.
Don’t rush this step. Writing a complete draft of an entire memoir can take several months, but it will be so satisfying once it’s all done. Aim for a finished manuscript between 40,000 and 80,000 words.
9. Seek out beta feedback
Once you have a completed draft, it’s always helpful to get feedback from other writers— especially in memoir. This is because, as we mentioned above, memoir writers are very close to their material and may unconsciously be filling in the blanks with their own memories.
Friends and family members aren’t ideal beta readers, because they’ll want to lift you up instead of offering constructive critiques, and because they’re also very close to the material. The best beta readers are other writers who understand what makes a good story.
Then, review all the feedback you’ve received and consider which suggestions fit with your vision for your own writing.
10. Revise, revise, revise
No writing journey is complete without swaths of painstaking revision—even for a professional writer. Using the feedback you’ve received from the beta stage, go through your manuscript and smooth out any unclear areas, awkward phrasing, or inconsistencies.
The goal is to make your work read as much like a final polished book as possible. This means telling a full, complete, empathetic story as well as making every sentence shine. Learn all about the objective point of view, how it differs from other PoVs, and the best ways to use it in your story.
Then, you can work on getting your work out into the world. Many writers choose to self-publish their memoirs, but there’s also a market for traditional publication. While self publishing can give you a bit more creative freedom, traditional publication can give you a wider audience.
Popular memoirs from which to draw inspiration
To see how other writers have utilized these techniques, check out these successful memoirs. They may even spark some memoir ideas of your own.
Neon Angel, by Cherie Currie
Singer and actress Cherie Currie’s memoir, Neon Angel, was the basis of the 2010 film The Runaways. It focuses on her time on the ’70s all-girl rock band, The Runaways, at which point Currie was just barely emerging from childhood.
While it uses the band’s inception and touring as a framework, the memoir is really about (that’s the theme we talked about above) surviving sexual assault and the lasting effects of trauma.
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
One of the most famous memoirs of the 21st century, H is for Hawk follows the author’s experience raising and taming an £800 goshawk. She learns falconry as a way to connect with the natural world and to deal with her grief over her late father’s death.
The surface story is about the first year of learning how to manage a wild predatory animal, but the understory is about moving forward after a period of devastating bereavement.
A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley
This more recent British memoir is about a group of friends who opened an independent feminist bookshop in the middle of 1980s male-driven, homophobic London. It chronicles how they opened the shop to champion female writers and create a safe space for queer women.
In its wider context, it looks at the development of the feminist movement and the social obstacles they had to overcome to be accepted. The memoir combines an interesting social history with the author’s more character-driven personal journey.
Writing memoirs helps communicate your life story
As you can see, each of these memoir examples above is about something bigger than just one pivotal experience. But they use this major event as a way to structure the story into a thematic message. This is what makes memoirs such a powerful medium.
Now, with these tips, you can get your own memories written down and shared with the world. Happy writing!
