Memoir Characteristics To Know As You Write Your Life Story
By Mary Kole
Mary Kole is a former literary agent, freelance editor, writing teacher, author of Writing Irresistible Kidlit, and IP developer for major publishers, with over a decade in the publishing industry.
If you want to write your life story in the form of an autobiography, there are specific memoir characteristics that you should keep in mind. It is important to realize that a memoir or autobiography is not just a collection of stories from your life, but rather a narrative that conveys a specific message or theme and pulls from a limited number of anecdotes or vignettes. You shouldn’t include everything that has ever happened to you if you’re writing a modern memoir. So what do you do instead? Read on to learn some key memoir characteristics that will get you on the right track.
What Are Important Memoir Characteristics?
The first element you’ll want to develop is a theme. When you’re writing a book of your life experiences, it's tempting to try to write every interesting personal or memorable story down. And you absolutely can do this as you’re organizing yourself, but you should know that you will have to be selective about what you include. The “cradle to present day” approach is outdated. Instead, identifying a central theme or idea that will tie all of the stories together is one of the most important memoir characteristics that you need to keep in mind. This will help to create a cohesive narrative that readers can easily follow.
If you’re looking for more memoir characteristics, consider how you portray yourself and other characters in your story. These people on the page are, after all, who your readers will relate to. Memoirs are not just for or about the author, but also about the people who have impacted their life. A great memoir pulls readers into fully rendered characters, including the protagonist (you!). Consider what the characters in your memoir struggle with, what they are successful at, and what they wonder about. The big thematic questions you ask will help pull the project together.
Now that you’ve considered characters, you should also look at plot. Yes, this is technically the true story of your life, but it needs some narrative flow—which is one of the most important memoir characteristics in today’s market. What is the order of events? Are you using showing vs. telling writing? Do you have scene and dialogue? Is there action or just passive reflection? Do you do any worldbuilding or scene setting? All of these memoir characteristics will help to give your readers a better understanding of the events that you are describing.
The Memoir Characteristics that Really Matter
There’s some controversy about this final memoir characteristic, and where you land will really depend on your own moral compass. But there’s some debate in the industry about whether or not a memoir has to be more about accuracy or about a good story.
It’s likely impossible to remember everything that has ever happened to you in perfect detail, right down to dialogue, time of day, etc. And modern memoir readers don’t necessarily expect a transcript of your daily life. Perhaps the most important of these memoir characteristics is the entertainment value. This is your life story but it’s also a story that you’re sharing with outside readers.
While it is important to be truthful in your memoir, at least as truthful as memory allows, it is also important to note that you can follow the “spirit of the law” rather than the “letter of the law,” meaning that you can make narrative techniques that are used in fiction writing. That’s why memoir is often referred to as creative nonfiction.
By learning and playing around with these memoir characteristics, you’ll help readers remember your story long after they close the book.
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