Writing Life Stories: How to Begin Your Memoir Project
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.
We’re all writing life stories, whether in a fictional wrapper or not. But some writers are interested in autobiography, so that they can speak directly about their life experiences. Writing life stories about your experience is one of the most important things you can do. It’s a chance for you to capture memories and experiences that have shaped who you are today, and to share them with others (whether that’s a small audience of your loved ones or a bigger market of strangers). But how do you start? How do you go from writing life stories to shaping a memoir narrative? Here, I’ll explore the process of writing life stories, from picking the focus of your memoir to structuring the project, and the market opportunities that exist for contemporary memoir writers.
Writing Life Stories: Picking Through Your Memories
When you’re writing life stories, it can be overwhelming to think about all the memories and experiences that have made up your existence, whether you’re twenty or eighty. We can’t possibly transcribe every event of our lives for the purposes of memoir, so we have to be selective. Writing life stories means narrowing down which events and moments are the most significant, and considering the universal themes or ideas that have been most prominent throughout your life. Maybe there’s an event or situation that has had a lasting impact on you, or maybe you have a lot of revelations and thoughts on a certain topic.
Once you have identified the topic of your memoir (a chronological explanation of everything that has happened since your birth is not a modern or marketable take), look for specific moments or experiences which illustrate those themes in vivid detail. This will help give shape and focus to how you’re writing life stories into something accessible to a larger audience.
Writing Life Stories: Focusing on Structure
Once you’ve chosen the main ideas that will form the backbone of your story, it’s time to bring them to life with a story outline. You’ll need to include narrative elements such as character development and plot structure. Who are the key characters in this story? (Yes, I know that they’re real people, but now that we’re thinking of writing life stories into something that resembles narrative nonfiction, it helps to remove ourselves from the people and events a bit—hence, I call them characters and plot very intentionally.)
Which scenes from your life can best illustrate the significant relationships you’ll be exploring? How does each scene fit together as part of one larger arc? Remember, you’re not giving readers everything that has ever happened to you. That’s why you’ve pivoted from writing life stories to encapsulating a narrative. Focusing on the memoir in this way gives depth and meaning to your story while also making it more engaging for readers who don’t personally know you. It also helps create an emotional connection between reader and author by allowing readers to deeply relate and resonate. You’ll want to use scenes to bring people, events, and reflections to life—which means using dialogue and interiority to flesh out your experiences.
At this point, ideally, some connections between elements will emerge as you keep writing life stories into a narrative structure. Make sure that each scene and chapter has its own beginning, middle, and end, so that readers know where they stand at any given moment within the larger context of your life story. After all of this very hard work is done, it’s time to start drafting, but that’s another topic!
There’s a lot that needs to happen between simply writing life stories and creating a robust narrative of a certain facet of your life. This task is complicated by the idea that your story isn’t over yet—each day that you live, you’re learning, growing, and developing new connections between the present and past. But that’s what makes memoir such a juicy and challenging undertaking. Enjoy the journey!
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