Memoir is not just a fancy literary term for an autobiography. I say that from the start, because I so often hear the terms incorrectly interchanged.
Your memoir will be autobiographical, of course, but it can’t be about you.
Confused yet? Stay with me.
You may have heard both of these genres associated with creative nonfiction.
What is Creative Nonfiction?
The term can seem confusing, but it’s all about telling a compelling true story while using the same kinds of elements found in good fiction to make it sing.
Creative Nonfiction is a term that can be applied to a wide array of genres, including memoir, autobiography, biography, travel writing, personal essays, interviews, blogs, and more. Actually, it should be characteristic of almost any form of nonfiction.
In many ways, Creative Nonfiction reads like fiction while sticking to the facts. It allows you to tell a true story in a most compelling way by employing narrative elements like foreshadowing, backstory, dialog, conflict, tension, description, and more.
Such elements aren’t in themselves fictional. Your story remains absolutely true, but such tools enhance the reading experience.
Some nonfiction is designed primarily to educate and inform (think textbooks, how-to books, or self-help books), but would argue that even these can benefit from Creative Nonfiction techniques. Why not build a narrative that helps readers best relate to the content and become immersed in it?
Memoirs (from the French and Latin for “memory” or “remembrance”) by definition focus on your personal experience, intimacy with the reader, and reflecting both transferable principles and universal emotional truth.
That’s why, ironic as it may sound, a memoir should be as much about the reader as the writer. Yes, it’s your story, based on your experience, but unless readers see a bit of themselves in it, what’s the point? You will have written a book that is merely about something, rather than for the purpose of something.
So what can Creative Nonfiction bring to your memoir? Resonance. Relatability. Accessibility.
And how will it manifest itself? By triggering the theater of the readers’ minds so they can feel the story, imagine themselves in it, experience it with you.
Most importantly, convey your emotional truth. Show how your experiences, challenges, and lessons learned made you feel, how you coped, and the impact they had on your personal or spiritual growth.
Autobiography vs. Memoir: What’s the Difference?
An autobiography is your life story from birth to the present.
A memoir is theme-oriented with anecdotes from your life that buttress a specific theme.
Too many authors write a memoir because they believe their lives are so interesting that even strangers would enjoy a detailed account.
Don’t misunderstand — maybe you are interesting.
All of us are, to some degree. I know hardly anyone who doesn’t have a story.
But unless you’re a celebrity, sorry but most people beyond your family and close friends aren’t likely to care.
They care about themselves and how your personal story might somehow benefit them.
So your theme must be reader-oriented, offering universal truth, transferable principles that will help them become a better person or get them through whatever crisis they might be facing.
The closest I have come to writing my own memoir, Writing for the Soul, uses selected anecdotes about famous and interesting people I’ve met to illustrate points I make about writing.
Had I merely written an autobiography and not offered writing instruction, it would’ve been largely ignored.
Should You Write a Memoir?
While you don’t have to be famous to write a great memoir, you must tell a story that educates, entertains, and emotionally moves the reader.
You may write a memoir without intending to traditionally publish it. You might write it for only your family and friends.
I’m here to help, regardless your reason for writing your memoir.
What Should Your Memoir Be About?
Your memoir should draw on anecdotes from your life to show how you progressed from some unlikely place to where you are today.
In that way, it’s about you, but it’s for the benefit of the reader.
Maybe you’re:
- From the other side of the tracks
- From a broken home
- A victim of abuse
- A recovered addict
- An orphan
Yet you have achieved:
- Financial security
- Acceptance
- Happiness
- Health
- Faith
You might start with how bad things once were for you and how unlikely it was that you would escape your situation.
Then you would show pivotal experiences and people important to your transformation, what you learned, and how your life changed.
Naturally, the better your stories and the more significant your change (in fiction, we call this a character arc), the better your memoir.
However, great stories are not the point — and frankly, neither is the memoir writer (you).
The point is reader takeaway.
Readers should be able to apply to themselves and their own situations the larger truths and principles your theme imparts.
That way, you don’t have to awkwardly try to apply your message to them. Ideally, they’ll do that for themselves.
They may be enduring something entirely different from what you did, yet your story gives them hope.
What Publishers Look For
Don’t buy into the idea that only famous people can sell a memoir. Sure, they might be able to get away with a recitation of their daily routines, because people are interested in the minutiae of the famous.
But memoirs by the largely unknown succeed for one reason: they resonate because readers identify with them.
Truth, especially the hard, gritty, painful stuff, bears that universal truth and those transferable principles I mentioned above.
Candor and self-revelation attracts readers, and readers are what publishers want.
Astute agents or publishers’ acquisitions editors recognize how relatable a memoir will be.
Agents and editors tell me they love to discover such gems — the same way they love discovering the next great novelist.
The key is a compelling story told with creative writing.
So, when writing your memoir…
Remember, you’re the subject, but it’s not really about you.
It may seem counterintuitive to think reader-first while writing in first person about yourself, but readers long to be changed by your story.
Give them insight about life through your experiences. Give them the tools they need to overcome their own struggles, even if they’re not at all like yours. Give them a model for overcoming.
Couch it in entertaining, educational, and emotional stories, and they’ll not only stay with you till the last page, but they’ll also recommend your memoir to their friends.
How to Write a Memoir
- Settle On Your Theme
- Select Your Anecdotes
- Outline Your Book
- Write It Like a Novel
- Avoid Throwing People Under the Bus
Step 1. Settle On Your Theme
Your unstated theme must be, “You’re not alone. If I overcame this, you can overcome anything.”
That’s what appeals to readers. Even if they do come away from your memoir impressed with you, it won’t be because you’re so special — even if you are. Whether they admit it or not, readers care most about themselves.
They’re reading your memoir wondering, What’s in this for me? The more transferable principles you offer in a story well told, the more successful your book will be.
Cosmic Commonalities
All people, regardless of age, ethnicity, location, and social status, share certain felt needs: food, shelter, and love. They fear abandonment, loneliness, and the loss of loved ones. Regardless of your theme, if it touches on any of those needs and fears, readers can identify.
I can read the memoir of someone of my opposite gender, for whom English is not her first language, of a different race and religion, who lives halfway around the world from me — and if she writes of her love for her child or grandchild, it reaches me.
Knowing or understanding or relating to nothing else about her, I understand the love of family.
How to Write a Memoir Without Preaching
Trust your narrative to convey your message. Too many memoir writers feel the need to eventually turn the spotlight on the reader with a sort of “So, how about you…?”
Let your experiences and how they impacted you make their own points, and trust the reader to get it. Beat him over the head with your theme and you run him off.
You can avoid being preachy by using what I call the Come Alongside Method. Show what happened to you and what you learned, and if the principles apply to your readers, give them credit for being smart enough to get it.
Step 2. Select Your Anecdotes
The best memoirs let readers see themselves in your story so they can identify with your experiences and apply the lessons you’ve learned to their own lives.
If you’re afraid to mine your pain deeply enough to tell the whole truth, you may not be ready to write your memoir. There’s nothing a little less helpful — or marketable — than a memoir that glosses over the truth.
So, feature the anecdotes from your life that support your theme, regardless how painful it is to resurrect the memories. The more introspective and vulnerable you are, the more effective your memoir will be.
Create a list of events in your life and their impact on you. These may be major events like a war, your parents’ divorce, a graduation, a wedding, or the loss of a dear friend or relative.
But they may also be seemingly mundane life events that for some reason affected you deeply. Just make sure they support your theme.
Who is unforgettable and what role did they play in making you the person you’ve become?
Interview family and friends for different perspectives. Peruse photographs, revisit meaningful places, research dates, the weather, and relevant history.
Step 3. Outline Your Book
Without a clear vision, trying to write a memoir will likely end in disaster. There’s no substitute for an outline.
Potential agents or publishers require in your proposal a synopsis of where you’re going, and they also need to know that you know.
One that changed the course of my writing career is novelist Dean Koontz’s Classic Story Structure, spelled out in his classic How to Write Bestselling Fiction. Though obviously intended as a framework for a novel, I discovered it applies perfectly to almost any genre (including TV sitcoms, if you can believe it).
And fortunately, for the purposes of my subject today, Koontz’s classic story structure serves a memoir beautifully too.
Here it is in a nutshell:
- Plunge your main character into terrible trouble as soon as possible
- Everything he does to try to get out of it makes it only progressively worse until…
- His situation appears hopeless
- But in the end, because of what he’s learned and how he’s grown through all those setbacks, he rises to the challenge and wins the day.
You might be able to structure your memoir the same way merely by how you choose to tell the story. As I say, don’t force things, but the closer you can get to that structure, the more engaging your memoir will be.
For your memoir, naturally, you’re the main character.
And the Terrible Trouble would be the nadir of your life. (If nadir is a new word for you, it’s the opposite of zenith.)
Take the reader with you to your lowest point, and show what you did to try to remedy things.
But what about that “as soon as possible” caveat?
Maybe your terrible trouble didn’t manifest itself until later in life.
Fine, start there. The backstory can emerge as you progress, but you’ll find his structure and sequencing will make for the most compelling read.
Important in fiction as well as in a memoir is to be sure your reader is invested in the main character enough to care when he is plunged into terrible trouble.
While in fiction that means some hint of the stakes — he’s a husband, a father, has suffered some loss, etc. If that’s also true of you, subtly inject it.
Also in a memoir, you want to promise a good outcome, some form of your own wonder at who you are now compared to who you once were or destined to be. That way, readers can take from your story that things can dramatically change for the better in their lives too.
One of the reasons this structure works so well in fiction is because it’s often true in real life.
If you’ve become a successful, happy person despite an unfortunate background, it’s likely that you tried many times to fix things, only to see them deteriorate until you developed the ability to break through.
All Koontz and I are saying is to emphasize that.
Keep your outline to a single page for now.
Then develop a synopsis with a sentence or two of what each chapter will cover.
Write this in the present tense. “I enroll in college only to find that…”
And don’t worry if you’ve forgotten the basics of classic outlining or have never felt comfortable with the concept.
It doesn’t have to be rendered in Roman numerals and capital and lowercase letters and then numerals, unless that serves you best.
Just a list of sentences that synopsize your idea works fine, too.
And remember, it’s a fluid document meant to serve you and your book. Play with it, rearrange it as you see fit — even during the writing.
Step 4. Write It Like a Novel
It’s as important in a memoir as it is in a novel to show and not just tell.
Example:
Telling
My father was a drunk who abused my mother and me. I was scared to death every time I heard him come in late at night.
Showing
As soon as I heard the gravel crunch beneath the tires, I dove under my bed.
I could tell by his footsteps whether Dad was sober and tired or loaded and looking for a fight.
I prayed God would magically make me big enough to jump between him and my mom, because she was always his first target…
Use every tool in the novelist’s arsenal to make each anecdote come to life: dialogue, description, conflict, tension, pacing, everything.
These will make sure you grab your readers’ attention and keep it — because these tools ensure that they’ll become engrossed in your story.
Worry less about chronology than theme.
You’re not married to the autobiographer’s progressive timeline.
Tell whatever anecdote fits your point for each chapter, regardless where they fall on the calendar.
Just make the details clear so the reader knows where you are in the story.
You might begin with the most significant memory of your life, even from childhood.
Then you can segue into something like, “Only now do I understand what was really happening.” Your current-day voice can always drop in to tie things together.
Character Arc
As in a novel, how the protagonist (in this case, you) grows is critical to a successful story. Your memoir should make clear the difference between who you are today and who you once were. What you learn along the way becomes your character arc.
Point of View
It should go without saying that you write a memoir in the first person. And just as in a novel, the point-of-view character is the one with the problem, the challenge, something he’s after. Tell both your outer story (what happens) and your inner story (its impact on you).
Setups and Payoffs
Great novels carry a book-length setup that demands a payoff in the end, plus chapter-length setups and payoffs, and sometimes even the same within scenes. The more of these the better.
The same is true for your memoir. Virtually anything that makes the reader stay with you to find out what happens is a setup that demands a payoff. Even something as seemingly innocuous as your saying that you hoped high school would deliver you from the torment of junior high makes the reader want to find out if that proved true.
Make ‘em Wait
Avoid using narrative summary to give away too much information too early. I’ve seen memoir manuscripts where the author tells in the first paragraph how they went from abject poverty to independent wealth in 20 years, “…and I want to tell you how that happened.”
To me, that takes the air right out of the tension balloon.
Many readers would agree and see no reason to continue reading.
Better to set them up for a payoff and let them wait.
Not so long that you lose them to frustration, but long enough to build tension.
Step 5. Avoid Throwing People Under the Bus
If you’re brave enough to expose your own weaknesses, foibles, embarrassments, and yes, even your failures to the world, what about your friends, enemies, loved ones, teachers, bosses, and coworkers?
If you tell the truth, are you allowed to throw them under the bus?
In some cases, yes.
But should you?
No.
Even if they gave you permission in writing, what’s the upside?
Usually a person painted in a negative light — even if the story is true — would not sign a release allowing you to expose them publicly.
But even if they did, would it be the right, ethical, kind thing to do?
All I can tell you is that I wouldn’t do it. And I wouldn’t want it done to me.
If the Golden Rule alone isn’t reason enough not to do it, the risk of being sued certainly ought to be.
So, What to Do?
On one hand, I’m telling you your memoir is worthless without the grit. On the other, I’m telling you not to expose the evildoers.
Stalemate? No.
Here’s the solution:
Changing names to protect the guilty is not enough. Too many people in your family and social orbit will know the person, making your writing legally actionable.
So change more than just the name.
Change the location. Change the year. Change their gender. You could even change the offense.
If your own father verbally abused you so painfully when you were thirteen that you still suffer from the memory decades later, attribute it to a teacher and have it happen at an entirely different age.
Is that lying in a nonfiction book? Not if you include a disclaimer upfront that stipulates: “Some names and details have been changed to protect identities.”
So, no, don’t throw anyone under the bus. But don’t stop that bus!
Common Memoir Mistakes
Making it too much like an autobiography
Memoirs aren’t a chronological history of everything that’s happened in your life. Make sure your theme is strong, compelling, and reader-focused. If the stories you include don’t speak to your theme, cut them.
Including minutiae
Use only the details that matter. Have a large family or circle of friends, only a few of whom were critical to your outcome? Leave most of them out. Avoid describing day-to-day experiences or descriptions unless they directly relate to your theme.
Bragging
Your memoir isn’t the place for touting your achievements. You’ll turn readers off. Describe your challenges and emotional truths authentically. Own your successes but stay humble. Memoir is about the journey more than the destination.
Glossing over the truth
Writing a memoir will challenge you emotionally. It can be hard to revisit tough times or traumatic experiences — but unless you tell the whole truth, your readers won’t be able to relate and your story will fall flat.
Preaching
How can you avoid sounding preachy or overbearing in your writing? Look for any time you use the words “must,” “should,” “ought,” or “have to,” and then find ways to reword your sentences using the Come Alongside Method to encourage, inspire, or suggest instead.
Affecting the wrong tone
Your memoir isn’t a place to be flippant, sarcastic, or condescending. You can be lighthearted at times, but use humor judiciously. Don’t try to cover up your emotional truth with lame jokes. Your story won’t feel authentic and your readers will lose interest.
How to Start Your Memoir
Start slowly by setting the stage or explaining family dynamics and you’ll soon lose your reader’s attention.
Hook your reader from page one by beginning in medias res — in the middle of things. That doesn’t mean it has to be slam-bang action, but something must be happening.
Not sure exactly where to start? No problem.
You don’t have to know the best beginning for your book in order to start writing — and you shouldn’t procrastinate indefinitely until you figure it out.
Instead, many memoir writers only discover their strongest potential opening as a last step. Decide what stories you’ll include, write those, and choose the best one once you see what you have to work with.
Memoir Examples
Thoroughly immerse yourself in this genre before attempting to write in it. I read nearly 50 memoirs before I wrote mine (Writing for the Soul). Here’s a list to get you started:
- All Over But the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg (my favorite book ever)
The Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter tells the story of growing up dirt poor in Alabama with a father who had a “murderous temper” and a mother who went 18 years without a new dress to make sure her kids had a better life.
- Cultivate by Lara Casey
Part inspiration and part practical guide, Lara’s insight helps women who feel “inadequate, overwhelmed, and exhausted” to find grace through cultivating what matters most.
- A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
One of Hemingway’s most beloved books, this memoir provides a fascinating snapshot of his life as a writer in 1920s Paris.
- Out of Africa by Karen Blixen
Modern Library named this classic book, written in 1937, as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time. In it, Karen describes her experiences running a coffee farm with her husband in Kenya in 1914.
- Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
The history of Frank McCourt’s “miserable Irish Catholic childhood” and how stories helped him to survive slums and starvation and ultimately thrive as a professional storyteller.
- Still Woman Enough by Loretta Lynn
In a much anticipated follow-up to her first memoir, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta tells the story of the second half of her life. She writes about the stresses of fame and candidly discusses her often turbulent relationship with the husband she married at age 13.
- Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
A moving and insightful look into one of the greatest comedians ever — including Steve’s creative process, his incredible work ethic, and why he walked away during the height of his career.
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Didion’s story of marriage, family life, and unexpected tragedy will touch anyone who’s ever loved and lost a spouse or child.
- This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff
After divorce splits his family, a young Toby Woolf runs away to Alaska, forges checks, and steals cars — then redefines his life.
- Molina by Benjie Molina and Joan Ryan
The story of a father who raised 3 famous major league baseball catchers and left a legacy of “loyalty, humility, courage, and the true meaning of success.”
- Undone by Michele Cushatt
Michele’s story of divorce, cancer, and integrating a new family shows readers how embracing faith and letting go of the need to control can lead to a vibrant life despite chaos and messiness.
- Will the Circle Be Unbroken? By Sean Dietrich
Sean’s story of love, loss, and the unthinkable gives readers hope for a future that breaks the destructive cycles of previous generations.
Turn Your Life Story Into a Captivating Memoir
If you’ve ever thought about writing a memoir (or wondered if you should even try), you now have everything you need.
Think about your theme. What have you learned that could help others? How will you tell your stories to inspire your readers and change lives?
Brush up on the 7 essential story elements to make sure your memoir is as relatable as possible.
And once you’re ready to get started, head over to How to Outline a Nonfiction Book in 5 Steps.
