Ideas for memoirs content Archives

First Line of Your Memoir is the First Hook for the Reader

May 9, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

We’ve talked a lot about where in your life you should start your memoir to really hook the reader. Successful memoirs start anywhere and everywhere, but today I’d say they most typically begin with a compelling, pivotal incident that took place in, say, the first third of the person’s life or the period of time the memoir addresses. I think that’s a great way to get readers invested from the beginning—they will want to see what comes next as well as what came before to lead up to that episode.

One Rule: Be Compelling

But some memoir authors start right at the beginning. Richard Nixon’s memoir launches his life with the sentence: “I was born in a house my father built.” Janis Ian’s 2009 memoir, Society’s Child: My Autobiography, begins, “I was born into the crack that split America.”

The idea is that even if you want to follow the simplest format—start with your first appearance in the world and proceed chronologically—you still should begin your book with something more interesting than the simple time and place of your birth. Add a fact, offer a surprise, be sarcastic—keep in mind that the reader can always put the book down and never pick it up again, so with each sentence, give readers a reason to keep reading.

Salvador Dali starts not with action but with thought. He opens his memoir by revealing how confident he was even as a child: “At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” So you see there are no rules. I would have said this type of passive beginning would not work as well as a moment of high action, but it does work. It sets the mood for how the book will roll out.

Writing Order: Again, No Rules

Just because the reader will read your first line before anything else doesn’t mean you have to write the first line before anything else. You don’t even have to write the first chapter first.

Many authors find the way they can most easily start writing is to write about an episode they know very well but one that does not require a lot of emotion for them to tell. Then little by little, you’ll get accustomed to writing about yourself and it won’t be so difficult. When you’re ready, you can write a great first sentence, first paragraph and first chapter even if you’ve already finished much of the rest of the text.

Yes, It’s Still a Memoir When It Includes Extensive Info About Other People in Your Life

March 28, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Part of the buzz around actor Sam Neill’s new memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?, comes from the information Neill shares about his friend Robin Williams. While Sam Neill is a pretty well-known celebrity, he enjoys nowhere near the devotion and popularity that Williams continues to have nearly a decade after his death.

Drop Names to Sell Books

Name-dropping is a good way to get your memoir noticed. Celebrities hang out together and are expected to share details they glean from their personal relationships with people who may be even more famous than they are. In Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe divulges liberally about his co-stars, including Tom Cruise, from the movie “The Outsiders,” as well as everyone else he knows. It’s just a normal part of an actor’s memoir to dish about fellow celebrities.

You may not know any celebrities, but you may finding yourself focusing whole chapters of your memoir on other people. Perhaps you want to use your memoir to pay tribute to—or expose the misdeeds of—your parents. Or if you were abused by a spouse, you might write so much about the spouse that it’s practically a separate biography within your autobiography.

Still Your Memoir

Does this change the nature of what you’re writing? Are you still the author of a memoir, or is it some more general type of nonfiction book?

When you’re telling your story from your point of view, it’s a memoir. Even if you devote quite a bit of ink to someone else’s story, unless that person is truly the focus of the book, it’s still your memoir. One of the most famous books about two people is Just Kids by Patti Smith. You could argue that Just Kids is as much about the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as it is about Patti Smith, but the book still is considered to be Smith’s memoir.

So go ahead and write all you want about other people who’ve had an impact on your life. That won’t change the way the book is perceived or marketed if you want to sell it. This will be your memoir, about you and the people who played a role in your life.

5 New Year’s Resolutions That Fulfill Your Dream of Writing a Memoir

December 20, 2022 by Rosanne Ullman

A paper with "New Year Resolutions" written on it, and a pen

If you want 2023 to finally be the year that you write your memoir, you can, of course, just list “write my memoir” as one of your New Year’s Resolutions or even your only New Year’s Resolution. But you also can use writing your memoir to fill the slot of any of five different resolutions.

1. Leave my family and friends a record of my life. This is a great resolution to make. How many times do we hear people say they just wish they could ask a parent or grandparent some questions? Your memoir will paint a vivid picture of what it was like to grow up at the time and place of your childhood with your parents and extended family. It’s such a personal, appreciated gift to give the people who love you, especially those who share some of the same family members.

2. Get my perspective down in writing. Sharing your opinions and viewpoints is another great goal to have for the coming year, and memoir is the perfect format. Everyone talks, but who listens? With a compelling memoir, you’ll have a captive audience of readers.

3. Work through difficult or traumatic life episodes. Journaling is becoming more and more recognized as an effective tool for facing a past that may frighten, sadden or anger you. It may even still be hidden from you. Begin your writing as a journal, and then turn it into a memoir. Whether you share it with anyone is your decision, but this can be the year you defeat your demons through memoir writing.

4. Publish my first book. If you want to be an author, what do they say? Write what you know. Your own life is a good place to start as an author. Remember that a memoir typically focuses on a narrower slice of your life than your entire autobiography, so this first book could lead to more books about fascinating you—or once you’ve gotten into the writing habit you can go on to fiction or another nonfiction topic that interests you.

5. Help others. Many memoir authors write about a life challenge that resonates with readers. These authors hope that chronicling how they triumphed over difficulties will give the next person confidence that things can improve. If you fit this description as an author, the sooner you can get your story out there, the better.

With the dawn of 2023 just around the corner, your goals take on a new shine. They’re ready to go, and you have 12 months to fulfill those resolutions. Write your memoir in 2023!

Memoir Authors Should Study “Finding Me” by Viola Davis

November 3, 2022 by Rosanne Ullman

Every successful memoir offers lessons for memoir authors. Celebrities who want to write a memoir have an easy time getting an advance from a publishing company, but having that advance, or even being a celebrity, does not guarantee that the memoir will be a best-seller. To appeal to readers, it has to be well-written and tell a compelling story, just like most other best-selling books. So when a celebrity memoir does sell briskly, it’s worth taking a look for those lessons.

Lessons for Your Memoir Writing

Viola Davis’s Finding Me is a good place to start. Any rise to fame is at least marginally interesting if described well, but Davis has more than that to work with. She had a childhood framed in extreme poverty, bullying and parental fighting, and she experienced rejection after rejection because casting directors didn’t find her pretty enough, or light-skinned enough, for leading roles.

Davis tells her story in ordinary, yet eloquent, language while quoting dialogue in the voices of people speaking casually, people less educated than she eventually was. She draws in the reader with every sentence and makes that look easy.

From the Write My Memoirs review on Goodreads, here are a few other tips this book offers memoir writers:

“Like many memoirs, Finding Me begins with a pivotal moment in the author’s life. In a lot of celebrity memoirs, that moment recalls a time along the journey of fame—after its launch but not too far in. Instead, Davis starts her memoir with an episode from her childhood. That’s because the little girl, Viola, influences the entire story. Davis always goes back to who that girl was, the hard life she endured, and who she remains in memory, legacy and perpetuity.

“From that episode, Davis jumps way ahead to a related anecdote from her time as the star of the TV show How to Get Away with Murder and then to another pertinent episode soon after, at her therapist’s office when she was 53, shortly before she wrote this book. Bridging little Viola with both famous, multi-award-winning Ms. Davis and private Viola Davis sets the tone for the book: they’re all the same person. The actor we applaud is still the child inside.”

Specific Devices in Memoir Writing

Memoir authors often reach for segues to soften the lines between topics. Davis uses a kind of basic technique that shows even sophisticated memoirs can rely on common writing devices. To tell readers about her mother’s background, she starts with how she always studies her mom’s face whenever they’re together. She can see the lines and wear and tear from a rough life. Then she goes into that life. When she’s finished, it’s easy to transition to her father’s life.

Your story may have many of the same elements of Davis’s memoir—rising above a tough childhood, for example. Read Finding Me to inspire you to tell your story in a way that keeps the pages turning.

Writing a Memoir about a Traumatic Experience

July 17, 2022 by Rosanne Ullman

Bulletin board posted with types of trauma

Documenting trauma is a common motivation for writing a memoir. But to write this type of memoir, authors have to go through the event emotionally all over again. That’s a big hurdle. At Write My Memoirs, we want to help you conquer that challenge.

Roxane Gay, whose own memoir documents trauma, advises writers to be raw, honest and pretty explicit. She believes your depiction of your horrifying experience should fall short of traumatizing your reader but still provide enough graphic detail so that the reader may have to put down your book for an hour or even a day before finishing that part.

Be Gentle With Yourself When Writing About Trauma

Going over what happened to you is something you can’t force. Chances are that by the time you’re considering writing this memoir, months or years have already passed since the traumatic event occurred. You didn’t just sit down at your computer the next day. But maybe the time still isn’t right.

Ask yourself whether you’re ready to more or less relive the event. If you feel that you cannot handle it, there’s no harm in waiting longer, letting more time pass between the you that faced trauma and the you that is writing the book. It’s difficult to write about it.

Making Your Story Relatable

Clink and other experts make the distinction between a memoir you write as therapy and a memoir you write to sell. The former is for you, the latter for everyone else. If your goal is to get closure or work out your feelings of trauma, then include the content you need for your own wellbeing. If your goal is to help others, that’s a whole different book. In that case, you’re writing for them, not for you, and you should be more selective in your content as well as less indulgent in your writing voice. Of course, you can do both. Write the book for yourself, and use that as the foundation for crafting a different, more marketable memoir.

The way to write for others is to make your personal story relatable to a lot of people. Think about what they will want to take from your experience. That doesn’t mean you should make it a how-to guide on recovering from trauma. Tell the story as a dramatic, compelling, page-turning saga. Then it can be both a valuable book for your readers and a statement of your own triumph over, or acceptance of, your traumatic ordeal.

“Life and Times”: Your Memoir Will Document Both

July 5, 2022July 4, 2022 by Rosanne Ullman

Silhouette of person's head watching fireworks

Friends, this post was written just hours before the July 4 holiday of 2022 turned tragic. What a sad event to drive home the point that, through your memoir, you have an opportunity to add your personal documentation to a shared history.

After today’s fireworks, another Independence Day goes into the books. I mean that literally—Independence Day 2022 may find itself in a memoir someday. As you write your memoir and cover past decades, you may find yourself referring to holidays and current events.

Your Memoir Shapes History

Storytellers control how people remember historical events, as we’re reminded by futurist Erwin McManus’s quote that “whoever tells the best story shapes the culture” and the song in the Hamilton musical asking, “Who tells your story?” Your memoir will take its place among the chronicles of a certain time and place. When you write about your life in 1956 London or 1975 Los Angeles, your published memoir presents as valid a portrayal as any other work describing that place and time.

The pandemic is a perfect example. How could anyone whose childhood spanned the pandemic neglect to describe what life was like when businesses were shuttered, city subways empty, families unable to gather indoors? Perhaps their descendants will know that in 2020 a virus interrupted normal life, but through a memoir they’ll discover the impact on their dad or grandmother in a particular location. A memoir set in New York City will report conditions quite different from one set in rural Wyoming.

Volumes have been written about World War II, but each individual soldier has unique memories from the war. A soldier’s memoir will use the war as both a backdrop and a focal point, and in that way the memoir author will add details in color and texture to what the world knows about the war years.

Uneventful times, if there is such a thing, can slip under the radar. We’re taught in history class that Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941, but what do we remember from, say, summer 1959? Offhand, I have no idea. A memoir can provide the contrast between the volatile war that preceded the 1950s and the radical changes that came with the 1960s.

Include the World At Large in Your Memoir

No one memoir will be the defining saga, the last word, about a time and place. But writing about your life is important not only to give voice to your personal experiences but also to contribute to the body of work that memorializes your era.

When you write, pay attention to what was going on in the world and how it affected your decisions, other people’s actions and everything that happened to you. Do some research, pull up some headlines and ask older friends to recall the major news of the day for you. When you write in your Write My Memoirs account, click on the “Historic Events” bar to pull up significant news stories of past decades. It’s a cool writing tool!

Include details when you describe your childhood home, the transportation you took, your city’s downtown—and the July 4 fireworks you’d attend each year. Tell the reader about your first car or cell phone, or how you wrote chain letters or went sledding on a hill that’s now paved over for parking needs.

You’re trying to tell a small story—your life. But when you’re a memoir author, you’re also reporting first-hand on the events you’ve witnessed. Taken together, the memoirs written on that era form the historic narrative of its life and times. Don’t underestimate your contribution to that history.

Memoir Organization: The Chapter that Pushes “Pause”

June 6, 2022 by Rosanne Ullman

Structure is always a major decision for memoir authors. Should you simply go chronologically, starting from the beginning of your saga and following with chapters that document the incidents as they rolled out in your life?

Or, instead, should you view your life as a collection of topics and tackle each subject matter one at a time? For example, you might devote a chapter to your professional life. Within that chapter, you can go chronologically, but everything that’s important about your work will get covered. Maybe another chapter is about your extended family, your spirituality or your hobbies. Your life becomes a collection of aspects of who you are.

Only One Rule: There Are No Rules

There are no rules in writing a memoir. Let me say that again. I’m not talking only about structure. This is your life. You are the one who lived it, and you are the one who is writing about it. You get to decide what to include and how to present your life. There are no rules in memoir writing. So you can employ a chronological structure and still interrupt the time line with a chapter that is more topic-centered.

Let’s say your memoir’s core focus is the way you contracted, suffered from, and then rebounded from a rare illness. You want to explain what happened to you and perhaps help others who might have the same illness. You lay it out chronologically, starting from the time you were young and healthy, recalling the first signs of the illness, documenting the details of your treatment and finishing with your triumph and recovery.

Example of a “Pause” Chapter

During your ordeal, you picked up painting. This gave you a way to pass long hours, take your mind off your troubles, express yourself creatively, and bond with a local artist who sold paintings on the street. And, eventually after you conquered your medical problems, painting provided a side income that continues to benefit you in current time as you’re writing your memoir.

Although painting has become an important aspect of your life and your recovery, it still feels tangential to your medically focused memoir. So that’s one problem: should you include it at all? The second issue is that it develops over time. If you introduce incidents involving painting into every chapter in which they fit chronologically, you’ll be mentioning it a lot but only as a paragraph here and a paragraph there. You’ll always have to stop what you’re talking about to catch up on this development in your hobby.

An easier way to manage a topic like this is to devote one whole chapter to your painting. Insert the chapter into the chronology of when you set up that first easel in your basement studio. Then explain how the diversion helped you throughout your illness and your life. You can use a sort of future “would” tense: “I would discover that this creative outlet would fulfill me not only while I was sick but long afterward.” Then you can go into the details.

If It’s Good Enough for Springsteen…

I noticed that Bruce Springsteen uses this chapter-interrupt device in his memoir, Born to Run. He singles out one of his E Street Band members, saxophonist Clarence Clemons, for a separate chapter that pauses the general chronology of his memoir in order to tell everything about his colleague’s talents and the relationship that developed between them. He takes this narrative well past the point in time where the previous chapter leaves off while providing a bit of background of Clemons’s life before that point as well.

More Uses for the Interrupting Chapter Device

It’s a huge freedom! This single-chapter departure from your own structure takes the burden off you as a writer, permitting you to explain something in depth without having to revisit it in multiple chapters. You also can use it to preview how that one aspect of your life turns out, tease other pieces of your life you either haven’t yet introduced or haven’t yet resolved, or pay special homage to a person, institution, company or topic.

Admittedly, devoting a separate chapter to a topic is not as difficult than weaving it into your long memoir thread. But don’t feel as if you’re taking the easy way out. When something is easier for the memoir author to write, that means it’s probably easier for the reader to understand, keep track of and enjoy. And that’s the whole point, right?

It’s Poetry Month! Can You Write Your Memoir in Verse?

April 8, 2022 by Rosanne Ullman

If you prefer to write poetry over prose but still want to write a memoir, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from writing your memoir in poetry. And you wouldn’t be the first by a long shot.

Like a series of stories, a series of poems can break down poem by poem to provide information about a point in time and, taken together, the series will build a full narrative. Poetry is the format, but the genre is still memoir. By the end of the book, the reader learns about a segment of, or significant event in, the author’s life.

So it’s not just a book of poetry by one author. The poems must relate to the topic of the memoir and proceed in an order that makes sense to the reader. As with any memoir, the chapters—or poems—do not have to roll out in chronological order. You can start in the middle, then cover earlier parts, and finish by picking up from that first middle part with a conclusion. You can begin at the end and work backwards, or you can begin at the end and then go to the beginning and follow through full circle. If you’re skilled enough to make it work, your chapters can even jump around. These considerations are no different whether you’re writing in poetry, in prose, or in customary nonfiction reporting.

Currently Memoirs Written in Verse

If you’d like to pick up books of memoirs written as verse, we have some suggestions for you. For some reason, these poet/memoirists are all women. Five of these are listed on bookriot.com.

Inside Out & Back Again
by Thanhhà Lai
A Vietnamese girl has a tough time growing up as a refugee in Alabama.

Memoir: Poems by Honor Moore
by Honor Moore
Reviewing this memoir by the poet Honor Moore, The Village Voice reviewer wrote: “Moore’s poems speak of a strong faith in hard work and in the land of working alone. Her poems mark out both the experiences she describes and . . . the experience of making a book of poems.”

Brown Girl Dreaming
by Jacqueline Woodson
The Black girl experiences of the 1960s-1970s fold out through verse.

Poetry for Men: A memoir written across three continents
by The Expiring Mind
Even this one seems to be written by a woman—perhaps it is her message to men told through memoir and poetry.

How I Discovered Poetry
by Marilyn Nelson
One of the country’s celebrated poets uses her craft in 50 poems to describe her 1950s childhood.

The Favorite
by Lucinda Watson
Through 64 poems, the granddaughter of IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr., paints a picture of complicated family relationships and growing up with privilege.

Under the Mesquite
by Guadalupe Garcia McCall
Somewhat fictionalized, this poetic account tells of a child dealing with her mother’s cancer diagnosis.

Pocket Poetry Day 2022: April 29

April 29 is Pocket Poetry Day. To celebrate poetry, post your poet on social media with the hashtage #PocketPoem. We’d love it if you’d hashtag #writemymemoirs as well!

The 2022 poster shown above was designed by eleventh grader Lara L. from Saunders Trades and Technical High School in Yonkers, New York. Her poster won the 2022 National Poetry Month Poster Contest and features a line by 2021 Presidential Inaugural Poet and 2017 National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman.

One More Time: Yes, Your Life Story Is Worthy of a Memoir

March 25, 2022 by Rosanne Ullman

There’s no greater incidence of imposter syndrome than among memoir authors. When your first book is a memoir, not only can you question whether you’re a “real author” but also whether your topic is important enough for a book. The question of worthiness comes up time and again. Is my life interesting enough to fill a memoir? Why would anyone want to read about me?

By definition, your life is unique. There’s only one you. We language nerds never use the term “more unique” or “less unique,” because “unique” means “one of a kind” without adding a descriptor. So I won’t say that some lives are less unique than others, but certainly some lives, while unique, have fewer dramatic moments or seem to follow more typical patterns. They’re kind of ordinary. So let’s look at both extremes.

Unusual Lives

The most common reason people give for writing a memoir is that they’ve lived through a difficult event or time and want to write it out for cathartic reasons or to help the next person facing the same crisis. This can be any life challenge—an abusive childhood, harsh poverty, a health condition, an escape from a dangerous political environment, anything.

The opposite exceptional life—privilege or fame—also motivates people to write a memoir. Simply chronicling how the person acquired wealth or became famous supplies the author with a story that people will read.

In both cases, the compelling plot drives the narrative. How did this start? What came next? The idea is to make it a page-turner. If you’ve had something significant and uncommon happen to you, or if you’ve chosen to take a road less traveled, I can assure you that your life is interesting enough to write about.

Ordinary Lives

Now let’s say you’ve had a life much like the lives of everyone else you know. You’d like to document the facts of your life, but you have a hard time picturing anyone except your family wanting to spend time reading about your picket-fence family life, your desk job with its periodic promotions, your golf hobby or your volunteer activities in your community.

First, at Write My Memoirs we often get requests for second and third printings from our self-publishing authors because of the person’s initial underestimate of how many friends and acquaintances will ask to read the memoir. People who know you even only through social media can be curious to read about your life.

Second, let me ask you something. What are your favorite TV shows? Maybe “Stranger Things” or “Law & Order” is on your list, but many of the most popular shows, both comedies and dramas, center on ordinary people like you and a family or professional life like yours. The incidents may be exaggerated, but from “Family Ties” and “Family Matters” to “Friends,” “Modern Family,” “This Is Us” and both versions of the “The Wonder Years,” the shows are relatable to viewers specifically because they ring true; you recognize your own life in the lives of the characters.

For the memoir of a more ordinary life, the plot isn’t what drives the page-turning. It’s the way the life is presented. Humor can entertain, warmth in telling your story can engage readers and, most important, being candid and honest makes readers trust you and enjoy what you have to tell.

Writing is the Key Ingredient

So if you’re looking for a recipe for a great memoir, it isn’t really the story. The key ingredient is the writing. Use strong verbs. Paint visual pictures so the reader is right there with you. Don’t repeat yourself. Don’t leave holes that readers can’t fill in by themselves. Develop your own writing style, and be consistent with it.

You’ve lived the life you’ve lived. No one else has lived it. Telling what that life was about from your point of view will make a fine memoir. You just have to sit down and write it!

Writing Tips: How to Develop Empathy in Your Memoir

February 28, 2022 by Rosanne Ullman

You probably want people who read your memoir to root for you. Even if the main topic of your memoir does not address something like overcoming hardship, facing tragedy or triumphing over opposition, you most likely want to encourage empathy for yourself. Unless you’re unusually self-critical, telling your story from your point of view will naturally point readers in that direction.

But there also are writing devices you can use. Here are three.

1. Writing Tone: Be Intimate, Raw, Honest, Humble, Authentic

Eliciting empathy from readers is really no different from trying to make new friends. Why do people want to spend time with someone?

You earn empathy from readers not only by the story you tell but also by the way you tell it. Write intimately, as if you’re sitting with just one person and “spilling your guts” to a degree.

Like new friends, readers like nice people. Show your heart! If your journey takes you from being not very nice to becoming a much better person, start your memoir at a more recent period and then jump backwards. That way you’ll let readers know that sticking with your story will pay off, because eventually they’ll like you.

Readers sense authenticity; if they feel phoniness, they’ll doubt your story. If they think you’re outright lying at all? You’re toast.

If readers hear arrogance in your writer’s voice, they’ll turn against you. If you blame others or just bad luck for what you’ve done, they’ll abandon you. Readers will be turned off by a flippant attitude that treats your sins as if they’re less significant than the sins of others. So take accountability for mistakes you’ve made and your own contribution to your troubles.

Expressing true contrition and raw honesty will keep readers on your side. Your tone must demonstrate that you don’t think you’re always right or better than other people.

Writing at the average reader’s level is a good way to get them to relate to your storytelling. If you write down to them, that condescending attitude will probably not sit well with readers. At the other end, writing in highly scholarly language can be tough to slog through and also indicate that you’re not easily relatable to ordinary people.

2. Writing Content: Give Evidence for Empathy

Be careful if your memoir positions you against the world, because the world might just win in your readers’ minds. To encourage empathy, show empathy. Roll out incidents that demonstrate how you empathized with other people.

Include, as well, episodes that show people empathizing with you. Give some play to other people who agreed with you, friends who had your back, relatives who came to the rescue. Explain your reasons behind your actions. Include any “aha” moments you had so that readers can take that ride along with you.

3. Writing Quality: No Sloppiness

Smart readers like smart writing—your memoir must be well-written. Readers do not have to be English professors to spot typos, bad grammar, repetition, hard-to-follow narratives and other errors that indicate poor writing. Even just unsophisticated writing can undermine a good story, because readers might not be able to follow your thoughts.

While you don’t have to be a professional writer, you should have a professional editor look over your work. Little things like paragraph transitions make a big difference in keeping the story flowing and the reader turning pages.

If your writing is poor, readers may feel sorry for you—but sympathy is not empathy. You don’t want readers to pity you; you want them to respect you for the way you handled tough situations and your good times, too. Ultimately, you want readers to enjoy your book—through your challenges, your decisions and your survival. Put them right by your side, and they’ll get it.

Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!