Memoir writing process Archives - Page 5 of 25

What Matthew Perry Taught Us About the Addiction Memoir Category

November 7, 2023October 31, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

As fans continue to struggle with the death of Friends star Matthew Perry, much attention has centered on Perry’s memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, published just about exactly one year ago. The book earned generally favorable reviews, and Perry supported it with a series of televised interviews including, most notably, an hour-long conversation with Diane Sawyer on ABC.

Perry’s memoir could be called an “addiction memoir,” a “redemption memoir” or both. Many of you may be writing or hoping to write a similar type of book that chronicles your journey as you overcame an addiction or triumphed over a different life challenge. You may not be asked to do a lot of TV interviews after your memoir is published, but you can follow some of Perry’s writing concepts to make your book a good read.

What can we learn from Matthew Perry’s memoir? Quite a bit:

Overcoming a huge obstacle makes you want to write a memoir. Beating addiction is necessary in order to live a long and fulfilling life, so you have a lot to celebrate if you’re able to conquer addiction. The natural motivation for many people to chronicle their journey is to help the next addict. In a quote and video clip that’s gone viral since Perry’s death, he tells an interviewer: “The best thing about me, bar none, is if someone comes up to me and says, ‘I can’t stop drinking, can you help me?’ I can say, ‘yes,’ and follow up and do it.” He established a clinic for addicted men, but his memoir also was part of that effort to help people.
Perhaps even more than most memoir topics, this one requires utter candor. If you don’t want to feel vulnerable, you probably can’t write an addiction memoir. Perry is brutally honest, not concerned with whether he’s giving “Chandler” a bad name or anything like that. For readers to relate to your saga, you have to come across as baring all and hiding nothing.
Don’t put off writing your memoir. No matter what the topic of your memoir, as soon as the arc of your story is resolved, start writing. You may live much longer than Matthew Perry, who was only 54 when he died. But life goes quickly, and lots of things can get in the way of finding enough time to write a book. While you’re still able to create and the story is fresh in your mind, start writing it. You don’t want to regret letting your life story go untold.
You don’t have to wait for a final ending. No matter what your redemption story involves, you never really know whether you’ve ultimately succeeded in defeating your demons. If you came out of an abusive situation, you don’t know for sure that you won’t find yourself inadvertently stuck in another abusive relationship. If you’ve recovered from a serious illness such as cancer, you can’t be certain that you won’t have to battle it again someday. And if you’ve overcome addiction, there’s no guarantee that you won’t experience a relapse. Matthew Perry continued to have medical problems related to his previous drug and alcohol use. If you have a redemption story to tell, what you do know is that you landed on the other side of something frightening.
When you talk about other people, keep the negativity confined to the facts. One big concern for many memoir authors is how much they can divulge about someone else’s bad behavior. As long as you stick to the truth as you remember it, you can write about someone else. Matthew Perry wrote about his childhood marked by his parents’ divorce. It didn’t make his parents look great, but that’s part of the creative freedom an author gets. However, he also made an unfunny, unnecessary and hurtful joke about Keanu Reeves that had nothing to do with the story he was telling. He received so much blowback from this throwaway line that he removed it from the book in subsequent printings. You don’t have to reveal every opinion you have about everyone you mention. You’re better off complimenting people if you choose, rolling out the facts, and letting your description of the action speak for itself rather than specifically trashing the people who make it into your memoir.
Readers, including friends and family, may be more supportive than you think. Today, addiction doesn’t have the stigma it used to carry. If you feel compelled to tell your story, don’t be afraid to admit what you went through. Don’t feel embarrassed that you stayed with an abusive partner or gave into the temptation of alcohol or drugs. Remember that much of your audience is looking to you for guidance; they’re not out to criticize you. Complete honesty wins over a lot of people.

For many memoir authors, the catharsis gained from writing their story serves as some of the best therapy for getting on with their lives. You want people to know how you faced that challenge and what worked for you to reclaim your own life. Having that book as a reaffirmation that you didn’t back down, didn’t give up, is a reassuring reminder of how strong you are.

When and How to End Each Chapter of Your Memoir

October 17, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Woman sitting on library floor with book

Different Writing Devices Produce Different Effects

How do you know at what point one chapter of your memoir ends and the next begins? Should you have sub-chapters within chapters? As with everything relating to memoir, you can make your own rules. But let’s take the second question first.

Be Disciplined and Edit

I’m not a fan of separating a memoir into three or four parts and then doing chapters within each part—or worse, letting each part go on and on without dividing it into chapters. If you’re writing a history of the world, maybe you want to split that up a bit, devoting Part I to the prehistoric world and subdividing that into the stone age, the bronze age and the iron age. But look, your memoir is not the history of the world. It’s a close look at a shorter time frame. Subcategories within categories can have the reader picturing your outline or storyboard, and listing Parts I, II and III can be kind of a spoiler, because readers see how your life divides up.

So let’s assume you go with ordinary chapters. According to Scribe Media, an average nonfiction book of 50,000 words typically has 12 chapters. The math of that comes to 4,166 words per chapter, or let’s call it 4,000 words per chapter. I think that’s a fair guideline but nothing you should consider carved in stone. If one chapter feels complete at 2,500 words and another not until 7,500 words, rely on your sense of what works.

Of course, you still should always look at your work with a critical eye. Will the reader want to slog through that longer-than-average chapter? Let’s say you devote a whole chapter to high school. Does it feel longer than the four years of high school seemed to last? If you didn’t get along with any of your teachers, maybe five examples are one too many and you can cut the weakest of them.

If you have an exceptionally short chapter, make sure the content justifies its own space. Perhaps the information can be woven throughout a few other chapters. Or for a simpler solution, maybe you can tack it onto the end of the previous chapter or the beginning of the next.

Organic Timing for a Chapter’s End

I haven’t experienced much of a struggle in determining when it’s time to end a chapter. As you get used to writing, your writer’s voice will just grow quiet when you’ve finished what you have to say about that segment of your memoir.

Endings are pretty obvious especially when you write your memoir in chronological order. If, again, the chapter is about high school, graduation or prom will pretty much cap it off. If the chapter is more of a theme that spans several time periods, such as your difficulties getting along with your sister, you will know when you’ve shared all the important points of that relationship.

Be Deliberate When Ending Each Chapter

It’s so helpful to read memoirs even as you write yours. When we read as readers, we’re interested in following the story. But when we read as writers, we’re also observing all the techniques that hook the reader, make the story flow, keep the information clear. So be mindful of the various ways a skilled author ends a chapter. You’ll discover that you have a choice at the end of each chapter. To take one of the common approaches to ending a chapter, you might:

Build suspense. This is probably the most common device. It doesn’t have to be a big cliffhanger, but you always want your reader to have trouble putting the book down. A chapter’s last sentence can easily make the reader curious about what will happen next. Try something like: “When I shoved the diploma into my jacket pocket, I felt the key I’d dropped into the pocket hours earlier and knew I had to figure out what door that key would open.”
Foreshadow. Similar to developing suspense, foreshadowing gives the reader a glimmer of what’s coming next but offers a bigger hint. You can foreshadow what’s coming immediately in the following chapter or in an episode that occurs several or more chapters later. In either case, try something like: “Even as I watched him drive away and my breathing finally returned to a normal pace, I had a feeling our paths would someday cross again.”
Review/reflect. Like a short story, a chapter can be its own vignette that circles back to a theme or message. Just be careful not to be preachy or “authorsplain.” If you’ve made your point through the narrative, you don’t have to boil down that point for the reader. But you still can drive it home a bit: “That quaint town helped me see beauty in nature and appreciate the value of every individual who entered my life, but it wasn’t going to hold me back from discovering what else was out there for me.”
Increase the reader’s emotional connection to you. A memoir can reveal your darker side, so you have to make sure you don’t turn the reader against you. Consider ending a particularly brutal chapter on an emotional note: “His reassuring nod nearly brought me to tears. It was all I needed to be sure that I was making the right decision—owning up to my mistakes while still following my heart.”
Put the reader in your shoes. To some extent, your entire memoir is intended to resonate with the reader. Support this by ending a chapter here and there with a sort of invitation to readers to consider what they would do in that position. You can combine this with building suspense: “The three options would lead me down completely different paths, and I knew I could choose only one of them.”
Summarize. I wouldn’t use this technique often, because you shouldn’t have to repeat what you’re trying to get across. But it does add variety to your chapters’ endings. It can be something like: “So that was it. I’d tried everything the doctors had recommended. I did the hard work in therapy, had the MRI to check for physical problems, propped myself up with a supportive community and even changed jobs. Nothing worked, and at this point I wanted to just give up.”

You can probably think of more types of chapter endings on your own. Keep in mind that in a first draft you don’t even need to be concerned with this. It comes with the polishing—that’s the great thing about a second draft! And once you get the hang of ending a chapter, it will flow for you. Writing is like anything else—practice improves your outcome.

Why I Like Coaching Memoir Authors and Editing Memoirs

September 22, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Photo of books published by Write My Memoirs

The rewards of owning a business like Write My Memoirs

We are now uploading Write My Memoirs blog posts to Substack. They also will continue to be posted on the Write My Memoirs website. We update our blog with a fresh post every two weeks, usually on Tuesday or Wednesday.

For Substack users unfamiliar with Write My Memoirs, I’m using this post to introduce myself and the work of my business. For those of you accustomed to receiving an email notice of the latest blog, Substack will continue to send you those emails.

Memoirs Should Not Be Tedious

Through Write My Memoirs, I have the opportunity to help people write and publish their life stories. Some authors write what’s considered more of a full autobiography, while others stay true to the memoir genre and chronicle one event, theme or time period in their life. Either way is fine; you should write the book you want your family to have or, perhaps, the one you hope to sell.

This is such rewarding work for me. Writing/editing is my interest, my talent and what I was trained to do—I have a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and have worked for decades as a professional writer and editor across many industries. I’ve also taught writing through a focus on grammar. But, while Write My Memoirs offers a go-at-your-own-pace grammar workshop, we don’t focus on grammar when helping someone complete a memoir. For many people, grammar is tedious. Writing a memoir should not be tedious.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Expressing your thoughts in writing is hard enough. Then add the aim of crafting a compelling narrative so that readers will want to continue turning the pages; even seasoned writers do not always hit that mark. It’s also challenging to dig into your own psyche, admit your mistakes or shortcomings, and reveal your vulnerability to others. When a memoir focuses on, or even just includes, a traumatic event, reliving that trauma is really difficult. Additional work is necessary in doing research to fill in memory gaps and fact-check names, dates and places. It’s easy for authors to get frustrated, impatient and, sometimes, disillusioned about whether they should even finish the task.

Helping Throughout the Memoir Writing Process

But if it were easy, these authors wouldn’t need a coach or editor. I’m so glad I’m able to help authors attain this goal. Let’s look at the process from beginning to end.

Motivation. Simply having someone keeping you accountable can motivate you to produce work regularly—but, honestly, this is on you. I can help you design a writing schedule, and I can share a few tricks that have been shown to help people stick to the schedule, but somehow you have to get those fingers on the keyboard and put something up there on the screen. Together we can explore whether you work best with or without specific deadlines and how much nagging you’d like me to do. There’s just no one formula for everyone; staying motivated is a highly individual dynamic. It’s nice having a partner, though, and I’m in it with you all the way.
Good writing. People like to point out all the terrible writing out there online, but I’m pretty impressed with the manuscripts I receive. So what if you write complimentary when you mean complementary or you’re partial to a haphazardly placed semicolon? I can fix those things. I find that, for first-time authors, their own memoir makes a perfect initial book, because it’s their heart that’s driving the effort. They’re writing from a deep place, so it comes out as authentic, passionate, relatable. What nonprofessionals need is polishing, which is what a professional editor can supply. The voice is still the author’s voice, but the readability improves.
Logical organization. While a chronological memoir is fine, typically it’s more interesting to start a memoir at a pivotal moment and then trace what came before and follow up with what happened from that point forward. That takes a bit of finesse, which is where the coaching gets really helpful. Even a story written chronologically tends to need a little pause here and there to explain some background, expound about a specific character or jump ahead in one aspect to finish it up since it doesn’t much relate to the rest of the book.
Publishing. It’s so sad when a manuscript sits in a drawer and never becomes a real book! I enjoy helping authors update, edit and finalize a previous attempt to get that work out of the drawer and onto the bookshelf. Write My Memoirs is partly a self-publishing business. We do all the preparation for our clients and can print up as many copies as our authors want, in any size, soft cover or hard cover. Speaking of covers, we help authors with cover design.

As the coaching, editing and publishing progress, I get to know the authors and enjoy the stories they tell. I’m with them as they complete this major goal. Often it’s just a few hundred pages in soft cover, but it’s their life right there in print. When their friends and family members learn that they’ve written up their lives, they all want copies. Reprints are among our most common requests. The authors then feel the result was worth the work, and I do, too.

Melissa Etheridge Explains How Memoir Writing Supports Healing After Tragedy

September 5, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Singer Melissa Etheridge has just written a memoir, Talking to My Angels, that includes revealing her grieving process after losing her son in 2020 to an opioid overdose. In a recent appearance on “Good Morning America,” Etheridge said her son’s death was one of the reasons she wanted to write the memoir.

Writing the memoir helped her with her grief, Etheridege said, in several ways:

Memoir is a vehicle for responding to people’s curiosity about you. Because Etheridge is a celebrity, she knew there would be questions about the circumstances surrounding her son’s death. “I knew as time went on that I would need to answer the questions, and I wanted to,” she said. “I’ve never really run away from truth, or life, as it’s happened, and I knew that I would need to explain this. So I thought that this might be a good time to do a book, so I can explain to people how I handled an addiction in the family, a death from the addiction in the family, and how we all got through it.”
For people going through something similar, memoir is a way to let them know they’re not alone. Etheridge explained, “I have seen, and know about, many parents who take on such a huge guilt and shame when one of their children becomes addicted, and has this problem, and dies from—this was fentanyl—and more and more this is happening. It can happen in any family. But the guilt and shame that so many take on…can really stop your own life.” She added that the person you lost doesn’t want you to stop your own life.
The process of writing is healing. Writing is “such a great healer,” she said. “To get it out…to then move on from it, not to just tell it over and over but to move on and say, ‘Yes, this happened.’”
Memoir teaches authors about themselves. “I have learned so much,” Etheridge said. “I learned how much I loved. Learning that can be so exhilarating. Wow, I loved that much that I hurt that much. And I love being human.”

Some of our Write My Memoirs members are finding a kind of solace just as Melissa Etheridge did—by writing out the facts of something unpleasant or tragic that happened to them and connecting with readers through their feelings about that time in their life. They’re discovering how powerful memoir is as a healing agent.

Why Do People Write Memoirs?

August 22, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Person leaving footprints in the sand on a beach

Facebook has several memoir groups, and on one of them a member posted the question, “What is the primary reason for writing your memoir?” Quite a few people responded in the comments.

Memoir as a Family Legacy

Some reflected the thoughts of many of our Write My Memoirs members—to write a memoir, as one commenter put it, simply for “posterity.” Another person hoped her memoir would become a “family heirloom.” She noted, “If I never amass a fortune to bequeath, at least I will be able to share my story.” Similarly, someone said she was writing her memoir “for my kids and grandkids to have a record of me should they someday want to read it.”

Memoir to Honor Someone Close

Some memoirs have the theme of capturing the life of someone who had a significant impact on the memoir author. The memoirist may intend to honor a parent, mourn a child who died young, or maybe relate the story of a great friendship or marriage.

In the comments on the Facebook post, someone wrote about writing her memoir to bring awareness to deaths from Agent Orange. Her husband was a sailor in the US Navy who died from the effects of the chemical. Another said her memoir commemorated the short life of her sister, who died at 19, and someone else said she was documenting all the good advice from her mother.

Memoir to Serve as a Note of Caution

One typical reason people write memoirs is to help readers learn from the author’s mistakes or warn them about dangers the author encountered. A number of responses fell along this theme.

One commenter said she was writing her memoir to help people who have been shunned by their families. Her family shunned her after she left what she calls a religious cult. Another person wanted to caution people about “medical gaslighting” and the medical community not believing you when you describe symptoms. Yet another person had addicts for parents and crafted her memoir to offer ways to break the cycle of addiction.

Memoir to Heal, Share and Reflect

Many lives are infused with humor and interesting anecdotes, and if you’re sharing those stories you might as well compile them into a memoir. One commenter had 30 snippets of stories she’d written over the years, so she went through them and laced them together. Another wanted to relate her quirky tales from being a lesbian southern belle. One said he simply wanted “to tell the world my fascinating story,” while another wanted to write about his “unusual existence.”

One commenter wanted to write her memoir before it was too late. “I feel the need to tell my story for future generations,” she said. “As a child during the Cold War, I was part of an exodus of unaccompanied children from Cuba fleeing Communism….We are elderly now. If we don’t write about it our stories will die with us.”

A couple of commenters mentioned writing as a way to heal; memoirs are well known to help people heal from trauma or work through grief. One commenter said she was motivated “for self-healing and to share life experiences.” Another said sharing her life story was “nothing short of transformation, for myself and others.”

For some people, writing a book is a goal. One commenter said she wrote her memoir “to prove I could do it. I first dreamt about publishing a book when I was a little girl.”

And for people who are natural writers, a memoir is an obvious task. “I write because writers can’t not write,” one commenter remarked. “And I write my story because I believe we all have stories that matter.” At Write My Memoirs, we agree with that!

Lessons for Athletes Who Want to Write Memoirs—And Vice Versa

July 11, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

This week in July 2023, the National Senior Games are taking place in Pittsburgh, and I’m competing in track and field. If you’re over 50 and enjoy athletic competition in any sport, check out Senior Games. It’s fun. But that’s another topic for another time, or here’s a link to read a piece I wrote about a previous Nationals event. But what you all want to do is write memoirs.

We All Have Our Gifts

In regular life, I’m a writer, editor and memoir coach. I’m good at all three. My writing comes naturally, so that part’s a gift. I learned to edit by going to graduate school in journalism, so that’s my training. When I kind of accidentally became owner of Write My Memoirs, I taught myself little by little how to coach memoir authors, so that expertise comes from trial and error, consulting with colleagues and other types of experience.

In athletic competition, I run, jump and throw. I’m bad at all three. I was never an athlete of any sort. I can swim and I played tennis as a teen, but I was never good enough to compete in any sport. Track and field is way out of my wheelhouse. Despite that, in middle age I started running for exercise—just two miles most days. So when my husband began competing in Senior Games, I got tired of being a spectator and decided I’d enter some of the running races. Eventually I added javelin and two jump events.

The best I can say for myself is that I don’t always come in last. Sometimes I do. In this group of exceptional senior athletes, I am simply not very good. I don’t have a gift the way I do with writing, but I don’t mind. I can train and practice and teach myself.

If you’re feeling that, as a writer, you’re simply not very good, I can relate because of what I do that I feel inadequate about. But you know what we say in Senior Games? Even when you land in last place, you beat all the people sitting at home on the couch. Try thinking in those terms when you write your memoir. You’re doing something a lot of people want to do but never get past page one.

Here are a few ways I can align your desire to write with my desire to compete in track and field.

Lessons from Comparing Athletic Competition to Writing a Memoir

Like my triple jump, your writing is something you can improve. I watched videos and read information to figure out the steps for the triple jump. I knew that it wasn’t a popular event, which is how I came in seventh place in my age category in this year’s Nationals! Okay, that also was last place, but I got a ribbon. I know it seems as if everyone is writing a memoir, but in terms of percentage of the population, you are a rare bird if you take your memoir the whole way to publication. Even if you don’t write the best memoir ever published, you still get a ribbon! You’ll be an author. You’ll have a book to hand out to friends and family. It’s huge.
Just as I don’t enjoy running, you don’t have to enjoy writing in order to write a memoir. I run as part of my general fitness program, not because I attain a “runner’s high” or whatever dedicated runners seem to feel. You can look at your memoir as something you’re doing for yourself—not the part of yourself that wants to spend time doing something enjoyable, but the part of yourself that wants a targeted result. You want to produce your memoir. To realize that goal, you have to sit down and write it, or at least hire someone to take your information and write it for you.
In competition, experts tell us all to just compete against yourself. Go at your own pace. Don’t burn out. So I run as much as I can as long as I can get myself to do it. That comes to two miles at least three times a week. If it rains or something unexpected comes up in my schedule, I wait until the next day. Writing is not that different. You don’t have to finish your memoir within one year or commit to a writing regimen of at least 30 minutes a day or set up an ideal writing environment. You know when you’re slacking, so at that point pick up the pace. Just don’t let it go completely. As with running, you keep putting one foot in front of the next, and sooner or later you get to the finish line.
I’m the only “me” there is. Each of us is unique. There are so many aspects to being a person, and we differ in all of them, from the way our bodies are built to the way we think to the way our lives have progressed. My challenges in competing are different from other athletes’ challenges. Some have it easier, but many have it harder. I’m lucky to be able to run at all. Because you’re unique, your memoir will be special. If your story were already out there, you wouldn’t have to write it. Value the way you approach a project like memoir writing in your own way. Appreciate that your unique life will make an interesting narrative.

Your Memoir is Important

This isn’t a zero-sum game. I can compete alongside athletes much better than I am, with no delusion that I might win, and still be valuable as a participant in Senior Games. And you can offer a memoir that will add to the literature of what it’s like to live a particular life.

Think About the Future, Not Just the Past, When Writing Your Memoir

June 27, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Memoir writing is so tricky because you think you’re writing about events in your past, but you really have to consider three versions of yourself: past you, present you and future you. If you’re having trouble getting started on your memoir or sticking with a writing schedule, the consideration for future you may be a factor.

Past and Present

It’s difficult to get back into the brain of your earlier self and remember your life’s important facts, much less the colorful details that give them meaning and context. As you write, you try to feel the emotions you were feeling at the time of the incident you’re relating. As you relive an episode in order to write about it, you open up all of your senses and strain to see, hear, taste and smell everything that went on. That’s the way to share your story accurately, candidly and in a way that’s true to yourself.

You also have to contend with who you are at the time you’re writing your memoir. Perhaps some memories are so painful that you have to prepare yourself before you sit down and write about them. Now that you’re older, you have a different perspective. While you may be writing about your childhood, as an adult you know a lot more about what was happening to you. So by necessity, your current self is all over this book. The story is in the past, but the writing is in the present.

You’re the Most Important Reader

Then there’s the you of the future. You may not think much about this person, because you’re focused on the past. But don’t lose sight that “future you” is who will show up next.

We talk a lot about writing for your target audience. You want to make sure you’re describing details for your reader. You have to figure out what you can assume the reader knows and which information you need to fill in for the reader. In short, when you’re writing your memoir you’re trying to think like your ideal reader.

But you know who is probably the most important person you should want to please? You! Not the you who’s writing the memoir, because you’ll make sure you like your work before you publish it or share it in any way. But what about the way you’ll feel some years from now? Don’t forget about that person. That’s an important reader—maybe the most important reader.

Try to Have No Regrets

You can’t possibly know exactly how you’ll feel a decade from now when you pick up your own book. But you can consider this eventuality. Will you have to forgive yourself for anything that’s in your memoir? If reading an anecdote you wrote embarrasses you a little right now or makes you cringe, will that improve or be even worse years from now? Maybe now that you’ve gotten some of these stories out and on paper, they don’t have to make the final cut in the published version.

A lot of your memoir is likely to involve stories about other people. In the future, will you wish you hadn’t named someone who harmed you—or will you wish you had named everyone and not used pseudonyms? Do you think you might be kind of over your anger or hurt by then? Or are you stepping too gingerly—avoiding hurting other people when protecting their feelings will come at the sacrifice of your own?

“Future You” Can Help with Hard Decisions

As you zoom ahead and picture yourself in the years to come, rereading your own work, it may help you now to decide which way to go in terms of including certain content and the tone you use in the writing. Ultimately, you want to be glad you told your story and wrote your memoir in the fashion that you did. Think about how you’ll feel looking back not at your life, but at what you chose to tell about your life and the way you chose to tell it.

An Easy Way to Start Your Memoir Writing Habit

June 13, 2023 by Rosanne Ullman

Neon light saying "We are all made of stories"

If you’re having a hard time getting into a writing habit to start your memoir, you may think you have to follow the broadly accepted advice to set aside a time each day—or at least each week—to force yourself to sit down and write. Even if all you write is a sentence, the thinking goes, you’re establishing a habit and soon the writing will flow.

Or it won’t.

A Different Jumpstart for the Writing Habit

If scheduling your writing isn’t working for you, try a different approach. Really, scheduling first is the tail wagging the dog. To be motivated to write, you have to want to get a story down so it won’t be forgotten. So instead of trying to come up with ideas when you decide to sit down and write, try reversing the process and sitting down to write when you have ideas.

We muse over our own life stories all the time, especially when we’re committed to, or even just considering, writing a full memoir. Since we carry around our phones, we always have a way to text ourselves or keep a notes app for things we want to remember. The next time an episode from your life crosses your mind, just take out your phone and write a few words as a reminder of what that story is.

You may find as you continue through your day that the story keeps returning to your mind. Then when you find yourself near your computer or a legal pad or however you want to write down everything, you’ll want to get that story down. It won’t feel like you’re forcing anything.

The Writing Habit Forms on Its Own

This doesn’t mean you have to write perfectly crafted text. It’s still a rough first draft of one story. But it’s something. Later you may feel like going back over the same story and giving it more texture or improving the writing if you can, or you can leave that story and start adding to it with more episodes in the same way you did the first one.

Talk about a habit! Once you start doing it this way, you could find yourself sneaking over to a corner during a party, pushing “pause” while you’re watching TV, stopping yourself in the middle of a conversation with a friend, taking a moment during work, or doing a talk-to-text while you’re driving.

Be careful not to edit yourself as these stories come to you. Write every story that comes to mind without mulling over whether it belongs in your memoir. Writing it gives you practice in telling about your life whether that story makes the final cut or not.

Decide Later Whether to Include Each Story

When you reach the next step—putting these stories into chapters and connecting them with transitions—you’ll make the decision, story by story, about whether each of them is relevant to the overall narrative you’re telling.

If you want to write a memoir, it’s because your life is full of stories you want to relate around a certain theme. The events are already in your mind. All you have to do is put them into publishable words. Try letting the stories come to mind first, and then do the writing second. You may find it easier than sitting down and staring at a blank screen.

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.

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