How to write a memoir (without being a writer)

Find the through-line first

Answer this out loud: "If my life were a film, where would it start?" The answer is almost never your birth. It is the day something changed. Start there, and let the childhood come in later, where it explains something.

Then ask: what did I want, what stood in the way, what did it cost, what did I learn that I did not expect? Those four answers are the book's spine. Everything else hangs from them or gets cut.

Talk before you type

Record yourself answering an interviewer's questions (our list for yourself is a good set). Spoken answers are looser and truer than drafted ones, and you will say things you would never have written. Transcribe them. That transcript is your first draft, and it is in your voice, which is the one thing a ghostwriter cannot give you.

Build people from particulars

"My father was strict" is a label. "He checked our shoes at the door with a torch" is a person. For every central person in the book you need two sayings verbatim, one line from a key moment, what they called you, one argument you remember, and one thing they did that showed love. If you cannot supply those, you do not know them well enough yet to write them, and you should go and ask someone who does.

Tell stories to the end

Most first drafts are full of stories that stop at the interesting part. "The telegram came" and then a paragraph about something else. Every story needs the scene, what happened, what was said, how it felt, and what came of it. Go back through the draft and mark every story that stops early. Finish each one, or cut it.

Keep the truth contract

Say what you know and how you know it. "My mother said" and "the family always said" and "I think" are three different claims. Readers trust a memoir that marks them, and family forgives it.

Finish

Set the size before you start: a 40,000-word memoir is a real book and takes most people about thirty recorded conversations' worth of material. If you would rather talk than type, that is exactly what this product does: it asks, remembers, designs the book, and writes it from your words.

Questions people ask

How long should a memoir be?

Anything from 20,000 words (a slim gift book) to 80,000 (a full trade memoir). Most family memoirs land between 35,000 and 50,000.

Do I need to write chronologically?

No. Start at the turning point and let the past arrive when it explains something.

What if my memory is unreliable?

Say so on the page. "I remember it this way; my sister remembers it differently" is honest and more interesting than false certainty.