This is a huge topic. Entire books are written on it (I have a shelf full of them, and many of them are great). I’m just going to offer a few things to think about as you begin the process.

Writing a memoir is like assembling a puzzle. The pieces are the significant events, decisions, relationships, and conversations that have shaped your life. But you must select the most relevant pieces; you can’t include them all.

Just like with a jigsaw puzzle, it’s easiest to assemble a memoir if you start with the borders. So, start by choosing the focus of your memoir. These are the outer borders. A memoir is not an autobiography, which tries to tell your entire story from birth to present day. Rather, a memoir is selective. It is limited (focused) in some way, usually by timeframe or theme.

The timeframe can be as short as a single impactful weekend in your life. If your memoir is limited by theme, it can cover your entire life, but you’ll be including only the events, decisions, etc. that are relevant to the theme. An example would be a comedian writing about their comedy career – they would include only those childhood and adult events that are relevant to their development as a comedian. Or consider William Styron’s memoir Darkness Visible, which I’ve discussed in another blog entry. Styron’s memoir is about his struggle with depression, so it’s limited in both time (the period of his depression) and theme (those life events relevant to his struggle with depression).

Once you have an idea of the borders, you can start thinking about what pieces fit within those borders: the events, decisions, relationships, and conversations that were most significant in that time period or that are most relevant to the theme. Some will be obvious to you, while others will become apparent over time (and more memories will certainly come to you as you work on your memoir).

As you write down these puzzle pieces in point form, start to consider the structure your memoir may take. The most common structure, and often the most appropriate, is chronological. This is the easiest structure for a reader to follow. However, a “modified chronological” approach is often better than a strictly chronological one.

What’s a “modified chronological” approach? Well, often it’s best to start a memoir with an event that happened later in the story (a flash-forward). Why? Mainly because you need to hook the reader at the start. You do that by throwing them right into the middle of the action. “I was born in Mississauga, Ontario, in 1964…” doesn’t do that (unless you had a particularly dramatic delivery).

Instead, you start with a significant event that will make the reader empathize with you (“This is someone I can relate to, and will help me understand myself”), intrigue them (“How did they get into that situation?”), or give them expectations they hope to have fulfilled (“I want to learn how they achieved that”). Once the reader is hooked, you proceed to tell your story.

Once you’ve created a point-form list of the key people, events, decisions, etc. that seem to fit the theme and/or timeframe, put them into chronological order (you can decide later what your flash-forward will be). Then start fleshing out each of them, writing as much as you can recall. It is important to turn off your inner critic at this point. Don’t get discouraged by thoughts like, “This isn’t interesting; this sounds like a ten-year-old’s writing; no one’s going to care about this.” (Every writer has had those thoughts!).

Just get everything down. You can’t edit a blank page. Early drafts are ugly. That’s normal. At first, you’re creating a monster. Only much later will you tame it, after many hours of tussling and training. It will still be a beast, but it’ll be your beast, and one day you’ll proudly walk it down the street, obedient by your side. But for now, you keep it chained in your basement as it takes shape (how did we get from puzzles to monsters?).

Throughout the process, remember that your memoir is a story that only you can write. It will only get out into the world if you make it happen.