Do you need to rethink your memoir’s strategic sequence?

"Most people embarking upon a memoir,” writes William Zinsser, “are paralyzed by the size of the task. What to put in? What to leave out? Where to start? Where to stop? How to shape the story? The past looms over them in a thousand fragments, defying them to impose on it some kind of order. Because of that anxiety, many memoirs linger for years half written, or never written at all” (from his article, "How to Write a Memoir").

Lots of memoirists struggle to find the best structure—organization, framework—for their stories.

If you’re one of them, don’t worry. With (a) experimentation and with (b) help from other writerly types, you’ll eventually figure it out.

But first, let’s take a moment to remind ourselves:

By definition, a memoir is only a slice of life—a segment of life, a snapshot of life—focused on a specific theme or time period.

Last week we looked at one way to structure a memoir—on a poem-based theme. See our recent post, How can you hand your readers a coherent, organized story?

Amber Lea Starfire has this added info for a theme-based memoir, “Themes may include any elements that the scenes have in common, such as relationship conflicts, illness, geography, or repetitive historical events.”

Amber continues, “The scenes do not have to occur in chronological order and, in fact, can jump all over the place in time as long as the transitions between jumps are strong and do not confuse your reader.” (See more of her post at How to Choose Your Memoir’s Structure.)

Keep this in mind, too:

Your task is to write a memoir

that illustrates universal values or struggles,

timeless truths or quests

that your readers can apply to their own lives.

When structured well, your memoir will

tell a complete and satisfying story.

Getting that structure just right can cause writers a lot of angst. I re-structured my current memoir several times, but nowadays at least we use computers to copy and paste. I’m so old that for much of my early life, to make even a slight revision I had to retype—sometimes on a manual typewriter—entire chapters, often entire l-o-n-g documents. Hooray for computers!

Maybe your collection of stories is, like Zinsser described, “defying you to impose on them some type of order,” yet you long to write a memoir that will have maximum impact on your readers.

William Zinsser to the rescue! He suggests that once you’ve written a number of vignettes, “spread them on the floor. (The floor is often a writer’s best friend.) Read them through and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge. They will tell you what your memoir is about and what it’s not about. They will tell you what’s primary and what’s secondary, what’s interesting and what’s not, what’s emotional, what’s important, what’s funny, what’s unusual, what’s worth pursuing and expanding. You’ll begin to glimpse your story’s narrative shape and the road you want to take. Then all you have to do is put the pieces together” (from Zinsser’s article, "How to Write a Memoir").

Yeah, right, you might be muttering. Easier said than done.

If you struggle to find your memoir’s structure, Judith Barrington offers this encouragement: “You must rely on blind faith that sooner or later it will appear. You may need and enjoy the freedom of relative formlessness for a while—but not forever.”

And then, even when you think you’ve discovered the right structure, “you must be willing to adapt it, revise it, tinker with it, or entirely rethink it” (from Judith Barrington’s Writing the Memoir).

You might need to rethink your memoir’s structure.

I had to rethink mine.

I gave myself permission to take the time

to rethink my memoir’s structure.

And I sought advice from trusted writerly types—

the pros like Zinsser and Barrington and Starfire,

and especially my critique partners.

Doing that meant 

my publication date is going to be later than I hoped,

but I’d rather have the structure just right.

How about you?