Recently we looked at using a poem or Bible passage as a theme for your memoir, which is nifty because it automatically hands you an outline—a structure, a framework—for your memoir. (Click on How can you hand your readers a coherent, organized story? and Must-know info about your memoir’s theme.)
But not all memoirs are based solely on themes. Some are based on your experiences set in a time period with beginning and ending dates.
For example, a lady in one of my memoir classes wrote about several years when she worked as a chef for a prominent senator and served dinner to, among others, the President and First Lady.
What about you?
- Perhaps a whole new world opened when you worked your way through college as a farm hand in Wyoming.
- Did you serve in the military?
- Did you battle post-partum depression?
- Did you work in a foreign culture?
- Did you face a crisis or natural disaster that threatened to undo you?
- Did you find joy in an unexpected place or relationship?
- Did a seemingly insignificant event change the course of your life?
- Did a heartbreak turn into a blessing?
The ideas are endless. All the above examples would have a beginning date and an ending date. Such a memoir would then be based on a slice of your life or a snapshot of your life (compared to an autobiography which begins with day one and covers everything).
If you write a memoir based on a specific time period, you need to learn about a story arc, sometimes called a narrative arc.
Do you know what a story arc is?
Author Adair Lara wrote: “When I began work on my memoir . . . I didn’t know a thing about arcs. I thought, I lived this story. I’ll just write it down the way it happened. . . . It was as if I decided to build a house and just started nailing together boards without giving a thought to blueprints. I put up some strange-looking houses that way, in the form of inert drafts filled with pointless scenes. I would have saved myself a lot of time if I had drawn an arc.”
But, she explains, “Back then, I hadn’t even heard of an arc. Now I know it’s the emotional framework of a memoir.”
Many memoir teachers will tell you to structure your story this way:
Act I or The Beginning,
Act II or The Middle,
and Act III or The Ending.
Act I, The Beginning: You introduce yourself to your readers and tell them, specifically, what you wanted or needed or planned—but you also write about a problem or a challenge that surfaced and threatened to mess everything up. Perhaps you were hit with a financial setback, had a psychological issue, a spiritual need, or a relationship struggle. Maybe something or someone threatened to undo your career or destroy your reputation. Maybe, like me, you learned your husband developed different goals in life than you had.
Act II, The Middle: You tell readers that obstructions piled up, your struggles intensified, and issues got complicated—either internal or external—and they seriously threatened to keep you from achieving your goals, meeting your needs, and/or making your dreams come true.
Adair Lara explains it this way: “You try a lot of things to solve your problem, with mixed results. You have setbacks, you make mistakes and you push on, until you either get what you wanted, or you don’t, or you stop wanting it. . . .”
Act III, The End: You detail how hurdles, hindrances, and complications came to a climax.
Dr. Linda Joy Myers writes: “In act three, the threads and layers of complexity reach a peak—the crisis and climax of the story. Here the character is tested, where the true depth of learning and transformation is revealed.”
This is where you, the protagonist, had to make decisions: Did you battle on and overcome? If so, how did you go about it? Or, instead, did you have a change of heart because you recognized the unexpected Plan B was better than your Plan A?
Dr. Linda Joy Myers continues, “The crisis may be thought of as a spiritual challenge or a ‘dark night of the soul,’ where the deepest beliefs and core truths of the character are tested. The climax is the highest level of tension and conflict that the protagonist must resolve as the story comes to a close.
“There’s an aha at the end,” she says, “an epiphany when the main character has learned her lessons and can never return to the previous way of living.”
How do you do that—how do you discover that epiphany?
In true memoir form, you reflect on what happened to you. Peel back layers and dig deep.
That might take a long time but doing so is probably the most important part of discovering your real story.
Take a closer look than you ever did before. Recognize—maybe for the first time—the ways you changed. Then tell readers what you learned, how you transformed, how you became a stronger, better person.
Remember:
People read memoirs
to learn how to handle similar situations
that arise in their own lives.
In that way, you become a role model for them,
an inspiration,
an answer to prayer.
For more info about story arc, click on Cate Macabe’s post, “Writing a Memoir Like a Novel: Story Arc,” and Adair Lara's post, “The Key Elements of Writing a Good Memoir.”
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