Tips to help you write your memoir

If you’re reading this, you’re probably writing a memoir—or you want to write a memoir.

Be encouraged. Your words are important. Your story is important. Others need to know your story. Believe it.

Henri Nouwen says it this way:

“When . . . the lived human experience . . . 

becomes word, community can develop. 

When we say, 'Let me tell you what we saw. 

Come and listen to what we did. 

Sit down and let me tell you what happened to us. 

Wait until you hear whom we met,' 

we call people together 

and make our lives into lives for others. 

The word brings us together and calls us into community.” 

(Henri Nouwen's Bread for the Journey)

We need each other, right? Community is a blessing. God-designed. Your memoir can create a much-needed community, of one type or another.

Will Boast wanted to write a memoir—at least eventually he did, after trying to force his story into a novel.

Eight years in the making, he finally published his memoir, Epilogue, a book on my must-read list.

Will learned lessons along the way, and he wants to pass them on to you—and, don’t you long to know more about how to write your story? I hope so!

In his blog post, 5 Tips for Writing a Memoir (be sure to click on that link), Will shares the following. (I’ve included only snippets; be sure to read his entire post.)

If fiction is the art of invention, memoir is the art of selection and arrangement. Will writes, “. . . It took me a year, at least, before I stopped suffocating under all the stuff that goes into a memoir and started to find, among the debris, the struts and beams that would form the structure of the story.”

Memoir is the most flexible of forms, out of necessity. “Life rarely, if ever, bothers to present us with a tidy series of events that, with a steadily increasing sense of tension and/or mystery, suddenly resolves into understanding, triumph, release, etc. . . . It’s the memoirist’s task,” Will says, “to create connections—emotional, thematic—between episodes.”

Sympathy is perhaps the trickiest thing to manage in memoir. “There are two sorts of memoirs I really can’t stand: those that make the writer out to be heroic and perfect, and those that make him out to be tragic and debased,” Will says.

Memory is mysterious and fallible, but not as much as we fear. “A memoir aspires to be a recreation of events, not a transcript, but that doesn’t mean it can’t get very close to the truth indeed.”

Memoirs, unlike novels, don’t end. “. . . This most self-aware, self-reflexive of forms [memoir] keeps on commenting on itself, attaching new codas and footnotes to each chapter, and subtly re-writing the words you’ve labored so hard to make definitive.”

Be sure to read the entirety of Will’s post, 5 Tips for Writing a Memoir. It will take only a few minutes. Also check out his memoir, Epilogue.