Hi friend,
I’m really glad you’re here. I want to start by telling you why I built Making Memoir, because the truth is that it came out of something I desperately needed myself. I’ve been writing my memoir for years, although certainly not continuously, or with some beautiful master plan laid out in front of me. I started the way I think a lot of people start: I had a story I knew I wanted to tell. I had scenes I could still see clearly, people I wanted to write about, moments that had changed me, and memories I had carried around for years without really knowing what to do with them. So I started writing.
I wrote and I rewrote. I read lots of good memoirs. I even took classes hoping they would teach me how to write my memoir, but they only took me so far.
I had overlooked one fundamental truth at the beginning of my writing journey, something that would have saved me an enormous amount of time if I’d understood it beforehand: having a story to tell and knowing how to turn that story into a memoir your ideal reader would actually want to read are two completely different things.
I wish someone had told me that. (Or worse - maybe someone did and I blew right past it!) For a long time, whenever the writing wasn’t working, I assumed the answer was to write prettier. I thought I needed to make the sentences better, add more detail, dig deeper, be more vulnerable, or simply keep writing until eventually a book magically emerged. I struggled to know which scenes belonged in which chapters and why. Sometimes I had beautifully written scenes that didn’t belong in the book at all. Sometimes I was trying to word-edit a chapter when the real problem was the structure underneath it. Sometimes I was writing something simply because it had happened, without ever stopping to ask what that moment was actually doing for the story. And sometimes I was so deep inside my own life that I couldn’t see the book anymore. Sound familiar?
That might be the strangest and hardest part of writing memoir: you know too much. You know what happened before the scene and what happened afterward. You know why your mother said that thing, how you feel about it now, what that relationship eventually became, and which tiny details carry enormous emotional weight because you lived them. Your reader knows none of it. And so somehow, we have to take this enormous, messy thing called life and shape it into something another person can (and wants to!) enter, understand, and care about. We have to turn it into a publishable story.
Once I started thinking about memoir that way, I became a tad obsessed with figuring out how it actually works. The nitty-gritty mechanisms. I didn’t just want to be told to write beautifully, write honestly, find my voice, or dig deeper. I wanted to know what was working underneath all of that. What makes each successful memoir tick in its own distinct way?
How do you decide where a memoir begins? How do you know what belongs and what doesn’t? How do you turn real people into compelling characters without turning them into fictional ones? How do you write a place the reader has never seen so vividly that they feel like they’ve lived there? How do you connect dozens of scenes from different years into one story that feels whole? How do you write about the person you used to be without letting everything you know now leak onto the page? And maybe the biggest question of all, which so many of us overlook in the beginning: how do you figure out what deep transformation your memoir is actually about?
Those questions eventually became the beginning of Making Memoir. Not because I’ve reached the other side and now have every answer. (Spoiler alert: I haven’t.) I’m still writing my own memoir.
I’m still cutting scenes, discovering connections I couldn’t see a few months ago, reading other memoirists with pencil in hand, changing my mind, and occasionally realizing I’ve been approaching something completely backwards.
But I’ve also spent years learning things the hard way that I wish someone had put in front of me much earlier, and eventually I started wondering what would happen if I did exactly that for someone else.
What if, as I work through my own memoir, I took everything I’m learning and turned it into something another writer could use? Real frameworks, questions, breakdowns, blueprints, and new angles. A fresh lens to look at your manuscript through when you know something isn’t working but can’t figure out what. I wanted to share the shortcuts through some of the problems that took me far too long to understand, including the things I discover while I’m still in the middle of doing this myself.
Because the more I’ve studied memoir, the more convinced I’ve become that so much of this can be learned. Maybe it can’t be reduced to a perfect formula, and I don’t think any worthwhile art should be, but it can be understood, taken apart, practiced, tested against our own pages, and made a whole lot less vague.
There are reasons certain scenes pull us forward and others lie flat on the page. There are reasons a collection of fascinating memories can still fail to feel like a story. There are craft decisions hiding underneath the memoirs we can’t put down, and I want us to learn how to see and appreciate them.
So whether you’re sitting on a story you’ve wanted to write for years, you’ve already written 40,000 words and have absolutely no idea whether any of them belong together, or you have a messy first draft, a folder full of scenes, three abandoned Chapter Ones, or nothing more than the persistent feeling that there is a book somewhere inside your life, you’re in the right place. Over the coming weeks, we’re going to take memoir apart piece by piece: story, structure, character, scenes, memory, worldbuilding, voice, meaning, and all the complicated little questions that appear when the story you’re trying to write actually happened.
For now, I want to leave you with just one question: if your memoir couldn’t tell your entire life story, and it were only allowed to tell one story from your life, what story would you choose, and why?
Because one of the simplest things I’ve learned about memoir is also one of the things that took me way too long to understand, and I’m embarrassed to admit it:
Your life is not your memoir. You can’t include every scene and everyone. Your life is the material, and the memoir is a very limited box. Our job is to find the story hiding inside your life and define the boundaries of that small box.
If I had taken that truth seriously, I would have saved myself a lot of overwhelm and wasted writing time. So that’s exactly where I decided to start.
If you're writing a memoir too, I’m excited to have you along!