How to Decide What to Write About

As a memoir coach, the number one question I receive goes something like this: “How to decide what to write about?” This gets asked right after I remind people that unlike autobiography, memoir is not about you. Once people learn that they tend to get just the littlest bit panicky, especially when I also tell them that memoir is also not about your whole life or the life of your child, parent or your crazy former spouse. Actually, they get more than a little panicky then, which is when I always bring out my mantra.

Memoir is about something you know after something you’ve been through.

Perhaps you’ve heard this from me before. But it has come to my attention that many of you would like me to expand on this. Here we go.

Unless you’re wickedly famous, no one is likely to care about the little details of your life, such as where you were born or how much you weighed at birth. However, there are certainly learning curves you’ve had that readers will find interesting, particularly if you share with us what you know that you didn’t know before that experience.

When you share these pieces in the context of a story, readers can’t get enough. In fact, wrapped inside a story of transformation, even little details can become fascinating. Knowing you weighed 12 pounds at birth doesn’t mean to much on its own, but in the context of a decades-long struggle with weight and body acceptance, readers begin to care.

Knowing Your Areas of Expertise

I call these insights “areas of expertise.” You possess dozens, and here’s a thought exercise to help you spot them inside the broader story of your life.

Imagine yourself graduating high school. You’re standing in your cap and gown, smiling for pictures, the whole world ahead of you. Knowing everything you know now, if you could go back to that person and give her some advice, what would you say?

• Would you tell her fame is more work than it’s worth?
• That loyal friends are only revealed through the worst of circumstances?
• That in order to find a true family who loves and accepts you, sometimes you must distance yourself from the family you were born into?
• That you never learned anything by being right, only when being wrong about something?

How to Think About the Book You Want to Write

Whatever words of wisdom you would pass along, these are things you know because of what you’ve been through. Pair these insights with the experiences through which you learned them, and you’ll have the foundations of a great memoir.

If that exercise wasn’t helpful for you, not to worry. We can attack the problem from the other side.

Memoir is about something you know after something you’ve been through.

It’s possible that many of life’s greatest lessons are known in your soul more than they are understood intellectually. Losing your mother might have taught you that grief is a process that must be gone through slowly. Faced with future grief, that insight will serve you well. But chances are, you’ve never packaged what you learned into a short, coherent sentence. What you remember is the final conversation with your mother, the funeral that followed, the sessions with your therapist where you worked through your grief.

For this reason, some people have an easier time identifying their memoir topic by starting with what they’ve been through. Then, with these experiences in mind, they’re able to recognize and articulate the transformation that came through them. Then, they can begin to decide what to write about. See how this works? This time we think about the action first.

Consider Life’s Big Milestones

If you were to sum your life up into five big moments, which would you choose?

What milestones made you who you are today?

These might be dramatic moments, such as the overdose that almost killed you. Or they might feel smaller, like the day you adopted your first cat. Whatever these moments are, if you remember them as significant, chances are you were changed because of them.

• Perhaps your overdose taught you that the only way to beat addiction is to address the underlying emotional trauma you were trying so hard to forget.
• Maybe your afternoon at the animal shelter taught you that, in many ways, cats are better than husbands — now matter how great your husband or how lousy your cat.

What are Your Big Life Moments?

If you need some help identifying the transformational experiences in your life, consider asking yourself these questions:

• What’s the most rewarding relationship you’ve ever had?
• What’s the most miserable job you’ve ever held?
• What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done?
• What is the proudest accomplishment of your life?
• What’s the worst news you’ve ever received?
• What’s the best decision you’ve ever made?
• What is your biggest regret?
• What are some characteristics or experiences that make you different from almost everyone you know?

Is this starting to make sense? Probably. So, read this again:

Memoir is about something you know after something you’ve been through.

See how this little sentence can help you decide what to write about? Approach the writing process this way and you will uncover dozens of areas of expertise worthy of a piece of memoir. Depending on the scope of the transformation, some stories will better suited for an essay, others for a book.

All will be engaging, inspiring, and informative.

All will inject tremendous significance into the details of your life by showing their impact on who you are — and what you know that we might learn from you.