How to Know What Piece of Memoir to Write First

If you’ve read my blog posts, you know I draw a clear line between memoir and autobiography. Here’s a quick recap: Autobiography is best reserved for the famous. It covers the entirety of a person’s life and shares all the little details raving fans or history buffs might find interesting. By contrast, memoir is for everyone. It covers an aspect of person’s life. As I like to say, memoir is about something you know after something you’ve been through — an area of expertise in your life. You have many, which prompts a question aspiring memoirists wrestle with: What part of my life should I write about? And that, in turn, will inevitably lead to deciding what piece of memoir to write next. In other words, deciding what to write next is a process. Let me walk you through it.

Should you explore what you learned about resilience through your time in the military? Or should you unpack how you finally developed a healthy relationship with food after learning how to cook it yourself? What do you want to write?

Here’s the most important lesson I’ll share in this post:

You can (and should) write more than one piece of memoir.

One of my favorite authors, Caroline Knapp, penned several engaging — as well as bestselling — long-form memoirs. Her book, Drinking: A Love Story, covered her alcoholism. Her book, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs, was about how dogs do things for people that people cannot do for themselves, as illustrated by her relationship with her rescue dog, Lucille.

All four of my books have contained a good degree of memoir. And I’ve written countless short pieces of memoir that were published as radio essays and Op-eds. So, the question isn’t what memoir should you write since, in a writing life, you can write them all. The question is what memoir should you write first.

Hopefully that assuages some of your fears, but let’s see if we can do better. As you ponder which memoir to write first, here are a few angles to consider.

1. Choose the topic that interests you most.

If you aren’t sure, feel free to skip this section. I have more practical advice further down. But before we make things complicated, let’s see if a simple solution will do.

If one aspect of your life sounds like more fun to write about, if the message is more needed, if the story feels more clear, then you have your topic.

There’s nothing to overthink here. If you feel drawn to a particular story in your life, write it. Penning a piece of memoir is challenging work and a genuine fondness and curiosity for the subject matter, coupled with an appropriate amount of confidence, is a better motivator than any accountability partner could ever be.

If all you’ve needed is permission to write the story that’s on your heart, permission granted. If you’re stuck between options or not sure what to write, keep reading.

2. Choose the timeliest story.

The calendar is filled with what I call “High Emotional Holy Days” — those holidays, memorials, and seasons of the year when all of us spend time thinking about the same things.

On Independence Day, we spend a few short hours not taking freedom for granted. On Thanksgiving, we practice gratitude and take stock of what we have. In the month of February, we celebrate the remarkable achievements of African American men and women who left their mark on our world. On September 11th, we revisit the feelings of loss and fear we experienced on that dreadful day in 2001. We ponder the curious nature of hate, the restoring power of love, and how a single event can reshape an entire culture and rewire a collective psyche.

If you’re trying to decide what to write about first, consult your calendar (or take a look at the handy deadline calendar I’ve created for you). What events are coming up that would make a story from your life more timely?

Writing to the calendar is a shortcut to both inspiration and publication. Because in preparation for these high emotional holy days, media outlets actively collect relevant pieces of memoir. This is a great way to get an article published at an outlet that might not have considered you otherwise. And the right article at the right time can help you land a book deal, as I personally experienced with my first book.

For book-length memoir, it’s true that you’re unlikely to finish and a publish a manuscript before the next occurrence of your chosen holiday or memorial, but writing to the calendar is still a smart way to identify topics the reading public will care about. And you can bet your publisher will be mindful of that when they choose the date for your book’s release.

3. Choose the finished story.

Every piece of memoir is a story of transformation. Bookended by depictions of your life before and after what happened, it tells the tale of how you went from A to B while showing us how you changed. For this reason, a certain level of perspective is helpful in writing memoir. For instance, if you’ve just returned home from your first AA meeting, it might be a bit premature to write your alcoholism memoir.

That’s not to say your relationship with alcohol couldn’t find its way into another story from your life that you can write right now. Scenes depicting your addiction could be used in a fascinating story about the power of asking for help. Or perhaps you could write a memoir about how true love intervenes, instead of simply watching the show — as illustrated by the story of your soft-spoken partner, who risked your wrath to look you in the eye and tell you something had to change.

The best stories have a beginning, middle and end. Make sure yours will too. If not, consider a different angle, or a different aspect of your life.

When I say you need a certain level of perspective, I’m not saying you must have it all figured out. While my first book explored the grief I experienced while losing my mother to Alzheimer’s disease, she was alive while I wrote it, as well as for many years after it was published. That being the case, the real arc of the tale is not her life, or her illness, but what I learned about letting go. I let the experience impact my thinking, and then wrote about the growth I experienced.

How to Decide What Piece of Memoir to Write Next

When setting out to write something, I always ask myself: “What interests you right now, Marion?” Literally. I ask myself the question. Try it, though do remember to exchange your own name for mine. (Yes, please laugh now).

The very act of asking yourself this out loud will get you thinking, I promise.

Then, notice the phrasing. See how the question is not, “What do you want to write?” or “What are you doing these days?” As I wrote above, if you already know the answer to what you want to write, you’re good to go. Instead, the words of this question are trying to get at what interests you, meaning what is it that holds your interest right now. In that, it’s giving you permission to go deeper and admit that something has your attention. After all, something always does.

For instance, maybe, like me, you are fascinated by just how much help one person can be to another. I recently got this idea in my head after providing end-of-life care to a friend and supplying for him the exact conditions in which he wanted to leave this life — nothing illegal, no assisted suicide, but a carefully sculpted path that we had constructed on which he and I walked him all the way home. And while that is a good scene, at its heart is what we can do for one another. It left me contemplating that territory and its borders.

However, I am simultaneously interested in how, despite having had twelve dogs in my life, this particular dog with whom I now live seems to be my deepest dog bond yet. This has me wondering if that connection somehow increases or deepens with age.

Maybe there is something egging you on or nagging away at you, undermining your confidence or reassuring you, provoking you to confront something that needs to be changed or making you ever more sure that you are right on target. Feel that? There it is. Write about that.

See how this works? I hope this has pointed you in the direction of stories you might use in a piece of memoir.

But even if you’re still unsure, take heart. You can still leave this article with its most important lesson:

The best memoirists write more than one piece of memoir.

You’re only deciding what to write first.

Want more help? Come see me in any one of my online classes.

Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.

Memoirama 2. Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book.

How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary: Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world.

The Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. Live, once a month. Limited to seven writers. Get a first draft of your memoir finished in six months.