How to Structure a Piece of Memoir From One, Single Line

WHEN WE GET A LINE of music lyrics stuck in our heads, it’s called an ear worm. But what do we call it when a line of language won’t leave us alone and appears as a guide, a beacon, a navigation marker of some sort? How do we write it into a piece – or write a piece around it – so we show, and do not tell, our way through a memoir? How to structure a piece of memoir so that the line we’ve got humming in our hearts makes sense, in context? 

When I was a young writer, and working on a piece that ultimately launched my writing career, a line popped into my tired, sad head. At the time, my mother was a 50-year-old Alzheimer’s patient. My sister and I were in our early twenties. Our father had just died. We were our mother’s primary caregivers. It was not a good time. And I was writing about the experience in real time – meaning as I lived it – first for a piece in The New York Times Magazine, and then for my first book.

The line that popped into my head was this: Grief is a mute sense of panic. For me, grief was exactly that. For me, then, grief was the predominant mode for my heart and soul – as experienced as flat out, unrelenting panic. I was not good at caregiving, or at accepting loss. What seemed to me to be a series of boxcars of horror simply kept hurtling our way.

Along with that, I was unsure of myself as a writer, but that line would not leave me alone. I wrote it down in a notebook but, for a while, kept it out of the first draft of that piece. Why? Because I was not sure I had a right to say such a bold thing, or if I was correct in my assessment of grief. Then there was the fact that I did not know where to put it.

How to Make Use of a Fine, Single Line of Writing

And so I read up. I read quotations by people far better-published and well-known than I, eventually getting to the quote from the great C.S. Lewis in which he states that he has no idea that grief felt so much like fear. I remember thinking how much I agreed with him, but that fear did not quite express what I felt. My response was internally kinetic. It was causing me to think badly. Thus, the word, “mute.” While my grief was experienced as panic, it was quiet.

What I soon began to appreciate was the characterization brought to the piece with that line. My sister was calm, controlled in her responses. And she was far more still inside. Though grieving, she made lists and executed on those lists. I did not. But this began with what we carried in our heads. Panicked, we cannot plan. As I thought about the line, I learned about my writing assignment and what had to be shown on the page in scenes.

I came to realize that if we weigh the words of such lines, we can plot our way to sharing what we know after something we’ve been through. This is how to structure a piece of memoir. We show our transcendence from here to there – from when we were in one situation or frame of mind, until we are changed. My mute sense of panic was something I came by organically. My mother and I were very attached to one another. My sister and mother were less attached, as happens in many families. Our father had just died. I was the younger of the two children. Many factors contributed to growing this response of mute panic, but having that line in my head allowed me to plot my book from when I was one way to when I was another. It let me show you my transcendence.

A single line can be a shimmering truth that clarifies our tale and, when it does, the first response we should have is gratitude. After that, we need to decide what to do with the line. Chances are it is a guide to how to take a large, seemingly overwhelming story and sculpt it down to a piece that merely goes from here to there – from when we did not know something to when we did. That is all that a piece of memoir has to do. Memoir, as opposed to autobiography, does not attempt to take on more than that.

How to Structure a Piece of Memoir

Grief is a mute sense of panic was such a line for me. With that line in my head, I learned how to structure a piece of memoir and create an Act One that showed you my attachment to my mother, an Act Two that shows how I found my voice as part of my way out of grief, and an Act Three that shows how using that voice lets me live in the world as I am now.

Lines like this can trip up a writer when we merely drop them into a piece and forget how much – as well as how little – spade work we must now do to contextualize them. What needs to go into Act One to set the scene for you to understand why I lost my voice to panic? When does that line need to be deployed so it is not merely lost amid the words, and how to do I show the reader what comes in the aftermath of such profound realization? These are the questions I had to ask and answer. These are the same questions you can ask and answer when such a line occurs to you.

This is what writing well requires. It requires consideration for what you know after something you’ve been through and how and when to show us those moments of illumination.

Working with writers in my role as a memoir coach and memoir editor, I frequently spot lines of great wisdom and insight. But just as frequently, they have been dropped into a piece without the context needed for the reader to understand their real worth. The job at hand then becomes to create that context. This begins with understanding what just happened.

Memoir is the Single Greatest Portal to Self Discovery

Why does a shimmering string of words of great wisdom occur to a writer? In the case of memoir, it is because you are writing about your life, a process that I always argue is the single greatest portal to self-discovery. As a result, you have just learned, or formed, this great truth. Good for you.

“Look at that,” I always try to say to the writer. “Look at what you know after what you’ve been through.”

In my Master Class, everyone is writing book-length memoir, and we frequently get to witness writers learning amazing things as they write. Right around month four of the six-month class, shimmering lines of real wisdom begin to pop up in the first drafts. What I’ve seen is that such concentrated effort on the argument of the book produces real awareness.

The key to these lines is to provide them the story they deserve. Good memoir writing requires that you respect the worth of your wisdom and contextualize the moments of transcendence for us so that when we get to one, we feel the full power of the work you did to know this great truth.

So, go on: Write those great lines, and then give them the tale they deserve.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash