If you’ve been meaning to write a memoir for the last fifteen years, you are in good company. Many of the people I teach show up apologizing for how long they’ve been meaning to start. They’ve outlined their story in their heads. They’ve told friends about it at dinner. They may have even bought a nice notebook. But it’s still empty, or worse, has a few pages of false starts that they’ve now decided are not good enough.
After years of teaching memoir writers, I’ve come to recognize the three things that actually keep people from starting. (Hint: none of them is that you’re a bad writer.)
1. You don’t think your life is “interesting enough.”
This is the most common block, and the most wrong. Most people who think their life isn’t interesting enough for a memoir are comparing themselves to bestsellers: the famous achiever, the war correspondent, the addict in recovery, the survivor of the impossible. They assume memoir requires a sensational hook that makes a stranger pick up the book in an airport.
But the best memoirs aren’t about extreme circumstances. They’re about ordinary lives examined with honesty and careful detail. A childhood spent homeschooling in the Idaho mountains. A recovery abroad from a failed marriage. A complex mother-daughter relationship in Brooklyn. A neighborhood that no longer exists. These are the seeds of some of the best memoirs ever written. What makes it book-worthy isn’t that something astounding happened to the writer, it’s what the writer noticed in their life and how they made sense of it.
2. You’re afraid of how others might react (especially if you write about them).
Your frenemy Monica. Dad’s temper. The kids and their struggles. It can be daunting to write about someone who might not like what they read about themselves. You might be reluctant to write about old wounds. To write about the person you used to be. A version of events that doesn’t make you look great.
These are real concerns. But here’s the thing: nobody is reading your first draft. You are writing for yourself, with no restrictions on who shows up on the page or what they do there. First drafts can be about liberating yourself from that naysaying voice and telling your truth in whatever form it takes. You can always edit people out later. You can give them pseudonyms. You can decide, much later, whether the book is for a publisher or for a desk drawer. None of those decisions belong in the first draft. The first draft is for you.
3. You don’t know where to start.
Chronologically? With the most dramatic moment? With childhood? With a sensory detail you can’t shake? The infinity of possible openings is paralyzing, and aspiring memoir writers may spend years trying to figure out the right starting place and never write a single page.
The truth is that the opening you’ll eventually settle on for your final draft is almost never the one you started with. Writers find their real openings by writing, not by planning. The first sentence you write on day one is just a way to get some momentum. You’ll trade it in for a better one once your story takes shape on the page. The same goes for shaping your story. To put it in a potter’s terms, you want some clay on the wheel before you start sculpting.
Whatever you’ve been meaning to write isn’t going to happen by waiting for the right moment or the right opening line. It happens when you sit down and put a few sentences on the page. Then a few more. They don’t have to be the right ones. They just have to be there to keep you moving toward a first draft.