Maybe it’s when you marry that the submerged memories of your abuse start surfacing. That “inciting incident”-as is called in novel structure-is what begins the bigger story that highlights your themes. You may decide to open your memoir with that event, playing it out like a movie scene so readers see what germinated the events to follow.įrom there you might begin your actual memoir decades later, when you fall in love with the man you will marry. You might start off your memoir with that key, powerful event in your life that sets the stage for your story, but from there, you may want to skip ahead in time (even years) to when that event starting impacting you in a specific way.įor instance, let’s say you experienced some traumatic event in your childhood-think of Maya Angelou’s incident at age eight (telling someone about the man who raped her, who then was murdered) that left her mute for years.Since your memoir is going to pull from various anecdotes in your life to support your theme or topic, you want to determine what event in your life is best to springboard your story. This is why it’s important to know your purpose in writing this particular memoir and your themes. The duration is contingent on the particular story you aim to tell. You could be writing a gripping story of the time you got trapped in a hotel during a tsunami or the year you spent living abroad. Your memoir may cover three days of your life or it may cover thirty years. From my experience in critiquing and editing hundreds of manuscripts, including memoir, if you start anywhere, you may wander off to Shangri-la and find yourself stuck in a snowdrift-not where you’d planned to go.Īs with any journey, you need a specific starting point that will actually get you to your targeted destination. Because no matter where you start, you’ll end up where you’re meant to be.” I disagree. Your memoir obviously needs to start somewhere and end somewhere, and since you’re not writing an autobiography with the purpose of detailing your entire life, you need to spend time thinking about the time frame. Today we’re going to consider the starting and ending points for your memoir. I’ve been sharing excerpts from my new book The Memoir Workbook.
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