How to write a memoir, step by step

If you are not yet sure your book is a memoir rather than a how-to or thought leadership book with personal stories in it, start with memoir, how-to or thought leadership. This guide assumes the story itself is the book.

Step 1: decide why you are writing it

Scribe's memoir outline guide starts here, before any stories: write down the three things you most want from writing it. Some are personal (to understand a period of your life, to leave a record for your family), some are about readers (to help people going through what you went through), and some are professional. Be specific and realistic. The same guide warns against goals like getting on a famous talk show, and makes a point worth keeping in front of you: the memoir itself cannot heal you, though the work you put into it can.

The answer changes the book. A memoir for your grandchildren can include family detail a stranger would skip; one for strangers has to earn every page with them in mind.

Step 2: choose the slice of your life

The same guide asks whether your memoir will cover your whole life, a specific period, a specific relationship or theme, or something else, and suggests answering in about a minute, on the grounds that most people already know what they want to say. Here is how those options look in practice, using memoirs published by Scribe Media and described on scribemedia.com:

A test for your slice: can you say in one sentence what changed between the first page and the last? If the honest answer is "I got older", the slice is too wide.

Step 3: name the reader

Memoirs need a reader as much as business books do. Usually it is someone living through what you lived through, or about to. Dr. Richard Harris's story on scribemedia.com puts it in one number: 1, "The Reader He Wrote It For". Craig Stanland's story describes the moment he wrote on the last page of his notebook that he was doing this "to save just one person".

Not knowing the reader is a common reason memoirs stall. Quan Huynh's story describes him being unable to write a word because he had no idea who his audience was, until he was reminded that he could talk to incarcerated people in a way nobody else in that workshop room could. That reader shaped Sparrow in the Razor Wire. Our guide to defining the one reader works for memoir too.

Step 4: pick a structure

Scribe's memoir outline guide says plainly that a memoir does not have to move chronologically; what matters is an order that serves the story. Three structures cover most memoirs:

• Chronological. Events in the order they happened. The simplest to write and to read. It works best when the slice is tight, so the timeline does not wander.
• Two timelines. A present-day thread that keeps pulling the narrator back into the past. Raising Athena, as its book page describes it, uses a daughter's arrival at West Point to bring back the author's own memories of serving.
• Linked stories or pieces. Self-contained chapters grouped by theme or rough chronology. The memoir outline guide uses Tiffany Haddish's The Last Black Unicorn as its example: a rough chronology, from high school to Hollywood, without a single connecting thread between every story. Adam Castillo's book is another version, built from 12 Speeches, "Forged in Crisis, Now Collected as One Book" (his story).

Some memoirs also hand work to the reader. Devin Fish's Answering the Hard Questions is described on its book page as a book of questions and answers, with more than 150 only the reader can answer. That is still a memoir; the questions are the bridge to the reader's own life.

Step 5: build the memoir outline

A memoir outline is simpler than a nonfiction outline, and that is on purpose. Scribe's memoir outline guide uses three steps:

1. List every story, experience, event and period that might belong. Bullet points, not sentences. They do not have to connect yet.
2. Order them in the way that best serves this memoir, chronological or not. The result will look almost like a table of contents.
3. Ask what is missing. Which stories should be on the list but are not? Usually these are the hardest ones.

The guide suggests that the first two steps take one to four hours combined and no longer, because much of a memoir is discovered while writing it. A perfect outline is not the goal; a direction is.

An illustrative example, not a real book. Our printable outline worksheet works for a memoir if you use the chapter boxes for stories.

Step 6: draft one story at a time

Scribe's guide on how to write a memoir gives two questions to work through for each story in the outline, going back and forth until the story is fully on the page:

1. What happened that mattered to you? Write the sensory details: a smell, a sound, the thing on the floor that seemed out of place. Specific details are what put a reader in the room.
2. What did you feel about it then? Stay inside the moment as you lived it. Only after that, if you want, write how you feel about it now.

The same guide's drafting rules are worth taping to the wall. Do not edit while drafting. Draft as if nobody will ever read this version, so you are not writing for the people in it. Keep thoughts that carry emotion ("All I wanted was to get out of that room") and cut analysis that explains or justifies. And do not feel pressured to end each story with a lesson. Scribe's outline guide adds one more: if you catch yourself writing "you", try "I". A memoir is first person.

For a routine and a first-chapter plan that hold up over months, see how to start writing a book.

Writing about real people

Every memoir is full of real people, and the law did not stop applying because it is your story. This is general information, not legal advice; the rules vary by state and country, and a publishing lawyer should read anything sensitive before you publish.

• Defamation. Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute summarizes defamation as a statement that harms another person's reputation, and lists what a claim generally requires: a false statement of fact, published to a third party, with the required level of fault, causing harm. It notes that truth is generally a complete defense, and that calling something "opinion" does not automatically protect it if it implies false facts.
• Privacy. The same source describes invasion of privacy claims, including public disclosure of private facts and false light, which some states do not recognize at all. True but private details about other people can raise different questions from false ones.
• Other people's words. Letters and diaries are a special case. The US Copyright Office's FAQ explains that copyright belongs to the author of a work or the author's heirs or assignees, not to whoever owns the physical diary. Quoting song lyrics or someone else's writing may need permission; the Office's fair use page says there is no set number of words or lines that is automatically safe, and that use of unpublished work is less likely to be fair.

Practical habits help: keep your notes, dates, letters and photos; write what you saw, did and felt rather than guessing at other people's motives; and ask the lawyer whether changing names or details is enough in your case. As for the human side, Scribe's memoir guide suggests deciding what goes in well after drafting, not before.

Common memoir mistakes

• Starting at birth. Unless your whole life is the point, start where the story starts.
• Telling readers what to learn. Scribe's guidance is to talk about what you took from an experience and let readers take what they want from it.
• Retreating into the present. When a memory gets hard, it is tempting to switch to how you see it today, or to backstory. Stay in the moment first.
• Settling scores. The Scribe Method's advice on personal stories is to write from your scars, not your open wounds. A memoir written to win an argument reads like one.
• Half memoir, half manual. If you also want to teach a method, that may be a second book. See choosing the kind of book.

If you would rather tell your story with a professional writer, Scribe Media, which makes this site, sells ghostwriting, coaching and publishing for memoirs and other nonfiction, and offers a free call. Plenty of strong memoirs are written alone with the steps above.