How to Write Your Memoir: A 3-Step Guide by Jerry Jenkins 5

THIS WEEK, I have the honor of hosting Jerry Jenkins, author of more than 180 books with sales of more than 70 million copies, including the best-selling Left Behind series. Twenty of Jerry’s books have reached The New York Times best-seller list (seven debuting number one). This article was originally posted on jerryjenkins.com with the same title. 

MEMOIR IS NOT just a fancy literary term for an autobiography. I say that from the start, because I hear the terms used interchangeably so often.

Your memoir will be autobiographical, but it will not be your life story.

Confused yet? Stay with me.

Simply put, an autobiography is likely to cover one’s birth to the present — emphasis often on accomplishments, but the more honest and revelatory the better.

A memoir draws on selected anecdotes from your life to support a theme and make a point. For instance, if your point is how you came from some unlikely place to where you are now, you would choose scenes from your life to support that.

Maybe you came from:

• The wrong side of the tracks
• A broken home
• Having been a victim of abuse
• Addiction
• An orphanage

To a position of:

• Wealth
• Status
• Happiness
• Health
• Faith

You might start with memories that show how bad things once were for you. Then you would show pivotal experiences in your life, important people in your transformation, what you learned, and how you applied certain principles to see this vast change.

Naturally, the better the stories, the better the memoir. However, great stories are not the point — and frankly, neither is the memoirist (you).
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What Publishers Look For

Don’t buy into the idea that only famous people can sell a memoir. Sure, if you’re a household name and people are curious about you, that’s an advantage.

But memoirs by nobodies succeed all the time — and for one reason: they resonate with readers because readers identify with truth. Truth, even hard, gritty, painful truth, bears transferrable principles.

Memoirs full of such relatable candor attract readers, and readers are what publishers want. An astute agent or acquisitions editor can predict how relatable a memoir will be and take a chance on one from an unpublished unknown.

Agents and editors tell me they love to discover such gems — the same way they love discovering the next great novelist.
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So, when writing your memoir…

You may be the subject, but it’s not about you — it’s about what readers can gain from your story.

It may seem counterintuitive to think reader-first while writing in the first-person about yourself. But if your memoir doesn’t enrich, entertain, or enlighten readers, they won’t stay with it long, and they certainly won’t recommend it.
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How to Write a Memoir in 3 Steps

1. Know Your Theme

And remember, it’s not that you’ve made something of yourself — even if you have. Sorry, but nobody cares except those who already love you.

Your understated theme must be, “You’re not alone. What happened to me can also happen to you.”

That’s what appeals to readers. Even if they do come away from your memoir impressed with you, it won’t be because you’re so special — even if you are. Whether they admit it or not, readers care most about their own lives.

Imagine a reader picking up your memoir and thinking, What’s in this for me? The more of that you offer, the more successful your book will be. Think transferable principles in a story well told.

Cosmic Commonalities

All people, regardless of age, ethnicity, location, and social status, share certain felt needs: food, shelter, and love. They fear abandonment, loneliness, and the loss of loved ones. Regardless your theme, if it touches on any of those wants and fears, readers will identify.

I can read the memoir of someone of my opposite gender, for whom English is not her first language, of a different race and religion, who lives halfway around the world from me — and if she tells the story of her love for her child or grandchild, it reaches my core.

Knowing or understanding or relating to nothing else about her, I understand love of family.

Worried About Uniqueness?

Many writers tell me they fear their theme has been covered many times by many other memoirists. While it’s true, as the Bible says, that there’s nothing new under the sun, no one has written your story, your memoir, your way.

While I still say it’s not about you but really about your reader, it’s you who lends uniqueness to your theme. Write on!

How to Write a Memoir Without Preaching

Trust your narrative to do the work of conveying your message. Too many amateurish memoirists feel the need to eventually turn the spotlight on the reader with a sort of “So, how about you…?”

Let your experiences and how they impacted you make their own points, and trust the reader to get it. Beat him over the head with your theme and you run him off.

You can avoid being preachy by using what I call the Come Alongside Method.When you show what happened to you, if the principles apply to your reader he doesn’t need that pointed out. Give him credit.
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2. Carefully Select Your Anecdotes

The best memoirs let readers see themselves in your story so they can identify with your experiences and apply to their own lives the lessons you’ve learned.

If you’re afraid to mine your pain deeply enough tell the whole truth, you may not be ready to write your memoir. There’s little less helpful — or marketable — than a memoir that glosses over the truth.

So feature anecdotes from your life that support your theme, regardless how painful it is to resurrect the memories. The more introspective and vulnerable you are, the more effective will be your memoir.

Worried about throwing family members under the bus by telling the truth? That’s a legitimate concern. Click on the link above for suggestions.
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3. Write It Like a Novel

It’s as important in a memoir as it is in a novel to show and not just tell.

Example:

Telling

My father was a drunk who abused my mother and me. I was scared to death every time I heard him come in late at night.

Showing

As soon as I heard the gravel crunch beneath the tires and the car door open and shut, I dove under my bed. I could tell by his footsteps whether Dad was sober and tired or loaded and looking for a fight. I prayed God would magically make me big enough to jump between him and my mom, because she was always his first target…

Use every trick in the novelist’s arsenal to make each anecdote come to life: dialogue, description, conflict, tension, pacing, everything.

Worry less about chronology than theme. You’re not married to the autobiographer’s progressive timeline. Tell whatever anecdote fits your point for each chapter, regardless where they fall on the calendar. Just make the details clear so the reader knows where you are in the story.

You might begin with the most significant memory of your life, even from childhood. Then you can segue into something like, “Only now do I understand what was really happening.” Your current-day voice can always drop in to tie things together.

Character Arc

As in a novel, how the protagonist (in this case, you) grows is critical to a successful story. Your memoir should make clear the difference between who you are today and who you once were. What you learn along the way becomes your character arc.

Point of View

It should go without saying that you write a memoir in the first-person. And just as in a novel, the point-of-view character is the one with the problem, the challenge, something he’s after. Tell both your outer (what happens) and your inner (its impact on you) story.

Structure

In his classic How to Write Bestselling Fiction, novelist Dean Koontz outlines what he calls the Classic Story Structure. Though intended as a framework for a novel, it strikes me that this would be perfect for a memoir too — provided you don’t change true events just to make it work.

For fiction, Koontz recommends writers:

1. Plunge your main character into terrible trouble as soon as possible
2. Everything he does to try to get out of it makes it only progressively worse until…
3. His situation appears hopeless
4. But in the end, because of what he’s learned and how he’s grown through all those setbacks, he rises to the challenge and wins the day.

You might be able to structure your memoir the same way merely by how you choose to tell the story. As I say, don’t force things, but the closer you can get to that structure, the more engaging your memoir will be.

For your purposes, Koontz’s Terrible Trouble would be the nadir of your life. (If nadir is a new word for you, it’s the opposite of zenith.) Take the reader with you to your lowest point, and show what you did to try to remedy things. If your experience happens to fit the rest of the structure, so much the better.

Setups and Payoffs

Great novels carry a book-length setup that demands a payoff in the end, plus chapter-length setups and payoffs, and sometimes even the same within scenes. The more of these the better.

The same is true for your memoir. Virtually anything that makes the reader stay with you to find out what happens is a setup that demands a payoff. Even something as seemingly innocuous as your saying that you hoped high school would deliver you from the torment of junior high makes the reader want to find out if that proved true.

Make ‘em Wait

Avoid using narrative summary to give away too much information too early. I’ve seen memoir manuscripts where the author tells in the first paragraph how they went from abject poverty to independent wealth in 20 years, “…and I want to tell you how that happened.”

To me, that just took the air out of the tension balloon, and many readers would agree and see no reason to read on. Better to set them up for a payoff and let them wait. Not so long that you lose them to frustration, but long enough to build tension.
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Common Memoir Mistakes to Avoid

• Making it too much like an autobiography (missing a theme)
• Including minutiae
• Bragging
• Glossing over the truth
• Preaching
• Effecting the wrong tone: funny, sarcastic, condescending
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How to Start Your Memoir

Your goal is to hook your reader, so begin in medias res—in the middle of things.

If you start slowly, you lose readers interest. Jump right into the story!
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Memoir Examples

Thoroughly immerse yourself this genre before attempting to write in it. I read nearly 50 memoirs before I wrote mine (Writing for the Soul). Here’s a list to get you started:

1. All Over But the Shoutin’  by Rick Bragg (my favorite book ever)
2. Cultivate by Lara Casey
3. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
4. Out of Africa by Karen Blixen
5. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
6. Still Woman Enough by Loretta Lynn
7. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
8. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
9. This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff
10. Molina by Benjie Molina and Joan Ryan

Are you working on your memoir or planning to? Do you have any questions on how to write a memoir? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments below.