How to write your memoir when you’re not a writer

Plenty of people decide one day to write their memoir. Very few get past the first page. It is almost never a question of talent, and it is not a lack of memories either. It is that the usual method, sitting down in front of a blank page and starting with “I was born in...”, is just about the hardest one you could pick.

Here is a way of doing it that takes less willpower and produces more.

Don’t start at the beginning

Chronology is a trap. If you start at your birth, you will spend your first sessions on the period you remember least, the one you only know from other people’s stories. Many people give up right there, convinced their memory is failing them.

Start instead with a scene you can still see. A kitchen, a car, a train platform, one particular afternoon. It doesn’t matter where it falls in your life. The order can be sorted out later, and that is filing work, not memory work.

Talk first, write second

This is the most useful advice on this page. Telling a story out loud is far easier than writing it down. When you speak, you don’t reread yourself, you don’t correct yourself, you don’t stop to wonder whether the sentence is elegant. You simply tell it, the way you would to someone sitting across from you.

Open the voice recorder on your phone and talk for ten minutes. You will get more material from ten minutes of speaking than from two hours in front of a screen. Transcribing comes afterwards, and that is mechanical work, not creative work.

The blank page doesn’t resist someone who is talking. It resists someone who is trying to write well.

A good question beats an outline

An outline asks you to know in advance what your life contains. A question hands you back a memory you had forgotten you had. That is why biographers work by asking questions, not by handing out forms.

Pick one question, just one, and answer it out loud without preparing:

• Where did your family live when you were a child, and what did the house look like?
• What is the first smell you remember?
• What dish did someone in your family cook, and who made it?
• Who taught you something you still love doing today?
• What was your first day of work like?
• What object have you kept without ever quite knowing why?
• What decision did you make whose importance you didn’t grasp at the time?
• What do your children or the people close to you still not know about you?

One question per session is enough. If it leads to another, follow it. The best chapters almost always come from a digression.

Write a scene, not a summary

“I had a happy childhood” is not a memory, it is a conclusion. Nobody can read it and see anything. But “my mother always left the radio on in the kitchen, even when she wasn’t listening” is a memory: you are in the room.

When you catch yourself summarizing, stop and ask: what specific scene makes me say that? Tell the scene. The reader will draw the conclusion on their own, and it will land far harder.

Don’t edit out your voice

Once the text is transcribed, the temptation is to make it more literary. That is almost always a loss. What gives a memoir its value is not style, it is voice: your turns of phrase, your expressions, your particular way of saying things. Your grandchildren will not reread these pages for the quality of the metaphors. They will reread them to hear you.

Fix the typos, cut the repetitions, put events back in order. Don’t replace your words with someone else’s.

And don’t invent anything to fill a gap. If you can’t remember the year, write that you can’t remember. One invented detail, however small, casts doubt on everything else, including the parts that are true.

One chapter at a time, not a book

Nobody writes a memoir. You write one memory, then another. The book is what is left once you have done that thirty or so times.

Aim for sessions of fifteen to twenty minutes, once a week if that is your rhythm. It is short, and that is exactly why you will come back. A three-hour session never gets repeated.

What to do once it’s written

Keep everything in one place, backed up somewhere other than a single device. Plenty of family histories have vanished with a broken computer or a box forgotten in an attic.

Then turn it into something physical. A file gets lost; a book gets handed down. Even in a handful of copies for your children, a printed and bound book has a lifespan no digital document can match.

If you’d rather talk than write

That is exactly why we built Memoira. You spend about fifteen minutes answering a biographer’s questions out loud (her name is Guida), and the conversation becomes a written chapter in your own words. You edit whatever you want, you decide who can read it, and you are never alone in front of a blank page.

But the method matters more than the tool. Whether you use a voice recorder, a notebook or Memoira, start with a question, talk before you write, and keep your voice. The rest follows.