The purpose of memoir is to share a compact but powerful story about a specific situation that led to a life-changing realization. Again, the point of memoir is not to share everything that ever happened to you. Your premise sets the scope of your story. Lesson: the best stories come when you get out of your comfort zone. Situation: not quite enough money to make it in Paris. “ To raise $600 for his dream Paris trip, a cautious writer accomplishes 12 uncomfortable adventures given by his Internet followers, and through it all learns that the best stories come when you get out of your comfort zone.“ How does this look practically? Here’s an example premise from my memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris: NY Times bestselling memoirist Marion Roach Smith says, “Memoir is about something you know after something you’ve been through.” What big life lesson did you learn from this situation? What is the specific situation you were going through that will make up the core of the story? For memoir, this is going to be you, the author. Here’s what to include in your memoir’s one-sentence premise: How do you write that sentence? Every premise for a memoir needs to contain three things: a character, a situation, and a lesson. Then, anything that doesn’t fit in that sentence can go into the next book. That’s why, at the very beginning, you narrow your memoir idea down to a single sentence, because it forces you to focus on only the most important events for your story. One of the biggest mistakes new memoir writers make is to try to do too much in one book, to share too many stories, to talk too much about details the reader doesn’t care about.
No, they’re about a specific season, a particular, very intense period of time. Good memoirs-books like Wild and Eat, Pray, Love-are not about your whole life. Why sum up your whole book idea in one sentence? Because you can’t write about everything. #2 – Write your memoir idea as a one-sentence premise
Now that you’ve identified when it’s the right time to learn how to write a memoir outline, it’s time to move on to the next part, which is all about what to include in your outline. This can help you identify any gaps in your story, and can help in your editing process. Already finished writing your memoir? It’s not too late to create your memoir outline.
Outlining your memoir will help you at every stage of the process.Įven if you identify more with the pantsers on the planner vs pantser spectrum, having some kind of outline using the elements below will help you. If you’re in the middle of your memoir, take a step back and create an outline using the process below.Īnd if you’ve already finished your memoir and are thinking about next steps, it’s not too late to create your outline to help finetune your manuscript. If you’re thinking about writing a memoir, start with learning how to write a memoir outline. So when is the best time to create a memoir outline? The answer: as early as possible. All I had to do was remember, right? How hard could it be?Īnd so it wasn’t until after I had written the first draft of my memoir that I finally realized I wouldn’t be able to make it good without writing an outline. After all, it was a story about the experience I had in Paris. This wasn’t my first book, it was my fifth, and each of those books relied heavily on outlines.īut writing a memoir felt different. The biggest mistake I made when I was writing my memoir was in creating my outline too late. #1 – Know when to create a memoir outline Then, I began to learn how to outline a memoir, and it changed my entire writing process. How do I know? Because I tried to write a memoir-a real-life adventure story set in Paris-without an outline and failed. Learning how to write a memoir outline will help you have a better memoir in a fraction of the time.