How to Pinpoint that Exact Story I Want to Tell, or What I Can Tell You About My Life

In Writing a Beginning of the Memoir: A DIY for a WordFellow

We’re in this together now, thinking: indeed, I’ve lived a long life. Where did all that time go? This question alone can stop us long enough to dwell on things we’d thought forgotten. We have too many stories, or we think our stories can’t be looped into one narrative, like chaptering a novel or as parsed portions of a short story.

It’s not like we will be able to record our full lives. Mostly, we’ll be showing off some opened windows of well-rehearsed moments, or those moments that insist on being shaped. What story to tell really is not a choice among many stories, but the courage to tell that story, insisting on a telling.

What will be the story is not our question, but why this story at all, the one that keeps on popping. This is where we begin.

1. Start with with What Refuses to Go Away

What memories carry a feeling you can still name: joy, regret, confusion, relief, laughter? Try this:

• What is a memory you find yourself retelling, even casually?
• What season of your life do you revisit when you’re alone?
• What moment still feels unfinished or unresolved?

Recall This fragment of memory. In your penned account, something emerges: a pattern of moving, a pattern of loss, a pattern of caring for others, some key themes gained, though those weren’t apparent at the time.

In recording that period of our life, we assess how we changed. Was it slow growth? Sudden awakening? Never learned anything? We’re not merely identifying what happened or describing the moment objectively; we’re sharing a purpose or possibly a value when we’re able to establish how that moment marked our living.

2. Enter Through any Open Door

One hard and most freeing part of this process is not finalizing the beginning at the start of the writing. Anything written first becomes a mere doorway, and not even into the entire house. The spaces will come at random.

You might enter that:

• Year when you became a mother
• First time you left home and lived alone or independently
• Season you lost something, or someone important
• A job that defined you somehow in a career or discipline
• Long stretch of waiting for something or someone you weren’t sure would come

Choose the door that will open wide to the story of your life. It’s amazing that while you’re writing, these doors will continue to invite you to have a glimpse of what’s inside, and you’re allowed to roam, wander, and become that phantom in your own home.

And once you’ve entered a door, see that place concretely. Describe where you are exactly. What the room feels like, looks like, sounds like. Even what you’re wearing, the time of day. It’s like a pan shot if you’re shooting a film. You need to take note of the details before you can move inward.

Inward has to do with what you were thinking at the time, although that thought need not really make sense. What did you want at that moment? What were you trying to understand? Remember that you’re writing not mere history, but a feeling.

3. Let the Story Talk Back

In theatre arts exercises, one useful workshop activity is people-watching. You sit down on some public waiting bench and choose some random character or characters coming out of, say, the train station, the bus stops, or the pedestrian crossings across a park.

You let some characters on that street or park become fictional caricatures in your head.

Then you make them talk to each other. But this is not enough. You need to give that conversation a slant, a problem, a conflict, so it won’t remain static and can build up to a story.

Any random dialogue will do: “Would you like to come with me to the movies?” But how this progresses depends on your imagined issue.

In brainstorming your memoir, start with something similar, but this time, the dialogue is between you and that person who is also you in that moment you entered. This won’t stay abstract for long, because you will discover that there is an Other belonging to that time, and now it could be a character in your story.

Summary of this WordFellow Write Shop

Remember that your story doesn’t need to impress anyone to be worth telling. But it needs to be true enough for somebody else to hopefully recognize themselves.

And you don’t need your whole life on the pages yet. Begin with the part that refuses to leave.

1. Choose one memory that keeps returning. Write it down, even if it feels incomplete. Enter it as a doorway, not a conclusion.

2. Stay in that moment for a while. Describe what you see. Let the details come before the meaning.

3. Then let yourself speak to the person you were in that moment. Allow that voice to speak back to you.