Writing a personal experience book (memoir)—Part One

Over the past few years over half my clients have been writing a personal experience book.  The problem is that a personal experience book may be the most difficult nonfiction book to write.  It requires a good knowledge of fiction techniques, and there is the problem.  The author often wants to write just the facts and ignores scenes and emotion. As a result, I've decided it's about time that we go through the personal experience book (memoir) from one end the other and see we can clear up some misconceptions.

A personal experience book focuses on only part of your life story and not the full story.  It is the experience where you saw a child through a life-threatening disease, overcame a problem in your life or focused on a special period that stands out

In writing these most writers ask how do you know where to start and how do you remember the details? Steinbeck recommends that you start by taking just a period.  Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there.  Try to remember people.  It is important to tell what people look like and how they walked, you will find in a very short time things will begin coming back to you that you thought you had forgotten -- cutting comes later.  This form will develop in the telling.       

While at a lot of memoirs are written by celebrities today, more and more readers have been attracted to personal experience books about how people faced the difficulties that life chose to throw at them.  This included the life-threatening illness of a child, an automobile accident that required months to recuperate, a job loss that threatened to leave them broke forever, and much more.  Their story included the struggle to overcome difficult times, why they made the choices they made, and how they changed in the process.  The way you solved the problems gives them hope.

No matter what category you choose there are dozens of angles from which to write the book, let's look at a few grieving books that have sold.  I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye, Grieving the Death of a Mother, Confessions of a Grieving Christian, and 35 Ways to Help a Grieving Child. As you can see there are hundreds of ways to turn an angle on this category.

The most important thing is to carefully select the angle or the point of view you intend to take in your book.  It pays to look at some titles carefully, which you can do with Amazon.com and pick out something that is exclusively yours.

We will cover where to start, and fill in your memoir (personal experience book) in later columns.  You can, however, limit yourself to one overall focus. If you're focusing on solving a problem you must stay with that problem all the way through the book.  In addition, you must have a storyline.  In developing your theme, ask yourself what you had to go through at each stage, how did the problems start?  What happened after that? And how you solved it? This will be the bulk of your story.  It's not your whole life but just a slice running from a year to two or three years or more. This may take a lot of soul-searching and thought to come up with the details. The personal experience book focuses on a brief period of time and includes most of the elements of fiction plot development, conflict, characterization, and when appropriate, flashback.  It generally has a high emotional level and offers a therapeutic experience for the writer especially when the story is of the crisis or survival type.  Begin by brainstorming all the events you can remember.  Try to recall names, places, descriptions, details and conversations.  Get as much down on papers as you can remember, then start to write.  In the following months we will cover all the details.