Memoir Craft

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Ditch the Itinerary in Your Travel Memoir

What makes a travel memoir unique isn’t the places you’ve been but what you’re wrestling with inside that the journey illuminates.
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Find Your Memoir Voice Before AI Flattens It

A standout writing voice is a mixture of your natural style and sentence-level decisions that bring who you are to life.
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Yes, Write About Your Trauma, But Not for the Reasons You Might Think

Whether or not your memoir is published, it’s important to get it off your chest before the rest of your life’s work can come through.
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How to Center Your Story When Writing About the People in Your Life

When writing about a significant relationship, here are some tips to make sure you don’t end up a supporting player in your own story.
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How Scene Writing Helps You Lose Control (and Find Your Memoir’s Story)

Pay close attention to any surprising details or patterns in your memoir’s scenes—they often point to the story that really wants to be told.
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Stop Counting Toothbrushes: Find Your Memoir’s Real Story

One memoir coach sees writers rush ahead into chapters and character detail before understanding: Why am I writing this exact story right now?
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The Question Every Memoirist Needs to Ask (But Almost No One Does)

Before trying to structure a memoir, you must understand how you’ve changed and what that process looked like—which can be hard to pinpoint.
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Ghosting Your Own Book: How to Cross the Finish Line When You Want to Run Away

Faced with pursuing publication that might reopen old wounds, one memoirist overcame the challenge with help from therapy, community, and AI.
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How Compassion Changed My Writing

When a writer began to see her mother with compassion, her writing changed—and her stories started getting published.
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The Memoir Playbook I Wish More Writers Knew

Three practices separate successful memoirists from those who underestimate the writing craft.
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Why Your Family Isn’t Supportive When You Publish Your Memoir

Lack of support might come from fears about their own privacy, not understanding the enormity of your achievement, and/or information overload.
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What Is a Memoir’s Essential Question and Why Do You Need One?

The first question is often some version of “What happened to me?” Understanding it helps craft a story that speaks to your readers’ needs.
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Finding the Right Tone for Your Memoir

Your story’s tone and content don’t have to match—and when they don’t, they can combine to create something greater than their sum.
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Writing Memoir? The Life You Change the Most Is Yours

A memoirist who began writing with the goal of helping others was surprised by how the process healed old wounds and reframed her self-image.
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Why Your Memoir Feels Like Rambling (and How to Fix It)

Having analyzed over 1000 memoir manuscripts in a 15 year span, Wendy Dale found two linked components of powerful, plot-driven storytelling.
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It’s Not About You: Your Memoir Is Someone Else’s Story

The person on the page can’t be the person writing the book. Because if your life has changed enough to write about, you aren’t that person anymore.
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What I Got Wrong About Memoir and What I Now Understand About the Genre

An author reconsiders her biases, finding the best memoir writing to be courageous, complex, and capable of transforming others and ourselves.
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Why Fictionalize Memoir?

A writer wishing to bear witness and breathe new life into her family’s stories compares how three authors blended memoir with fiction.
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The Activist Memoir: How to Write for Change

While many memoirs’ stories are personal, others are social or political—and the best succeed by making readers feel what the author felt.
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Don’t Ruin the Mystery: How to Reflect in Memoir Without Giving It All Away

What draws readers into your story is the mystery of how you achieved your transformation, so reflection must be handled carefully.
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The Secret to Avoiding a Sagging Memoir Middle

The finest memoirs are distilled experiences: the more you compress, the more potent your story becomes.
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This Memoir Could Have Been an Email: Telling Your Story With Different Forms of Communication

Different forms of communication—letters, voicemails, social posts—can enrich your memoir, so long as they help tap into something universal.
The Biggest Memoir Mistake: When Too Much Backstory Derails Your Narrative

The Biggest Memoir Mistake: When Too Much Backstory Derails Your Narrative

Backstory in memoir works like a traffic light—stopping too often stalls your journey. Learn which past events truly serve your narrative.
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How to Find Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc (There May Be More Than One)

One author successfully pitched her memoir based on its thematic point, but shaping it into a satisfying narrative arc was much tricker.
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Breaking Point, Back Story, Resolution: A Three-Part Structure for Memoir

Memoir can benefit from starting at the moment that change became inevitable, then explaining what came before and what followed.