Tammy Letherer In the sixties, there was a TV show called Dragnet with a detective named Joe Friday who insisted on gathering “just the facts.”
If you’re old enough to remember that show, you’ve been around long enough to have lived an interesting life. Even if you’re younger, you’ve most likely faced some challenge worth writing about.
So let’s say you want to write a memoir. Where do you start?
With the facts, of course. But not, as Joe Friday would say, just the facts.
A common stumbling block for memoir writers is to be overly attached to reporting events exactly as they happened. This works wonderfully if you’ve lived an unusually colorful life populated with insightful, articulate characters who have impeccable timing and whose every action perfectly reflects the point of your story.
It also may work if you have a photographic memory or meticulous, indexed journals dating back to first grade.
But that’s not most of us. So we work with the facts that we know, placing them as faithfully as possible like black lines on the page while we color and shade the rest into a picture that captures our Truth.
Just as fiction is not reality, but is concentrated, intensified reality, memoir is not a re-telling of your experiences. It’s the essence of carefully chosen events that illustrate a distinct message.
Which brings me to the number one most common mistake memoir writers make:
Failing to follow a narrative arc is the kiss of death for many memoirs.
Fortunately, there’s a story template that is hard-wired into our human brains. It’s a structure that works as a sort of dragnet, pulling us along with the story until we’re caught up in it.
It’s the Hero’s Journey, and it can (and should) be applied to memoir.
I dive into this in my online class, Crafting Memoir: How to Outline Your Own Hero’s Journey, available on Skillshare.
I’d love for you to check it out and maybe tell someone you know about it. In this 30-minute class I talk about why you are the hero of your own journey, other common memoir-writing mistakes, and how you can begin to apply the twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey to your story.
If you’re thinking of writing your own story but don’t know how to begin, this is the perfect jumpstart.
Thanks for checking it out!
