how do i begin?

three simple rules of memoir -- plus assorted thoughts on fiction, memory, experience, perception and time

We know the truth not only by reason but also by heart.

— Blaise Pascal

‘Everyone has a novel in them,’ some dude who clearly disliked novelists once said. I disagree, but not for the reasons you might think.

What I think he actually meant is that everyone has a story in them. And within that story lies the raw material for a narrative. You might be working on paranormal/sci-fi erotica, an historical vampire gothic or literary auto-fiction, it’s all the same. The leap from lived experience to story to a coherent book-length work of fiction is as vast and mysterious as Bermuda Triangle. I’m not discouraging you from trying to cross it, especially if you feel your life depends on it (you certainly wouldn’t be the first).

I’m just saying this: A novel is deep and wet and full of twisting currents driven by electromagnetic winds. Many people get lost and give up or vice versa. So go for it, but before setting out on your crossing, you’d be wise to learn how to swim.

Memoir is different. I’ve published two novels and one memoir, and the latter felt very different for me. For many writers on this platform and elsewhere, the setting out of life on the page, is a fulfilling end in itself. Articulating experience for the purpose of future reflection is always a valuable undertaking. Doing so helps us to cultivate self-awareness, or at the very least a sense of coherence. Humans turn our lives into stories, it’s what sets us apart from the beasts. Practiced regularly, journaling and diary-keeping can become a kind of mental exercise regime with cumulative benefits, both for living and craft. Any half-educated person can write, but good writing takes practice. Presumably this is why so many people (not just professionals) write down what is happening to them as it is happening over years.

What I’m trying to say is that memoir writing is like swimming lessons.

You figure out how to hold your breath and float in the shallow end before moving up to the next level. Eventually, you learn the strokes. Once you can plash the length of the pool, you go back and forth and back and forth until you have committed the proper technique to muscle memory. The pool is a finite structure filled with water. It has a shape. You know where the deep and shallow end is. There’s a filter and chlorine and a lifeguard. It’s not impossible to drown in a pool, but chances are you won’t get lost.

Traditionally, novelists were meant to move on to memoir only once they’d established a ‘name’ (and readership) for themselves. But our fragmented culture and marketplace with its endless thirst for fresh new voices has altered this order. In the last quarter century, it’s become commonplace for new writers to begin with memoir and only then move on to fiction. This makes sense, not because memoir is inferior but because it’s easier. Unlike a novel, a memoir has clearly delineated boundaries. The raw material is already there.

If you have ever taken a creative writing course or a master class, done a workshop or watched a Q&A at a literary festival you have probably heard the old truism, write what you know. All this really means is that writing is observation. A novel or memoir is just experience and perception filtered through memory then set on the page in the form of a story. So in a way, everything a writer writes, from screenplays to librettos to a pleading letters to the parole board, is a kind of memoir. To my mind, anyway.

But to return to the dude who disliked novelists, what I think he ought to have said is this: Everyone has a story in them — and within that story lies the raw material for a memoir.

So let’s just agree on the following: Everyone has a memoir in them. Whether or not it will — or should — stay that way is a whole other question. But if you don’t begin you won’t finish.

So let’s get started on how to get started, because there are better and worse ways to do so. What follows below the paywall are my rules for how to begin, or begin again, if you have started out and then found yourself lost at sea.

The rules below are meant for memoir but can apply equally well to fiction. They are simple, failsafe and best of all: THERE ARE ONLY THREE. As long as you keep to these rules, I promise the work you produce will be far more valuable and likely to attract a readership than if you’d set out blindly.

1. Everyone has a memoir in them.

The sheer abundance of memory is what makes makes writing a memoir so gloriously doable. It really is a wide-open, all-comers, everyone’s-got-the-stuff kind of form. We are all multitudes and within those multitudes are an infinite number of stories just waiting to be teased out and typed up. There are boring people, of course, but show me a dull human life. (It’s literally never happened — it’s impossible. Go home. Give up.)

And yes, I know, many brilliant memoirs also involve staggering tales of transformative personal change — Tara Westover’s Educated, for instance, or Jan Morrison’s Conundrum — the list goes on an on. But it’s also worth remembering that two of the greatest examples of the form — Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (styled as a novel, but let’s not split hairs) and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory — are sensory reflections on happy, privileged childhoods in which high drama takes the form of butterfly collecting and the appreciation of a delicate French cookie. The reason these works are so famous, so endlessly read and re-read is not because their authors are the valiant survivors of some harrowing ordeal but because they are astonishing meditations on the nature of experience and memory itself.

So what I want you to know right from the off is that you’ve got the basic raw materials to write a memoir. Pretend I’m your inner-cheerleader¹and repeat after me:

I’ve got what it takes! 

I’ll take what I’ve got!

I’ve lived a whole life 

And life’s just experience

 filtered through memory 

and shaped into thoughts!

Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done (or not done) in your vanishingly short and agonisingly long time on this earth, I guarantee you it is more than enough for a memoir. I’m not saying anyone else will be interested in reading yours, but one thing is certain: If you don’t try you’ll never know. You’ve got more than enough and it’s all right there inside you, laying in wait. All you have to do now is craft your scattershot experience into a coherent work of remembered truth. The question is, how?

2. Remembering is a skill just like writing, and good remembering takes practice.

The American writer Lorrie Moore once wrote, ‘Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass that it distills down into.’ I’m pretty sure she was talking about fiction but the whiskey metaphor is even more apt when it comes to the art and craft of memoir.

Memory is how we make sense of the past as well as the present moment. It’s the determining force that shapes the future we cannot know. Even if we refuse to dwell on our memories they do not dissipate or vanish, instead they have a mysterious way of seeping through, startling us with their urgency when we least expect it — a whiff of vanilla shampoo that plunges us back into our mother’s lap, or a fragment of a pop song that transports us back to the YMCA dance in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 1982.

The past is all around us. It’s right here. So if you want to write a memoir, first close your eyes or go for a long walk (or better yet, a series of short walks) and let your remembered experience materialise in you mind’s eye until it is almost tangible. Do this everyday until you feel it beginning to become tangible, like you could reach out and touch the past if you tried.

And while you do this, understand that memory is not just the filing system in which we order our lives, it’s the information contained within the drawers, the data in the files. Outside the immediate present moment — this, now — memory is all we have. If we are all the sum total of our actions, then memories are the underlying arithmetic. Without them, our lives would not add up. Without memory there would be no stories. After food, water, oxygen and love, stories are what keep us alive.

So now that I’ve (hopefully) convinced you that you’ve got what it takes to write a memoir, now that you can, with any luck, see the field of wheat (your field, it’s yours, you grew it from seed!) spread out before you, golden and shimmering all the way to the distant horizon, just waiting for you to run into it and spin round to lose yourself and see what you can find, I feel the need to alert you to the problem with all this abundance. Brace yourself, because it’s a big one.

The problem is this the question we set out to answer: Where do I begin?

Before I answer it, please note that when I say ‘beginning’ I don’t mean it literally. The opening passage of a memoir (or any book) is rarely how the book actually began. I’m talking about the actual beginning of beginning, not the first page.

Remember also: a book is an artificial human construct, like a pool. Reality evolving, unbound, like the sea. Time moves forward like pages turned in order, one, two, three, four, five — but our perception of time is more muddled. The critic Northrup Frye wrote that ‘the only crystal ball is the rearview mirror.’ As humans, we move forward in life while looking backward and we do so while inhabiting only liminal space of the present moment. No wonder we’re all so confused.

1. Start small.

To begin, start with one thing. Not a whole anecdote, person or story but something much smaller. A vivid flake of your life. It does not have to be Obviously Important. In some ways it’s almost better for it not to be. But the fragment should stand on its own and not require set up. An image, a sound, a smell, one bar of a half remembered song.

Do not ask: Why this one? What does it mean? Just take whatever bubbles up to the surface. These questions will answer themselves in time.

Once you have the flake, describe your specific memory in all its aspects, as precisely as you can.

When I say ‘describe it’ I don’t just mean set it out on the page, but really get to know it. Take that tiny, tangible fragment of your life and stick it between your lips. Suck on it for a while, roll it round on your tongue. Then eventually, when you are good and ready, crack it between your back molars. If it’s the beginning of something you’ll know instantly because once opened, the seed will flood your whole mouth with a whole host of flavours — bitter, sweet, savoury, sour laid over the baseline thrum of umami. The richness and contrast. That’s how you know.

Once you’ve done this, do it again. One memory will invariably lead you to another and another and before long themes will emerge. Then a story. Then a book. So do it once, then do it again, and again and again and again until on the other side, clambering to shore.

Happy swimming.

1. Apologies to Dr. Suess.