How to write a memoir essay

Writing a memoir essay is a great strategy to see if your idea for a book-length work is interesting, relevant and relatable. In this article, I’m going to explain the purpose of writing a memoir essay, and the most important keys to getting it published. Over the years I’ve written dozens of first-person essays and opinion pieces for print and digital publications, so I’ll share some examples of my own published memoir essays, to show you how to structure your memoir essay.

First, what is a memoir essay?

A memoir is a personal narrative that reflects on specific experiences you’ve had in your life in line with a relevant and universal theme or topic.

So your memoir essay would naturally involve personal narrative style (first-person, generally) around a specific experience or theme that’s connected to your proposed book-length memoir.

If you’ve been in my world for awhile, you’ll know that I recommend a personal essay or first-person article as a great strategy for accelerating your publishing timeline. Writing a first-person essay for a blog is also how I secured a literary agent and offers of publication for my second book, A Letter From Paris. In just a few weeks!

Writing a memoir essay is a great strategy to get you a publishing deal 

Getting a memoir essay or first-person piece published is such an empowering alternative to the usual publishing timeline for writers… Because writing an article or essay on your experience and the theme you wish to develop into a book-length work (or ARE developing) works to clarify and boost your confidence around your writing skills, and will give you valuable feedback from publishing professionals (and visibility amongst them). You might find that editorial insights from your essay or article is better than a thousand critiques on your manuscript, AND could even lead to an offer from an agent or publisher, depending on other elements.

Getting a memoir essay published (which could take anywhere from a month to three) is also MUCH quicker than the common path taken by memoir writers which I see a LOT with memoir particularly…

• Spending five years on your manuscript,
• Spending two years on your book proposal….
• Paying for endless critiques or constantly workshopping either of the two and getting confused, dejected, and losing confidence and enthusiasm entirely….

My favourite publishing strategy particuarly for nonfiction authors, is to leverage a published non-fiction piece – say, a blog post, an essay, an Op-Ed or an article – and turn it into a book deal.

Why?

This is how I found an agent and publisher for A Letter From Paris, it’s how dozens of authors I know have secured incredible book deals. You also earn money (if you pitch to a paying publication), improve your writing skills, build your platform and make impressive connections, learn a lot, and more.

Publishing a non-fiction piece either in a top publication or even a lesser-known outlet is also a great way to boost your writing profile (AKA that dreaded thing called ‘platform’ for the introverts among us!), gauge interest in your memoir topic or particular threads of the story, improve your google-ability (yes this IS a thing – be assured any agent or editor will google you before they do anything else!), add fantastic clips and extra material to your book proposal, finesse your story and improve your writing skills.

How do you write a memoir essay?

When you’re writing a memoir essay with the express goal to get interest in your book for a publishing deal, the key writing tips for a memoir essay also apply to your book itself, but with one MAJOR caveat: do NOT give away the entire story. You want to leave readers – and potential publishers – in no doubt that there is MUCH more to the story.

The six storytelling principles I teach in detail inside THE ART OF MEMOIR apply to your memoir essay, too, because it’s not a journalistic article so it will need to be written in your voice, in your writing style. The very first principle to get you published – and to get readers interested – is your story hook.

HOW TO WRITE A MEMOIR ESSAY

• Step 1: Clarify your Hook [because this helps you structure the essay]

The most important thing you need to get right for your memoir essay is also the most important thing you need in a book-length memoir: a strong hook. Having a strong hook also implies bravery and strength in your writing voice, because until you’re willing to put your unique perspective and your personality  and your point-of-view into your personal story, it won’t stand out among the thousands of other essays or story pitches on that topic or common experience theme.

Put simply, a hook is something unique, unusual, contrasting, strange, personal and compelling about your specific experience. And it’s ALSO very personal, for a memoir essay. Your hook is that part of your story that your friends say “WTF?” when you explain that the same day you lost your dog and your husband, you also won the lottery.

It’s that part of your story that beggars belief but also elicits intrigue from your audience. It raises questions and interest and also compels a reader to RELATE to your story because it’s what’s unique about a universal theme.

Of course, you may not have lost your dog and your husband but also won the lottery on the same day, but generally if a story is important enough for you to want to share a story with the wider world, you have something very deep, meaningful and affecting to say. What is it? Why does this matter to you so much? It must be fresh and unique and you need to find that very fine balance between the universal and the personal.

And, as I’ve said before, with memoir – personal narrative – being PERSONAL – means you must reveal something… PERSONAL about yourself.

Writing a memoir essay for publication is humbling and vulnerable. I shared about my late father in my memoir essay and I hadn’t even said many of those things out loud to old friends, at that point. It’s usually where there’s some unresolved pain and you’ve needed to really work through an issue much harder than someone else. Or in a very unique or different way to many others who have experienced the same thing.
The hook could just be one little detail of the story – for example, when you look at thousands of stories of an experience of tragedy such as the September 11 attacks or the Bali Bombings, it’s usually the little personal details that start the story of an individual experience. That pulls us in and helps us relate.

Practise finding your story hook by talking about your story with friends. What do they find most compelling? What is the question at the heart of your hook? You will spend the rest of the essay or article or series of blog posts exploring this.

A BIG MISCONCEPTION AROUND STORY HOOKS

You need a hook to both successfully pitch the memoir essay and ALSO to write it well. And this is why writing a memoir essay for publication is such a great practise point for getting a memoir published! You can’t just say “I’m pitching an essay about my mother” or about “my experience with grief” – you need to be more specific than that. You need to show the relatable theme and the premise of the story – what you’re going to explore and give the reader that they haven’t ever seen or felt or known about this, before.

Memoir essay pitching tip: Don’t just say “the essay is about my mother.” Or – “the essay is about my hunt for a house and how hard it was”. There has to be some kind of contrast and specific detail that makes us see immediately how different this story is to the many others on this theme or experience. Even in a lyrical, prosaic memoir essay, you need to explore the internal grapplings with something  – well, gripping. Even the most stunning prose needs a hook!

Memoir essay writing tip: Start observing yourself when you watch a movie – how is the beginning of the story presented? What about stories and first-person essays (memoir essays) you read through to the end – what is it about these essays that gets you invested? Make note.

• Step 2: Great memoir essays include both an inner AND an outer journey in the story structure

Christopher Vogler in one of my favourite writing books, The Writer’s Journey writes:

“Good stories show two journeys, outer and inner…”

When I read a compelling memoir essay or article, I’m struck by how the narrator weaves the inner journey with what’s going on in their physical or outer world, and how the two reflect and build upon each other. Memoir essays can be written chronologically (so, from Monday to Friday as you lived the experience, for example). Or, you could write your memoir essay thematically (say, a collection of examples from the author’s life as relating to the topic or theme of the experience). You could also do what’s called a braided essay, where you weave multiple threads together cohesively, so that the essay works as a whole. I personally find braided essays the most satisfying to read, and most challenging to successfully write, and it’s the same with braided memoirs. I do think that the 6 storytelling principles still apply as I teach them in THE ART OF MEMOIR, because I braided research on my late father with historical data with present-day experience to tell the story of A LETTER FROM PARIS. And the essays that I published before the book came out needed to do the same. It’s tricky! It’s almost like writing three different essays. At once!
But as long as you know the way you’ll bring the beginning, the middle and the end together cohesively, which is exactly why i created the visual map I use to structure memoir inside THE ART OF MEMOIR, you have a map to use.

Here are two examples of memoir essays I wrote before A LETTER FROM PARIS was published:

The initial post which braided astrology with personal experience and letters of my late father…

A longer travel essay along the theme of ‘time travel’ which braided history and current-day…

Read this essay by Lauren Hough which was published in Huffington Post for an example of a thematic essay. What’s so human, and so compelling (and by the way, it led to a book deal for LEAVING ISN’T THE HARDEST THING, her memoir-in-essays from Vintage!), are the contrasts between her physical and working environment (being a “cable guy”) and the internal life she leads: left-leaning, queer, empathetic…

It’s the personal contrasts that keep you reading (as well as the vivid examples she gives!). The characters she meets in her job (external) show who she is and what she believes (internal). Do you see what I mean?

Coming back to the hook element – it’s not enough to ‘explain’ something that happened to you – eg. I did this, I went here, I felt like this…. Plenty of these pieces get published. They’re clickbait, they’re quickly-forgotten, and you don’t want them on your clip list. Instead you need to deep-dive into how the external influenced the internal – to show those two journeys, inner and outer… To explore your own empathy, if you will.

Memoir essay Tip: Use the outer to provoke the inner. What do I mean? If you’re writing a story about meeting your real father for the first time at age 19 in a dive bar in New Orleans, relate the external reality of being in New Orleans with why and how you came to be meeting your father there…

• Step 3: Only include what’s relevant [and eliminate all that does not connect to the focal point of the story]

In memoir essays, as with book-length memoirs and personal narratives, you must always remember that this is a STORY you’re weaving. And to make it highly readable, everything must connect to the central premise or narrative thread.
A key pointer to an early versus a later draft is including relevant material. Essays need to be clean and concise – you don’t have an entire chapter to introduce a character, you have a few sentences or a paragraph. Even in long-form essays, the story needs to be relatively tight.
So, if your essay is about meeting your father in New Orleans (as the above example suggests), only include anecdotes, references, observations and material that relates to said meeting or how you dealt with said meeting.

Memoir writing tip: Often (always?) you need to write out a whole heap of irrelevant material before you can get rid of it. You need to ‘write’ your way into the story. That’s fine! But make sure you leave it for a couple of days so you can assess what needs to go, when you come back to revise the essay – and/ or the pitch – for publication. Often you’ll find much of what you thought mattered, has nothing to do with the central premise of the story, AND, because you’ll have only 1000 to 3000 words to explore this experience, you want to keep things tight. And – remember to leave people wanting more!

• Step 4: End on a summary or new understanding of the problem or issue, and/or show a clear transformation

The most important part in a memoir essay is that you show some sort of transformation in your character or point-of-view or change from beginning to end of the story. While you might be exploring a topic, question or theme in your story, you need to show that you, as a character, have changed or at the very least learnt and reflected from your journey.
If it’s a non-fiction article, the ending will generally be a summary of what you’ve learnt, but with memoir it can be a little more subtle. You could end with a surprise realisation or moment of movement, to leave the reader on a high note. Again, if you’re using this memoir essay as part of a strategy to get a publishing deal or literary agent representation, you won’t want to end your memoir essay with everything explained and neatly resolved. There needs to be more to uncover and explore, for a publisher or an agent to want to see material for a book-length work.

• STEP 5: Revise your memoir essay and the pitch, before you send it out
  
  

Here are some general revision tips, which I teach in much more detail inside the editing component of THE ART OF MEMOIR:

• Never ever send your first draft to an editor – leave your memoir essay or article for a few days and come back to it.
• Edit for repetition and relevance: It always amazes me how much I repeat certain words in my writing. You only see this when you’ve left it a few days, and if you use that wonderful ‘search and replace’ tool in Word.  So look for repetition of certain words and delete or change them, if need be. Be ruthless.
• Edit for relevance – As I touched on, above, if you’re aiming for a word count of 1200, for example (very standard for essays in publications such as the New York Times Ties section), and trying to lop 400 words off, what is LEAST relevant chunk to the main question or theme of your article? Remember: You can include the whole story in your book. This is a strategic published piece to elicit interest and engage in the most compelling elements of your story.
• Don’t take a huge ‘run up’ – Just as a huge issue many editors see in memoir manuscripts submitted to publishing houses is that they take too long to get to the point of the story– so you should jump right into the inciting incident, or compelling event, in the beginning of your essay. Don’t write three paragraphs of beautiful poetry about what you did the day before the big event. You don’t have a lot of words to waste in an essay or article.
• Study other essays – this should really be my number one piece of advice. Whatever outlet you choose to pitch to, study what has been published for that particular section of that particular outlet so you can get an overview of how the story should be styled and structured.
• Read it out loud. This is a great tip one of my first newspaper editors gave me (particularly when you have a low word count of anything under 1000 words). Reading out loud helps you see what needs to go, and what doesn’t work, very quickly.

WRITING A Memoir Essay for Publication, in summary:

Writing a memoir essay for publication is a great way to develop your writing style and visibility for your potential book deal. It’s also going to strengthen your writing voice, because to get a personal story published, you need a writing voice that shows personality, point-of-view and perspective on the experience. Whether you want to write a memoir essay OR a book-length narrative, THE ART OF MEMOIR, my signature writing programme, is going to show you exactly how to structure and revise a nonfiction narrative for professional publication. Sign up for the masterclass below to learn more about what’s included in the programme and whether or not it’s right for you.