Start With a Room You Remember
When I talk to people about writing their memoir, they tell me, “I don’t know where to start.”
Pro Secret: It doesn’t matter where you start.
Yeah, it’s great to have an outline and some idea of how you’re going to structure things. In fact, it’s one of the first things we look at in my memoir course, Spill the Ink. I like to help people build a structure first because it helps you figure out where to “hang” your stories.
But if you’re at the very beginning and stuck and maybe even a bit intimidated, let’s take some pressure off.
Simply describe a room you remember from the time period that your memoir is set in.
Why?
Because describing that room is going to take you back. It will trigger emotions and memories. It puts YOU in the scene.
In college, I lived in a townhouse apartment with three (at least) other roommates. My bedroom was upstairs, to the left, over the kitchen. It had a twin bed and an old bureau from home. I had two sets of bed sheets, yellow and light blue with butterflies on them. (I’ve come a long way, baby.) There was a granny square crocheted afghan folded at the foot of the bed. The closet had those metal louver doors that scraped when you opened them. The rug was some sort of beige/brown shag and there may have been a window—that I can’t remember.
You know what I did remember while I wrote out that (very) short description?
The walls were paper thin.
And the people next door had a kid named Dana. Dana never got up in time for school. Every morning, Monday through Friday, whether I had to get up for class or not, I was awakened by the parents yelling “DANA!”
Then I’d bang on the wall and yell at Dana to get up, too.
Dana is all grown up now and I have no idea if he found a job where he didn’t have to be a morning person. I hope so.
The point is that just describing that room brought back the memory of that kid. And he is probably one reason why I decided not to have kids. 😊
If you’re not sure where to start, pick a room, any room as long as it belongs to the time you want to write about. See what pops out of your memory banks.