Structuring A Memoir To Keep The Audience And Yourself Intrigued 

By Candice Black

I made numerous attempts at writing a memoir before completing my first and I always seemed to get stuck within the first two chapters. The majority of ‘Emerging: An Artistic Practice Saved My Life’ was written over the course of a month, my suddenly ability to write the book I’d wanted to write for many years given life by the structure I found for it. 

The story of my life would play over in mind, sometimes in flashbacks, and at other times simply as though I had a story to tell. I wrangled over what my story would include: I couldn’t include everything – that’s not possible. Imagine trying to write everything that had ever happened in your life down to the microscopic detail. Not only did that seem boring to me, but I also didn’t think it would be interesting to the reader either. That’s when I had my light bulb moment. 

In writing a memoir an author would aim to tell the truth, and readers want to know that the author is telling the truth as well, unless it’s clearly autofiction. However, a memoir is a story: a life story but a story none the less. If every moment of my life had been filmed on camera, viewers still wouldn’t have access to every element of my life, such as my feelings and thoughts. A memoir is as much about what not include as to what is included. With that realisation, I developed the structure of my memoir.  

I knew in writing the book that I wanted to express what it was like to experience the difficulties I had faced. I also wanted others to know some of the dangers that I had lived through. That doesn’t make a memoir in and of itself: you could watch a documentary or read a factual article about safety, for example. I also couldn’t just list events and hope the reader found it enjoyable. It would be tedious to write, and if I found it tedious so would the reader. It dawned on me that the structure of my memoir had to intrigue me if it was to have any hope of interesting to the reader. With that, I looked for themes in my life story that I could build into a memoir that I pieced together like a puzzle. 

‘Emerging: An Artistic Practice Saved My Life’ tells the story of how creativity has been a consistent form of support in a life filled with difficulty and disappointment, but also adventure and artistic endeavor. Some of my experiences would be familiar to the reader and others less so. The memoir needed to have a beginning, middle, and climatic ending- but beyond that I was able to choose how I told my story. I structured it in a nonlinear fashion, so that the reader would have the opportunity to think about what had brought me to the place that I had ended up in, and what’s more what had I done in my life to get there.  It wouldn’t have suited me to say, “Look at this situation, I was at the mercy of fate.” In the spirit of the hero story, the reader wants to know if the author did anything to create a life of their own. It’s the most fundamental aspect of being a human being- living your own life. 

When I first started trying to write a memoir I came across a phase that haunted me: “misery memoir.” It’s the concept of a memoir that does nothing but relay the misery in a person’s life and publishers don’t want to read them.  I had experienced plenty of grief, but I agreed that it wouldn’t make a good book. In writing my memoir I chose, despite the horror of what I had experienced, to tell an optimistic story. To intrigue my reader, I offered them a puzzle about what had happened and gave them reason to hope for better in their own lives if they had happened to experience something similar or were worried about it. I self-published the book, mainly because I was excited and keen to get it into reader’s hands as soon as possible. 

If you’re looking for a challenge, writing a memoir can be just that. Finding themes that play out throughout your life story is a good starting point for structuring the work. How those themes intersect, when it became apparent to you as a person living their life that these themes were present, and what unites them, can lend itself to creating mystery in your memoir writing journey. These themes play out because of who we are, our choices in life and the choices that were made for us. Once you’ve found the mystery in your life story, that might just be a good time to start writing.  

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Candice Black is a visual artist & writer from South Wales, UK. As a mixed race, disabled, Welsh, female: her creative work has been a life line through challenging experiences. She explores trauma and somatic themes in her work, and expresses hope.

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Emerging: An Artistic Practice Saved My Life

Candice Black is a Welsh artist & writer. Her memoir is a testament to the power of creativity to carry a person through the brutal experiences of mental ill health, trauma, abuse, and addiction. Discovering that her will to survive might just bring the relationships with the people she needed the most to an end, Candice pieces the puzzle of her life together. As she tells her story, creativity becomes the lifeline offering a future.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing