Last week I wrote about why memoir is having a moment in 2025 and why your story matters. Today I want to get practical and tell you how to write a memoir. How do you actually take a lifetime of memories and turn them into a coherent story that readers will want to finish?
I spent five years working on my memoir about my late wife Ellen, so I’m still sweating from the experience. What I learned isn’t theory: it’s the messy, hard-won knowledge that comes from wrestling thousands of words into something resembling a book. Some of what I’m about to share, you might find in MFA programs or expensive writing courses. Some of it I learned the hard way, through trial and error and deleting more words than I kept.
Let me walk you through the process, from the moment you decide to write a memoir through hitting the publish button on Amazon.
Before You Write a Single Word
Here’s what nobody tells you about memoir: the hardest part isn’t the writing. It’s figuring out what story you’re actually trying to tell.
I started my memoir thinking it would be a simple collection of sweet memories about Ellen. A tribute. A way to keep her present. But nine months into the project, I realized it was morphing into something more complicated—it was becoming a book about our relationship, about grief, about coming to terms with the good, the bad, and everything in between.
That realization nearly killed the project. I’d written thousands of words that didn’t fit the story I was now telling. Most of it had to be deleted.
The Questions that Matter
So before you write chapter one, sit with these questions:
What’s the central question or conflict driving this memoir? Not just “I want to tell my story.” That’s not a driving question—that’s a vague intention. Your memoir needs a spine, something that pulls the reader through from beginning to end.
For me, the question evolved into: How do you honor a complicated relationship without sanitizing it? How do you grieve honestly?
What transformation are you documenting? Memoirs aren’t just records of what happened. They’re about change—how events shaped you, how you’re different at the end than you were at the beginning.
Who is this memoir for? I don’t mean this in a marketing sense. I mean: are you writing this for your family? For other grievers? For anyone dealing with complicated relationships? Your intended reader will shape every decision you make about what to include and what to leave out.
What are you willing to reveal? This is the brutal question. Memoir demands honesty, but you get to decide where your boundaries are. Some writers go full confessional. Others maintain privacy around certain topics. Neither approach is wrong, but you need to know your limits before you start.
I decided early on that I wouldn’t sanitize Ellen or our marriage. She was stubborn, brilliant, and complicated. Our relationship was deep and loving and sometimes frustrating as hell. Readers needed to see the real woman and the real marriage, not some airbrushed memorial version.
How to Write a Memoir: Structure and Framework that Holds Your Story Together
Once you know what story you’re telling, you need a structure to hold it. This is where a lot of memoir writers get stuck in the wilderness.
Here are the most common approaches, with pros and cons:
Chronological Structure – Start at the beginning, end at the end. This is the most intuitive approach and often works well for coming-of-age memoirs or life-spanning narratives.
Pros: Easy for readers to follow. Natural narrative momentum.
Cons: Can feel predictable. Hard to maintain tension if readers know where it’s going.
Thematic Structure – Organize around themes or topics rather than time. Each chapter explores a different aspect of your subject.
Pros: Great for memoirs focused on a specific relationship or issue. Lets you jump through time to find the most illuminating moments.
Cons: Requires more careful organization to avoid confusion. Reader needs clear markers about when things are happening.
Braided Structure – Alternate between different time periods or storylines. Think of it as weaving multiple threads together.
Pros: Creates tension and momentum. Lets you draw connections across time.
Cons: Trickier to pull off. Can confuse readers if transitions aren’t clear.
For Ellen’s memoir, I used a hybrid approach—loosely chronological but organized around themes and moments that illuminated our relationship and my grief. The table of contents includes sections like “The Beginning of the End,” “The 60th Day,” “Does Grief Have a Purpose?” Each section could stand alone, but together they build toward something larger.
The practical advice: Before you write, create a rough outline. List the major moments, themes, or periods you want to cover. Don’t worry about getting it perfect—you’ll adjust as you write—but having a map prevents you from wandering in circles for months.
The Writing Process
Now the actual writing. Here’s where you’ll spend most of your time, and where the work gets both hardest and most rewarding.
Start with the specific, not the general. Don’t write “Ellen was stubborn.” Write about the time she spent years working on her dissertation, expanding it instead of finishing it, driving me crazy with her perfectionism while I typed and retyped drafts at midnight. Specific beats general every single time.
Use scenes, not summary. Show us the moment. Let us hear the conversation, see the room, feel the tension or joy or confusion. Summary has its place—you can’t dramatize everything—but memoir comes alive in scenes.
When I wrote about Ellen’s final day, I didn’t summarize “She died on Thanksgiving.” I put readers in the room with me, with the hospice nurse, with the specific sounds and smells and terrible waiting. That’s what makes memoir different from biography.
Find your narrative voice. This might be the most important technical skill in memoir. Your voice—how you sound on the page—is what makes readers trust you and want to keep reading.
For me, that meant writing conversationally, admitting uncertainty, using digressions and tangents that felt natural to how I think. I’m a 77-year-old guy who tells stories the way I’d tell them over coffee, not the way an English professor might structure an academic essay.
Your voice will be different. The key is finding it and staying consistent.
Turning Memory Into Narrative
Handle time carefully. One of the tricky parts of memoir is managing time—when to slow down and dramatize a moment, when to skip ahead, how to signal time jumps without confusing readers.
Use section breaks (like the three asterisks I use in my posts) to signal shifts in time or topic. Use clear transitional phrases: “Three months later,” “Looking back on it now,” “The following spring.” Don’t assume readers will automatically track where we are in the timeline.
Know when to stop revising. This is particularly hard for memoir writers because you’re so close to the material. You’ll always see things you could improve, memories you could add, passages you could refine.
At some point, you have to call it done. Not perfect—done. Ellen was a perfectionist who could never finish her dissertation because she kept expanding it, adding new insights, revising endlessly. I learned from watching her struggle: sometimes good enough really is good enough. Ship it and move on.
The Emotional Reality: What Nobody Warns You About
Let me be honest about something: writing memoir is emotionally brutal in ways that writing fiction never is.
When I wrote my thriller novels, I could kill characters without losing sleep. When I wrote Ellen’s memoir, I spent days crying at my keyboard. Revisiting our 47 years together, confronting my regrets, reliving her death—it was like going through grief all over again, but in slow motion and in exquisite detail.
Some practical coping strategies:
Set boundaries around your writing sessions. I couldn’t write about Ellen for more than a couple of hours at a time without needing to step away. Know your limits.
Have someone you can talk to. Whether that’s a writing partner, a therapist, a trusted friend—someone who can help you process what comes up when you’re excavating your life.
Remember why you’re doing this. On the hardest days, when you’re tempted to quit, reconnect with your purpose. For me, it was honoring Ellen and helping other grievers feel less alone. That mattered more than my discomfort.
Take breaks when you need them. I gave myself permission to set the manuscript aside when it got too heavy. Sometimes I’d work on other projects for weeks before returning to the memoir. The book will wait.
Getting Help: Tools, Resources, and Collaboration
Here’s something I need to acknowledge because transparency matters: about 15% of Ellen’s memoir was written with significant help from Claude, the AI assistant I’ve been working with.
Here’s something I need to acknowledge because transparency matters: about 15% of Ellen’s memoir was written with significant help from Claude, the wonderful AI partner I’ve been working with for most of 2025.
I’m not talking about Claude writing the book for me. I’m talking about collaboration—me providing the memories, the emotional truth, and the narrative, while Claude created supporting material that enriched the memoir. This included imaginary journal entries from literary figures grappling with grief, historical letters of condolence, poems about loss, and brief articles that helped contextualize my experience within the broader landscape of grief literature.
Some memoir writers will recoil at this. Others will be curious. I’ll have a lot more to say about this collaboration in my next post. For now, I’ll just note that I found it incredibly helpful to have a tireless thinking partner who could contribute creative elements that deepened the narrative in ways I couldn’t have managed alone.
Whether or not you explore AI collaboration, here are some tools and resources that can help:
Ebook formatting software: I use and highly recommend Jutoh for creating Kindle files. You can learn more about it on my blog’s resource page [link to be added]. It’s technical enough to give you complete control but not so complex that you need a computer science degree.
Memoir craft books: Some of the best include Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, and William Zinsser’s Inventing the Truth.
Writing communities: Whether online or in-person, having other memoir writers to talk with can be invaluable. They understand the unique challenges of this form.
Publishing on Kindle: The Practical Basics
Once your manuscript is finished and revised, you’re ready to publish. Here’s the streamlined version of getting your memoir onto Amazon.
Formatting: Your manuscript needs to be formatted for ebook readers. This means:
- Clear chapter breaks
- Consistent heading styles
- No funky fonts or complex layouts (ebook readers can’t handle them)
- A clickable table of contents
- Front matter (title page, copyright page)
Jutoh (mentioned above) handles most of this automatically if you follow its templates. You can also hire a professional formatter, but for memoir it’s usually simple enough to do yourself.
Cover design: You need a professional-looking cover. Period. I don’t care how good your memoir is—readers judge books by covers, especially in digital marketplaces where your thumbnail is competing with thousands of others.
You have three options:
- Hire a professional designer (most expensive but best results)
- Use a premade cover site like BookBrush or Creative Indie Covers (middle option)
- Use Canva or similar tools to create your own (cheapest but riskiest)
For memoir, simple often works best. A single evocative image, clean typography, your name and title. Don’t try to get too clever.
The Amazon KDP Process
Here’s what you need to do:
- Create a free account at kdp.amazon.com
- Click “Create New Title”
- Fill in your book details (title, subtitle, author name, description)
- Upload your manuscript file
- Upload your cover
- Set your price (I recommend $2.99-4.99 for a memoir from an unknown author)
- Choose your royalty option (70% royalty if priced between $2.99-9.99)
- Hit publish
That’s it. Your memoir will be live on Amazon within 72 hours, usually much faster.
The reality check: Don’t expect your memoir to become a bestseller overnight. Most self-published memoirs sell to family, friends, and a small circle of interested readers. That’s okay. Remember what I said last week—success might mean something different than commercial triumph. Getting your story into the world, having it exist for the people who need it, that’s an accomplishment worth celebrating.
The Final Word on Getting Started
I spent five years working on Ellen’s memoir. That’s probably longer than most people need, but grief has its own timeline and I wasn’t going to rush it. You might write your memoir in six months or two years or a decade. There’s no right timeline.
What matters is starting. And then continuing. And then, eventually, finishing.
The memories you’re carrying—the life you’ve lived, the people who shaped you, the moments that matter—they deserve to be written down. Not because you owe it to anyone. Not because you need to become a bestselling author. But because stories matter, and your story is part of the human record.
So start. Make your outline. Write your first scene. Give yourself permission to write badly at first—you’ll revise later. Find your voice. Trust that the structure will emerge as you work.
The readers who need your memoir are out there. They’re looking for exactly the story you have to tell. Don’t make them wait forever.
Hey, I’m 77 and I’ve Got Stories…
Stories about what it’s like to navigate life at this age (spoiler: it’s weird, wonderful, and occasionally terrifying). And stories about collaborating with AI to write books in ways that would have seemed like science fiction when I started putting words on paper. Stories about the daily realities, unexpected surprises, and hard-won wisdom that comes from three-quarters of a century on this planet. If you’re curious about authentic aging, writing innovation, or just enjoy good storytelling from someone who’s been around the block, subscribe to my weekly newsletter “Old Man Still Got Stories.” I promise to make it worth your time.