Memoirs are among the best-selling genres on Amazon after religious and spiritual books. First things first, if you want to write a memoir that will actually sell, you have to ensure that you are doing all the right things, such as starting from the outline first.
Starting with an outline is especially important if you are at the very start of your writing journey, as you will get to organize your memories and decide exactly what you want your memoir to be about. The following tips will help you get the outline of your memoir right.
Keep reading.
Structure Your Memoir Like Fiction
The first thing that you should do when structuring your memoir is to structure it like fiction. Keep in mind that your journey of writing a memoir can be emotional or physical. The thing is that everyone’s life and everyone’s message is different.
Conflicts, external and internal, will also exist in your memoir. Think about the all-is-lost moment. Also, what is the climax and resolution?
You get the point: despite the fact that a memoir is essentially non-fiction, you will still be heavily relying on your craft of storytelling to get the narrative in front of your ideal readers and to have them hooked onto the pages.
You must identify the crucial plot points, some of which we mentioned earlier, to make the construction of the scenes of the memoir so much easier. If you have the perfect plot for the memoir but do not have the time and energy to write about it, you can always hire a memoir ghostwriter to get the book out in the hands of your ideal readers.
It is important to mention here that it can be incredibly tough to choose the elements of life that should be part of the memoir and which parts to skip better. You should know that the thing that makes a memoir different from a biography is not that it is simply a catalog of every little thing that you have gone through.
Keep in mind that a memoir is essentially a carefully curated list of life events that are exclusively designed to communicate a specific message.
Select the Theme Carefully
When someone reads your memoir, they don’t know who you are. As a matter of fact, the chances are high that they will pick up your book because of the theme that you are writing about. When your ideal readers pick up your book, they don’t want to read about you; they want to read about the theme of your memoir, such as living with a chronic illness, overcoming addiction, dealing with obesity, etc.
They might want to know about climbing out of poverty by starting a small business. Generally, unless you are a presidential candidate or another very important figure, you cannot think about selling your memoirs off your name or picture.
Although you are not as famous as a pop singer or a presidential candidate, you still have the ability to touch the hearts and minds of your ideal readers on a wide scale with your memoirs. The only thing that you must focus on is to choose your theme carefully and construct your scene list around that theme.
Create a List of Scenes
Once you have decided on the theme of the memoir, you will know the appropriate plot points to include in your memoir; you need to choose which scenes of your life will contribute to the story. This aspect also includes the backstory, which are events that take place before the potential timespan in which your memoir takes place.
Keep the backstory to a minimum, as you should avoid all aspects of info dumping, even when you are writing a memoir. There are countless things that happened in your life – all of them, in some way or another contributed to who you are as a person.
However, not all of the life events contribute to the existing theme of your memoir. On that note, you must be absolutely ruthless in your scene selection. You should exercise this sort of ruthlessness while you are working on your first draft of the memoir and also in your self-editing phase.
Put Things in Order
Once you have the list of scenes, you need to put them in order. It is important to mention here that you don’t necessarily have to place all of the scenes in chronological order. Like all great books that have the readers hooked from the very start, you want to start off your memoir with the same exciting hook as a way to instantly grab the attention of your readers.
The point is that you want to grab the reader’s attention from the very start, so they keep coming back for more.
Often, because memoirs aren’t as exciting as a psycho-thriller, you might want to include a prologue. Now, some people would argue against prologues – but – when it comes to writing a memoir, prologues are often necessary.
The worst thing that you can do is to start things off slow and get off on the wrong track. By doing so, not only will you impact your memoir, but you will also send your readers into the realm of boredom.
Take Care of Legal Due Diligence
When crafting the outline for your memoir, place a star next to anybody’s name who appears in your story and whom you will need to get a release. Place a different symbol next to someone that you will need to obscure. When it comes to legal due diligence, you need to change their names, their height, and even their gender – if you can.
The reason why you need to obscure these people is because you will be writing unflattering things about them. On that note, you will find it very unlikely for someone to be calm about unflattering memoir portrayals.
The thing is that the laws are different in each region, which is why you want to be very careful when writing unflattering things about someone – even if all of it is true, as you don’t want to get sued for written defamation.
