Five Phases of Memoir Writing
Knowing where you are on the journey can ease your mind
Congratulations—you’ve decided to write a memoir! Or maybe you’re thinking more along the lines of “memoirs”—shorter pieces about different aspects of your life.
Either way, you’re embarking on a creative journey that will make you laugh, cry, stare blankly out the window, sit back in your chair with deep satisfaction, pull your hair out in frustration, and feel every other emotion known to humankind. You will learn, grow, and heal. This is exciting!
But how to start?
I believe there are five distinct phases in memoir writing. It can be helpful to think in terms of phases because it’s easy to get ahead of yourself, worrying about things that are concerns for further down the road. If you know what phase you’re in, you’ll know where to keep your focus. These phases apply whether you’re writing a few pages or a full-length book.
Exploration Phase
As someone just getting started, you, my friend, are in the Exploration Phase. And you may stay here for a while.
The Exploration Phase is when you explore the potential stories you could tell and write what I call “download drafts.” These are short, very rough drafts of stories, scenes, descriptions, or reflections that are just intended to capture your thoughts and memories with little concern about whether your writing is “good.” Often those in the Exploration Phase write just for their own eyes.
During this phase, you might also play around with Memoir Warm-Ups to activate memories, organize your thoughts, generate writing topics, and dip your toe in the memoir water.
The focus in this phase is to freely and nonjudgmentally explore what you have to say and develop your writing style. You’ll go from being a novice to being an actual writer. Even though your work at this stage will be a collection of miscellaneous rough drafts, you will in fact have a body of work and a regular writing practice. Yahoo!
The Exploration Phase is fun and you may want to continue it indefinitely. You don’t ever have to stop exploring your life stories, but if your goal is to finish a writing project of some kind, you will eventually move on to the next phase.
Clarification Phase
After a certain amount of time exploring, you’ll enter what I call the Clarification Phase. This is when you’ll make some preliminary decisions about what pieces of writing you want to develop further and what form they will take. You’ll narrow down your timeline, structure and themes.
At that point, you’ll feel like you kind of know where you’re going with your memoir project. I say “kind of” because the creative process is not linear and you will no doubt make many changes as you go along. But if someone asks about your memoir project, you’ll be able to explain what you’re up to with more confidence.
Refinement Phase
Once you have chosen your focus, it’s time for the Refinement Phase. Anything that doesn’t fit your vision will be “composted.” You never know what today’s trash might turn into later, so separate—but don’t delete—anything you’ve drafted that feels unneeded at the moment.
Besides removing material that isn’t relevant given the choices you’ve made, you’ll need to add in parts that are missing and write transitions to link everything together. During the Refinement Phase, you will also start thinking about making your writing more compelling and clear. If you’ve described what happened fairly superficially, you may want to develop certain scenes with dialogue, more elaborate description, and insightful reflections.
By the end of the Refinement Phase, you’ll have a fairly polished draft that you’ll feel okay about sharing.
Private Sharing Phase
Onward, to the Private Sharing Phase. Now it’s time to let trusted others read your work and give feedback. You may have been doing this all along, but now you have a more complete and coherent story to share.
People you might share with include friends or relatives who are featured in the piece, as well as a few objective readers who can read your story with unbiased eyes. If you’ll eventually be sharing your work with the general public, then I recommend a professional editor at this stage too. Once you’ve received your feedback, you’ll do another few rounds of revision and end up with a finished manuscript!
Publishing Phase
The fifth and final phase is, of course, publishing. Publishing doesn’t have to mean professional publishing or even self-publishing. It could just be that you staple a bunch of pages into a packet to give your kids. It all depends on who you want to share your story with. But by the end of this phase, you have a completed memoir project—however that might look.
As I mentioned, the creative process is not linear, and you may find yourself jumping around between these phases rather than going through them in an orderly fashion. Still, the trend will be in the general direction of starting with exploration and ending with a published piece.
Your Turn
How do you feel about the idea of spending time in an Exploration Phase before launching into writing in a more purposeful way?
What phase are you in right now? How do you know?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Memoir Warm-Ups are 10-minute activities to stimulate memories, inspire writing, and help get you started in a non-threatening way. You can customize each warm-up to whatever topic you’re writing about at the moment and reuse them later. They’re especially helpful for writers in the Exploration Phase. Get a free set of Warm-Ups here.
Would welcome thoughts on "Private Sharing Phase" and best venues for doing this: post the writing on a database such as Google docs that's shared with selected readers? Or, if one wants objective views, is there a way to do this on Substack?
No surprise here: I am still in the exploration phase – or back in it as I go round and round in the circle game, trying to figure this out. ;-)