What’s the Point of Your Memoir?
If you had a wild thing happen to you and you want to tell the world about it, that’s great! That’s a memoir! But if that’s all there is and it’s just a story without a lesson or purpose, it kind of feels like a waste for the reader. Maybe it was entertaining, but what did they learn from it?
Moral of the Story
You don’t always have to have a big moral of the story at the end like every episode of Full House; it can be a little more subtle. But at least think about what you learned during this experience. Why are you telling us this story? Are we supposed to learn from your mistakes? Did you have a takeaway from it that we can get from it too?
You need to know this before you write because it will likely be a recurring theme throughout writing. This “purpose of writing” should come up several times throughout the book. If it doesn’t come up at all until the end, maybe you should pick a different purpose because that’s a sign it’s forced and not very representative of the book.
If you have a few lessons you want the reader to learn from reading your book, that works too! Nothing wrong with that. As long as you have one, you’re good.
An Example
If you spent a year researching bugs in the Amazon Rainforest, you probably had some great adventures and a lot of stories to tell when you got home. Now you want to write a book about it to share your experience. Awesome, I can’t wait to read it! But if you’re just writing story after story without a lesson or point, I’m gonna be bored. There’s no reason for me to keep reading.
So what can you do? Writing a memoir is a really personal experience, and it requires deep contemplation. Use that reflection time to realize what you learned during your year in the Amazon. Maybe you learned how important it is to follow your dreams and do the oddball thing your parents are wary of. Or you learned that the bug you were studying is crucial to the ecosystem there but it’s dying out—now you have an environmentalist book. If that’s what you want to teach, drive that home! Tell us how we can solve this problem of the endangered Amazon bug. Or maybe, after camping for a year, you learned how lucky you are to have a roof over your head at home with running water. The point of that book is you realized you were taking the small things for granted, and now you’re working hard to appreciate those.
All of these are great options, and as you can see, there are a million more lessons you can teach the reader from your one trip to the Amazon. But you can’t just throw this lesson in at the end. You have to know what it is when you start writing.
What Does This Look Like in the Book?
If you’re still not sold on this, let’s go through those examples to see how the focus of the book would change depending on the lesson you choose.
Follow your dreams: This book will likely start with you first hearing about this trip and thinking it sounds cool. Then you research it and bring it up with your friends and family, and they think it’s ridiculous. You’re discouraged, but the idea lingers. You mention it to them again and say you really want to do this thing. They’re hesitant—maybe outright rude—but you persevere. And then it ends up being the best experience of your life. While you’re in the Amazon, you talk about how you wish you could have had support but you’re so happy you came even without it.
Save the Amazon bug: This book might start with you first learning about this bug or your interest in the environment and nature. Maybe you talk about when you first learned about climate change or polluted oceans or some other environmental issue. Throughout your journey in the Amazon, you’ll stress how amazing and fragile the ecosystem is. You’ll convince us how cute and awesome this bug is, and then you’ll drop the bomb on us that it’s going extinct. The reader is now heartbroken for this poor bug and will do anything to save it. Then you end the book telling us exactly how to do that.
Appreciate the small things: This book might focus on how much you hate camping, how sticky it is there, how annoying the mosquitos are, how much you just want some fresh baked goods. If the whole book is about how terrible it is in the Amazon, that’s going to be a downer, but those details can be sprinkled in. When you get home, you can tell us how cozy it is and how you’ll never take those things for granted again. You might also realize when you get home that you miss being in nature and how quiet it was there and how good the air smelled and how simple things were. When you were there, you were too busy worrying about how itchy and sweaty you were to really appreciate those things. And now that you’re home, you miss that. Now you have new resolve to always live in the moment and appreciate what you have.
Can you see how this is all about the same trip to the Amazon, and yet, they’re all so different? If you write your stories, then decide after that what the point of it all is, you’re going to have to do some massive rewriting. Save yourself the time. Decide first, then write.
