GenresNon-fiction
Memoir
A life, shaped, not merely recalled.
A memoir is not a diary with the boring days left in, and it is not an autobiography that starts with your grandparents and ends last Tuesday. It is a life shaped around a question. Grief, illness, a childhood, a job, a place, a habit you had to leave: the reader needs to know, fairly early, why these years and not the others. The fact that the events happened to you is not, by itself, a reason for a stranger to care, though it is a good reason for you to write them down.
Memory is unreliable and that is allowed, so long as you don't pretend to a certainty you don't have. Scenes help. A memoir that only summarises will feel like a speech, while a memoir that only piles up scenes can forget to tell us what any of it meant. You are allowed to be the protagonist of your own book, including the unflattering parts. Protect other people's privacy where you should, and don't turn everyone else into a supporting actor who existed to teach you something. The best memoirs are curious about the writer, not impressed by them.
The kinds of book inside it
Coming of age
The book follows the years in which a person was assembled, and it needs a point of view that can look back without sanding the confusion off.
Grief
Loss is the subject, and the reader stays for the particular person who died and the particular life that has to continue.
Illness
The body becomes the plot, so the medical detail should be accurate and the person should remain larger than the diagnosis.
Travel memoir
The journey is real and so is the person taking it, and the places need to be more than a backdrop for a personal revelation.
Career
Work is the spine, which means the job has to be explained clearly enough that a reader outside the trade can feel the stakes.
Family
Other people share the story, and you owe them a fair portrait even when the family was the problem.
Addiction & recovery
Recovery is not a tidy arc you can sketch in advance, and the book is stronger when it includes the boredom and the relapses as well as the turning point.
When you want a first sketch, Storywell can draft a contents list in this vein. You are still the one who writes the book. Compose an idea.