At the beginning of our memoir process we shouldn’t focus on chronology, because we don’t know where our beginning is.

So instead of trying to figure out where your beginning is, and identifying the different scenes within your plot, it’s best to put that chronological/ linear approach aside, and do some big-picture thinking.

TASK: Use a free writing / stream of consciousness approach to capture a broad-strokes view of what we know about our story.

Here’s five prompts to use for your free writing session:

1. What is our Story About?
2. What are the themes related to the conflict you’re trying to resolve?
3. What obstacles will you meet along the way?
4. Where will your story take you?
5. Who are the Characters?

These prompts should be all the inspiration you need to link creatively. Don’t worry about when they took place, or the relationship between the things you’re including in your list. Don’t censor yourself. Just use this process as a brain dump to get all your thoughts down on a page.

This list is just a moment in time, and will grow and evolve through the memoir writing process.

You may decide to maintain this list, or use it as a stepping stone to get you to a different stage of your outlining process. But the whole goal of this approach is to think creatively and let go of your reliance on chronology.

Create a 1st Draft Story Premise

When you have your bullet point list showing what your story is about, have a go at formulating a story premise that includes: protagonist, objective, situation, antagonist, disaster, and conflict.

Here’s the first draft of my story premise:

• Independent girl Beth (protagonist)
• wants to leave her corporate life and become a digital nomad (objective)
• but when her 5 year plan falls apart (situation),
• because her husband (antagonist)
• decides he doesn’t want to leave Los Angeles (disaster),
• Beth takes drastic action to get the life she wants, even though she risks losing everything. (conflict).

For the memoir I’m currently writing I put together the above premise, by looking through my bullet point list and identify each element of the story.

I had a vague view of the outline before I started, but this story premise was an effective way to double check I had all of the critical elements essential for a good story.

Obviously there’s a long way to go to develop this story premise into a full-fledged outline, but it’s a building block. One that’s helped me feel like I’m making progress and moving in the right direction.

Making progress not only helps us to feel like we’re getting somewhere, but it also helps to reduce that feeling of being overwhelmed. I feel like this premise is an anchor that will help me build an constructive outline.

Theme	Characters	Plot