Your Opening Chapter is Important

One of the most important elements of a memoir is the opening chapters. Your readers may forgive you some sloppy writing in the middle of your book, but if you write a weak opening, you won’t grab your audience. If your readers aren’t intrigued at the beginning of your memoir, they’ll never find out how the story ends—because they just won’t care.

I know this is true for me, and how I choose books. How about you?

Try Before You Buy

In the old days, I’d rock up to a book shop and read the first pages (usually a very short one because chapters historically start half way down the page), and then flip to a random page in the middle of the book. If I wasn’t grabbed by either of those two sections … whether it was the topic or the writing style, I’d put the book back on the shelf.

Now we have Amazon, and you can Look Inside the books you’re interested in, or use the Request a Free Sample feature, to get the beginning of the book sent to your device (or read it online using your web browser).

I’ll usually use the Look Inside Feature and see if the first couple of pages grabs me, and then if I’m intrigued, I’ll Request a Sample so that I can continue reading on my Kindle.

My Preview Review of Memoirs Project

I want to write a killer opening to my memoir, but I need to get an insight into what will work and what doesn’t. Obviously I’m judging this based on my personal insights and perceptions, but because I’ve read a lot of memoirs (it’s my favorite book genre), It doesn’t take me long to determine if I will like a book or not.

So I’m launching my Preview Review of Memoirs project so that I can read what works and what doesn’t (in my humble opinion), so that I can get some tips about how to start my memoirs. The opening is going to be one of the last segments I write, so I have time to implement my learnings before I finished the first draft of my first memoir.

• If I wasn’t grabbed by a memoir’s opening, I won’t provide the title or author, and will write about the content in a generic way to highlight what I didn’t like and why it didn’t grab me.
• If a memoir grabs me, I’ll include the title and author so you can read the book’s preview for yourself.

The goal of my Preview Review Project is to create a reference library of memoir openings that work, so that we can deconstruct the mythology and approach that can be used for our memoirs.

If you’ve encountered a memoir that has an opening that works (it grabs your attention, and hooks you into the book), send me an email at bethmcqueenauthor @ gmail.com.

Here’s my first Preview Review to get us started.

Eating Disorder Memoir

I got a link through Freebooksy to announce this memoir was Free to download, but by the time I read the email, the book was already at it’s regular list price. But I read the opening anyway just incase it was a compelling memoir I wanted to buy.

What Worked:

• A short prologue to set the scene of a major life event, that introduces the writer’s condition of being severely under weight. This worked to intrigue me to discover what tale she had to tell.

Why I Lost Interest:

• The first chapter flashed back to the author as a four year old who has received detention in the naughty chair. Then it flashes even further back to what a great relationship she has with her mum and dad.
• Then it jumps back to the naughty chair as the author talks about all the different transgressions she’s done to make her a naughty girl in school. She told numerous scenes of her different misbehaviors. So much so that I felt she was hitting me over the head with it, it seem repetitive.
• She was painting herself as a troublesome child, but in order to keep me reading I needed to like the character.
• I assume she was doing this as it is a major contributor to the theme/plot, but I wasn’t compelled to carry on reading.
• It just felt like it was just listing a load of events to show how naughty the child was and it was too repetitive, with nothing driving the scene. Just observations. I feel that the beginning has to have more oomph in it, and use later chapters and scenes to cover the fill in.

Scene Structure: Creating Conflict

Addendum to this summary: I was doing some additional research about conflict in a scene, which I kind of understood when I read about it, but still wasn’t clear what kind of actions constituted conflict. So I did some additional research and came across this video about conflict.

Listen to what Ellen Brock (editor) has to say about how pointless this listing of bad events is.

If they’re only included to demonstrate how hard a person’s life is, or trying and make you feel sorry for them, it can feel irrelevant. It drags the story down because it’s not advancing the plot.

Look Inside! is the trademark feature of Amazon.

Theme	Characters	Plot