This is part of my writing diary, where I try to unravel the conflicts and decisions I’m trying to master during the process of planning and writing a compelling and well-written memoir.

You may read how-to books about starting of with a premise, and then building your outline, and then mapping out your scenes. Or you may read about people who just write their memoir by the seat of their pants. Are you a plotter or a pantser? What a load of old bollocks!

You’re not going to write a good memoir unless you do some plotting. You need to either plot at the front end or plot at the back end, but as some point in the process you’re going to have to plot, or else your book is not going to be very good.

But what’s been getting me is how erratic and scattered my memoir writing process has become.

I’ll go down a path or target – the recent one was the structure of goal, conflict, disaster, reaction, dilemma, and decision elements in each and ever scene you write. And then I hopped over to my structure, and then I focused on my title and subtitle, then I polished up my premise. All the while using my 750 words morning pages to freewrite scene content.

Yesterday I started an excel worksheet (except I’m on a mac and it’s called Pages), and tried to identify the key scenes and plot out where the foreshadowing scenes could occur. I need make sure that some key plot point wasn’t just coming out of left field with no hint to the reader that it was coming.

And today I learned to think about show don’t tell.

There’s so much to learn. I want my memoir to be good, but I’m procrastinating, big time.

I’m sure there’s a methodical approach that would work for me, somewhere, but right now I’m taking the erratic scatter gun approach.

I’m spewing out scenes, and tickling other sections into submission, but it’s definitely a jump about all over the place approach.

I’m doing some pantsing … writing content to organize later. And I’m doing some plotting to try and get my outline framework organized. It’s a very confusing time, and my mind is feeling overwhelmed.

Writing a memoir is messy. Not only figuring out the structure and creating the content, but also the process of digging through my and figuring out what backstory elements I need to include in my memoir, I still need to delve into that backstory to provide a realistic character. This backstory approach is what you do with fiction, and it’s essential for memoir too.

I’m not sure if I’m just overwhelmed with the process of having to deal with the emotional impact of the why and how things happened in my past and how they’re impacting my world today.

That’s defiantly part of the problem, because I’ve come to some aha moments that I didn’t know. Or I knew, but I didn’t acknowledge. Or hadn’t taken a closer look at them. Or I had just accepted them as part of a lie I told myself about the impact of decisions or people in my past.

But now that I’m having to write about the why, the universal truth of why I’m doing things and acting in a specific way. I’m looking at my wounds and the reaction and emotional behaviors related to those old hurts.

When I started writing this memoir I thought I wanted to write a good story about my desire to quit my corporate life to travel (aka my external motivation). I wanted to learn to write a memoir that had move is common with fiction than nonfiction.

But I didn’t expect to go on an emotional journey. This is all good, and hopefully I can tap into the emotions and turmoil I feel and write an honest account of this experience in my memoir. It wasn’t what I planned, but this whole voyage of discovery is turning out to be a much more impactful experience than I imagined.

Does this mean that my memoir is going to be a lot harder to write, and is this why I’m procrastinating?

I’m glad that I’m moving forward with this writing process, but I’ve suddenly realized how hard it’s going to be.

If you’re on the same path, and want to write your memoir and are looking for some inspiration (or can provide some inspiration), please join in the conversation in the comments section below and lets get our memoirs written.

Theme	Characters	Plot