How to Write a Memoir When You Don't Like Writing

Why the blank page defeats almost everybody

An enormous number of people intend to write a memoir. Almost none finish one, and it is rarely because their life was uninteresting or because they lacked time.

Writing asks you to do four things simultaneously: remember, select, structure and compose. Talking asks you to do one. That is the entire difference, and it is why the same person who cannot produce a paragraph will happily tell you the same story brilliantly across a table.

The blank page adds a fifth problem: it demands you decide where to begin, which is a question with no good answer. Nobody remembers a life in order.

1. Talk it, and let somebody else do the typing

The oldest solution, and still a good one. Dictate into a phone, or talk to a family member who types. Modern automatic transcription is accurate enough that an hour of talking becomes a searchable draft in minutes.

The weakness: talking into a device with nobody asking anything produces about four minutes of material and a lot of throat-clearing. Most people need a prompt far more than they need a microphone.

2. Answer questions instead of writing chapters

Get a list of questions - there is one here - and answer one a day, in whatever form suits you. Written or spoken, a paragraph or ten minutes.

This works because a question is a much smaller task than a chapter, and because it removes the "where do I begin" problem entirely. Fifty answered questions is a memoir, assembled after the fact.

The weakness: a fixed list cannot follow up. It will never ask you about the thing you mentioned in passing, which is nearly always the best thing in the answer.

3. Write in fragments, never in chapters

For people who do like writing but stall at scale. Write one memory at a time, as long or short as it turns out to be, with no attempt at sequence or transitions. A paragraph about a coal stove. Half a page about a dog. Three lines about a teacher.

Do not order them, join them or edit them for months. Structure is an editing problem and it is far easier to solve once you have forty fragments than in advance of having any.

4. Get interviewed

The best of the four, and historically the most expensive - it is what people pay a personal historian or ghostwriter for.

An interview solves every problem the other three leave open. You do not choose where to start, because you are asked. You do not have to remember what is interesting, because somebody else notices. You do not have to structure anything, because that happens afterwards. And crucially, somebody follows up: you say “he never talked about the war” and a good interviewer asks about the first time he did.

That last part is what a question list can never do, and it is where almost all the material that surprises a family comes from.

How spoken words become readable prose

Speech is not writing. A transcript of a good storyteller is full of false starts, “anyway”, repetitions and sentences that turn round halfway through. Read raw, it can be dispiriting - people often conclude they speak badly, when in fact everyone does.

What turns a transcript into a chapter is modest:

• False starts and filler come out.
• Related pieces move together, since people circle back to a subject three times.
• Sentences that ran on get punctuation.
• Nothing is added, and no fact is invented.

The vocabulary and the images stay exactly as they were, because that is the whole value. It is the same work a ghostwriter does - and it is the part MyLifeMemoir automates, with every chapter shown to you before it counts.

Will it still sound like you?

It should, because the words are yours. The test is easy to apply: read a finished chapter and see whether you recognise the phrasing. If a sentence does not sound like something you would say, change it - every line stays editable.

And there is a settling of the question that writing has never had access to. Keep the recording with the chapter, and the reader can simply hear you say it. Why that matters.