How to start a memoir when you don't know where to begin

The hardest part of a memoir is the first page. You have a lifetime of material and no idea which moment to begin with. This guide will help you choose.

First, find the question

A memoir is not your whole life. It is one story from your life, with a question at its heart. The question might be:

• How did I survive that year?
• Why did I leave, and was it the right decision?
• Who was my father, really?
• How did a kid from a council estate end up running a company?

Write your question down. Every chapter should help answer it. Anything that does not can go in a different book, or nowhere.

Seven ways to open

1. In the middle of the action. Start at a moment of tension and explain how you got there later. “The ambulance took eleven minutes. I counted every one.”

2. With a striking image. A single, concrete detail that sums up a world. “My mother kept the good biscuits in a tin marked ‘buttons’.”

3. With a confession. Tell the reader something surprising about yourself straight away. “For twenty years, I told everyone my father was dead. He was living in Leeds.”

4. With a turning point. The day everything changed: a letter, a phone call, a diagnosis, a departure.

5. With a place. Describe the house, street or town that shaped you, so the reader knows where they are.

6. With a voice. Open with something someone said to you that you never forgot.

7. At the end. Begin with where you are now, then go back. This works well for memoirs about recovery or reinvention.

None of these is better than the others. Choose the one that leads most naturally into your question.

Write a bad first page

Your first page will change. Almost every published memoir had its opening rewritten many times, often after the rest of the book was finished. Do not polish page one before you have written page fifty. Write it badly, then keep going.

Plan the shape before you write

Before chapter one, sketch the big turning points of your story on a single sheet of paper. Most memoirs have between five and ten. These become the backbone of your chapters.

Then decide on your timeline. Chronological is simplest. Alternating between past and present can add tension. Thematic memoirs, organised around ideas rather than dates, are harder to pull off but can be powerful.

Common mistakes

• Starting with your birth. Unless your birth was extraordinary, start later.
• Explaining too much. Trust the reader. Show the scene, and let them feel it.
• Settling scores. Readers can tell when a memoir is a weapon. Write with honesty, not revenge.
• Writing for everyone. Picture one reader, perhaps a grandchild or a stranger going through what you went through, and write to them.

Getting it written

Many people know their story intimately and still struggle to write it. If that is you, a memoir ghostwriter can interview you, find the shape of the story and write it in your voice, with you approving every chapter. It turns a project that might take years into one that takes months.