In writing my own memoir, as I’m currently doing, I’m doing to myself what I have done with my clients so many times. As such, I’m confronting how very very hard it is to tell a story that is absolutely bogged down in feelings. And yet, I don’t want it to be about my feelings, which would ultimately make it depressing and lacking in suspense. And I don’t want readers to have to re-experience my feelings with me. That would be cruel.
As I’ve been writing, I’ve been happy with my results, because, after all, this is the 31st book I’ve written, so I know what I’m doing, but because I’m so close to the work, I’m inspired this time to analyze how I get from a heap of raw feelings to a story, and here is the basic formula, if you want to really simplify things:
How to Write Traumatic Memoir Stories without the Trauma
Make a timeline of events. The more traumatizing the story, the harder it usually is to remember it in order, so the way to do this is first get all the feelings on paper, then go through the mess and write a simple list of events that happened to bring about those feelings in the order they happened. “Events” includes revelations you had, at the time that you had them, and what actions/events caused those changes in your mindset. Now, we’re moving into the realm of story and character arc and away from diary writing.
Now that you have your timeline in place, you don’t have to start the story at the beginning but can choose any point in time that feels like a dramatic opening. And you don’t have to tell the whole story, either. The way I’m staying sane in the emotional story I’m telling right now is that I’ve decided just to tell the end of the story in such detail that it becomes the story. The first part—the incredibly painful part—is implied by the events of the second part. I’m letting readers figure out for themselves exactly what happened, which is a fun mystery to keep their brains engaged, anyway. You see, I want to write a book about it but weirdly I don’t want to talk about it. This is a problem a lot of my ghostwriting clients also face.
Just know that if you get that initial boring paperwork of a timeline done, then you choose where in that timeline you want to start telling the story, that gives you a bit of a paint-by-numbers method for moving forward with any memoir that’s steeped in trauma and feels, at first, too painful to tell.