Before you start

Even before we sit down to write, many of us put ourselves off by telling ourselves that our lives are either too boring and ordinary to interest anyone else and the urge to write about them is probably a symptom of a narcissistic personality we’d better squash down and keep to ourselves.

Or we tell ourselves that our lives are too odd and strange and different for other people to ever really understand them or get anything valuable from reading about them.

Most of us, as a matter of fact, are capable of putting ourselves off before we start by convincing ourselves that these two quite opposite things are true at exactly the same time.

This isn’t quite a paradox. It is possible, of course, to be both special and ordinary. Most of us have lives filled with some unusual and dramatic experiences, as well as long stretches of the mundane. And of course, what’s mundane for you might well be exotic or fascinating for someone else.

Still, if these worries stop you getting to the page, the cure is to read memoir: as many as you can get your hands on. If you don’t like the one you’ve started, try to figure out why, then put it down and find another. Libraries are great for this: you can borrow as many was you want.

I’ve really enjoyed the beauty and strangeness found in the daily narration of a commute to work in Paris – ordinary to the author Lauren Elkin, but extraordinary to me – in her book No 91/92: Notes on A Parisian Commute. I’ve treasured reading about Noreen Masud’s visit to Morecambe Bay in her book A Flat Place – she’d never been before but I walk my dog there all the time – what was new for her was ordinary to me and seeing it through her eyes made it a little fresher and stranger to me again too. Nikesh Shukla’s memoir Brown Baby – a memoir addressed to his daughter – thinks hard about grieving a mother and experiencing racism. I haven’t experienced those things so the memoir gives me the gift of knowing something new, but it also lets me connect to the shared, familiar experience of parenthood, and the ordinary human worry of raising a child.

Once you’ve watched yourself read for a while, you’ll notice that most of the memoirs and life stories that speak to you will tell stories that combine the ordinary and the unique in interesting ways. It’s why I love the form – it can hold the shared experience of common humanity through the strangeness of the individually experienced life.

The first 500 words

Lean into the ordinary first: it’s a good place to practice focusing attention, searching for detail and shaping a scene.

Write 500 words about your commute to work or some other journey you make regularly. Pay attention not to what generally happens, but what specifically happened the last time you took that journey.

If you want to work further back, you can think about your journey to and from school when you were a child – but instead of capturing the general gist of a route you know well, try to pick one specific day to write about vividly.

Finding a shape

Most writers need to show their first drafts someone to get an opinion on how the writing is working. As you get started, you can ask your friends or members of writing groups to help you out with this. You can even do feedback swaps.

As you gain in experience, you might have a teacher or an editor that will help suggest changes too. Even very experienced writers work with editors and take their work through several drafts before it is finished.

Having said that, all writers need to learn to be their own first editor too. It can help to ‘tidy up’ a piece of work before you seek that first feedback, and the act of doing that first edit can help you find focus and see more clearly what the piece might be about before you show it to someone else. Here are two tips than can help you shape that first 500 words into a sleeker, clearer mini-memoir piece.

Finding the scene

First, look out for places where you slip into the general or where you are summarising lots of events very quickly:

I walked from from school through the park every day, whatever the weather. There were always seagulls waiting around at that time, probably waiting for whatever was left in the crisp packets and chocolate wrappers we dropped as we walked along. It was an old-fashioned park: there was a bit water fountain that sometimes had fish in it, and a rose garden, and a place where you could play tennis, though we never did. We’d walk through the centre, right over the grass even though you weren’t supposed to, and hang around for hours after school on sunny days.

Sentences like these tell us generally what tended to happen during a longer span of time. Or they might describe a place quite generally, without settling on a specific event.

You can introduce scenes like this, but it isn’t until you move into the specific that the reader will be really engaged with the texture of the story about your life you want to tell.

Compare the first attempt to this second attempt, where the general is replaced with a specific day that is being remembered:

The day the school holidays started, it was so hot my nose gut sunburned as I did my usual walk through the park to go home. I always went that way – over the grass where I wasn’t supposed to walk, past the seagulls that hung around waiting to peck at dropped litter, past the water fountain too. Sometimes the fountain had fish in, but it didn’t that day: maybe it was too hot. I crossed the tennis court through I didn’t stop to play. Sometimes we did hang around, but that afternoon I’d be told to come home right away.

Check that all these general sentences are earning their keep, and if they might not be better edited towards the particular and the specific.

Sensing, thinking and direct writing

Next, look out for phrases like ‘I heard’ or ‘I saw’ or ‘I thought’ or ‘I wondered’ or ‘I remembered’. These works sneak into first drafts of memoir a lot, especially if you’re thinking hard about a vivid experience and really striving to bring your reader into the moment.

You hardly ever need phrases that are about sensing (so hearing, seeing, smelling, listening, gazing etc) or words to do with thinking (remembering, wondering, imagining etc.)

The reader already knows it is you doing the hearing, seeing and thinking and cutting these phrases can bring some directness and liveliness to the writing.

Here’s an example, with the words about sensing and thinking marked up in red:

I remember the time I walked home after school and turned up at the house late after playing in the park during the heatwave. My head felt so hot. I got near the house and heard my dad shouting at me to come in. I wondered if I was going to get in trouble; I thought he’d be so angry at me and I could see him standing on the step, waiting for me. It turned out my mum had gone into labour and had my baby brother a week early, right in the kitchen.

Here’s that same passage, now in a second draft, and edited to take all the words about sensing and thinking out…

Once, I walked home after school and turned up at the house late after playing in the park during the heatwave. My head was so hot. I got near the house and my dad was shouting at me to come in. Was I going to get in trouble? He was going to be so angry with me – there he was, standing on the stop waiting for me. It turned out my mum had gone into labour and had my baby brother a week early, right in the kitchen.

Better, right?

What next

If you’ve followed these steps, you should have a fairly well edited and nicely shaped passage of memoir about an ordinary moment in your life. This is a scene – one fragment of a longer story.

Where you go next is up to you. You could follow on directly to the event that happened afterwards and take a chronological approach.

Or you could take up the theme – journeys, or walks, or train journeys or parks, or arrivals home, or (following my example) times you thought someone was angry with you but you were wrong about it – and write about the same theme in a different time and place.

If you do this a few times, you’ll often see patterns of meaning developing: the more complicated themes of our lives given to the reader through these ordinary, carefully shaped moments.