Writing Memoir Scenes That Work: Choosing What Stays in Your Memoir and What Goes

After working on your memoir for a while, choosing which scenes will make it to the final draft and which to cut can be daunting. Sifting through hundreds of pages of material you know intimately to find what you really need can feel like rooting around a teenager’s very messy room: beloved T-shirts spill from drawers, gym clothes and damp towels cover the floor, gum wrappers and hair clips lie everywhere—yes, dear reader, I live with teenagers.

(5 Tips for Turning a Personal Story Into a Book.)

Make culling easier for yourself by remembering that you are writing a memoir, not an autobiography. If you want to share a chronological and detailed account of your life, by all means, throw everything that has happened to you in your book and call it an autobiography. A memoir, however is not an exhaustive list of each trial and tribulation the memoirist has endured. A memoir is a period of time, situation, or experience the memoirist excavates in order to discover patterns within themselves and make meaning on the page.

Memoirs, as my MFA teacher at Pacific University Debra Gwartney needed to remind me when I was writing mine, are not only about what happened but what you make of that now. My memoir When She Comes Back is a coming-of-age story set in childhood, and childhood is 18 years long. I knew I wasn’t going to describe each afternoon I came home to an empty apartment, every night I cooked dinner for my sister and father, the many bedtimes I wondered when I would see my mother again. I needed to select moments that deeply impacted me; the memories I’d been revisiting most of my life because they’d lodged there in my history with their strange dynamics and questions about my family I couldn’t easily answer.

I began by making a list, as Debra Gwartney suggested I do, of eight to 10, maybe 12 events that I knew had to be in the memoir, and this is how I recommend my students approach their stories. Alongside these events you can jot down notes about why they are significant to you. Notice when you’re reflective, when you feel torn, when you’re equivocating. These elements are the building blocks of your scenes and will add nuance and depth to your manuscript.

After a draft or two, when you and your trusted readers have a sense of what problem the you in your memoir—the character you—is facing, the one the narrator you is trying to better understand, begin to hone your scenes with an eye for tension and stakes. Ask yourself: What does this scene illustrate, why is it important? Do you already have a scene like this? If you’re unsure, ask yourself how this one earns a place.

Remember, your memoir isn’t like the entire photo album of your life but the pictures that capture you and draw you closer because they have left a mark. The parts that snag.

In Beautiful Country, Qian Julie Wang writes of immigrating to the US as a child and the toll poverty, displacement, and being undocumented took on her and her family. In this excerpt, when faced with a decision to get in line for free food from a charitable organization or hide from employees she fears are immigration officials, 7-year-old Wang must make a choice: “My body gave in and, as it has all my life, my mind triumphed. Before my legs could protest, I broke into a full-on sprint, speeding down the street toward the safety of the sweatshop.” This scene illustrates Wang’s compliance and need to protect her family over her driving hunger; how fear marked her childhood, a sense of duty her every decision. It highlights a pattern in Wang’s behavior and offers a clue as to how she will cope as she moves through her childhood.

Hollywood Park is Mikel Jollett’s memoir of escaping a cult as a young child and his relationships with his father, his older brother who beats up on him when they are young, and his mother who lacks the emotional and material resources he needs. In this excerpt, Jollett and his brother, both in elementary school, get into a playground altercation with a bully, and for the first time, his big brother no longer has the upper hand: “He sobs under Brian Medford’s shoe. He looks so sad. I try to focus on the anger, the revenge for my bike, but it’s hard to look away from his face not to wonder if this is what was behind the anger. Maybe he would like to be in my place. Maybe in a different life somewhere we would switch. Maybe I would be the bad son and he would be the good son.” This is not simply a scene about brothers on a playground getting into a fight. Jollett cracks open this moment to reveal his younger self’s dawning awareness of how he and his brother each negotiate the circumstances of their family and his evolving understanding of himself.

In the detective story that is your memoir, scenes should work in concert to not only enrich your narrative and offer information about the characters, but keep the reader invested and turning the page. As Allison K. Williams writes in her craft book Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book, “Paying attention to your plot will help your memoir matter to the reader. Just like a novel you must engage them in your problem in the beginning, then give them hope you’ll solve the problem, and fear that you may not.”

Readers depend on you to show them what they need to see. Don’t dilute your story or overwhelm them with irrelevant facts and details. Don’t lose their trust and investment.

In a conversation I had with Williams on my podcast, she explained, “Yes, the great gift of memoir is showing readers ‘you’re not the only one who felt like this.’ But unless you are writing National Book Award-level prose our personal pain is not enough, no matter how honestly we express it.”

Comb through your manuscript to amplify the main problem confronting you. Ask yourself if your scenes earn a place in one or more of the following ways:

Show what’s important to the character you or narrator youHighlight a significant relationship and its dynamicIllustrate a pattern in your behaviorDepict something that the reader must know to understand your story/personal historySignificant enough event in and of itself

If you have scenes hanging around that don’t serve to build your story’s stakes and momentum, it’s time to do some housecleaning. The heartbeat of a memoir is a mind at work trying to make sense of what has occurred, why it still gnaws at us, and what we might do about it. As memoirists, our job isn’t merely to share circumstances we endured, but excavate and transform our experience so that readers engage and root for us as we propel them along our gripping journeys of self-discovery.