Memoir writers, you need to take a different approach to plotting than writers tackling a straight NF.
When you plan a memoir or biography, you tell your story in moments or dramatic scenes. You cannot narrate your entire story or life, so you need to select key moments from your life that dramatise the journey. So, if you are telling a story of your mother’s battle with dementia, you are going to find those key events or moments that tell her story.
You may jump decades ahead at times. You may leave out huge parts of your life. Is your story about your child’s lymphoma? Then perhaps it starts a few days before the diagnosis and travels that tight journey.
The key to memoir planning is to choose which scenes (or stories) you want to include and which you need to leave out… possibly for another book.
You build a memoir (and many non-fiction books) using scenes, not chapters.
Scenes are the smaller moments that, taken together, build the story. This means you are telling your story in a series of events, each one illustrating the larger story.
Each scene (event) functions as its own small story and has a beginning, middle and end.
Each scene is short, and self-contained. But it drives your story forward
Driving your story forward means it needs to end with the reader wanting to know … what happened next?
Each scene will be full of detail and colour as if the reader is in your shoes and living your life.
Time is not always important. You can jump decades ahead, or choose all your scenes over a period of a few hours.
Aim for a list of between 50-80 key scenes. You can group 3-5 scenes into a chapter.
A rough memoir outline/scene list looks something like this:
1. I meet Mark during the riot
2. The proposal on the beach, we fall overboard
3. Our first anniversary night, he looks ill
4. Over two weeks he gets worse
5. The first doctor’s visit
6. We find out I am pregnant, Mark collapses
7. The doctor tells us Mark’s diagnosis
All scenes need to drive your story forward, but you may need some scenes that ‘set the scene’.
These could be:
Scenes that introduce a character, a house, a family.
Scenes that introduce the era, location or political context.
You do not have to connect the scenes. If you select them well, they will tell a logical story without you having to explain.
You may want a scene that covers an entire lifetime / career in order to set that person up.
Non-Fiction (NF) writers,
As you start to write, you will notice you need to expand your TOC or chapter list. You are going to progressively break your chapters down into smaller content buckets using subheadings or text boxes. This is because a chapter needs structure. It is not a long and rambling diatribe.
In non-fiction, these buckets or sections that make up each chapter may be elements such as:
Personal sharing of your own story
Client anecdotes
A list of tips
Research
A box with case studies
A section with your lessons
A section with someone’s (good or bad) advice
Other people’s stories, letters, emails, interviews
A task lists for your reader
Exercises for your reader
An ‘in a nutshell’ chapter summary
It is also a good idea to try and keep your structure consistent. This means in every chapter your reader expects to see the same structure.
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