8 things I learnt about writing a memoir

Part therapy, part questioning your own memory, but a lorra, lorra fun.

I recently published a mini memoir series called Millionaire Mixed Tape, which you can rewind to here. I really enjoyed it - partly because I learnt so much. I thought I’d sum up my discoveries here.

1. Word count

When I embarked on writing a book, before I realised Substack existed, one of the many things I couldn’t get my head around was how I would ever manage to write enough words for it not just to be a long blog post.

By publishing one story across a number of articles, I was able to forget all about that and just get on with it. And by writing 7 ‘tracks’ I’ve realised, through maths, that as each post was around 1,400, I’ve probably done almost 10,000 words. If the average book is 80,000 words, then I’m an eighth of the way there! Wahoo!

2. Pace

Serialising your tale forces you to move the story along because within each article, at least something has to happen. This makes you skip through to the main ‘story points’ which helps you define what the story actually is. Within an article these little ‘events’ felt substantial enough to hang a story on, whereas when I was thinking in terms of a book, they felt too puny.

3. Outline

By writing in this way, I realised I’ve inadvertently created an outline, a structure of sorts. If I want to, I could come back and unpack more of the story later because I’ve done the ‘hard’ bit. This is perhaps why structure and planning is so important when it comes to writing a book. (But who wants to ‘plan’ or bother with boring old ‘structure’ when they’re itching to tell their story?!)

4. Experimentation

Because you’re writing articles, you can also play about with making each one stand alone, in case people are just dipping in. I think this is also why each track ended up having its own ‘theme’.

This is also helpful when looking at the data. All tracks have ended up with roughly the same likes as each other, but the one slowest to pull in those likes was the Track 5: Sisters are doing it for themselves. This had a bit of a ‘feminist’ angle to it, so perhaps it wasn’t for all.

The widest readership seems to have been Track 3: The slightest touch, which I worried was a bit too much of an economics lesson, so that was a pleasant surprise.

5. Tension

I really enjoyed leaving things on a cliffhanger. This was actually more to do with wanting to take a break from the story when it got too emotional, rather than anything premeditated. But actually I really enjoyed the power over stopping and starting a story at whichever point I chose, which leads me too…

6. Inventiveness

When it comes to writing your ‘story’ there are all these doors of your memory lined up; you can only go through so many, but the ones you choose will form your narrative. This felt really inventive. More so than when writing articles I think, because you’re still confined somewhat to delivering on a promise you make at the start for it to be satisfying. With a longer story, you have more freedom – nothing is ‘wrong’.

7. Responsibility

You’re writing about things that happened with real people in them, who are all, in my case still alive, and so it’s a big worry as to whether you’re going to upset them, if they were ever to read it. Taking your modern viewpoint and applying it to things that happened in the past adds another layer of complexity. I think you need to focus on the feelings and experience you felt at the time, while also being fair and sensitive to the context. Balancing those two is key.

Between tracks 6 and 7 I did start to question my own sanity slightly and whether too much nostalgia can be a bad thing, which I sort of know it can (but I’m in too deep now).

8. Feedback

As with all Substack posts, feedback is everything and a really heartfelt thank you to everyone who took the time to like and restack each post, and to write such lovely comments.

I really loved it when people saw what I was feeling, as I was seeing it myself while writing it. It really helped make sense of it.

One of the nicest things was when people said it wasn’t just what I was presenting but the way I was presenting it that was interesting. I know the events of the story might not be anything devastating, but I wanted to portray how I felt about it at the time because I haven’t been able to before, precisely because the events themselves weren’t easily summed up or explained - they were just what happened.

The risk with memoir is that you can’t articulate exactly what you feel or felt, but if you do manage it, the pay off is great!

So how was it for you? What have your experiences been when writing memoir? I’d love to know. Also, what are peoples’ experiences of voiceovers? I haven’t done one for this because I don’t know if people really use them much, so it would be good to know. And please ♥️ this piece if you liked it as it helps others find it.

So what’s next? Well I have thought about other themes that would lend themselves to another tape – or perhaps just another few tracks. There is another topic I’ve wanted to dive into for a while. The last one was money, and the next one is going to be… sign up to find out!