Did you know you already have enough interesting content and stories within you for a great memoir?

People often don’t realise this because of a misunderstanding about what a memoir is and its purpose. I’ll explain that shortly.

First and most importantly, rest assured you have enough interesting memories, experiences and stories to create a wonderful, quality memoir that people will want to read.

How do I know this?

In all the conversations I’ve had with people about their stories (multiple times a day usually), I’ve never had a conversation with someone who didn’t have a great memoir within them.

Not everybody wants to write a memoir. But for those who have even considered it, keep reading.

People often resist the idea they could write a memoir because they don’t see enough value in their story to justify the time and energy required to create it. Or they believe they need to be famous for their story to be of interest.

It’s a shame because their memoir that will never see the light of day would be a valuable addition to the world.

Why don’t these aspiring writers and memoirists see the potential that I see?

For one, many people don’t understand the difference between an autobiography and a memoir.
This is the misunderstanding I was referring to at the beginning of this post, and it’s worth clearing up…

An autobiography is the story of a life. These books are often popular when written by famous people because readers want to know what experiences, challenges and beliefs shaped that person and lead them to do the things that made them famous. An autobiography often starts with the writer’s childhood and takes the reader on a journey though time, until the writer’s present life.

A memoir is a story WITHIN a life. While not everyone is famous, everyone has at least one, five or more experiences ‘within’ their life (and associated lessons) worth sharing. The list is endless, but these stories might include your journey to overcoming addiction, or the year you turned 40 and went hiking in South America, or your experience of raising a special needs child, or learning to cook, or being the CEO of a large company, or surviving cancer, or going through divorce, or learning to run a marathon, or how you created financial freedom… and the list goes on.

Regardless of which idea you decide to pursue, the next thing to do begin mapping out the structure of your memoir to ensure you’re clear on the point and theme of the story – because clarity about these will ensure your writing doesn’t wander in random directions. That’s all to do with ‘how to structure a book’ and due to word count limit here, I’ll leave that for another post.

For now, the most important thing for you to know is you already have within you content for a great memoir. I can promise you that.