Write What You Know
If you’ve been considering writing about your life experiences, you may notice some thoughts coming up, such as "I wouldn't know what to write about" or "My life isn't that interesting."
It's natural to feel unsure about what and how much to share and whether or not anyone will find your stories interesting. When, in truth, you don't have to write down your most exciting experiences for your memoir to be engaging. For most of us, while our everyday life probably feels fairly mundane—it often is—the real story is in the details.
If you are searching for inspiration, Shirley Jackson's memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, are two incredible portraits of family life and motherhood in 1950s small-town America.
Jackson's depictions of raising children, moving houses, and making their house feel like a home are incredibly relatable, making her memoirs so enjoyable to read. Her stories are familiar, and you can picture yourself in many of the situations and challenges she writes about.
It’s relatable because Jackson writes about her day-to-day experiences as a mother: her children starting school, catching colds and other viruses, lying to her or hiding things from her, and the heartbreak of losing a family pet. It's all there—an honest and raw account of raising a family.
For example, in Jackson's memoir Life Among the Savages, she writes, "I look around sometimes at the paraphernalia of our living—sandwich bags, typewriters, little wheels off things—and marvel at the complexities of civilization with which we surround ourselves; would we be pleased, I wonder, at a wholesale elimination of these things, so that we were reduced only to necessities (coffeepot, typewriters, the essential little wheels off things) and then—this happening usually in the springtime—I begin throwing things away, and it turns out that although we can live agreeably without the little wheels off things, new little wheels turn up almost immediately. This is, I suspect, progress. They can make new little wheels, if not faster than they can fall off things, at least faster than I can throw them away."
So when you sit down to write, instead of worrying about what to write, start laying it out, one memory at a time. Try to remember as much as you can when describing situations and events. Go into detail about how you felt and why. That's where the story is.