Memoir-Organization+and+Details

Structuring your memoir:
 * Just as a research paper has an introduction, body, and conclusion, you might find it easiest to have a “before” section (introduction), a detailed story, and an “after” section that reflects on the story and concludes.
 * You are free, however, to jump right into the story and explain the background later; to use flashbacks and flashforwards; to use other techniques of fiction.
 * Make sure you include both narration (the story itself), and reflection (your thoughts and feelings about the story). Reflection helps readers find personal connections to your story – you can use this section to answer the eternal question that haunts writing: “so what?”
 * You can organize by time: what happened in chronological order.
 * You can organize by space: a story about each different room in a house, for instance.
 * You can organize other ways: a list of the meanings a thing had for me, with a story about each one, for instance.

Details in your memoir:
 * All writing needs details. The kinds of details you need are determined by the type of writing, which is in turn determined by your purpose, audience, self-presentation, and topic. Research tries to inform and argue based on evidence; the details it needs are authoritative pieces of evidence and your logical interpretation. Memoir, on the other hand, is meant to bring a story alive in the reader’s mind; the details memoir needs are the same as you will find in fiction.
 * Characters come more alive when we see them do things, not just hear that they did something; when you quote dialogue instead of just telling us what the conversation was about; when we see images of them instead of just hearing their names.
 * Setting can be made more real for the reader by using imagery (appealing to any of the five senses), by describing the physical location, the social world, the time of your life that is involved, the time in history that is involved. Show us objects, sights, sounds, aromas, textures, and flavors that are part of this world.