How I Wrote a Memoir During the Pandemic (+4 Tips to Ease Into Your Story)
If you had told me that I’d be writing a memoir during a global pandemic, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. But that’s exactly what happened. At the end of 2019, I finally felt the pull to start writing about something I’d been thinking about for probably six years. And I had big plans. I pulled out my planner and mapped out which months I’d do deep work, when I might be able to get away for a couple of days, and which seasons I’d need to press pause when family dynamics and school schedules demanded it. 2020 was the year of the manuscript! And then we all know what happened.
In Wild Words, the Season of Going Back in Time chapter was specifically designed to help you to reconsider your relationship to your creativity and become what I call an “archaeologist of memory” to unearth and uncover your unique origin story. It’s meant to be a gift you give your writer self, being able to answer questions like:
Why do you write?
What fuels you?
What are some of those early memories you have of being creative?
What’s your through line?
How has creativity supported you during difficult times?
I find that this exercise is really helpful to do so that you orient to something larger than yourself and remember that when you’re doubting everything, or maybe in a season of liminal space and you’re not writing as much as you’d like, or you think everything you’re writing is terrible and you just feel disconnected to that part of yourself, you can remember how it all started, that there’s a natural ebb and flow to this work, and that you are meant to be a writer.
But as I’ve come to learn through the pandemic, this exercise can expand. Once you’ve gone through the process of unearthing your inner writer origin story, you can also embrace The Season of Going Back in Time in the context of writing a memoir or any personal narrative. We’re still an archeologist, we’re just looking for a different pool of memories. And that’s exactly what I’ve done: excavated my past and gathered memories to help outline my book and shape the story I’m telling.
In 2012, I was living through the experiences I’m writing about now, and I remember back then noticing that voice in my head saying ‘I might want to write about this someday,’ but also recognizing that it wasn’t the right time. So I just took some notes and wrote in my journal and set the writing part of it on the backburner for a while.
At the end of 2019, I was ready to start. I actually felt a physical sort of urging and that's something that I’ve written about a bit in the manuscript, this idea that creativity can have a sense of physicality to it and we can be pulled by forces that feel beyond our control.
By January 2020 I’d been tinkering with this idea for a few months and decided to spend the night at a hotel to work on my outline. This experience was completely electric. I remember feeling so in the flow and knowing that something important was happening and even though I couldn’t see how I was going to get to the end, I had pieces organized in a way that was starting to make sense.
I remember going downstairs to check out and the elevator had a mirror on one side, so I sort of locked eyes with myself and was like you're going to do this. You’re writing this book. But very quickly, nothing could stay the same, and it was really hard for many months to have to come to terms with that.
Writing in 2020 and Beyond
The spring and summer of 2020 were a bit of a wash. The most I could muster was writing in a notebook after my son went to bed. I had a ritual of pulling out my notebook and just writing for as long as felt right, which could be two minutes or twenty, depending on the day. Because I had the outline, that was always my starting point. My goal was to write something longhand for each scene before I started typing. Once I did that, I crossed it off and then moved on to the next one. And that’s how I wrote my messy first draft.
By the fall I was starting to feel a bit more capable of forging ahead and decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month, which I thought might help create a container for this very specific stage of the writing process I was in. I did make my own rules though, so I wasn’t participating in a formal sense. For example, I didn’t have daily word count goals. I also gave myself permission not to write one day if that felt like the better choice or something came up. The goal wasn’t to write every day, but most days, which was a great improvement from what my writing practice looked like before.
After four weeks I started seeing the book take shape in a new way because the stories moved from my notebook into my Scrivener software and it felt like I was really making some progress. Then a few days after Thanksgiving there was a family emergency—unrelated to covid—that really rocked our world and once again, all my attention was pulled away from writing and towards responding to our family’s needs.
After the holidays, in February 2021, I did another version of National Novel Writing Month that felt a little more haphazard, but I was still able to make some progress. It all really came together over the summer when a year and a half later, I sent a polished draft to my agent and patiently waited for her response.
Of course, I wasn’t as done with the manuscript as I thought I was. I was done with that version of it, but the book still needed a lot of work so I’ve spent the past year going through several more rounds of revisions and really digging into some of the places where I only scratched the surface earlier, and also making some structural changes.
One of the big lessons I took away from writing in 2021 is how important it is to let your manuscript breathe. I think it’s important with anything you write, but especially memoir, because you’re often tackling really difficult experiences, traumatic memories, and even though we might feel like we’re in the flow when we’re writing, that actually depletes us of energy. Living in a pandemic and all that required, plus writing a memoir about a difficult time in my life meant I was even more exhausted than usual and had to be really mindful about how far to push myself and how hard and to just let the process unfold in its own way.
I could not control this at all. Everything just took longer. From the actual writing, to doing research, to sorting through my memories, memoir really has a mind of its own and the beautiful thing—once you release yourself from any sense of expectation or timeline—is that you can better partner with your body to allow the story to truly come forth in the way that it needs to. I can’t tell you how many times, during the periods where it felt like I wasn’t writing, that I would get an idea, or something would link together, or I’d get one sentence like a bolt of lightning. And that’s only made possible by embracing the fallow periods and knowing how vital they are to the writing process as a whole. We can probably sum up this entire episode with seven simple words: Things take as long as they take.
4 Ways to Ease Into Memoir
With that in mind, I wanted to share three practical ways you can support yourself and ease in if writing a memoir (or even a personal essay) is something you’re feeling pulled towards right now.
Tip 1: Start with a notebook
This is such a supportive way to start writing because there’s less pressure than a keyboard, and sometimes wildly more accessible depending on what’s going on in your day. A notebook is something you can bring with you, keep close by, and give yourself permission to write whatever you need to without constantly feeling like you need to edit as you go. After you’ve been writing for a bit, you and move on to setting up digital documents either in Google docs or a writing app like Scrivener.
Tip 2: Brainstorm themes
This doesn't have to be complicated, but just ask the question “What is this book about?” and start brainstorming some answers that come to you based on what you know right now. It might be a complete sentence, or just a list of themes like trust, redemption, friendship, or coming of age. I like to do this several times during the writing process because your answers will inevitably shift over time and as you learn more about the story and how everything falls into place, but I find having these anchor words can be really helpful both at the beginning to sort of guide your initial thoughts and drafts, and then during revision when you’re checking your scenes against these core themes to make sure everything you’re including has a place in the final manuscript.
Tip 3: Build reference material
This is where you can start getting tactile and see your story come to life a little bit. You’ll want to start digging through the archives of your life to look around for useful scraps. This can be an old journal, photographs, medical records, newspaper clippings, objects of all sizes, and the like. I ordered a desk file folder from the Container Store to keep everything sorted for easy reference, and picked up a small photo album from Kolo to fill up that I can flip through anytime. Photographs are so great for revealing specific details of time and place, and for jogging your memory about specific scenes you might be writing about.
Tip 4: Start with what you can remember
This is really what I consider the “brain dump” stage of the process when you can start mining your memories. For this exercise, you don’t need to worry about chronology or structure or even whether or not a memory is relevant. You just get it all down to sort through later.
To get started, you’ll want to make three columns in your notebook.
Column 1: The Memory | Give your memory a simple title (e.g. Meeting Brian for the first time, Driving to the desert, Checking into the hospital, etc.) This doesn’t need to be eloquent or beautiful, just basic facts…
Column 2: Sensory Details | Jot down anything you can remember about this moment, from how you felt to what you saw (e.g. the sky was filled with stars, I felt cold and borrowed someone’s scarf, we stopped for hamburgers, the nurse had blue eyes, etc.)
Column 3: Date | If you know the exact date, great. Only the year? Just fine. This can be helpful when you start organizing more deeply and are thinking about chronology and how to play with time… you’ll be able to see when certain events took place.
This reference list of scenes will serve you throughout the process. (I talk more about what to do with these scenes inside the Nest when we dig into structure) At this point, don’t worry about writing in any sort of order, just take whatever comes that may be associated with the time period you’re planning to write about. Maybe the memories won’t be relevant, but you don’t know that yet and it’s not time to decide. Open your heart and your mind, and start remembering what you can, and get everything down.
I did a first pass at this over the course of an evening, then continued filling it in for several weeks afterwards. And I find the more you start thinking about it, the more memories will surface, so be prepared to be reminded of something that feels monumental while you’re doing something mundane like washing the dishes or driving to the gas station or taking a shower.
(Then, of course, write it down.)
A gentle reminder that it’s completely normal to feel overwhelmed at the beginning, or in any stage of the process, really.
Something I do that helps with this is to put pen to paper whenever possible, because unlike typing, there’s a quiet intimacy waiting for you there. You won’t censor yourself or try to start editing before you’ve barely typed a single paragraph, and the stakes feel lower.
Just pick a scene from your list and write whatever comes. I also like to do this in-between drafts, or whenever I feel like a scene needs something deeper I just can’t quite put my finger on.
Always go slowly and listen to what you need!
