Start close in. Start even closer. Now, write your memoir.

Decision #7 from Sixteen Superpowers Memoir Writers Need to Have. Over sixteen posts, I help you make pacts with yourself so all will go well for you.

Photo by Andraz Lazic on Unsplash

7. Start close in. Think you’re close? Start even closer.

YOUR MANTRA: Be immediate or go home.

Immediacy is where it’s at. Immediacy means it’s fresh, it’s palpable, it’s dynamic. The trap many memoirists fall into is relying on remembering to carry the story. Already can you feel that remembering is a little boring? It’s not active.

Your job is not that. Remembering is too many lengths removed. Immerse yourself into the experience like it’s fresh, like you’re feeling it for the first time and like you don’t know how you’re going to get out of it.

Recognize that the obstacle to immediacy is that you do know how you got out. You’ve reached some conclusions about what happened and what solved the problem. And you made them beliefs you lived by and haven’t questioned much over the years, until now, when you sat down to write a memoir.

To re-energize your story, you have to crawl back underneath it to the time when you didn’t know and you were figuring it out.