Limiting the Focus of Your Memoir

A memoir need not be an attempt to document your entire life. In fact a lot of people are better off focusing on a single aspect of their lives, a time period or experience. The idea of a memoir is to deal with the feelings and emotions a particular time or event engendered. You can hold that experience up, examine it and see what insights may be drawn from it.

Rather than slogging through all the days of your life, select a more limited focus:

• Your experiences raising children


• Your military career


• Memories of childhood or adolescence


• Travel memories


• Overcoming an obstacle or illness


• An important relationship

In a memoir of this sort you can focus on more personal details, emotions and insights as well as inspirational or humorous moments than you can when trying to cover the scope of your entire life. This focus can quickly eliminate the frustrations of trying to find something to say about periods of you life that seem less interesting. If you decide to write about the things you find more interesting or inspirational or which gave you the most important insights, the chances are your reader will appreciate it.