Because we experience life chronologically, without a clear beginning, middle or end, memoirists tend to write in an episodic way — “this happened, then that happened, and after that… ” — and are often overwhelmed by a huge array of memories and details. When deluged by details and feelings, it’s difficult to sort out what to include, how to create a plot, and how to see friends and family as “characters.”

But the transition from “all these things happened to me” to choosing and shaping your narrative using the tools of fiction must happen in order for your writing to lift out of a journaling form into story and narrative. And as you work to create a form and shape to your story, choosing your turning points and finding your conflicts, characters, plot, and narrative arc, you are changed by this process. 

Elizabeth Lyon discusses how stories are transformational in her book A Writer’s Guide to Fiction: “Told artfully, a story can move you and alter your brain chemistry. By knowing my story . . . you might be transformed.” In Step Eight, we will examine the research and the ways that writing is healing, but for now let’s examine the rules of story and how to create what is called the “narrative arc.”

Story Structure and the Narrative Arc
Here are some important things to remember when creative your narrative arc.

• Unlike journaling, a story has a form — a beginning, middle, and an end. Another way to think about this is that your story, your book, needs to have a dramatic structure: Act One, Act Two, and Act Three.
• Something significant happens in each scene of the story — this is the point of the scene.
• A story has a reason for being told — this is your theme.
• The main character, the protagonist — in a memoir it’s you! — is changed significantly by events, actions, decisions, and epiphanies. The growth and change of the main character is imperative in any story, and is the primary reason a memoir is written — to show the arc of character change from beginning to end.
• All stories have conflict, rising action, a crisis, a climax, and a resolution.
• By the end, the story world, the world where the protagonist began, is transformed.

Some memoirists begin with a prologue that establishes the author’s voice and intent before getting into the main story — the beginning, middle, and end. It’s important to note that standard dramatic story structure has been around since Aristotle’s time; it’s a classic form that reaches into the psychology of human beings and offers a universal message.

Focusing Your Theme in the Arc
As you plan your story, clarify your themes. Being certain about them will help you build your book toward the final resolution of the theme’s questions and conflicts by the end of the narrative arc, the end of the book.

Many memoirists explore how certain events changed their lives irrevocably, such as Alice Sebold in Lucky: A Memoir, the story of a rape, or Augusten Burroughs in Running with Scissors: A Memoir, the tale of surviving a bizarre and chaotic childhood. Another theme is recovering from the death of a loved one — such as The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, or Paula: A Memoir (PS) by Isabel Allende.

Patricia Hampl’s The Florist’s Daughter or Mary Gordon’s Circling My Mother shows the heartbreak and challenging difficulties of aging and dying parents. Sexual abuse is explored in Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, and mental illness is the topic of Susan Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted and An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Jamison. There are countless varieties of themes, but though books may have the same theme, the stories, language, and structure make each book unique. It’s imperative that you develop your skills to allow your story to shine.

To clarify your choice of theme for your narrative arc, ask the following questions:

• What is the main, dominant meaning of my story?
• What is my book about? (One sentence.)
• How does my book end? What do I want the reader to understand and learn?

Three Acts of Dramatic Structure
Act One (Beginning)
The first act sets up the story, introducing the characters and situations that show conflicting desires and complications through different scenes. During this act you present the context: the who, what, when, where, and why of the story.

Act Two (Middle)
Drawing upon scenes and summaries, the story action rises through conflicts, complications, and challenges that the protagonist keeps attempting to solve. As the story progresses, even more complications develop that thwart an easy or quick resolution.

Act Three (End)
In the last act, the protagonist wrestles with the forces that have been working against her; this is shown through what is called the crisis and the climax of the story. Then follows the denouement or epiphany that resolves the loose ends of the story. The crisis may be thought of as a spiritual challenge or a dark night of the soul where the deepest beliefs and core truths of the character are tested. The climax is the highest level of tension and conflict that the protagonist must resolve as the story comes to a close.

Examining a Classic
Let’s examine the classic This Boy’s Life: A Memoir, written by the now famous author Tobias Wolff, to study how he developed his story through the three-act structure.

Act One
In This Boy’s Life, written in 1989, we are introduced to the young Tobias with this first line: Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide.

Here, in the first words of the memoir, we experience a tone of warning. A few moments later, we see a nearby truck crash over a cliff, and the mother’s anxious looks at her son, as if appreciating the fact that he was alive and with her.

Next, we are given a clue to character of young Toby: I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs. I knew she had no money for them… but now that her guard was down, I couldn’t help myself. We see him as self-aware, wily, and manipulative, and a scathingly honest narrator.

The theme of the book is introduced in this way:

It was 1955, and we were driving from Florida to Utah to get away from a man my mother was afraid of and to get rich on uranium. We were going to change our luck.

With such an introduction, we already know that no one is going to get rich, that there is more to fear, and their luck will not change.

We learn about the fractured relationship between his mother and father, and the fact that the family has been split down the middle: Tobias goes with his mother, who has no money, and the father refuses to pay support to Tobias and his mother. But his brother lives with the well-off father and goes to prep school — a very different kind of life. Despite, or perhaps because of his confessional tone, we’re sympathetic to the main character, already informed that things are going to go awry — and we want to know how this will happen — which creates suspense.

In this opening act, we have the who, what, when, where, and why of the story, and we are launched into the adventure of finding out more about these characters. We want to know what will happen that might change their luck, and what new trouble they will find. We can feel it coming.

Act Two
In Act Two, trouble has fully arrived and life has become more complex emotionally for everyone, especially the narrator. There’s a sharp divide between the narrator’s outer life and his inner struggles, and a buildup of several factors that need resolution: his increasingly dangerous behavior and dangerous delinquent behavior; the violent, but occasionally intimate relationship with Dwight, the man who becomes his stepfather; and the affectionate, protective relationship Toby has with his mother. As the middle portion of the book develops, violence and danger occur more frequently, seen through many short precise scenes that keep us reading and eager to find out how and if the conflicts will be resolved.

We watch young Toby, called Jack in the book, plunge further into his identity conflict and get into more troubles with duplicity, lies, and out-of-control delinquent behavior. He endures cruel treatment and beatings from his stepfather, and these become even more brutal. By being privy to Toby’s carefully selected thoughts, desires, and fantasy world, we understand him deeply, and see how little he’s able to protect himself or his mother, whom he loves above all else, but who’s caught in the same trap with him. He sees that he’s unable to save herself or himself from the dismal life they’ve fallen into once she marries Dwight.

Act Three
By the time we get to Act Three, we are driven to find out what happens, to find out if there is a resolution of the complications of the first two acts. We are still rooting for the narrator to see his way through to a new and different life he has been imagining, something other than living a half-life in a town where everyone is a loser. A major turning point occurs when Toby commits fraud to get admitted into prep school. This daring act, still a relic of his delinquent yet hopeful self, helps him to escape his prison, and gives his mother the courage to leave the abusive husband. Despite some recurring loose ends at the end of the book, we see the threads of hope for his life. Because he’s Tobias Wolff, we know that somehow he makes it all the way to the bestseller list, which adds a dose of irony to the experience of reading his memoir. Neither the Toby of the story nor today’s reader would ever guess that outcome from this coming-of-age memoir.

Suspense and Mystery in Stories
At the heart of every story is a mystery. We want to know how the narrator coped with the challenging events and conflicts presented in Act One. When reading A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood, we see young Richard Rhodes finding his way to freedom from terrible loss and a frightening stepmother. Even if we know that he becomes a famous man, we keep turning the pages so we can find out how he escapes and how he heals the abuse he suffered. In Paula, we want to know what helps Isabel Allende make sense of the death of her daughter, knowing that the act of telling her daughter the family stories is an act of healing.

Through powerful scenes showing specific life-changing events, we learn about how families deal with immigration and identity issues in books like Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandela: A Two Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam or Kien Nguyen’s The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood. There are the challenges and delights of the spiritual journey in Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris, or in Anne Lamott’s books on spirituality, or in Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. Class and sexual prejudice are explored in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure by Dorothy Allison or All Souls: A Family Story from Southie by Michael Macdonald.

In The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the family chaos accelerates throughout the narrator’s childhood with no major “aha” moment or resolution. But by the end, the narrator is free to live her own life and sees her unconventional parents through the eyes of her adult compassionate self.

Where Does Your Story End?
In planning your themes and the narrative arc, it’s important to get an idea of how your story ends. That’s why many writers find it very important and helpful to make an outline, whether or not you know how you will get from X to Y; and remember, it’s not carved in stone. An outline allows us to get some perspective on the chaos of “real life” and to impose the shape of a story.

Knowing the end will help you visualize the beginning and the middle. As T. S. Eliot famously said in his “Four Quartets“: The end is where we start from.

If you are not clear about the way your book will end, then decide what the crisis or the climax might be — a moment of greatest change or insight, when your life and your understanding of yourself shifted irrevocably. After that comes the denouement that ties together the end pieces of the story.

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As Linda Joy Myers tells us, there is much for the memoir writer to learn from fiction writers about how to structure story. For more Writing It Real articles on writing fiction, explore the archives by typing writing fiction into the search box. Here are direct links to three past articles that are especially related to Linda Joy Myers’ points:

The Craft of Fiction Writing: Part Three (On Plot) by Sheila Bender
The Craft of Fiction Writing : Part One (Exploring Premise and Timeline) by Sheila Bender
Crafting Stories for Children (and Adults) by Nancy Lamb