How to structure your life story, Part Two

In How to Structure your Life Story Part One, we discussed why a writer of life story, autobiography or memoir should employ structures for their similar to those utilised by writers of fiction. Fiction writers use many different approaches to structuring a story, some simple, others much more complex, and some with fun names like The Hero’s Journey, Freytag’s Pyramid, The Snowflake Method, and Save the Cat.

You can find in-depth outlines for all these and more on Reedsy’s platform for everything writing and publishing-related here. But for the purpose of this post, I’m going to keep things simple and look at the three I think are most helpful for anyone writing their life story.

Knowing your purpose

In my previous post, I looked at reasons why you might be writing your life story–your purpose–beyond a simple record of events. For instance, you might want your family to understand what made you the person you are, or help others by sharing the story of how you coped with serious illness.

Publishers of memoir call these kinds of themes, or messages, the ‘takeaway’; ‘What will the reader take away from this story?’ Whether you call it a theme, a message or the takeaway, this is what will inform your story structure. 

Even in an autobiography you can’t (and wouldn’t want to) include everything that happened in your life. Once you know what the takeaway is, it’s easier to prioritise what to include and what to leave out. So knowing your purpose is a crucial step.

Beginnings, middles and ends

We’ve all heard the adage that a story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, and this approach does have the virtue of simplicity. If you’ve got some material already written, either by using my ‘one anecdote at a time’ method, or another approach, you might try this exercise:

 

1. Give each of your individual anecdotes or stories a title (they won’t appear in the final text, they're just to help you plan your story).

2. Get three pieces of paper and head them ‘Beginning’, ‘Middle’ and ‘End’. 

3. Decide which category each of your anecdotes belongs in and add its title to the relevant sheet. If you like, you could put them on post-it notes to make it easier to move them around.

Just doing this exercise may be enlightening. You might realise that a crucial part of your story is missing, something that explains why you took a particular course of action at a particular time, or the consequences of that action, for instance.

 

It will also start the process of giving your story a shape that will make it a more satisfying read. Imagine, for example, that your takeaway is ‘we need to grab opportunities when they arise’. Having organised your anecdotes into beginning, middle and end, you may realise there were moments where you didn’t grab the opportunities, and the consequences of that. Or, that certain incidents helped you learn that lesson.

 

Even an autobiography may not be written in strictly chronological order. To highlight your theme or message, for example, you may choose to group a series of anecdotes that weren’t contemporaneous, or choose to introduce a particular person who had an influence on you at a particular point in your story. Knowing the shape of your story will help you make those decisions.

 

If you haven’t begun writing yet, you can take your three pieces of paper and use the categories to decide what to include or not before you’ve even put pen to paper. 

Either way, you’ll end up with an outline for your story that keeps it focused on what you actually want to say - your theme, message or takeaway.

~ ~ ~

The Three Act Structure

The Three Act Structure is a development of the basic beginning, middle and end format, and is used in a lot of fiction, as well as film. Each act includes specific story elements: 

 

Act One sets the scene and introduces the reader to your normal world–where you lived, what your life was like, the important people in it–before anything changes. In autobiography, this would most likely centre around your childhood and adolescence, or even a specific part of your childhood. In a memoir, it’ll outline how things were before the main events of your story.

 

Act Two tells of the ups and downs and the people you encountered on your journey, how you responded to them, and how you grew and changed as a result. In fiction, this is where the central character encounters the story’s major conflict and the climax, and where they do or don’t succeed in overcoming it. A single climax moment may not be appropriate to your story, but few of us get through life without confronting some challenges along the way. How we respond to them and what we learn are often what define us and bring the greatest change. So they’re going to be an important part of any life story.

In fiction, Act Three resolves the major conflict, ties up any loose ends, and achieves a ‘new normal’. In your life story, it’s where you reflect on what you’ve learned; there may also be elements of resolution and reaching a new normal, particularly if you’re writing a memoir.

 

You can use the same process of giving your anecdote titles then placing them under Act One, Act Two and Act Three to get you started.

Examples of stories that use the Three Act Structure are The Wizard of Oz, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, and The Hobbit.

This is a very basic description of the Three Act Structure with particular reference to writing your life story. If you’re interested in exploring this structure more deeply, there are numerous guides to be found online. Another version of the beginning, middle and end structure is Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, which might be especially useful if there’s an obvious pivotal moment in your story. It was famously used by George Lucas as the structure for Star Wars.

~ ~ ~ 

 

‘But, but, but …’ I hear you cry, ‘a novelist can adapt their storyline to make it fit a structure. My story is my story. I can’t change it!’ That’s true, and as we’ve already said, there’s nothing wrong with a simple telling of the events of your life in chronological order. 

Depending on the answer to the question ‘who are you writing for?’ (see Part One of this guide), there’s no need to follow a structure slavishly. But structuring your story gives it shape and direction, and helps you say what you want to say - your message or takeaway.

If you’re you’re considering self-publishing your story, a strong structure is essential to grab your readers’ attention and keep it, to the last page. If you’re writing for yourself or your family, then you have more flexibility. But even a very light beginning, middle and end structure will help you get more out of the process, make your story easier to write and a more enjoyable read.

~ ~ ~

Amanda Edgar’s Memoir Method

As indicated by the title, this approach is designed specifically for those writing a memoir rather than an autobiography. (Reminder: a memoir focuses on a particular period or aspect of your life, as opposed to an autobiography which starts at the beginning and tells your whole life story.)

Edgar’s method has three stages:

• Bracket 

• Segment

• Outline

In Stage One, Bracket, you decide:

•     Your core topic - what is your memoir really about? (apart from you!)

•     When did this journey begin, and

•     When did this journey end?

 

In Stage Two, Segment, you work out:

• What’s my core message?

• When did I fail? [author's note: this may sound strange, but if you got beyond failing, and continued on - say you found a way to come to terms with long term serious illness - acknowledging the initial failure makes your success even more powerful - the idea of the darkest moment before the dawn]

 

In Stage Three, Outline, the key questions are: 

• What are the moments that move the topic (from Stage One) forward?

• What are the moments that support the message (from Stage Two)?

These moments will form the Outline of your memoir. Once you have this outline, the task of actually writing it will become much easier.

You can watch Amanda talking about the method in more detail here. You’ll notice that she also talks about ‘plotting your memoir like a novel’!

In conclusion

Structure gives shape and form to your story and helps support your theme, message or takeaway.

There’s nothing wrong with a simple collection of anecdotes in chronological order if that suits your purpose. But there’s no doubt that even a light structure will give your story direction and make it a more compelling read.

You can go for a simple beginning, middle and end approach, a Three Act Structure, Amanda Edgar’s Memoir Method, or utilise one of the more complex forms used by fiction writers. Any of them will lift your writing from a simple record of the events of your life to a powerful story.

I’m a firm believer that, particularly as we approach later life, most of us, if we’ve reflected at all on our lives, have something to say about life in general. If you want your story to interest others, it’s certainly worth making the effort.

So get out that paper and pen - or your laptop - and get started!

How to structure your life story -

Part one of a guide to structuring your story to give it direction and purpose

In this post I use the term ‘story’ to mean your life story. This may take the form of an autobiography - a chronicle of the events of your life, usually in chronological order, or a memoir - a book about a particular aspect or period of your life.

What do we mean by story structure?

Structure, in fiction, or life story writing, is the way the different elements of your story are organised: the order in which they come, and what gets grouped together. Things like the individual events and incidents; descriptions of people and places; conversations you had and your reflections about them.
 

Structure is created when, instead of just saying ‘This happened, and next that happened, etc, etc’, your story is organised with a clear sense of it ‘going somewhere’. That the protagonist–you!–has a purpose, for example, a journey of self-discovery, or triumph over adversity. That, over the course of your story, something will change; wanting to know what that change will be makes the reader keep reading.

Why does my story need structure?

As a ghostwriter, I like to use the term ‘life story’ instead of ‘autobiography’ or ‘memoir’, since both are also forms of storytelling. Aside from the fact that your story is based on real life, they’re no different to a fictional story. The best autobiographies and memoirs are as good a read as a novel–they grab the reader’s attention and make them care about what happens to the central character. They make them want to know what happened next, and how the story ends. Writers do this in a number of ways (use of dialogue and vivid descriptions among others) and by structuring their stories effectively.

At the simplest level, story structure avoids the ‘and then, and then’ syndrome. If you started writing your story one anecdote at a time (see my previous post), even if you’ve written some connecting pieces, and don’t go on to give it structure, there’s a risk that it will become dry and dull.

If you did use the one anecdote at a time approach, after writing several anecdotes you may have noticed a theme emerging–for instance, a particular interest you pursued, how you coped with loss or failure, or the kinds of people that influenced you. Creating a structure to your story will help you focus on those aspeccts and make it a much more compelling read.

Let’s be clear, there’s no rule that dictates you must do anything more than record the events of your life in chronological order if this suits your purpose. If all you want is to create a record of the events of your life for family history purposes, for example, then this simple structure may be quite adequate, but giving your story a shape will give it more momentum, and pull the reader along through the narrative.

Knowing your purpose

The issue of how you structure your story is intimately linked to your purpose in writing it. Which brings us to two important questions: 

      1. Who are you writing your story for?

          and

      2. Why are you writing it?

 
The answers to these questions, and their implications for structure, are inevitably intertwined, so answering the first often answers the second too. There are three possible answers to this first question: yourself, your family, a wider public:

 

1. Writing for yourself

Many people write their life story with no intention of sharing it with anyone. Perhaps it’s part of a process of reflecting on your life at a time of change or stability, when you’re reflecting on your journey to this point. Or maybe it’s a way of processing difficult or confusing experiences–and by the way, research shows that writing about our experiences can have powerful therapeutic benefits. Structuring your writing will undoubtedly help in this process, bringing out themes and patterns.

 

2. Writing for your family

As I mentioned above, if you’re writing your story as an exercise in preserving family history, a simple chronological structure might be perfectly adequate.

But perhaps you have a bigger purpose in telling your story for your family. Perhaps you want your children and grandchildren to understand your personal journey, how the events and influences of your life made you the person you are. Or maybe you want to set your story against the context of the time in which you grew up. It’s also likely that, by the time you’re undertaking this enterprise, you’ll have gained a fair bit of life experience and wisdom to pass on to future generations - how you dealt with the difficulties you encountered, what you’ve learnt about the world and people in general, for example.

These messages will all be easier to bring out with a structure that supports them as the focus of the story.

3. Writing for a wider audience

Many people who write their life story will come into one of the first two categories. But another group of life story writers are those who would like to get their story out to a wider public. Perhaps because they’ve had an unusual life, or have overcome difficulties and want to help others facing similar troubles by sharing their story. Or as a piece of social history, to throw light on a particular period in history through a personal story or to highlight a wrong or a political issue.


Be aware that this is a crowded market; there are many people out there self-publishing their life stories, and many of these sell very few copies. This particularly applies to autobiography. But you don’t know until you try, and if this is your goal, you most definitely need to create a story structure that engages readers’ attention and leaves them feeling changed by the end of your book.



In my next post I’ll be looking at some simple story structures you can use for your life story, so look out for it soon!