Finding a Structure for My Memoir

By gosh, I think I found it.

Last night, I followed the same advice I regularly offer my memoir clients and mapped out my memoir in a 3-Act, Hero’s Journey Structure.

For quite some time —okay, for years now — I’ve struggled with the outline of my book.

Where to start?
What’s the narrative arc?
Where’s the best place to end?
What’s the climax?
Which scenes HAVE to make it in…and which ones can I leave out?

In all this time, I’ve been jotting notes, writing personal essays and blog posts, journaling, organizing, researching, reading, fretting, and losing quite a bit of sleep over how best to structure my memoir.

And, on many occasions, I’ve asked myself the age-old question: What makes my story unique and worthy of someone’s time?

Thankfully, I also follow the advice I regularly offer my clients, which is that every human story is worth telling. The hardest part, of course, always comes down to HOW to deliver these stories in ways our readers will appreciate.

Why are these roadmaps so hard to pull together? And why does creating an outline somehow feel like a creativity killer?

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Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I opened up the spreadsheet template which I often send to my clients — a resource meant to help them identify the 9 biggest plot points of their stories before breaking things down, scene-by-scene. I’ve included that spreadsheet at the end of this post.