Writing a memoir is a bit like therapy, except you have to decipher the meanings of experiences and thoughts and feelings all by yourself.
Just like in life when you wake up one day and think, MMM? I'm not so sure this is working and you take the leap to try therapy, it can be the same for memoir writing. You write stuff down, and then it's best to let it sit a day or two and you go back to it and then think, no, that's not what I meant to say. That sounds strange. There's more there. Try again. In the end, there may not be enough time in your lifetime to get it onto the page how you ultimately and ideally wished for. But it's the process that matters.
I'm not claiming I managed to finally get at the core of it in my soon to be released memoir about my time on Salt Spring, At One with an Island: Salt Spring Revisited, but towards the end, I was feeling as if I was getting a sense of that peeling the layers of an onion experience to a much greater degree than when I started.
Instead of just retelling an experience from Point A to Point B, there was a lot more questioning about the journey. Like why is Salt Spring so important to me? Why is Ruckle Park so significant to me? What about consistency of place now matters to me and why?
I know that some say to write an interesting memoir, you have to touch upon the universal within your particular story. That may be one of the biggest challenges. Why should anyone care about your story at all? Well, they won't. Unless you can find a way to attach to something they might also be experiencing or have experienced, to unearth some nugget of universal truth; to provide some insight.
For the longest time, I used to hang on every word that successful writers shared about their writing process. In the past few years I've stopped doing that.
It makes sense to just accept that you are truly on your own unique journey, no matter how many hangers-on you may or may not have along for the ride. Their journey is not yours. Other writers will undoubtedly have some nuggets of wisdom to share, but in the end, it's that unique understanding of your own inner world and your own personal history, finding courage, and exploiting the version that is yours and yours alone that you must get at to tell your own story.
And then, let the consequences fall where they may.