Now that you have edited, played and struggled with your episodes and they are close to complete, lay them out in front of you. By this stage, you’ve probably spent weeks working on them. Take a minute to look them over. Page through. Maybe take an hour to read them all, at a leisurely pace, one more time. After delving into the details of the editing process, it’s nice to re-familiarize yourself with the big picture they paint. Now, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle picture, it is time to piece your memoir together.
You will definitely need to order your episodes in some way or another. As said in the introduction to this guide, chronology is certainly not the only way to do so. While a majority of memoirs follow time’s progression of days, months and years, many do not, organized instead by influences, individuals, or even reverse chronology. And the majority of those that are chronological still employ flashbacks, references to what’s come since, and other allusions to give broader pictures of the single events discussed.
This is your memoir, and it is for you to decide how the chapters will fall. Some will naturally follow one another. You may want to alternate episodes by their level of intensity; or, by contrast, you may want to lump “the dark years” together so that the light at the end is so much the brighter (or some variation on that technique). This guide supposes that, familiar as you now are with the stories you’re working with, their order in the final volume will come pretty naturally.
AUTHOR: Matthew S. McGowan
MORE INFO: Excerpted from "Memoir Writing: Sharing Your Life"
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