How to Write a Memoir

Some dude's memoirs. He got the memo, nothing grand, just the memories.

Memoirs are a vague concept but there’s a general understanding everyone should write one at some point. Another understanding is that future generations will want to know about our lives and worlds therefore we must solidify our world for them. But today flipping though travel journals I put together several years, I’m so glad I made them! I value those journals hugely thus I deduct that...memoirs and journals are for me as much as anyone.

Writing a memoir seems like such work. No one has the time for that! And when you’re still in college, the old age decided to writing a memoir is decades off. Still, memoirs are for everyone and everyone should be a letter effort into preserving their memories.

1) If it was significant, write it down. If something important happened or you were delighted by something, write a short paragraph about what your impressions were. It’s easy to save it to a Word document or put it in a notebook. One day you can paste in the facts, the first impressions are priceless.
2) Save old emails. I’ve done this for years. I copy the the generic sections "I did xyz and thought abc about it" and paste it to a file on my computer for future journal material. In emails you write out what you visited, what you ate, who you saw, nearly everything! You can cut sections out of emails and paste them in your journal, or use them as a base and expand on them.
3) Just do a travel journal or a month journal. Write down what you saw on a trip or what you did for a month, just a tiny window on life, nothing huge!
4) Keep photos, postcards, ticket stubs, letters, newspaper clippings, bits of life. You’ll want to have those in your memoirs and for the memories. You can paste them in a journal or like me, keep them in a box.
5) Try a blog (obviously)!

This is just for starters. Memoirs need source material so give yourself lots of material to source from and remember, you’ll want those memoirs as much as anyone else one day. That one day can even be the next year!