Without reflection, life is just a string of incidents connected by time. Like salmon, we get so immersed in swimming upstream we don't see how choices and circumstances became a story with a plot and a point.
With reflection, we see the past as the present rolled out for understanding and the present as the past rolled up for action. Be a time traveler. Explore yesterday through the rear-view mirror of today. Discover how writing a memoir is a journey back to the future.
Step 1: We never forget what is worth remembering. But some memories like to play hide and seek with us. Photographs are windows into our memories. Find one that captured something in your past which is still very much alive in you today.
Step 2: Create a rough outline of your memoir by recording every thought and feeling that comes to mind while studying the photograph. Connect these thoughts and feelings with lines to show their relationships and relative importance. This brainstorming tree or mind map is the basic framework of your memoir.
Step 3: Transform your rough outline into a rough draft. Put some emotional meat on the bones of your framework. But don't edit your thoughts and feelings while exploring them. The power of your memoir must come from your heart, not your head. So don't pick at the feathers of your bird while it's trying to sing; that can cause writer's block. Just free write your way from one part of your rough outline to the next.
Step 4: Edit your rough draft to create a powerful, polished memoir with challenge, conflict, climax, choice, consequence, change and closure. The power comes from your heart -- the emotional depth of your memory. The polish comes from your head -- the mental discipline of culling and clarifying every word, sentence and paragraph so your readers experience something valuable for their own lives.
Step 5: Yesterday bore today and today will birth tomorrow. Apply what you learned from writing your memoir. Weave yesterday and today into tomorrow so your life, despite its ups and downs, slides into home plate with an ecstatic "Wow, what a ride!"
Alice discovered a Wonderland by following a rabbit down its hole and Dorothy discovered a Wizard by following the yellow brick road. Both came back changed and you will too by following a vivid memory into yesterday. Revisit the heroes of your life. One of them is you. Write a life-changing memoir.
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