Basic units of memoir writing: Vignettes, scenes, and dialogues are at the core of any memoir. Here are some ideas for writing them more quickly and elegantly.

Basic units of memoir writing

Vignettes, scenes, and dialogs are at the core of any memoir. Here are some ideas for writing them more quickly and elegantly.

1. Don’t worry about order.

Don’t stop to figure out how these snippets—vignettes, scenes, and dialogs—may eventually fit together into a story.

These bits and pieces will accumulate as you recall more and more and continue to write them down. Giving yourself permission to write in small, separate segments (vignettes, scenes, and dialogs, etc.) is a great way to start writing. Because there will always be your memory list of things to write about, you will never experience “writer’s block!” Fitting these pieces together to craft a polished story will come later, in the rewriting stage. Right now, it’s important to get text—any text—down on paper.

2. Early stage suggestions

Make the early stage of writing vignettes, scenes, and dialogs easier.

Write leaving large separations in your  computer document. If you are still writing by hand, write on the backs of scrap paper cut into half sheets—this will help free you from any obligation you may feel to fill whole blank pages!

Feeling obligated to write can quickly make a drudgery of what ought to be pleasurable.

After you have written computer segments of vignettes, scenes, and dialogs—or half pages— place them in any order that makes sense to you at the moment. Don’t belabor making sense of things at this stage. Write more vignettes, scenes, or dialogs as they occur to you.

3. Create order in vignettes, scenes and dialog.

When it feels appropriate, go through your individual stories and create an order for them as seems best.

As you re-read your vignettes, scenes, and dialogs, note where you need to fill in gaps in your emerging memoir or make transitions (“…and because Uncle Boris came to America, my mother was able to…”). These transitions will connect the separate components to each other.

What were disparate elements at first (and perhaps for a long time even as you continue to write) will add up to readable, informative stories when you add fillers and transitions. (Eventually many of these vignettes, scenes, and dialogs will take their places in the chapters of your memoir.)

4. A later task.

After you have many pages of text, the time will come for you to decide that this is better than that, to expand on this piece that now seems too short or to make more concise what had once already seemed economical prose.

This is editorial work, and it has its proper place in lifewriting—but you are not yet at that stage of writing! Right now, you are priming the pump with first drafts. Let first drafts be first drafts as you create vignettes, scenes, and dialogs.

In conclusion to vignettes, scenes and dialogs

Persevere in writing your memoir. You will be happy to have done so when you hold your book in hand!