Writers sometimes struggle with how to begin a story and will not write the story until they have the beginning—the first paragraph.

This is not a good way to proceed.

The first paragraph of a memoir sets the tone.

The first paragraph creates the tone and often presents imagery that will shape the reader’s appreciation of your story—whether a vignette or a full memoir.

In a short story I wrote many years ago, I did not compose the first paragraph until I had written the whole story. Frankly, I was stumped and did not know how to begin the story, how to launch the  reader.

I asked myself: What is this story about? Not the details but the feeling. Well, I couldn’t answer that until I had written the story. When I had completed the piece, I lingered with it a while and again asked myself the question of what the story was about.

It was clearly about memory, group memory. Then I asked what sort of observation would I need to make in the first paragraph to both lead into the feeling of the story and to entice the reader to paragraph two and page two. In answer, I didn’t think I needed to give facts. I wanted was feelings.

An example of a first paragraph that works

Here’s what I came up with (mémère in line one is a familiar form of “grandma” in francophone Canada and Franco-American New England—you would know this by the time you had arrived at this story in this collection of short stories, What Became of Them):

“Some people don’t remember,” I could still hear my mémère saying as I stood at the edge of the road looking down the driveway, but I could not remember what it was people did not remember, nor when it was she had said that about people. But, I could feel the heat of that day when we planted the nut trees and the smell of the earth reaching up to us, and my wanting to touch her, to have her put her arm around me.

This first paragraph still reads well for me.

Twenty-five years after writing that first paragraph, I still feel moved by it. What is it that people don’t remember and who are these people who don’t remember? The only way to find out is to read the story. And the boy—now man—remembering so much that is essential even if he doesn’t remember the facts. Apparently, he is one of the people who remembers. But what does he remember besides feelings? Why is he taken with this memory? Obviously, this is a story about memory and its role in the life of the protagonist.

Yeah, call me vain but I still like this first paragraph.

First paragraphs are important. Poets & Writers has long had a sort of column in which first-sentences are included as a way, I can only imagine, of enticing readers to purchase new books.

A caveat for memoir writers

The example I have provided you is from fiction. Fiction admittedly provides more leeway to play with style.

In a memoir, at what point does focus on style and prose compromise the authenticity—or at least the verisimilitude—of the witnessing that is implicit in any memoir? The conceit—the promise from writer to reader—is that nothing is made up. A memoir is synonymous with truth.

If details are too precise or too numerous, one wonders about the authenticity of the “memory.” Often being more lyrical in one’s prose involves descriptions that defy memory. The story begins to feel like a creation rather than a memory. What else is the writer making up? How about the facts?

I recently read a memoir in which the writer (who was not the subject of the story) apparently made things up. It did not feel to me like it was the subject’s experience but the writer’s. While I was able to read the story as fiction and enjoy it, the book did not seem like a memoir. I felt that I had not really met the autobiographical subject—only a fictional character. I had met the writer and not the subject. So…

As you work on your first paragraph, remember this is a memoir and not fiction—but apply the rules of fiction to make the paragraph sing.

Keep writing and stay in the memoir conversation.

To view this first paragraph topic on my YouTube channel, CLICK HERE.