Memoir is one of the most democratic art forms. If you're alive, you've got a story to tell. But how do you bring it to life? Learn eight tips from experienced writers like Virginia Woolf, Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, and Saul Bellow, as well as newer writers like Stephanie Klein.

1. Build a better memoir
8 TRICKS
by Melissa Yuan-Innes

2. Truth
Tell the truth, or someone will tell it
for you.
~Stephanie Klein, Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir

3. Humour
There is nothing more touching to me than a family
picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best,
but you can see what a mess they all really are.
~Anne Lamott

4. Intimacy
A memoir is not what happens, but the person to whom
things happen.
~Virginia Woolf

5. Roots
They rise from the roots of the world.—Paul Cézanne
The word for stone, asin, is animate. Stones are called grandfathers and grandmothers and are
extremely important in Ojibwe philosophy. Once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to
wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting itself into my hand.
—Louise Erdrich, “Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart”: Writers on Writing.

6. WORLD-BUILDING
When you find only yourself interesting, you’re boring.
—Grace Paley
True memoir is written, like all of literature, in an
attempt to find not only a self but a world.
—Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories

7. Focus
Memoir is not the whole head of hair but one or two
strands of hair.
~Jean Little

8. Entertainment
You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the
reader’s arms, like a drunk, and say, ‘And then I did this
and it was so interesting.’
~Annie Dillard, in William Zinsser’s Inventing the Truth

9. Life
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of
insignificance from the door.
~Saul Bellow
Slides by Melissa Yuan-Innes