Memoir Writing

(I know everyone in the world is talking about #YAsaves today, in rebuttal to a horribly annoying Wall Street Journal post that I won't link to because if you have no read it, then you won't be as pissed off this Monday. But everyone has already offered rebuttals, much more poignantly than I could. So I'd just like to add: Hells yeah, YA. Ahem. Anyway!)

I might have mentioned this in my most recent post, but I'll say it again: Memoir writing is soooo different from fiction.
Fiction is like knitting a scarf. You start with one or two threads, a couple needles, and a bunch of air. Then you knit those threads together, fold them back over themselves, tie them together, pull them tight throughout the plot, until you have a novel.

Maybe a multicolored, crazy-looking novel with some fringe on either end -- one that needed some really complex stitching -- but a novel nonetheless!
Memoir writing, on the other hand, is a different beast altogether. You start with everything. A million memories, some more meaningful to you personally than others. But only a very small percentage of those memories are relevant to the story you're about to write.*
Yes, memoir writing is more like weaving on a loom.

It makes you look at memoirs and think "Wow, that's lovely, HOW THE F*** DID THEY DO THAT?!?" It takes a hundred strings from all over your life, and ties them together into one cohesive piece. One story, out of the thousands of stories that make up your whole history.
If it looks hard, believe me: it's even harder than it looks. I am normally pretty good at continuity*** from scene-to-scene. When I revise novels, I need to look for plenty of issues, but dropped story-lines typically isn't one of them. I don't have my MC encounter conflict and then forget to resolve it.
Apparently, in memoir writing, this is a HUGE PROBLEM for me. I write one scene about thinking about breaking up with a guy, and then in the next scene, I am dating someone else. OOPS, FORGOT TO CONNECT THE DOTS.
It's interesting, because the scenes I avoid the most are the ones I find hardest to write. No one wants to talk about how they were a douche to someone. Or how they screwed up, and lied, and messed up their life and other people's. No one wants to admit their mistakes, much less in their life story.
But without the mistakes, it's not a story at all. In fiction writing, I make my narrator suffer as much as possible, because that's where the story resides. In the struggle. In the fight for life, for freedom, for whatever the MC wants or needs.
I need to learn to do this in my memoir. I need to make character-me suffer. Because that's where the story lies.
It's just a liiittle harder to do when it's "you" on the page!

* Assuming, of course, that you know the plot of your memoir, the point you want to make, your theme. Otherwise, you'll just be vomiting random funny/interesting stories onto the page. Which is fun for you, but other people probably won't care.**
** Trust me, I have tried this. Thank you dear memoir professor for being blunt when my gorgeous, poignant, moving memory-scenes were totally irrelevant to the story I was trying to tell <3
*** Aside from occasionally forgetting what shoe my narrator took off, or if the MC is still wearing the coat they had on three scenes ago.