Chapter VII

52 memoir prompts: one a week for a year of writing

Fifty-two memoir writing prompts that lead to scenes, not summaries: objects, places, people, firsts and turning points, plus how to use them.

By Yosuke Sakurai · · 10 min read

A question asks for an answer. A prompt asks for a scene. “Where did you grow up?” can be answered in four words. “Draw a floor plan of your childhood home and walk through it” can’t, and that’s the point: it puts you back in one place, at one moment, and asks you to look around.

These 52 memoir prompts work that way. Each one is meant to produce a short piece of writing, a page or two, about one specific moment. Do one a week and in a year you’ll have fifty-two scenes, which is most of the raw material for a memoir. If you’d rather answer questions, or you’re interviewing someone else, our 60 life story questions are the better place to start.

How to use these prompts

  • Pick one, not five. The one that makes you think “I know exactly what I’d write” is the right one today.
  • Set a timer for fifteen minutes. Long enough to get somewhere, short enough to start. If you’re still going when it rings, keep going.
  • Keep your pen moving. The writing teacher Natalie Goldberg’s first rule of writing practice is to keep your hand moving. Don’t stop to fix spelling or hunt for a better word. You can edit a messy page; you can’t edit a blank one.
  • Write one scene. One afternoon, one conversation, one journey. If you catch yourself writing “and for the next ten years”, go back to the afternoon.
  • Use names. The street, the teacher, the make of the car. Specifics are what make a memory yours.
  • Date it and keep it. Put the date and the prompt number at the top, and keep every piece, even the ones you don’t like. Good writing often turns up in the third paragraph of a piece you nearly threw away.

What a prompt turns into

Here’s prompt 9, “Write about a pair of shoes you owned”, done two ways. First as a summary:

I had a lot of shoes as a child, mostly hand-me-downs, and I didn’t like them much.

Then as a scene:

The school shoes came in a box from my cousin two towns over, a size too big, so my mother stuffed the toes with newspaper. All that first term I walked like a duck. On the bus home I’d take them off and smooth the paper out on my knee to read whatever was printed on it: football results, a recipe for marmalade, half a story about a lost dog.

The first is true and forgettable. The second tells you about money, family, a resourceful mother and a child who’d read anything, without saying any of those things directly. That’s what the prompts are for.

Start small

  1. Write ten sentences that begin “I remember”. Don’t explain them. The artist Joe Brainard filled a whole book this way: every entry in his 1970 memoir I Remember starts with those two words.
  2. Sum up your life so far in exactly six words, the form SMITH Magazine made popular with its book of six-word memoirs, Not Quite What I Was Planning. Then do it again for a single decade of your life.
  3. Empty your pockets or your bag onto the table. Write about the three oldest things there.
  4. List every address you’ve lived at, as far back as you can. Pick the one you remembered last and write about its front door.
  5. Describe your hands. What have they done today, and what were they doing when you were twenty?
  6. Write about breakfast on an ordinary school day when you were small.

Objects and photographs

  1. Find the oldest photograph of yourself you have. Write about the five minutes after it was taken.
  2. Choose a photo of someone who has died, or whom you’ve lost touch with. Write what you’d say if they walked into the room now.
  3. Write about a pair of shoes you owned.
  4. Write about a present you didn’t want, and what became of it.
  5. Write about something you’ve kept for more than twenty years. Why haven’t you let it go?
  6. Write about something you broke.
  7. Describe a piece of clothing that made you feel like someone else.

Rooms and places

  1. Draw a floor plan of a childhood home from memory. Then walk through it in writing, room by room, and stop where the strongest memory is.
  2. Write about a place you weren’t allowed to go.
  3. Write about a journey you made over and over: to school, to work, to a grandparent’s house. What did you pass on the way?
  4. Write about your first night in a new place.
  5. Write about a place that no longer exists.
  6. Write about a waiting room: a hospital, a station, an office. Who or what were you waiting for?

People

  1. Write a portrait of someone using only what they did with their hands.
  2. Write about a time an adult surprised you when you were a child.
  3. Write about someone whose name you’ve forgotten but whose face you haven’t.
  4. Write about a neighbor.
  5. Describe someone’s laugh, and the last time you heard it.
  6. Write about the person who taught you something practical: to drive, to cook, to swim, to change a tire.
  7. Write about a stranger who was kind to you, or unkind.

Firsts and lasts

  1. Write about the first money you earned and what you spent it on.
  2. Write about the first time you felt grown up, and whether you were.
  3. Write about the first time you were truly frightened.
  4. Write about a last time you didn’t know was the last: a visit, a conversation, a view.
  5. Write about your last day at a school, a job or a home.
  6. Write about the first time you saw the sea, or snow, or a big city.

Food, music and the senses

  1. Write about a meal you can still taste. Who cooked it, and who was at the table?
  2. Choose a song from when you were sixteen. Play it, write for as long as it lasts, then keep going.
  3. Write about a smell that takes you straight back somewhere.
  4. Write about the sounds of a house at night.
  5. Write about a family recipe and the hands it has passed through.

Choices and turning points

  1. Write about the day before everything changed. What were you doing, and what did you expect tomorrow to be like?
  2. Write about a road not taken: a job you turned down, a move you didn’t make. Then write one page of the life you’d have had.
  3. Write about a time you said no.
  4. Write about a rule you broke, and whether you’d break it again.
  5. Write about a decision someone else made for you.
  6. Write about a time you changed your mind about something that mattered.

Harder things

These can be the most rewarding prompts and the hardest. Skip any that aren’t right for now, and stop whenever you need to. Nobody has to read what you write.

  1. Write about a time you were in the wrong, and whether you were forgiven.
  2. Write about a goodbye.
  3. Write about an argument you still replay. Give both sides their best lines.
  4. Write about a time you were lonely.
  5. Write about something you lost, and what you did next.

Looking back

  1. Write a letter to yourself at the age you were in the photograph from prompt 7.
  2. Write about an ordinary day in your life now, hour by hour, for someone reading it in fifty years.
  3. Write about something you believe now that you’d once have laughed at.
  4. Write the first paragraph of your memoir. Then write it again, starting somewhere else.

Prompts for older writers

Plenty of people start writing their life story in retirement, and prompts suit that well: one a week is a gentle pace, and a long life is full of scenes. If you’re starting out, prompts 4, 7, 16, 25, 27, 33, 34 and 38 are good first choices. They begin with something concrete, an address, a photograph, a journey, a meal or a song, and let the memories follow.

Writing alongside other people helps too. Starting in the 1970s, the gerontologist James Birren developed a method he called guided autobiography, which he taught in small groups at the University of Southern California. Each week the group takes one theme, beginning with ones that are easier to write about, such as the branching points of your life, your family, money and career, and moving later to harder ones, such as health, beliefs and death. Everyone writes a couple of pages between meetings and reads them aloud to the group. Groups using his method still meet in places like libraries, senior centers and colleges, and a few friends can do the same around a kitchen table.

A few practical things make it easier:

  • Write the way that’s comfortable. A big notebook and a felt pen, a computer with the text enlarged, or talking into a phone and tidying the transcript later all count.
  • Shorter is fine. Ten minutes and half a page is a good session.
  • Your history is history. What you remember of a war, a wedding in 1962 or the day the factory closed is a first-hand account. Nobody else can write it.

If you’re helping an older person by asking questions aloud, rather than writing yourself, our 60 life story questions and our guide to interviewing a parent about their life suit that better.

Writing about real people

A memoir is full of other people, and sooner or later a prompt will take you somewhere they wouldn’t want to be seen. Anne Lamott’s advice in Bird by Bird is famously blunt: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

She’s right that your memories are yours. Who reads the result is a separate question, and you can answer it later:

  • Write first, decide later. A draft is private. Get it down honestly, and decide what to share when you know what you’ve got.
  • Write what you saw. Describe what someone did and said, and how you felt, rather than guessing what went on in their head.
  • Leave out other people’s secrets. Your story includes them, but some things are theirs to tell.
  • Change names when sharing widely. For a book that strangers will read, changed names and details protect people without changing the truth of the story.
  • Show people their pages. If you can, let someone read what you’ve written about them before others do.

From prompts to a memoir

After twenty or thirty pieces, read them all in one sitting. You’ll notice that some keep circling the same thing: a person, a place, a question you never settled. That’s your thread. A memoir follows one thread through a life rather than covering all of it, which is the main difference between a memoir and an autobiography.

Put the pieces that belong to the thread in an order that makes sense, which isn’t always the order they happened. Then look for the gaps, the scenes the story needs but you haven’t written yet, and write those next. Our guide on how to write your life story covers finding the shape once you have a pile of pages.

Where Eve fits

Prompts are good at getting you started. They’re less good at the next question: the one that follows from what you’ve just written. That’s the part Eve, the AI biographer in Ever Journal, is built for. She drafts a first chapter from a few basics, then reads what you’ve told her and asks about the biggest gap.

You answer by typing, or by talking on Eve+, and she weaves the answer into your book, writing only from what you’ve told her and marking what she doesn’t know instead of guessing. You approve every change. If a list of prompts has you stuck on which one to pick, she’ll just ask the next one. Ever Journal is free to start, and you can see how Eve turns answers into chapters.

Sources

Back to the contents