From Meandering to Magnetic: 5 Memoir Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (Ep. 6)

You’ve found the courage to write your memoir, and you’re pouring your heart onto the page. But it’s not landing the way you hoped. Something feels . . . off. Flat. And each page of progress feels like pulling teeth.

It’s not because your life isn’t interesting. And it’s not a lack of talent.

You’ve got the soul for a great memoir. Now you just need the science.

In this episode, I break down the five most common mistakes aspiring memoirists make that sabotage both the writing process and the reading experience—and how to avoid them so your story feels cohesive, compelling, and deeply meaningful.

You’ll learn:

• Why including too much of your life makes your story weaker
• The subtle shift that turns you from victim into hero on the page
• The simple 3-part structure that creates momentum (for you and for the reader)
• How both too much telling and too much showing can derail your memoir
• And how to identify the central question that gives your story focus and power

If you want your story to feel magnetic—not meandering—this episode is your roadmap.

Mentioned in this episode:

1. FREE WORKSHOP — Finish Your Life-Changing Memoir: 3 Steps to Stop Stalling and Start Writing so Your Story Doesn’t Die with You 
2. MEMOIR WRITING PROGRAM — Unearthing Beauty (doors open late March, 2026)
3. FREE DOWNLOAD — How to Find the Heart of Your Story 
4. What We Carry by Maya Shanbhag Lang (there’s also a link to download the discussion guide, but careful—it contains spoilers!)
5. “What Is a Memoir’s Essential Question and Why Do You Need One?” by Lisa Cooper Ellison
6. Unmoored: How An Adoptee Found Her True Identity by Ann C. Averill 

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Transcript

0:02

Welcome to the Soul and Science of Great Writing, where the mastery of craft meets the mystery of creation. I'm your host, Mara Eller, freelance editor, book coach, and writing teacher with over 16 years of experience. I'm obsessed with the transformative power of words and with understanding what makes writing truly exceptional, not just to help my clients, but to grow my own craft too. So what makes writing truly great? Is it the spark of inspiration, the unique voice, the intangible soul that breathes life into words? Or is it the careful structure, repeatable strategies, and attention to detail that turn an idea into something readers can't put down. In truth, it's both. The soul and science of great writing brings creativity and craft together, exploring the soul and the science with equal parts awe and analysis. Today we're continuing our series on memoir by talking about the five most common mistakes I see Memoirists making can not only keep you from finishing your memoir but also keep the memoir from resonating deeply. I will name each mistake and explain exactly how to avoid it in your own writing. Plus we'll talk more about what we carry, the memoir we are studying as part of this series and how that author skillfully avoids each of these common mistakes. If your life allows, you might wanna pull up your notes app on your phone or grab a notebook and a pencil because this one is packed with actionable tips that you're gonna wanna remember and put into practice. Let's do it. Last week we talked about the subconscious resistance that can keep you from writing your memoir, the veils your brain creates to protect you from the risk of being seen both by yourself and by others. While that episode focused on the soul level struggles memoirs encounter, this week is more about the science side, the practical, tactical issues that can trip you up during the writing process itself. Today we're breaking down the five most common mistakes aspiring memoirists make and how to avoid them. Mistakes that will make your memoir not only harder for you to write, but also less engaging to read. Because while you're writing partly for yourself, you also want this book to land, to reach readers and move them in some way. You want the book to get written, yes, but you also want what you write to be good, to connect, to matter. To do that, you need to avoid these five mistakes, so the story you tell feels as powerful on paper as it does in your heart. Let's dive in. The first mistake on our list is trying to include too much of your life. One way this can happen is when you are thinking about your memoir more like it's an autobiography, So remember, memoir is a story about a specific transformation illustrated by a specific episode or slice of the author's life. It's not a recounting of everything that's happened from birth until present. That would be an autobiography. Another way this can come up is when you're tempted to give too much context. So you have a specific section of your life that you're focusing on, but you keep feeling like you need to give all of this background information and it starts to get really long and the reader's attention may also wander. I encourage my clients to limit their focus in two ways. The first one is by time. Give yourself a limited timeframe that you are working within. this can be really easy if you have something really specific, like the year you spent hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Or the year you spent traveling around the world, to reference two well-known memoirs. Or it could be a memoir focused on your dating life. So it might start with your first date and end when you got married. Whatever it is, try to identify a pretty clear beginning and end. Even if that ends up slightly changing, it will still really help you focus in on the core of your story. Now, that doesn't mean that you won't share memories from before that time, but they won't be the focus of the story. They will be selective, essential context that you sprinkle in as needed, but a word to the wise, you probably need a lot less of that than you might think. So figure out your timeframe and then force yourself to really stay within that span. Now the other way to focus your story, and I recommend that you use both, is with your topic. Especially if your timeframe is a little bit longer, you gotta get really clear about your topic. So it's not everything that happened within that timeframe, even within a relatively short time. If your memoir was focused on one year, you still need to have a topic from within that timeframe to limit yourself even further. So what is this story about? Is it about your search for belonging? Is it about your escape from controlling religion, is it about a crisis of faith? is it about coming to terms with being adopted? Whatever your topic is, get clear about it and then keep yourself as limited to that as possible. So I like to think of it as a Venn diagram. Love me a good Venn diagram. So you've got time and you've got topic, and where those two overlap, that's the little slice of your life that should actually belong in your memoir. Anything else that you include, you better have a really good reason. You better be able to connect it to that topic in a really important essential way. Otherwise, leave it out. That will help you stay focused while you're writing, so you don't write tons of material that you don't actually need, and it will help your story stay focused so the reader doesn't feel like this is just a rambling journal entry with no real point. The second mistake that memoirs often make is focusing on what happened to you rather than on what you did and how that transformed you. So remember, a memoir is about your transformation, as illustrated by whatever happened to you, but it's not actually about what happened to you. If you get that focus wrong, it's tempting to start just describing everything that happened, listing all the events, and describing them in lovely detail. But no one besides your mom is going to want to read that and maybe not even her. Unless you're a celebrity, we really don't care unless it's integral to your transformation. What makes readers care is a hero, a main character who struggles and changes over the course of the story. What happens to the hero only matters because of how the hero responds. You need much less about the events themselves on the page than you think. And much more about what you did in an attempt to navigate them. We talk about this a lot in my Unearthing Beauty program, where I have an exercise dedicated to helping writers uncover what they did in the midst of these difficult situations. Because we don't always see our own actions. Sometimes the majority of our response is internal. Sometimes we have cast ourselves as the victim, but in order to write a great memoir, you have to be the hero, which means the focus of the story is on your choices and actions, Which ultimately reveal what you learn and how you transform. Now, I'll just add here saying that you're the hero of the story doesn't mean that you're putting yourself in the position of God or some kind of superhero who has everything figured out. Remember, a hero is just somebody who faces the problem, struggles to overcome it and learn something in the process. Mistake number three is not creating a story arc with a structure. One of the biggest struggles for memoirs is knowing what to put in and what to leave out. Something we've already been touching on. There's literally a lifetime of detail to select from. Even after you narrow your focus with a timeframe and a topic, there is still going to be a lot you can't and shouldn't include. Plus, memoirs can easily start to feel meandering leaving the reader wondering, okay, that was nice, but what's the point? Where is this going? The reader needs to be pulled through the story with a powerful narrative arc that includes only the moments that truly matter. Using a tried and true story structure is the number one best way to help you see what's important and what isn't, and to arrange it in engaging way. There are tons of story structure options out there, including the 12 step hero's journey, which I do love. But some like that one can be a little overwhelming. They can get pretty complex And they can also become a little too prescriptive because sometimes we just need to write our way through before we can figure out where each scene fits on the 42 point plot outline. Sometimes too much analysis at the front end disconnects us from the soul of the story and becomes paralyzing instead of freeing. That's why I love using a simple six or three part structure. There's a reason the three act structure is so pervasive, it works. I taught this structure in my write like Taylor Swift workshop late last year because it's great for songs, one verse for each act, as well as being great for fiction and memoir. In my memoir writing program, I use this three act structure as well, but I expand it to six parts just to give a little bit more detail. Here's how the three act structure works. Act one is the problem. The hero wants something she can't yet obtain and begins a journey to attempt to get it. This problem is introduced by what is known as the inciting incident, the initial event that pushes the hero off balance and makes her desire obvious. So we need a hero who wants something that she can't easily get. Show us the inciting incident, which makes it clear to her that she wants this thing and can't get it. Act two is the struggle. The hero struggles against various obstacles, internal and external, going back to that internal and external transformation we talked about in episode four, trying different strategies to get her desire. This will often take up the bulk of the words on the page, the bulk of the space in the book, because this is where the hero clings to their old way of doing things and has to try different strategies and is forced to learn different things and eventually change their strategy by learning something life changing. Act three is that change. The hero unlocks a life-changing insight, applies it to solve the problem, and ends the story as a slightly different person than they were at the beginning. So you've got problem, struggle. Change, simple but effective. There are other ways to do it, but the vast majority of successful memoirs follow this structure and it's by far the easiest for newer writers. So I highly recommend that you try to map your story onto this basic three act structure, at least giving yourself Some anchor points to help you focus on illustrating that transformation through struggle that is at the heart of every great memoir. Mistake number four is not knowing when to zoom in and when to zoom out. You've probably heard the saying show, don't tell. But the truth is that great writing requires both. It's possible to have too much showing, but most of us end up doing too much telling and not enough showing, not using vivid imagery to immerse the reader in the story, which is something they want and expect in a memoir. I'm sure I'll do an episode on showing and telling in the future. But for now, a great way to think about it is zooming in versus zooming out. Showing happens when you're zoomed in on details, using lots of sensory description to show the reader what the characters are seeing, hearing, smelling, and so on. The pacing here is slow. You might spend a paragraph describing the way the sun glinted on the surface of the lake. Telling happens more or is necessary when you're zoomed out, moving the story forward with summaries of what happened, For example, you might summarize by writing, the early years of motherhood were a blur of diapers and cracked nipples, first smiles and last straws each day an eternity, and each month an instant. In that one sentence, I moved us through several years Now I managed to make that telling feel fairly vivid there, by still using some specific details, which is a pro tip for telling well, but it's still telling, it's still zoomed out, moving us forward at a much faster pace. So every story needs some of both, but the key is to know when to zoom in and when to zoom out, which requires knowing what's important, which comes from using a story structure and knowing what your memoir is most truly about. Which leads us to the fifth and final mistake: not having a central universal theme to ground the story and bring focus. In order to be really great, a memoir has to reach beyond the author's experience and connect with the reader. This is done by identifying and subtly highlighting the universal themes found within the author's particular story. We talked about this on episode four with Ariel Curry. She shared how the memoir, Grayson tells the story of how the author found herself followed by a baby gray whale when she was swimming in the ocean one day. But it's about how we can connect with animals in these almost magical ways sometimes, and how we can learn from them if we're willing to pay attention. That's something many of us have experienced to some degree, so it allows us to see ourselves in her specific story, even if we've never swam with a whale. Identifying this essential about ness also helps you decide where to zoom in in order to highlight that theme and how to develop symbols and metaphors to bring interest and depth to your memoir. But it's not so easy to find that central a broad enough to encompass everything that happens in the book, but specific enough to be unique in particular. We spend a lot of time on that in my Unearthing Beauty program, where we begin by identifying the values and themes that are most important to the author and then looking for those as they come up in the author's experiences and particular stories. You can actually access one of the exercises that we use early in that program for free on my website. It's called How to Find the Heart of Your Story. It's a free PDF download, which I will link in the show notes, so that can be a great place to start. But essentially you just have to start by looking for it, by thinking about it. As you're thinking about your memoir, as you're writing, be on the lookout for a central theme or insight, the most important idea your story illustrates. Write down your ideas. They will likely change and evolve as you write, but that's okay. Just keep trying to hone in on it and eventually it will come into focus. Okay. Those are the five mistakes you need to avoid in order to write a great memoir. Let's review them by looking at how they work in the memoir. We're studying together right now what we carry. First, Mayette neatly limits the scope of her memoir by focusing on a certain time and a certain topic. The topic is her relationship with her mother and how that impacts her own concept of motherhood. The timeframe is from when she first becomes a mother herself. Which leads to her reevaluation of her relationship with her own mother to when her transformation is complete. As Ariel said in episode four, the story is over when the internal transformation is complete. I won't say much more there because I don't wanna spoil the ending, but it's a span of about 15 years, which is kind of long for a memoir. It means she needs that topic part to be really clear, so she knows what to focus on within that longish time span, which again is what it means to be a mother and her own relationship with her mother as she declines as a result of early onset Alzheimer's. The second mistake was focusing too much on what happens instead of on the hero's response. Even though what we carry has a second important character, Maya's mother, it is still very much about Maya and how she handles the challenges of both mothering her own daughter and caring for her aging mother and what that brings up for her. You can see this in the first chapter, the prologue. The first line is her mother saying, Mai. I want to tell you a story, but the next paragraph is all about Maya. I'll read it for you. My daughter was nine days old. Overwhelmed by the new demands of motherhood. I had turned to my mom for support. I wanted her to listen in a sympathetic way, to take up my feelings, to murmur in agreement, as she did. Always, after talking to my mom, I felt better. Importantly, the author here clarifies right away what she wanted. For her mom to listen and be sympathetic to make her feel better, but that's not what her mother is doing. In fact, her mother wants to tell Maya a story as we heard in the first line. I want to tell you a story. Their desires are in conflict from the first page, the first four lines of the book. Mother wants to tell her a story. Maya just wants sympathy. Conflict, which is what drives every story. Right there, we have a clear articulation of what part one in our three part structure needs to do. Sets up the problem. The hero faces, Maya deepens this problem on the next page. Her mother tells the story, which sets up a question, but then her mother doesn't give the expected answer to that question that the story raises. I'll read that for you to give you that context. The story is once there was a woman in a river, she held a child in her arms. She saw that she had a choice. She could save herself or she could save her child. They would not both make it. What does she do? So it's kind of a proverb. Maya says that she felt restless. She says, I knew the answer without having to give it much thought the woman would sacrifice herself for her child. It's how all stories of motherhood went, particularly Indian myths. I said so to my mother, expecting her to agree, but she surprised me. We do not know the outcome. She told me. We do not know what the woman in the river chooses. Until we are in the river up to our shoulders, until we are in that position ourselves, we cannot know the answer. We tell ourselves we will sacrifice ourselves for our children, but the will to live is very strong. Her words astonished me. Maya writes. A woman choosing herself, the mere possibility felt audacious. I am skipping a little bit here, but continues. I wasn't sure what to make of this new side of her. While part of me welcomed it, I was an exhausted new mother. I wanted her to cut to the chase to tell me how to manage motherhood, to describe what she had done. I wanted her to be who she had always been. When I most craved clarity, she had given me an enigma. I didn't understand that she was trying to give me the answers. I sought that she was trying to come clean. So while there are a lot of words on the page in this book about what her mother did and said, it's all framed in relation to what Maya wants and thinks and decides as a result. Part of how she does that so well is by focusing right from the start on what the hero wants. It's an incredibly simple but powerful tip for story writing. Make sure you know what your main character wants in the book as a whole and in each scene. That's what drives everything else. Then focus on how the hero tries to get what she wants, successfully and unsuccessfully. The third mistake is not using a narrative structure. What we carry uses a clear three part structure, dividing the book into three parts with Roman numerals and headings to show us like part one, part two, part three. There's no table of contents in most memoirs, including this one, which always annoys me because I always wanna see that. But it does have a three part structure, like on the page for us to see. Part one sets up the problem she wants her mother to be, as she's always been, to make her feel better, to give clear answers to her pressing questions about how to be a good mom for her infant daughter, but that's not what she gets. Instead, her mother introduces ambiguity and then gets diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. By the end of part one, maya is very far indeed from getting what she wants. And by the way, that is all spoiled by the back cover already. So no real spoilage there. Part two begins after that diagnosis and is focused on how Myas struggles to take care of her mother, be a mom to her own daughter, and still be herself with a career. So remember part two is the struggle. She's struggling for that clarity and obstacles keep getting in her way. Part three is her transformation, which I won't give away, but it bits perfectly with that three part structure. I'll add that if you're reading along, you might notice that parts one and two are each about 45 chapters while Part three only has 16 chapters. In a three act structure, the third act is pretty much always the shortest, often significantly shorter than the others, and act two is typically the longest, so don't feel like you need to have them all be the same length if you're trying to do a three part structure. The fourth mistake was not knowing when to zoom in and when to zoom out. In the prologue, Maya zooms in primarily, basically exclusively on the dialogue. She doesn't include any other sensory detail, but instead summarizes how she was feeling, the context we need for understanding this moment in her life, which again is very brief, very little, and what they both want. This works because the story her mother tells is meant to be a guiding metaphor for motherhood, containing the guiding question for the whole book. How is a mother supposed to handle it when she has to choose between herself and her child? The entire book shows Maya wrestling with this question in all the myriad forms it takes. If she had zoomed in with more sensory description on the moment when her mother shared this story, it would feel more specific and therefore more limited. So this is a great example of where the narrative actually benefits from more telling and less showing. The first really zoomed in scene that contains more than dialogue is in chapter two, when she narrates their move from New York City to Seattle, though it's still mostly telling with a few precise details thrown in. This helps get the story moving quickly since this is all setting the scene for the inciting incident, which is the story her mom tells her in the prologue, which happens after their move and after Maya's daughter is born. So it's a little bit of a flash forward for that prologue and then we go back a couple years in time to lead up to that moment. Zooming in too much there would bog the story down and the reader would lose interest. So Maya masterfully chooses to tell with some wonderful, precise details thrown in to move us along and carry us quickly forward in the plot towards the truly important pivotal scenes. Last but not least, the fifth mistake is not having a central universal theme. While I won't tell you what I think that insight ends up being in this book, to avoid spoilers, Maya clearly tells us what the theme will be about in the first chapter, that prologue. It will be about how mothers navigate competing demands and how our understanding of motherhood is directly influenced by the stories we believe about our own mothers. The plot will be about how Maya navigates the competing demands of motherhood and how her understanding of motherhood changes as she learns more about her own mother. But the theme reaches beyond Maya to include all of us mothers and parents particularly, but even everyone who has or has had a mother, which is to say everyone. You could even say it extends to everyone who has ever felt torn between caring for themselves and caring for others. You don't have to use a proverb or a guiding metaphor to do this, but it is certainly an effective method. The key is to select a guiding question for your memoir, what memoir coach Lisa Cooper allison calls your essential question in her fantastic post on Jane Freeman's blog last week, which I'll link to in the show notes. For example. In this prologue, Maya raises several questions in the reader's mind. On a plot level we want to know. What was her mother trying to tell her with that parable? And how will that help Maya navigate motherhood? The answers to those questions will lead us to the external transformation we talked about in episode four. It also makes us wonder how much of ourselves should we sacrifice for our children? Do we ever really know the people closest to us? These are questions that guide the writer as she is crafting her memoir and that guide us as we're reading. By the time you're done with revisions, every single chapter should connect to that guiding question in some way. it should be grappling with that question or answering it, or showing what the answer is not. You should be able to articulate, for every single chapter, how it interacts with what you decide is ultimately the most essential guiding question of your memoir. Start by making a list of all the questions you're trying to answer it by writing this book. Just write them all down. They'll probably be focused on you at first, but it's relatively easy to expand them from individual to universal. If your question is how did I survive this particular hard time and grow as a result, you can replace I with we and play with different ways of naming that hard time until you find one that's specific enough to be interesting, but general enough to apply to more people than just you. I recommend picking a question at the beginning of your writing process that you think is going to be the central focus of your memoir, and then refining it as you go. It will, it should evolve as you write, as you discover more about your story through the process of writing. Then in the revision process, make sure that you are articulating that question somewhere in the first chapter. For example, a client of mine, Ann Avril, in her memoir about grappling with the emotional baggage of being adopted, title Unmoored, Ends her first chapter with a list of questions that whispered in her ear, even as her life was objectively good on the surface. Ending that list with what value or purpose can you possibly have if born a love child? Then she asks, what Siren lacks still saying to my soul. While these questions are phrased in the first person, I and my, they hint at questions that almost anyone might ask, and the rest of the book answers those questions. It's a beautiful book, by the way, told in short chapters with lovely, slightly poetic prose, so I highly recommend you check it out. I will link to it in the show notes. Hopefully that helps you get a sense of what these concepts look like in action on the page. If you've been working on a memoir and realize you've made one or more of these mistakes, that's actually good news. It means there are some powerful ways you can make this process a lot easier for yourself. These are all learnable skills. Becoming aware of them is the most important step, and you just did that. Now you just have to apply what you've learned. You can absolutely do that on your own, many writers do. But if you want support and more individual guidance for that process, I'd like to invite you to join my upcoming cohort of Unearthing Beauty. It's a five month hands-on program designed to help you nail each one of these techniques And many more, so you can write a powerful, engaging memoir full of beauty and meaning. Together with a small group of like-minded writers and lots of individual feedback from me on your work, we narrow your focus center, your agency, build a structure to shape and drive your story, identify when to zoom in and zoom out, and how to do both really well, and we ground it in a deeply resonant central theme that gives you direction and purpose. We do it all in unearthing beauty, guiding you through the soul and the science of writing a great memoir. Doors open the last week of March for the 2026 cohort, and the best way to learn more is to sign up for my free workshop. Finish your life changing memoir. Three steps to stop stalling and start writing so your story doesn't die with you. You can sign up for free at the link in the show notes. Until then, remember the difference between a memoir that feels meandering and one that feels magnetic, both to write and to read is almost always structure, focus, and theme. Start by narrowing the scope, using that dual lens of time and topic. Then craft your guiding question. Those two steps alone will help a lot. Sometimes you just need to write after that to get it all out on the page before you can go back and map it onto a story structure. But the sooner you do the smoother the process will be. If that sounds like work. It is. It's the hard but beautiful work of turning lived experience into literature. Your story deserves that level of care, and I'm here to help if you need it. That's it for today's episode. Next week I'll be chatting with a writer who's currently in the trenches of memoir writing. She came to me for book coaching late last year, and she's grown so much through our work together. We'll talk about why she decided to invest in her writing, how she's been finding her voice, and how that's helping her find the heart of her memoir. I will also share a few more insights about the first few chapters of what we carry as part of our guided close reading. If you found this episode helpful, could you do me a favor? Take an extra minute to rate and review the show. That will help others find it, and will also make my day. I will be back next Wednesday, taking you deeper into the transformative power of writing. Until then, remember, words are more than ink on a page. They are a path to wholeness.