Character Building in Memoir

Memoir and life story writing are more than just recounting the events of your life. Not to diminish the stories of “I went here, and I did this,” but consider destinations and accomplishments more as the raw material to work with rather than the finished product.

To bring your life story or memoir to life, you have to paint a vivid picture for your readers of the stakes, the risks, and the tension. Yes, those same elements that make great fiction make great memoir too.

But most importantly, you have to present well-developed characters who the reader really cares about. Your characters (whether in fiction or in non-fiction) are what really bring your story to life. Remember, for readers to care about what happens, they have to care about who it’s happening to.

Just because we know the people in our memoir personally doesn’t mean we can skip the exercise of character building. After all, a story is a story, and it’s an author’s job to paint their characters as vividly as possible, whether they’re fictional or not.

As Tiffany Yates Martin explains in her book Intuitive Editing: “ . . . of all the craft elements you may hone in your writing, learning to create well-developed, three-dimensional, relatable characters and taking them on a meaningful journey is the most important skill you will ever master.”

In other words, when a character is written into a story, they need to have much more than just a name, a title, and some dialogue. Before the character is even mentioned on the page, the writer should know that character’s history, fears, loves, desires, and beliefs. The writer should already know what that character ate for breakfast, their biggest regret in life, and what their relationship with their parents was like.

While much of that information will probably go unused in the story, writers should still know who their characters are in the world, independent of their novel. Hemingway said: “When writing a novel, a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

When a writer crafts a well-developed character and vividly brings them to life, the plot will evolve organically. The character will show the writer where they want to go, not the other way around.

It’s the same philosophy a “pantser” uses in writing. Instead of methodically creating a detailed outline of their book before they sit down to write, pantsers discover the story as they write. It’s the characters who are driving the narrative’s direction.

To underscore the importance of creating strong characters, consider Ann Lamott’s theory: “Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, something is bound to happen.”

William Faulkner seems to agree: “It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”

So how do writers begin to craft vivid characters? There’s no one, universally accepted method that they follow. Some begin by observing the people around them, including family, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. They can blend together different traits and quirks of several people to create one, unique character.

They can call on their own experiences and emotions and channel them into their characters.

Or, if they’ve been inspired by characters they’ve read in books or seen in movies, they can expand on them as well.

Some writers fill out a Character Planning Sheet or a Character Profile Template. There are gazillions of these kinds of templates on the internet - take you pick. Game designers use them to organize and develop characters. They are invaluable in a writer’s toolbox. Filling out a character profile sheet helps writers flesh out the details of their character’s life, whether those details are used in the story or not. Regardless, it helps the writer to create a three-dimensional person who has back story, motivations, hopes, and dreams. It helps them craft characters whose actions are consistent with their profile, which makes them believable.

So what role does character building play in memoir writing? As it turns out, it plays a major role. When you’re talking about other people in your memoir, it’s important to explore as many aspects of them as you can, beyond just their interactions in your life.

A character profile template invites you to explore your characters’ physical appearance, personal history, psychological traits, communication style, motivations, strengths, fears, weaknesses, capabilites, conflicts, and values, just to name a few. It allows you to go deeper and broader into the lives of these characters rather than just skimming their surface.

It doesn’t mean you’re going to incorporate all of that information into your memoir. It means that when you’re writing about them, maybe you pick up on something you hadn’t considered before, like a mindset they may have brought to an interaction with you. Maybe you can see the circumstances of your life through different eyes. Maybe you can appreciate your time together with a different perspective in mind.

When you fully explore the people you’re writing about, you will bring more depth, breadth, and authenticity to your experiences with them and to your overall story. Readers will appreciate that authenticity and will connect more deeply with your story.

Spend time mining the real lives of the people you’re writing about, just as you would mine the life of a fictional character. Remember, people are people, and just like you are not one-dimensional, neither are the people you write about in your memoir.