The Three Lies That Keep People From Writing Their Story
Most people never write their story for three reasons, and all three are wrong. It doesn’t matter that you aren’t famous. The record disappears whether you are or not.Share on X
Most people let March 14 pass without writing a word, and the reasons they give themselves are lies.
The first lie is that your story isn’t important enough. You’re not famous, nothing dramatic happened, who would even read it. The second lie is that you’ll write it later, when you retire, when the kids are grown, when there’s time. The third lie is that someone else remembers it, so it’s safe.
All three are wrong. Your story doesn’t need to be famous to matter. Later doesn’t come. And nobody remembers it the way you do. That means when you go, your version goes with you.
Watch: 4 Tips on Writing the Beginning of Your Story (So It Doesn't Suck), Wrestling With Words
I Am Writing Mine Right Now
If you don’t write it down, it disappears. I’m documenting a community that no longer exists. The memoir may be the only place some of it survives.Share on X
I’m in the middle of my own memoir. It’s called Adventures of a Bellydance Photographer, and it covers eight years, from 2005 to 2013, when I documented the bellydance and renaissance faire communities in California with a camera and showed up to nearly everything.
I didn’t start out looking for a community. I started out grieving. My wife Claudia died in January 2005, and the months after that were desert hikes and silence. The communities found me before I went looking for them. A renaissance faire, a bellydance stage, a front-row seat I never gave up. For eight years I photographed dancers, faires, birthday parties, and cruises, and somewhere in there I came back to life.
That scene doesn’t exist anymore. It collapsed in 2015 after a controversy that ended one of its biggest festivals, and California bellydance never recovered. Many of the women I photographed in performance are scattered now. A lot of the online record has been deleted or locked away. The photographs I took and the chapters I’m writing may be the only place some of it survives. That’s what finally made me understand why you write your story. You write it because you’re the last witness, and witnesses die.
Your Story Is a Record, Not a Performance
People freeze up because they think writing their story means writing literature. It means writing the record. What happened, who was there, what it felt like, before the details blur and the people scatter.
You’re the only person who knows your story from the inside. Your parents’ marriage, the town that changed, the job that doesn’t exist anymore, the friend nobody else remembers, the version of your city that got paved over. You hold a piece of history that exists nowhere else, and the moment you stop holding it, it’s gone.
That’s not a performance. It doesn’t need an audience of thousands. It needs to exist. A story written badly and saved beats a story told perfectly and forgotten.
The Form Can Be Anything
The other thing that stops people is the assumption that a memoir has to look a certain way. Born here, then this happened, then that, the end. It doesn’t.
I’m writing a second one right now, and it breaks that rule completely.
It’s called Buttercup, and it tells the story of Claudia’s last years through the eyes of our cat. Buttercup saw everything, the emergencies, the ordinary evenings, the long bad months. So I let her narrate. It’s Claudia’s memoir and the cat’s memoir at the same time, and it only works because of the strange angle.
The lesson is simple. If the straight version feels impossible, find the angle that lets you tell it. A pet’s point of view. A single object. One year instead of a whole life. The unexpected frame is often the thing that finally makes the story come out. There’s no correct shape. There’s only the shape that gets it written.
Why Later Is the Trap
The most dangerous of the three lies is “later.” Later feels safe because it’s always available. There’s always next year, always after the next thing settles down.
But memory doesn’t wait for your schedule. Details fade. The people who could confirm what happened get older and pass on. The brother who was there when your father said the thing you’ve never forgotten won’t always be a phone call away. Every year you wait, the story loses fidelity, and some of it is already gone that you don’t even know is gone.
I waited years to write my memoir, and in that time the community it documents fell apart and most of its record vanished. I got lucky that I kept the photographs. Most people don’t get lucky. They wait, and then there’s nothing left to write from but a fog.
How to Start on March 14
Don’t start with your birth. Start with one scene. One moment you remember clearly, with people and a place and something that happened. Write that down, badly, in whatever words come. That’s a memoir chapter. You now have one more than you had this morning.
Don’t write it in order. Memory doesn’t arrive in order, and a story doesn’t have to either. Write the scene that’s loud in your head today. Tomorrow write a different one. The shape comes later, after the pieces exist.
If the writing itself stops you, that’s what people like me are for. A ghostwriter can pull the story out of you in conversation and put it on the page in your voice. But you don’t need anyone to begin. You need one scene and the willingness to write it down before the last person who remembers it’s gone.
That’s the whole holiday. Write your story, because you’re the only one who can, and because waiting is the one mistake that doesn’t give you a second chance.