What makes an experience memoir-able? You’ve listed a number of experiences on your Remembers When Lesson 1 Worksheet and you can keep listing experiences every day. If you haven’t filled a sheet yet, don’t worry. Just keep carrying your worksheet and write down any experience that comes to mind.

But if you have a page or two of experiences listed already (or even more!) the big question for today is “How do I choose?” Should you start with the most significant experience in your life? Start with the earliest memory? Choose the one you think people want to hear about or that you tell most often?

This is one of the great secrets in the How to Write Memoirs toolkit – a foolproof way to select the right place to start. Ready?

Choose the third one on your list.

That’s right. Number three.

Why? I’d like to tell you all about scientific evidence that shows that the third idea you have will be the best, but that would be a lie. The simple truth is that it doesn’t make a difference which of your experiences you start with. We are saving you the trouble of trying to make a decision by choosing for you. There is no right or wrong place to start writing memoirs – no experience that is not memoir-able. You’ve proven it already by simply remembering it.

So now that you have where to start, print Remembers When Lesson 2 Worksheet and jot down some of the things that make number three on your list significant. Who was involved? When did it happen? Where were you? What was going through your mind? Make sure you have listed three to six details about the experience on your worksheet.

As you think about this experience today, the most important thing is to think about what you learned and why this memory came to mind when you thought of your experiences. Then in that last box on the page, answer the question “What did you learn?” We’ll take the next step in our next post.