Y’all, writing is hard enough, and that’s not even a matter of how to write a hybrid memoir. Just getting the words on the page can really feel daunting and overwhelming, especially if you have never written a book-length project before.
How on earth do we string together 50 or 60 or 100,000 words to get that book to be the expectation that your reader has?
There is so much pressure just to meet the bare minimum of what a book is, let alone create that excellent book that I know you have in mind. And oftentimes, I find that folks get really frustrated and feel as though they have to pick a simpler version of their book to be able to accomplish it.
I’m talking here specifically about what I call a hybrid memoir, and in this post in general, we’ll be discussing how to write a hybrid memoir.
A hybrid memoir combines the more traditional format of a memoir—meaning it is a slice of your life told in a single book—with a more prescriptive nonfiction approach, where not only are we getting that story, but we’re also getting some of the nuggets of wisdom that you gathered through living that story and, of course, through coming back and analyzing it later.
I find that those can often feel like two different book projects.
Folks will flip-flop between wanting to write a memoir and wanting to write a more traditional leadership, business, or self-help-style book.
And there really is no reason to choose.
I have, in fact, built my whole career on helping people combine these two purposes of their book: to tell a really engaging story—ideally, a story that reads like fiction, that your reader won’t be able to put down—but also to use that story to teach.
How to write a hybrid memoir is really a question of how to write a story that spreads your mission.
And yes, this is not selfish, to get more leverage for yourself. To get in front of bigger audiences, to speak and get paid what you deserve to get paid for it, to bring in more clients who are so excited to work with you.
All of the things that books can bring you.
Those things can come from either prescriptive nonfiction or a memoir. We just have to know how to do either of those strategically.
So if you’re trying to figure out how to write a hybrid memoir, there really is no reason to choose between the story and the expertise. We just need to know how to put those pieces together.
Today, I want to break down a very simple three-step process for doing exactly that: how to structure that narrative, but also weave in some of these expert ideas that I know you really want to showcase and highlight.
Step One: Structure Your Story
The first thing to understand about how to write a hybrid memoir is that we need to get the narrative in shape first.
Now, I know this sounds a little easier said than done.
There are lots of options for how to do this, and I’ve talked about memoir structure many, many times. But I want to give you a very simple way to think about it here.
When we’re trying to structure your narrative into something that will be satisfying and rewarding for readers, the main thing we’re looking for is that the character—you—is pinched at the correct time.
By pinched, I mean kind of pushed, shoved, forced, moved around in a way that feels exciting for the reader.
Start by dumping out the stories
The first thing you’re going to need to do is dump out all of the ideas that you have.
What are all of the stories that you think you might incorporate?
You’re probably looking for some backstory. This can be childhood, young adulthood, but mostly we’re looking for the stages of your life that happened within your particular topic.
This is why it helps to get clear on what your memoir is actually about, because memoir is not your whole life.
If we are writing about something like adopting a child, for example, then we want to pick a point around the time of that adoption, around the time you got the idea to adopt, and move through the end of that adoption.
What stories do we have to pull from?
We’re simply looking for the stories that happened between that first idea and once the adoption was complete.
If we’re thinking about something more like a traditional career memoir, we might want to start with entering the workforce, or we might want to start with actually entering the industry that you’re writing about.
And then we move forward until the end of that story.
That can be leaving the position, getting promoted, doing something different, or it can be some fairly arbitrary end that has to do with where we are right now.
Again, we are looking for the stories that make up the progression from the beginning point—when something changed that led you on that path—to the endpoint where you have resolved the crisis or the idea or the pathway that you were working on in this particular topic.
A lot of folks really struggle with the beginning and the endpoint. If that’s you, it may help to think more specifically about where your memoir should end.
Either way, first, jot down all of the stories that take us from the beginning point you have chosen for your memoir to the endpoint.
Look for the moments where you got squeezed
One of the major components of how to write a hybrid memoir is using the narrative beats to structure the information. So the next thing to do is to look through those stories for the really climactic points.
What are the points in that story where you really learned something?
Where were you really squeezed?
Where did you have to make a decision?
What are the points where you did make a decision, but it wasn’t maybe exactly what you would do now?
These are the kinds of moments we’re looking for.
In our seven-step process at Page & Podium, we’re looking to plug in pivotal points like that at every quarter of the memoir: about 25% of the way through, about 50%, and about 75%.
Then the final thing we’re going to plug in is your climax.
What was the most exciting part?
What was the part where you really got pinched?
Where did you have to move forward with the information you had gotten so far in the book?
We’re going to put that at the climax, which comes at about 90% of the way through the story.
When we lay things out this way, we have at least some level of structure for the movement of the story.
It keeps us from really dragging, and it keeps us from really rushing, because we have a pretty stable, pretty even pacing and rhythm for how we’re moving through that story.
If you want the much more detailed version of this process, I have a seven-step structure process for memoir that digs much further into how those pieces fit together.
But for now, the important thing is this: dump out the stories, lay them out so that you hit those major pinch points, and make sure we’re building to that climactic moment.
Before we do anything else with the expertise, we need to get the narrative in shape.
The narrative is important as a narrative.
It is going to scaffold out the other things you’re trying to say.
Step Two: Dump Out All the Ideas and Lessons You Want to Share
Now we’re going to shift gears.
The second step of this expert memoir process is dumping out all of the ideas and lessons that you want to share.
If you are someone who is working with clients, if you are coaching, if you are a therapist, a nutritionist, a consultant—if you are working with people—you likely already know pretty clearly what those lessons are.
They’re probably the things you are teaching every day.
But even if you’re out there all the time working with folks, I also want you to look back at how that story is planned out.
As you dumped all those stories out and laid them out in your narrative arc, where are the points that you were really learning something?
What can you see now, looking back at that story, that really contributed to what you do, what you know, and what you teach now?
Write all of that stuff down.
I mean all of it.
The stuff you are teaching now.
The stuff you think you might want to teach.
The stuff that you are just now seeing as you write all of those stories out.
Get it all jotted down.
One of the interesting things that can happen here is that you realize you know more than you think you do. You have all of these ideas and philosophies that you have picked up over years of actually doing the work, but you may never have sat down and looked at them all in one place.
Once you’ve got all of those things written down, I want you to look back at them.
What you should see is that you have different types of observations, and they are likely to fall into three buckets:
Problem. Cause. Solution.
The problem bucket
You will probably have some things listed in your brainstorm that you might call problems.
These are the kinds of things where we can identify the problem based on what we’re seeing in your book, but it is also likely what you see your clients or the people you teach and work with doing when they are not quite ready for help.
In marketing, sometimes we call these symptoms or pain points.
They’re the kinds of things that help us see that a person needs our help.
So if I were writing a book, I might think about something like writer’s block.
I have believed for a long time that writer’s block is not some mystical thing that is stopping us from writing.
We’re simply not clear on the idea yet.
When somebody tells me that they have writer’s block, I can tell you what they need. They need development. They need some support to figure out what the idea is.
But writer’s block itself is the problem-based thing that we can see.
The cause bucket
The second thing you probably have is a bucket of causes.
There is some overlap here.
When I talked about the problem of writer’s block, I also talked about the fact that the real underlying cause is not that you don’t have anything to write or that you cannot write.
The underlying thing is that you haven’t yet picked through and gotten clarity on what the issues are.
So my cause here might be lack of clarity.
My cause might be a lack of development.
My cause, quite frankly, might be lack of support from a professional to help you get clarity.
There are lots of causes, and you will likely have some of those written down among all these lessons, philosophies, bits of wisdom, and things you want to talk about.
The cause can do a lot of work for us.
Humans are resistant to change unless they understand what it actually is that needs to change.
Of course, we don’t want to have the problem anymore.
But oftentimes, we want to Band-Aid it. We don’t really want to dig in and fix stuff.
Once you can highlight what the cause of the problem is, people can become much more receptive to seeing that there is more to it than just this problem, just this pain.
Think about the writer’s block example.
Writer’s block is the problem.
Sure, folks want to write more.
But what we actually want is to write in a way that feels good. We want to write in a way that, when we finish our writing session, we feel like we accomplished something. We feel like we’re moving forward on the project.
Understanding that the cause of writer’s block is a lack of clarity makes everything make so much more sense.
Now we’re not trying to set Pomodoro timers, hoping that we can push through it.
Instead, we can get at the root of the problem.
The solution bucket
And the third bucket is the solution bucket.
Here we’re thinking:
What do I recommend that people do?
What is my philosophy?
What is my framework that I teach?
What is the takeaway?
What do we want them to do with this information going down the line?
When we go from problem to cause, we set ourselves up so that the solution does not just feel like a swing in the dark.
We didn’t just see the problem and paste on a solution.
We saw the problem.
We dug into it.
We analyzed it.
And we found the solution that hits the root cause of that problem.
This is so much more effective than simply giving a list of tips.
This is an actual framework.
This is something you can teach, something you can speak from, something you can build a platform on to promote your book.
It is infinitely useful to have all of this stuff laid out and broken into these buckets.
So step two is: jot down all of the lessons, philosophies, wisdom, all the things that you teach, that you want to teach, that you think about, that you want to speak about, that you want to share online.
Dump them all out—a word or two each—and break them into your buckets of problem, cause, and solution.
Step Three: Combine the Story and the Expertise
This is really the key to how to write a hybrid memoir without making it feel like two books mashed together.
The good news is that because you have sorted each set of items—your stories into a narrative and your ideas into buckets of problem, cause, and solution—we can now pretty easily superimpose them.
When we think about a narrative arc, oftentimes the first quarter or so is you, in a memoir, moving through a really bad time.
That is often really aligned with what the problem is.
We are seeing you, as readers, work through this hardest hard time that led you to where you are now.
Well, guess what gets mapped onto those stories?
Your problem pieces.
Look at the first quarter of the story. It might end up being a third, even a half sometimes.
Where does each problem analysis go?
Which story best leads into this particular problem analysis?
Which moment in your story most naturally links with this problem point that you want to make?
Slot those in.
Now you have an outline where you know exactly what stories go where, but you also know what philosophy goes along with them.
And because the analysis is coming out of the story, you avoid one of the biggest problems with this kind of book: centering your memoir’s message without sounding preachy.
Map the causes onto the middle
Then you’re going to do the same thing with all of your cause factors.
Map those onto those middle-point stories, those middle-point moments in your life where, often in the narrative, you are starting to figure out what was happening.
You’re starting to figure out, in yourself as a character in that book: Why was I having those problems?
You’re starting to experiment.
You’re starting to learn.
This is the point where some of those realizations about cause are going to slot in so beautifully.
The story and the expertise are doing the same thing at the same time.
You, as the character, are figuring something out.
Your reader is figuring it out with you.
Put the solutions in the back—but do not drop the story
When you’re figuring out how to write a hybrid memoir, this is where I see people make one of the biggest mistakes.
Finally, you’re going to put your solution stuff in the very, very back.
Now, one cautionary word here.
Oftentimes, I find that when folks get to the solution, they will drop off almost entirely from the story aspect.
Y’all, this is a mistake.
We instead need to see you struggle to implement the solution.
What often happens in a narrative like this is that around 75% of the way, you will have what we at Page & Podium call the epiphany.
And what that means is you have come to the point where you have suffered enough that you can finally see what you need to do.
But seeing what you need to do is not the same thing as doing it.
Oftentimes, from 75% through the end of your book, we are seeing you gather the courage, gather the support, gather the resources.
We’re seeing you assemble the team, as it’s quite often called in storytelling structure, to get things together to meet that final boss in your climax.
What better place to teach your audience what they need to do than by showing them what it looked like when you needed to do it and actually had to do it for the first time?
That’s what can go here in this last quarter of your book.
Give the solution, and give the solution by pairing it with stories that show you implementing that solution.
Now we don’t feel like we’re preaching.
We don’t feel like we’ve just created a 200-page ad for your company.
Instead, we are effectively teaching.
We are effectively sharing your mission.
And we’re doing it in a way that feels like reading a fiction book, feels like reading a novel.
What is not to love, y’all?
You Really Do Not Have to Choose
If you’re trying to write a book that shares your story while also showcasing your expertise and credibility, you really do not have to choose between those things.
You can tell a really engaging story.
You can make your memoir meaningful.
You can give readers the real you, let them understand how you became the person you are now, and still give them a practical way forward.
You just need to think strategically about how those pieces fit together.
So if you’re wondering how to write a hybrid memoir, this is the process.
First, get the narrative in order.
Second, dump out all of the wisdom and philosophy you have picked up along the way and sort it into problem, cause, and solution.
And then put the two together.
Let the story show the problem.
Let the story show you figuring out the cause.
And when we finally get to the solution, keep telling the story. Let us watch you actually try to live what you now know.
That is how you get a book that teaches without preaching.
It is how you get a book that showcases your expertise without sounding like a walking ad.
And it is how you get the kind of hybrid memoir that is my favorite type of book to read and my favorite type of book to publish.
Need Help Getting the Story Into Shape?
Figuring out how to write a hybrid memoir shouldn’t be the challenge you spend your energy on. Instead, having a guide to put your structure together can help the process feel freer and more creative.
If a step-by-step plan through those seven steps of getting your narrative in order would be helpful—and y’all, it would—you can now get the full structure sequence that used to be part of The Memoir Method as a standalone course.
It includes in-depth tutorials, worksheets, brainstorming exercises, and the step-by-step process for getting that outline done.
You can work through it at your own pace and finally get that narrative moving forward.
Head over to pageandpodium.com/structure to get started.
