How to write a memoir · 5 min read
How to interview yourself for a memoir you can actually finish
The blank page is the enemy. A recorded self-interview is the workaround. Here is the prompt set and the recording cadence that gets the book past chapter four.
When we ghostwrite a memoir, we record interviews. Six to twelve sessions of 90 minutes each. The transcripts become the raw material for chapters. The author’s voice, intact, on the page.
You can do the same thing alone. Differently structured, smaller in scope, but the same underlying move. Talking is easier than writing. Recording yourself talking, then writing from the transcript, is a way around the blank page that most solo memoirists never try.
The setup
Phone voice memo app. AirPods or any decent mic. A 60-minute block on the calendar, weekly, for the duration of the drafting phase. That is the entire kit.
Storage matters. Keep recordings on a private drive or an end-to-end encrypted cloud. Transcripts are sensitive material; treat them that way.
For transcription, use a service like Otter, Descript, or Rev. They are fast and reasonably accurate. Costs run around $0.10 to $1.25 per audio minute depending on tier. For a memoir-length project, expect $200–$600 in transcription fees total.
The prompt set
Eight prompts that consistently produce useful material.
Tell me about the day this whole thing started. Do not interpret it. Just narrate it like you are walking through it with a camera.
Tell me about the kitchen. Or the car. Or the office. Whatever room contained the most important conversations of the year you are writing about.
Who is the person you most expect to be angry about this book? Tell me about them as if I have never met them.
What were you wrong about, at the time? Not what you are wrong about now. Specifically: at the time.
What did you tell people at the time, and what did you not tell anyone?
What is the smallest object in this story that you can still see clearly?
What did you eat the day the worst thing happened. Or did not eat.
What did you do the night after.
Run one prompt per session. Talk for 40 to 60 minutes. Do not edit yourself as you go. Do not stop when something hard comes up.
The cadence
Weekly is sustainable. Daily is not. Memoir interview work is emotionally costly; the brain needs the rest week to integrate.
Six to ten weeks of weekly recordings will produce 30,000 to 50,000 words of transcript. That is your raw material for a 70,000 to 90,000 word manuscript. The math works out because spoken language compresses substantially when written.
What the transcript is not
The transcript is not the manuscript. Resist the temptation to lightly edit the transcript and call it a chapter. It will not read as prose. It will read as someone talking — which is fine on Audible, not fine on the page.
The transcript is reference material. You read it. You highlight the lines that surprise you. You build a scene outline from those lines. You write the scene cold, in past-tense prose, with the transcript open beside you.
This is the same workflow memoir ghostwriters use on you. Doing it to yourself is harder than having someone do it to you, because the part of you holding the camera is the same part you are interviewing. But it works. The blank page is not the same enemy when there is a transcript on your desk.