In aspiring to begin a memoir, we hesitate because our memories feel messy—more like static images than full stories. But what if those fragments are actually the best place to start? How do memories lacking in clear structure serve as rich material for memoir?
Begin with What Insists on Being Remembered
Sometimes, we don’t get a full scene—we get an image. A gesture. A sound. That’s enough. Memory doesn’t obey story arcs; it offers presence. Start with what lingers.
When I sat down to write a memory, what came to me instead was an image: my Ninang (godmother), in her twenties, running a laseta through strips of buli to make them pliable enough to stitch into palm fronds. She wore a secondhand T-shirt and faded trousers—clothes that didn’t need to be washed every day. That image had no plot. But it had weight.
This is how I begin.
I Think of Beginning a Memoir Like Dream-Building
Memoir, especially in its earliest stages, feels more like dream-building than storytelling. In dreams, some images are vivid, others blurred. And yet we wake up with a feeling we can’t shake. That’s what writing from memory feels like.
I dream of a house by the beach, my writing desk facing the ocean, a flowering tree beyond the window. The desk rotates in my imagination like a pinpoint on Google Maps. In memoir, this kind of imagined memory matters. It’s rooted in something real, even if we can’t trace every detail.
Let Fragments Guide Our Beginning
We can’t wait for a tidy narrative arc, but allow the fragments to come. Our job is not to force them into shape too early—but to collect them.
If my memories were a teleserye, I might have characters, conflicts, and arcs. But they arrive more like cameos: faces I can’t name, names I can’t face. And that’s okay. Memoir isn’t about perfect recall. It’s about faithful attention.
Sometimes I consider switching to my first language, Tagalog, to access those fragments more easily. But that opens up another challenge: I can only enter the memory as a child—and the child wasn’t always paying attention. Still, through that child’s eyes, one vivid memory surfaces:
Tumatakbo kami sa burol. Paahon, pababa, paahon, pababa.
Sigawan kami sa tuwa. Naririnig ko si Inay, tinatawag kami—“Baka kayo madapa!”
Begin with Our Inner Child’s Perspective
Our childhood memories may not be logical, but they are emotional. Trust them. What felt huge then—a hill, a trail, a short walk to the balon—may feel small now. But the emotional scale is still valid.
We used to run from the hill to the beach on the other side of the aplaya. We picked shells. Nanay, our grandmother, would wash us off at the nearby balon. I remember gathering black and red seeds from a flowering bush, scooping them into the folds of my skirt.
Now, I try to situate those places on a real map, but the scale has changed. What once felt like a vast kingdom now barely registers as a narrow patch of land. That’s okay. That shifting sense of place is part of the memoir’s truth.
Accept that Sense Comes Later When We Begin
At first, our memories will feel disorganized. They may not obey plot or structure. That’s not disorder—it’s emergence. We’re seeing characters, settings, and point of view on their own terms.
What we have is not yet a story, but it’s something just as important: material with weight and resonance. That’s how memoir begins. Not with meaning—but with memory.
We Can Begin Writing Without a Map
Memoir doesn’t start with structure—it starts with recognition. With fragments. With emotional weight. We don’t need to wait for everything to make sense. We just need to begin. What insists on being remembered is already the beginning.