Or, “Memoirist, Narrow Thy Focus.”

An old buddy of mine from the Marines sent me a message the other day. He asked me about writing, and if I had ever considered writing a book about our old unit. This friend said that he was interested in writing, but he didn’t know where to start.

Many people, not just combat veterans, feel the same way. They’d like to write about their lives, but the task feels overwhelming. Where do you begin? What do you include? Where do you end?

I earned my MFA in nonfiction writing from New York University. This is a question I ought to be able to answer. It’s also a question I heard at NYU more than once: “How do I know what to put in my memoir?”

The most common answer I heard to that question was, “You’ll have to write 900 pages to find the 300 pages that belong.”

That answer is technically true, but unhelpful. I will try to do one better, and I’ll answer the day’s question with a story.

I arrived at NYU with a goal to write a memoir about my time in the Marine Corps and the fallout from my military service (drug addiction, insanity, etc.)

I had a structure planned out, something like this:

                Part 1: Meet w/ my recruiter, get first physical, decide to become an infantryman

                Part 2: Go to boot camp, episodes from boot camp

                Part 3: Go to infantry school, episodes from infantry school

                Part 4: Join my unit, 1^st Battalion, Eighth Marines, train for a combat deployment

                Part 5: Deploy to Afghanistan

                Part 6: Appointed minesweeper for my squad, then fired

                Part 7: Return from Afghanistan, fail a drug test

                Part 8: Get kicked out of the Marine Corps, become a drug dealer

                Part 9: Ending to be determined.

Here’s the trouble with this structure. It’s complicated. On top of that, at every new stage of this structure, I have to introduce a new cast of characters. Your reader’s head is only big enough for a handful of important characters. Introduce too many, and they all start to blur together. Especially when most of them are Marines.

The other problem is, my material tended to explode. And I’m not talking about my work with mines, thank God. I mean that, when I started writing part 1, I felt I needed to include more details than I’d planned. Same with boot camp. I felt I needed to include small anecdotes to provide context for other anecdotes. It was like “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” Before I had even finished writing about boot camp, I had a hundred pages of material. I was on pace to write a thousand-page memoir.

You may not have the problem with exploding material, but some writers do. It’s a sticky trap: you start writing about your childhood, each detail begets a new detail, each story a new story, each new character more characters, and it feels as though you will never finish writing the first grade.

That’s certainly what happened to me at NYU. I failed to write my memoir, and I wrote a novel instead. But along the way, I discovered a strategy that could have made my writing life much less complicated. If you would like to write about your life, I recommend you start with a tight, clearly defined time frame.

Let’s take another look at my planned structure:

                Part 1: Meet w/ my recruiter, get first physical, decide to become an infantryman

                Part 2: Go to boot camp, episodes from boot camp

                Part 3: Go to infantry school, episodes from infantry school

                Part 4: Join my unit, 1^st Battalion, Eighth Marines, train for a combat deployment

                Part 5: Deploy to Afghanistan

                Part 6: Appointed minesweeper for my squad, then fired

                Part 7: Return from Afghanistan, fail a drug test

                Part 8: Get kicked out of the Marine Corps, become a drug dealer

                Part 9: Ending to be determined.

This is a wide, loosely defined time frame. I don’t even know how it ends. Let’s say I reduce it to the time that I’m actually in the Marine Corps, Parts 2-7. I was in the Marines for about 2 years and 9 months. I suggest that, if you’re a first-time memoirist, 2 years and 9 months is STILL too loose a time frame.

How about we stick with Parts 5-7, a deployment to Afghanistan? A combat deployment is about 7 months. I’m about to say something crazy here. 7 months is still too loose a time frame.

How about Part 6? In October, 2010, I was chosen to serve as my squad’s minesweeper. I walked at the front of my patrol, swept the ground with a metal detector, and if I believed I had found an IED, I would lie on my belly and brush away the dirt from the surface of the ground. I would look for wires, batteries, any evidence that we’d found a buried IED. I was also bad at my job.

I got fired from my position as minesweeper in December, 2010, after I blundered during a raid in a Taliban compound. Somehow, even though serving as the minesweeper could have gotten me killed, even though it gave me a responsibility for the lives of my squadmates that I didn’t want, it still hurt my feelings to get fired.

This, I think, is a time frame that works: October, 2010 – December, 2010, the period when I served as minesweeper for my squad. This gives me a discrete, manageable series of events to narrate. Once those events are in place, you can add backstory, context, and reflection as you see fit. I like to think of the events in the time frame as a wire structure or a spine from which I can hang everything else that belongs in the story.

You don’t have to be a Marine or a minesweeper to make this work for you. Just narrow your focus to something manageable, then try to narrow it even further. If you think you want to write about high school, try to narrow your focus to the grade level in which the most important things happened to you. Narrow further, maybe to the time you ran for student body president, or to the season you got cut from the basketball team.

There are counterarguments. If you’ve read the Liar’s Club or the Glass Castle, you know that the authors write about their whole childhood through several well-selected episodes. If you’ve got a series of episodes in mind, and you think you can write a book with a more episodic structure, go for it. I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m just saying that the project is easier if you start with a narrow, discrete time frame. I think, too, that when you successfully write out the story of one of these time frames, it gives you the confidence to write larger.

There is a way, too, that you can have both. Think of a book like Wild, by Cheryl Strayed. The time frame is Cheryl’s experience hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. I think it took her a few months or six weeks or something like that to complete the hike. Again, great time frame for a book. But within it, she tells a larger story about her relationships with her mother, her husband, and heroin. When you pick a tight time frame, you can couch a larger narrative within it, and make them unfold alongside one another.

My suggestion, though, is to just write the tight, well-chosen time frame (up to 3 months, but as short as a single day or moment). Once you’ve got it down, revise to the structure you want.