Write Your Memoir on Your Lunch Break!
Choosing Your Title
Welcome to National Memoir Writing Lunch Break, or NaMeWriLuBre. Writing a memoir isn’t easy, but it’s also not hard.
My name is Audrey Murray, and I’m going to guide you through the entire process of writing your memoir, from choosing your title, to shooting your author photo for the book jacket. The best part? I’m going to come along on the journey with you, as I write my own memoir, about my lifelong love of languages.
Do you have a story to tell? Trick question: we all have a story to tell!
So let’s get started!
Step 1: Choosing Your Title
Your title is the most important part of your memoir, because it will go on both the cover and the spine of your book. Also, if your book ends up as one of those old-timey hardcover library books, your title will be the only thing readers see, besides the Dewey Decimal number.
So what should your title be? That largely depends on what kind of life you’ve lived. For example, are you a mid-level marketing professional? Recovering shopaholic? World War II veteran? The choices are endless.
But here are a few hard and fast rules:
- Rule of Threes
The best memoirs tend to be three words long, or convey three key ideas. Think Eat, Pray, Love or On the Road or Lord ofthe Rings.
For my memoir, I’m going to focus on my love of languages, so I’ll pick three languages at random: Japanese, Swahili, and Serbo-Croatian. Each of these languages is found on a different continent, which will give me more options for the cover photo.
2. Try to Rhyme/On a Dime
[to the tune of Beastie Boys] 🎶🎤Yoooo people love rhyming/better than rock climbing.🎶🎤
Rhyming is an important, but oft-overlooked, part of the memoir game. It’s also something the most successful memoirists avoid talking about.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mary Kay replied when I caught her on a Reddit AMA.
“No comment,” Salman Rushdie shouted through the thick door of his apartment, whose address I had tracked down via innovative Googling, and which I had been standing outside of for hours yelling, “GIVE ME THE REAL SCOOP ON RHYMING MEMOIR TITLES.”
I’ve, unfortunately, picked languages whose names are hard to rhyme with, but here’s a quick brainstorm.
Japanese: please, sneeze, tease, freeze
Swahili: wheelie, kneelie (word?), really
Serbo-Croatian: nation, Haitian, vacation (stretch)
3. Use a Colon
The best memoirs often have coloned titles. Again, think of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, or On the Road: Confessions from a Man with a Car and a Dream, or Lord ofthe Rings: Getting Lost, and Found Again, in Mordor.
In general, it’s best to have your colon be followed by either a gerund or the word “confession.” So, if you’re the mid-level marketing professional, you might go with SEO to CEO: Confessions of a Go-Getter Who Turned Keywords into Keys to the World. Or, if you’re a World War II veteran, you might be best served by something like Bomb, Pray Love: Learning to Shoot for the Stars, Even If Your Company Is Running Low on Rifles, and Forge Nations out of Groups of People Who Don’t Share a Common Language
For mine, I’ll go with Living with Linguaphilia: Learning to Sneeze in Japanese, Pop a Wheelie in Swahili, and Pass for Haitian in Serbo-Croatian.
This title also serves a dual purpose, because some people will assume I am living with a terrible disease and buy my book out of morbid curiosity.
So what will your title be??
Write it here: ______________________________________________
