There’s a moment in every memoir where the writer reaches for the shortcut. Instead of showing us what happened, they tell us what it meant. “It was terrifying.” “I felt so alone.” “We were happy.” These sentences feel true, but they land like a closed door. The reader stands outside, being told what to feel instead of being invited to feel it.

I think about this a lot when I’m reading memoir. The difference between a story that moves me and a story that just informs me often comes down to one thing: did the writer trust me to feel it myself?¹Lakin, C.S., ‘Bringing Your Memoir to Life with Sensory Detail,’ How to Write a Book. https://www.how-to-write-a-book.com/bringing-your-memoir-to-life-with-sensory-detail/

The advice is old. Show, don’t tell. But knowing the principle and executing it are different things. The harder question is always: how?

C.S. Lakin suggests imagining your life events playing out on a movie screen. Stop the film. Look at the stage. What do you see? What do you hear? What does the air smell like? This is not metaphor. It is a technique. When you can see the door swinging open, when you can hear the laugh that made your blood go cold, when you can feel the pencil freezing in your hand because you were trying to do homework while your father came home drunk — then you have a scene. Then you have something the reader can step into.²Lakin, C.S., ‘Bringing Your Memoir to Life with Sensory Detail,’ How to Write a Book. https://www.how-to-write-a-book.com/bringing-your-memoir-to-life-with-sensory-detail/

The alternative is abstraction. “Whenever my father came home every night, he terrorized our family.” That is true. But it is also a summary. It tells us the shape of the thing without giving us the thing itself. There is no terror in that sentence. There is only the label for terror.

I find this distinction both simple and profound. You can know something intellectually — you know that fear is present in a memory — without ever letting the reader feel what fear felt like in your body. The body is where memory lives. The senses are the door. And most of us, when we write from memory, reach first for the meaning rather than the sensation.

Why? Because meaning feels safe. Emotion feels exposed. Writing “it was scary” is efficient. It takes one sentence. But writing the specific way fear moved through you, the way your hands went cold, the way you held your breath without realizing you were holding it — that requires sitting with the memory longer. It requires letting the scene be unfinished in your mind, not just in the way it ended but in the way it felt.

This is the work. It’s not glamorous. It’s not even particularly creative, in the way we imagine creativity to be. It’s more like archaeology. You dig. You scrape away the interpretation, the summary, the meaning you’ve made of it since. And underneath, if you’re patient, you find the raw material. The sound of the screen door. The green of the lino under your feet. The way light came through the kitchen window at a certain hour.

These details seem small. But they are not small. They are the vehicle. They are what carries the reader into the experience. Without them, you’re just giving a report. With them, you’re giving an invitation.

There’s another reason we tell instead of show. We think our readers already understand. We think they know what it means to have a father who came home drunk, or to lose someone, or to be abandoned. And maybe they do, in the abstract. But your specific experience, your particular fear, your own body’s memory of it — that’s something only you can give them. That’s what they came for.

I wonder if part of the resistance to showing comes from a kind of modesty. Actually showing the moment feels like exposing yourself in a way that telling does not. “It was scary” keeps a distance. “My hands went cold and I stopped breathing” brings you closer. There’s vulnerability in the specificity.

But that’s exactly what memoir asks of us. Not the vulnerability of confession, necessarily. The vulnerability of precision. The willingness to say what actually happened, not just what it meant.

You can always add the meaning later. In revision, you can step back and reflect on what it all meant. But first, let the scene breathe. Let the reader be there. Trust that they will feel what you felt if you give them enough to feel it with.

The writer Anne Lamott once said that truth is the antidote to sophistication. I think about that when I’m tempted to summarise, to tell, to wrap a bow around the moment. The truth is in the details. The truth is in what your eyes saw when everyone else was looking away. The truth is in the sound of the car door, the smell of the cigarette smoke, the exact texture of the blanket your mother wrapped you in.

These are not small things. These are the whole thing. These are what make a memoir feel true — not because it reports facts, but because it recreates the experience. It opens a door and says, come in. This is what it was like.

So when you sit down to write a scene, try Lakin’s exercise. Picture the movie screen. Watch what happens when you pause the film. Don’t tell me your father was terrifying. Let me hear the door swing. Let me feel the cold. Let me be there.

That’s not telling. That’s showing. And it’s the difference between a memoir that reports and a memoir that remembers.

• 1
  Lakin, C.S., ‘Bringing Your Memoir to Life with Sensory Detail,’ How to Write a Book. https://www.how-to-write-a-book.com/bringing-your-memoir-to-life-with-sensory-detail/
• 2
  Lakin, C.S., ‘Bringing Your Memoir to Life with Sensory Detail,’ How to Write a Book. https://www.how-to-write-a-book.com/bringing-your-memoir-to-life-with-sensory-detail/