Narrative Structure – Write on the World

If an autobiography tells the story of your whole life, a memoir zooms in on a specific piece of it. A memoir is a focused narrative built around a central theme or question, often rooted in transformation, struggle, identity, or insight. It’s not about everything that’s ever happened to you—it’s about what happened and why it matters.

Instead of telling an entire life story, a memoir zooms in on a particular “slice”—a specific period, theme, or experience that defined or transformed the author. Memoirs tend to be more literary and reflective, often prioritizing emotional truth and personal insight over comprehensive detail.

In my last blog post, we talked about how the basic steps of the novel writing process can be used to write a full autobiography. The same holds true for memoir—but with one crucial shift. With memoir, the first step isn’t structure. It’s theme. Let’s walk through how to find your theme and shape your memoir around it—one notecard at a time.

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The Hero’s Journey story framework was first described by Joseph Campbell, a scholar of mythology and comparative religion. Campbell’s influential book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949, examines the patterns and themes that recur in myths and stories from cultures around the world. (I highly recommend watching the below interview of Campbell with Bill Moyers to learn more.)

In the book, Campbell outlines the monomyth, a narrative structure that he argues is present in many of these stories. Campbell’s idea was that the Hero’s Journey is a universal pattern that reflects the human experience of transformation and growth. He believed that the monomyth could be found in many different cultures and historical periods, and that it offered a powerful framework for understanding the ways in which stories shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

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