A memoir is the story of a memory.  It is the story about something that happened to the writer.  In order to make your memoir interesting you will need to think about two things

¨ baby steps
¨ thought shots

Baby Steps

Baby steps are used to describe and action step by step—or baby step by baby step.  For example, you could write “He walked through the doorway.”
Or you could use baby steps and write:

 He grasped the cold doorknob and turned it slowly to the right.  He
 pushed the door inward.  The hinges squeaked and cold air rushed
 past the opening door.  The room was dark.  He darted his eyes to the
 right.  Nothing.  He pushed the door open a little farther, and slowly
 moved his right foot into the room.  His shoe creaked a bit as it hit the
 polished hardwood floor.

Babysteps give the reader meaningful details.  Another way of thinking about baby steps is called “Exploding the Moment.”  It’s when a moment is slowed way down—like in the movies.  The following is an example of an exploded moment written by a 5th grader.

 It was 4:00 a.m. of a cold Saturday morning in January. We were
 going to see my cousin take off to Massachussetts and the to
 Saudi Arabia.  We were at the air base in Burlington, VT. When
 my mom got in the door she started to cry.  I could feel the urge
 to cry but I held it in. All my relatives were there.  Finally we went
 into the big cold room where we would see them go.  Everyone was
 crying but I held it in.  I felt like a walking teddy bear because
 I would walk over to someone and they would give me a hug, then
 to another person and the same thing would happen.  It was now 6:30
 and I was now the official helmet holder—not for very long because
 that thing weighed a ton.  We had brought flags.  One for my cousin
 Todd and one for us to wave at him. When it was finally time to go
 we all went ouside and waved as they drove in their big, big truck.
 I felt my heart drop and get hevy when they went away and I
 remember this like it was yesterday.  (From Barry Lane's Reviser's Toolbox)

Thoughtshots

Thoughtshots are another way to include detail in your writing.  A thoughtshot allows the writer to pause and reflect on a particular event or a detail. For example, you could write “My mother always sat down in front of the television after dinner.”  But a thoughtshot would be far more interesting to read.  Here is an example:

I don’t know why my mother always sat down in front of the television after dinner.
Perhaps it was the only time she really had for herself.  My sister and I always
had to do the dishes.  My step-father usually went out to the garage to work on
the old Buick that he always thought he could get up and running someday.
Maybe Mom just liked being alone with her game show.  She always watched
Jeopardy with Alex Terbeck.  I think she thought Alex was handsome and smart.
Maybe she dreamed that Alex would come into our living room one day and swoop
her off to game show land.  Mom knew a lot of the answers on Jeopardy, and she’d
call them out to the television as if those contestants could hear her.  “Where is China!”
she’d yell.  I always thought it was sort of dumb, and I remember one time my best friend
Angela was over at my house.  She heard my mother and looked at me like I was weird.

A thoughtshot lets you go deeper into your own mind, and it allows you to go deeper into the mind of someone you are writing about.   A famous writer named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said the “When we read we meditate with other minds.”  A thoughtshot lets you do that as a writer, and sets things up so your reader can do that, too.

Here’s an example of a thoughtshot from Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.

 The jolts that took the pilot had come, and now Brian sat
 and there was a strange feeling of silence in the thrumming
 roar of the engine—a strange feeling of silence and being alone.

 He was stopped.  Inside he was stopped.  He could not think
 past what he saw, what he felt.  All was stopped.  The very core
 him, the very center of Brian Robeson was stopped and stricken
 with a white-flash of horror, a terror so intense that his
 breathing, his thinking, and nearly his heart had stopped.

Seconds passed, seconds that became all of his life, and he began to know what he was seeing, began to understand what he saw and that
was worse, so much worse that he wanted to make his mind freeze
again.

He was sitting in a bushplane roaring seven thousand feet above the northern wilderness with a pilot who had suffered a massive heart attack and who was either dead or in something close to a coma.

He was alone.

In a roaring plane with no pilot he was alone.

Alone. (1987, p. 12) (From Barry Lane's Reviser's Toolbox)
 

Mapping Your Neighborhood
Baby Steps and Thoughtshots
Memoir Overview
Graphing Your Life
Writing the Lead