Memoir Tip of the Month: Structure Should Emerge from Emotion, Not Chronology

What if your story doesn’t begin at the beginning? What if emotion creates a more powerful narrative flow rather than a timeline?

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What if your story doesn’t begin at the beginning?

Some of the most unforgettable memoirs don’t. They plunge us into the middle of the storm. In media res, English teachers call it. “In the middle of things.” They loop back, skip ahead, and circle around. Why? Because our emotions don’t follow clocks.

We’ve been taught to think of our lives as a timeline. Childhood → school → marriage → career → retirement. A tidy staircase of experience. Steps through life, one after another. But memory doesn’t work that way—and neither should memoir. Memoir isn’t about reporting a sequence. It’s about revealing meaning. And meaning rarely arrives in chronological order. When you read a memoir that moves you, is it the year you remember—or the feeling?

Readers follow emotional momentum, not dates. They don’t need a timeline. They need resonance. They want to feel the story makes sense, even if it doesn’t follow a straight line.

In my book, The ABCs of Storytelling: Reflections of a Story Coach (2024), I use