Writing a memoir can be highly rewarding, giving you an opportunity to revisit life events, order and settle them in your own mind, and present them in a form that will be interesting to other people. You may choose to share your memoir with family or friends, or to self-publish. Perhaps it has wider appeal and you might want to send it to an agent or publisher.

Whatever the intended audience, spending a little time as you write to consider the way you are presenting your story can make it more effective for readers and make writing it an easier experience for you. The usual writing advice applies – show rather than tell, use and active voice, and so on – but below I give 5 specific tips to help your memoir take off:

Remember that you are telling a story

You want to take a reader by the hand and guide them through events of your life. Make it vivid. Present things as they were for you and show the reader how situations unfolded. This will affect the way you choose to structure your story. Memoir is not autobiography, so you don’t have to relate everything that has happened to you in order and in detail. Find a structure that works well for your story.

Focus on theme

A memoir is often about a part of someone’s life: so it might focus on a particular period or a relationship. As you write, a theme might emerge – perhaps love, resilience or loss – and keeping this theme in mind can help to focus your memoir on the story you want to tell.

Establish a voice

You don’t have to climb into a role to write your memoir but presenting a strong ‘voice’ can give readers confidence in what you are relating. Authenticity is something readers will respond to. Being yourself and allowing them to hear your voice will make your writing more engaging and help readers to trust you as narrator. But don’t impose your own views on readers; you can tell them your feelings about what happened, but leave them room to make their own judgements.

Treat your people like characters

The reader won’t know your mum or your friend John, so you need to present these people in a way that shows them as rounded, real people. Stepping back from your story can help you to see people as the reader will. Imagine that they are characters in fiction: how would an author describe them so that a reader can get a sense of their personalities.

Bring key moments to life with dramatic scenes

Just like in fiction, draw the reader into the world of your story by describing the actual events as they happened. This can make your memoir vivid and emotionally affecting. You can quote dialogue, if you can remember it, or use some artistic licence to recreate what was said. None of this means that you should ‘make stuff up’ and add things that didn’t actually happen, but the aim is to portray to the reader the essence of truth in what occurred.