Memoir Course
Two Ways to Learn About Memoir Writing
We offer two ways to learn about writing a memoir. First, we offer a 10-session self-paced audio or video course that goes in-depth into the Imaginative Storm method. It will teach you how to access your imagination and memories and get words down on paper. Then it will go into the craft of effective, memorable writing.
Second, we offer a Manageable Memoir course that is 90 minutes and covers the nitty-gritty of getting your life story into a first draft.
The Manageable Memoir Online Writing Course
Build a memoir in 100 Days or less
In this 90-minute course, you’ll learn how to break your story down into 10-minute bursts of writing. Navigating by your two guiding stars (we’ll help you figure out what those are), you’ll build up a collage of perceptions and memories held together by a present-day throughline.
The key is to start small, be consistent, and understand that every moment in your life holds a story worth telling. Your life is not one story; it’s a thousand stories you can weave together however you please.
What you’ll learn in 90 minutes:
Focus on what matters most in your life story
Navigate the overwhelm by using 10-minute writing bursts
Build a meaningful structure using your two “guiding stars.”
Create a powerful sense of momentum from the very first day
Let go of uncertainty and start with confidence
By the end of this session, you’ll already have three new pieces of writing.
Who This Memoir Course Is For
This memoir course is for anyone with a story they cannot quite put down. You do not have to know how it ends, or even how it begins.
Some students arrive with decades of journals and no idea how to make them into a book. Others have a single chapter they have rewritten twenty times. A few come in with nothing but the feeling that their experience meant something and deserves to be written well. All of them belong here.
What this course asks is not expertise but willingness, the readiness to look closely at your own life and treat it with a writer’s attention rather than only a rememberer’s. If you have been telling yourself you will write it someday, we built this course for you to make that someday now. Think of it as a working memoir workshop rather than a lecture series. You write, you learn, you revise, and your life story writing gets sharper week over week.
The craft is only half of it. Staying in a regular writing rhythm, especially once the course is behind you, is what carries a memoir all the way to done. The Weekly Writing Circle is built for exactly that: a live hour every Saturday where you write alongside other people and keep the momentum from stalling. And the course is one step on a longer path. When you are ready to go further, Imaginative Storm also runs workshops, online intensives, and in-person retreats.
What You Will Learn in The 10-Session Memoir Writing Course
Memory is raw material, and this memoir-writing course teaches you what to do with it. Life is not a story, not yet. It is a pile of moments, some vivid, some half-forgotten, none of them arranged. The work of memoir is turning that pile into something a reader can walk through.
With the Imaginative Storm method, you will learn how to surface the scenes that actually matter, how to find the thread that connects them, and how to shape your life story into prose that moves the reader. You will learn what to leave in and, just as important, what to leave out. You will learn how time works on the page, how to write yourself as a character, and how to handle the real people in your life with both honesty and care.
By the end, you will understand how memoir holds together, and you will have the pages to prove it. Memoir is not the same as journaling, and it is not therapy, though the writing can heal. It is a craft. The distance between writing that helps you and writing that reaches a reader is technique, and technique is exactly what we built this course to deliver.
The 10-Session Memoir Writing Course Curriculum
The curriculum moves you from raw memory to a shaped narrative, one craft skill at a time, so you are always building on the session before. Early sessions focus on getting the material onto the page without judgment. Later ones turn to structure, voice, and revision—the work of making a true story read like a good one. The full session-by-session breakdown is below.
You can expect 10 sessions, each about 90 minutes long.
Each session includes a short intro, a warmup prompt, two 10-minute prompts with a shorter list-making prompt between them. (We do the timing for you.) Each session ends with a Surf the Storm prompt to do in your own time.
The course also includes access to the Prompt Archive, so you can hear what other course participants wrote to the prompts you’re working with. (We recommend you listen to these after you write to the prompt yourself.)
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Learn the principles of the Imaginative Storm method which includes: writing by hand, using a timer, writing what you don’t know.
What you’ll learn:
The benefits of not trying to write well, and why unleashing your imagination is the secret to powerful, original writing.
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Unlock the creative power that’s been waiting inside you.
In this first session, you’ll discover the freedom of writing without second-guessing yourself. You’ll learn simple techniques to tap into your inherent creativity and write like you’ve never written before. This session opens the door to creative breakthroughs that will amaze you.
What you’ll learn:
How to tap into your imagination and write with spontaneity, originality, and creative flow
How to find your true writing voice and express your experiences, insights, and emotions with authenticity
How to revive stories you’ve told before by uncovering fresh angles, deeper truths, and untold layers
How to write more powerfully and freely by letting go of perfection and embracing curiosity
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Unleash your raw, uncensored voice.
In this high-energy session, you’ll write without rules or judgment. When you silence your inner critic, you’ll find it easier to develop characters, write realistic dialogue, and engage your readers. Your creative writing feels more alive.
What you’ll learn:
How to transform your writing and produce material you didn’t know was insideyou
How to tell vivid, visceral stories that evoke emotion in the reader.
How to make a character feel unique and grounded in their own reality by writing truthful dialogue.
How to silence your inner critic, let the truth come forth, and develop your authentic writing voice.
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Write with sensory power
Great writing doesn’t just describe—it immerses. This session will help you connect with all your senses, including physical feelings, intuition, memories, and the atmosphere of a place, to make moments feel more vivid.
What you’ll learn:
How to make your readers feel what you feel
How to make scenes come alive using sensory language
How to uncover rich details that create an emotional connection
How to re-enter experiences through the body and the imagination
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Use details of place to deepen emotional connection
In great writing, setting is more than just a backdrop. It holds memory, mood, and meaning. In this session, you’ll learn how to use location as a tool for emotional depth, character development, and narrative movement.
What you’ll learn:
How to avoid descriptions that read like laundry lists
How to use sensory and spatial information to build atmosphere, suspense, or reminiscence.
How to use a place’s textures and echoes to bridge the past, present, and future.
How to re-inhabit past moments with honesty and depth
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Incorporate nature’s power and symbolism
Nature is more than scenery—it’s the original storyteller. In this session, we will explore ways to integrate the natural world into your writing. Life’s elements, from seasonal changes and weather patterns to plants and trees, will become a lens through which you understand your own and your characters’ journeys.
What you’ll learn:
How to use nature and elements to build impactful metaphors
How to connect personal experience to universal cycles for deeper resonance
How to transition from granular focus to an expansive perspective to craft a scene or memory
How to place your story in context of living history and the rhythms of time
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See beneath the surface of human interaction
Great stories are constructed not only from words but also from subtext, tension, and unspoken elements. This session explores “Socialese,” the secret language of relationships, group dynamics, and social identity. This will teach you to recognize the subtle indicators of human behavior and to effectively translate them into your written work. This is where character, motivation, and emotional complexity take shape.
What you’ll learn:
How to create life-like, layered, and deeply human characters
How to use silent behavioral cues and nuances to convey identity, status, and affiliation
How to infuse everyday moments with meaning by capturing social subtext
How to allude to your characters’ lives outside the main narrative to make your world feel richly inhabited
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Create characters with depth and complexity
The essence of a gripping story lies in its characters being propelled by things they themselves don’t understand. This session explores how to look beyond surface-level traits and expose the emotional reality behind your characters’ actions and decisions, even when the characters don’t grasp their own inner workings. This is where your characters come to life, animated by their experiences, inconsistencies, and underlying drives.
What you’ll learn:
How to create multifaceted characters—heroes, villains, or neutral figures.
How to use voice, gesture, and emotional tone to capture the feeling of being in someone’s presence
How to make minor characters memorable, even with limited page time
How to create characters different from yourself with empathy, credibility, and subtlety
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Use Personal Experience to Deepen Whatever You’re Writing
Your own experience is your richest source material. In this session, you will uncover the deeper meanings behind your life experiences. Discover memories, perspectives, and emotional truths that can add authenticity and depth to your work.
What you’ll learn:
How to identify the emotional arc of your memoir or personal narrative
How to choose the life experiences that support your narrative’s aim
How to make your readers feel connected to the experience
How to write about yourself with honesty and humility, without sounding self-absorbed
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Build structure and momentum into your story
Every story needs change. It’s how your narrative gains its shape, purpose, and emotional force. In this session, we’ll cover how to identify your story’s central theme, decide what to include or exclude, and maintain reader interest throughout the narrative. This is where your powerful material begins to take form.
What you’ll learn:
The building blocks of strong storytelling in memoir
How to recognize what comes next, even if you’re not sure where you’re going
How to build excitement in your narrative by intensifying tension, stakes, or emotion
How to make your story feel whole and satisfying with a strong beginning and ending
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Use contradiction and paradox to add dimension to your writing
Paradox is what thrills the imagination — and where readers lean in. The most compelling narratives thrive on conflict, balancing opposing forces like light and dark, certainty and doubt, or love and fear. In this session, you will learn to leverage opposites to create complex characters and scenes, and understand how duality makes storytelling more layered, truthful, and alive.
What you’ll learn:
How to spark imaginative energy by embracing paradox and opposing forces
How to reveal deeper truths accepting ambiguity and complexity
How to reimagine conflict in fresh, compelling ways
How to craft narratives that capture life’s nuances and avoid simplistic, predictable plots
Not Sure if This Course Is for You?
You can purchase just the Welcome Session and Session One for $39. If you like it, you can then purchase the rest of the sessions for $360.
Purchase the full course now and save 25%! $399 $299
What You Get:
Unlimited lifetime access
You will also receive a downloadable pdf of the book Write What You Don’t Know. It is included at no extra charge.
Meet Your Memoir Writing Instructors
Allegra Huston has not just taught memoir. She has written one. Her book, Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found took her through every stage of the form, the excavation, the doubt, the shaping, and the long work of seeing it into print. That lived experience is what she brings to the course. She knows the territory because she has crossed it, and she teaches from the inside of the work rather than the outside of a syllabus. Before any of that, she spent years as an editor, which gives her an unusual double vision. She can feel a memoir as a writer and diagnose it as an editor in the same breath.
James Navé holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has spent decades helping writers find the emotional core of their stories. As a manuscript coach, he is especially good with the hardest part of memoir, the tangled, tender material most writers would rather walk around. He has a way of helping you say the true thing without flinching, and of showing you that the scene you were most afraid to write is usually the one the book needs most.
What Past Memoir Students Say
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“I love the way present ideas bring up past ideas. Can’t wait to see what will evolve in the coming weeks. The course is fantastic!”
— Dan Stenabaugh, writer
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“This has comforted me very much in the thought that it brings the memoir down to something manageable, and then grows from there and builds it up gradually.. It’s the intimacy of writing, having fun, being with yourself, and then going wherever you want to go.”
— Philippe Trufferf, businessman
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“I love how you designed the Manageable Memoir course in small chunks, and it is helping me look at my memoir in a new light.”
— Alice W. Meadows, writer
In-Person Memoir Writing Retreat
Looking for an in-person immersive memoir writing experience? We host memoir writing retreats. Click the button below to learn more.