Memoir writing software: keeping a life story straight

A memoir is a book. Its chapters come in an order chosen for the reader, and that is rarely the order things happened. The hard part is often not the sentences. It's keeping track: the aunt who appears in chapter 2 and again in chapter 19, the house that changed hands twice, the year something happened, the photograph that has to sit next to the paragraph about it.

This page starts with a checklist of what a memoir has to keep track of. It's yours to keep, whatever you end up writing in. Then it covers what to look for in memoir writing software, and last, how InkSpine handles it, with the limits stated plainly.

What a memoir project has to keep track of

Whatever you write in, make room for these six things. A notebook, a spreadsheet or a folder of documents will do; what matters is that each one has a home before chapter 12, when you start needing it.

People

• The name they go by in the book, and the real name if you've changed it. Keep both, and note why you changed it.
• How they relate to you. Mother, second husband, the neighbour who taught you to swim.
• The years they're in your story. When they arrive, when they leave or die, when they disappear for a decade and come back.
• What you've already told the reader. Her age, his job, the falling-out. This is the line that stops chapter 19 contradicting chapter 2.

Places

• Houses, towns, schools, workplaces, each by the name you'll use for it in the book.
• What it looked like then, not now. The wallpaper, the smell, the road before it was widened.
• Who lived there, and when you were there.

Dates

• When each chapter happens. A year at least, a season or a month if you know it.
• The fixed points: births, moves, weddings, deaths, the dates you can check. Memoirs jump about, and these are what let a reader follow.

Memories and documents

• What each item is: a letter, a photograph, a certificate, a diary entry, a recording.
• Where the original is kept, and who has it. Your brother's loft counts.
• Whether it goes in the book, quoted, pictured or only used as a source for your own memory.

Groups and families

• The families, and the groups you belonged to: a regiment, a congregation, a band, a workplace, a class at school.
• Who belongs, and when. People join and leave groups, and a family changes shape with every marriage and death.

Threads

• The strands that run through the whole book: an illness, a marriage, a move abroad, a faith lost and found.
• Where each one starts, where it goes quiet and where it ends. A thread that vanishes for eight chapters is either a choice or a gap, and you should know which.

One more list is worth keeping: the people you may want to show a chapter to before the book goes out.

Life order and book order

Most memoirs aren't told in a straight line. One opens at a hospital bed and goes back forty years; another moves through a life by the houses in it. So you are always holding two orders at once: the order things happened, and the order you tell them.

A practical way to keep both: give every chapter a date, then read down your chapters in book order with the dates beside them. The jumps and the gaps show up on their own. A run of chapters in 1974 followed by one in 1998 might be exactly right, but you should be choosing it, not finding it in the proofs.

What to look for in memoir writing software

These are criteria, not products. Each one matters for a memoir in particular:

1. Chapters you can move around, without cutting and pasting inside one 90,000-word document. Book order changes more than once in a memoir.
2. Notes on people and places beside the text, not in a separate notebook you have to remember to open.
3. Photos inside the chapters that come through to the finished book, with their captions.
4. Footnotes for the places where you need to explain a name, a date or a term without interrupting the story.
5. Files you'll still be able to open in twenty years. A memoir is often a family keepsake as well as a book.
6. It works without the internet, and you decide where the book is stored.
7. Every draft kept, so a rewrite never costs you the first version of a hard chapter.
8. A finished file at the end: at least an ebook (EPUB) and a Word document (DOCX).
9. A one-time purchase or a free version if you are writing one book, not starting a career.

A word processor can hold a memoir perfectly well, and many have been written in one. What it doesn't give you is a place for the people, places and dates; those end up in a second document, and the two drift apart.

How InkSpine handles a memoir

InkSpine is a writing app for books, with a Memoir & life writing mode. Choose it when you start a project and the app uses the words of a life story instead of a novel's.

Choosing the mode. When you click Start my own on the Welcome screen, or import a manuscript into a new project, InkSpine asks "What are you writing?" Choose Memoir. You can change it at any time from the project's Dashboard or from Preferences → Project, and nothing in your files changes: it only changes the words the app uses.

Knowledge, beside your chapters. In Memoir mode the notes beside your chapters are called Knowledge, in four kinds: People, Places, Memories & documents, and Groups & families. Each entry has a short description and a page of your own notes underneath. Open it with ⌘5 (Ctrl+5 on Windows and Linux).

Names recognised in your chapters. Once a person or place has an entry, InkSpine underlines its name wherever you write it. ⌘-click (Ctrl-click) a name to open its card without leaving the page, and the References tab in the panel on the right lists everyone and everywhere the open chapter mentions. That is the "what have I told the reader" check, done for you.

Threads. The Threads screen draws each strand of the book as a line across your chapters: a friendship, a loss, a year that changed you. A stretch with nothing on it shows where a thread went quiet, and opening a thread tells you its longest gap as a number of chapters.

Life overview. The Life overview shows who appears in which chapter, across the whole book, one row per person.

Dates and narrators. Each chapter can carry a Date and a Narrator. If the book is told by more than one voice, or jumps between years, those two fields keep it straight.

Photos inside your chapters. Drag a photo onto a chapter, or use Insert figure in the toolbar, and it appears in the editor where you dropped it. Hover it and click Add caption. Photos and their captions come through into the EPUB, the Word file and the PDF. A picture with a transparent background, such as a hand-drawn family diagram, keeps its transparency in the EPUB and the Word file.

Footnotes. Add one with Footnote in the toolbar (⌥⌘N, or Ctrl+Alt+N on Windows and Linux). In the Word file it becomes a real footnote at the bottom of the page, and in the ebook a linked note at the end of the chapter.

A place for what isn't going in the book. The scan of a ration book you only need for reference, a photo you want to look at while you write: pin it to a private note in the Workbench and connect the note to a person or a chapter. Notes and their pictures are never exported.

Already have a draft in Word? Import on the Welcome screen splits a .docx file into chapters at its headings. The Word import guide goes through it step by step.

Every draft kept. Your text is saved to its file as you type, and InkSpine saves a version of the chapter after five minutes without typing. Open the chapter's History tab to read an earlier version beside today's and copy back the passage you want. How comparing versions works.

Files you own. Your book is a folder of plain files on your own computer. Each chapter is a Markdown file you can open in any text editor, with or without InkSpine. Why your book lives in plain files.

Works offline, on Windows, macOS and Linux.

The pages around the story. Front and back matter come with ready page types, among them Dedication, Preface, Acknowledgements, Afterword and About the author.

The finished files. Export an EPUB for ebook stores, a Word document (DOCX), and a PDF proof copy to send to family or first readers. The EPUB guide shows the export screen.

Being straight with you

• People add up fast. InkSpine Free keeps 10 entries per project, shared across people, places, memories and groups. A memoir with a big family will reach that. Entries past 10 stay visible and readable, and InkSpine Core removes the limit.
• Other Free limits. Free keeps 3 threads and 10 Workbench notes per project, and opens the three newest versions of each chapter (the rest are listed; Core opens them all).
• Exporting the finished files (EPUB, DOCX and PDF) needs InkSpine Core or a free trial. Writing, the on-screen preview, and Markdown and HTML export are free.
• It's not a family-tree program. If you want to map generations of ancestors, use a genealogy tool. InkSpine is for writing the book.
• No prompts or interview questions. InkSpine doesn't suggest what to write about. The memories are yours to bring.
• The PDF is a proof copy, for reading and sharing. It is not typeset for print.
• Privacy, said exactly: your manuscript is never tracked, and it stays on your computer unless you turn on an optional connected feature. Anonymous crash reports and usage statistics, which never include your words, are on by default and can be turned off in Preferences → About → Privacy.
• No built-in sync between computers today.

If the checklist above is what you needed, take it and use it in whatever you write in. If you'd like the people, places and threads to sit beside the chapters themselves, see what InkSpine does for memoirs or download it and start a Memoir project.

In InkSpine

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