When I teach memoir and personal essay, I start by asking my students to write a list of their key scenes—if they already know what their project is—or, if they’re at the beginning of the process, what the key moments in their lives are. The idea here is to write no more than a sentence, at most, for each key scene or moment. Why do this? Because the key scenes will be your narrative anchors, the moments of progressive complication in your arc, the big “redwood trees”, as it were, in your book, around which less important moments will cluster. Doing this gives you a map, and starts you on the road to an outline. Here is a list of categories for scenes that you might use to trigger your list of important scenes.
Giving Birth
Death
Learning (education, positive and negative)
Key childhood experiences (positive or negative)
Peak experiences (of any type)
Religion or Spirituality (positive / negative / Consolation / Desolation)
Writing a list of key scenes will move you towards discovering your “through-line”, the “deeper story within the story”, the necklace onto which the pearls (scenes) are strung. The through line is defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as “A common or consistent element or theme shared by items in a series or by parts of a whole.” Memoir or personal essay is not our autobiography, or whole life. Instead, it’s the exploration of a particular thread, or story, from your life. But remember: the through-line doesn’t come immediately, so don’t worry if you don’t know it straight away. It is the semi-conscious question that drives us to write.
What is a Scene?
So, what is a scene? I think you instinctively know, given all the media we all have consumed by the age of 21 (film, TV, novels, short stories, plays), but essentially a scene is where the reader feels immersed in the action.
There will be dialogue, with characters talking to each other, ideally using dialogue to provide information about the story and information about the characters.
It’s where we will be shown, not told, how, for example, your mother was angry. Not “my mother was angry” (telling), but “my mother threw the plate against the wall and said, ‘would you ever respect the fact that I’m trying to get some time for myself, here!’” (showing). In other words, scenes have action, they have conflict.
They use the five senses. They are where we slow down and immerse ourselves and the reader in the story. There may be little moments of reflection from the adult “you” to give context and explain, but mostly they will capture the experience of the “past you” in describing the action.
What else? We will also need to “set the scene”, describing the room, the environment, and provide information about our characters.
Scenes are key, and the good news is you can do them in memoir / personal essays / creative nonfiction (CNF) just as much as in a novel or short story. Ever since Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and writers like Michael Herr (Dispatches) pioneered the New Journalism in the 1960s, CNF, the fourth genre, has increasingly become a genre where you can do just as much to bring your story alive as you can in fiction. Part of this is by working on having immersive scenes.
To sum up: scenes are where description slows down, approximating real time, where action is described in a moment-by-moment fashion, in as immersive a way as possible. Scenes are where you show.
Exposition
But what about telling? Exposition (another word for “explaining”) is the other side of the equation. This is where you tell, where you provide the reader with context. If a book were only scenes, we would not understand why they are important. Exposition is where you explain what these scenes mean to you. If scenes largely capture the person (usually you, if it’s a memoir) to whom things happened, then exposition is where you explain the meaning of what happened, in the voice of present-day you. Exposition is where the wise narrator (you) provides context and reflection on the past and what it means. This is where you get to speed up, sum up and deliver necessary information, often background information or information that helps us transition from scene to scene. The closest thing to exposition in cinema is a montage, the voice over, or the non-verbal establishing shots of a city (so the reader understands, “Oh, we’re in Paris”), etc. Exposition can be anything you need it to be: in a book about the important year you spent in Sweden, it may compress 10 years in Dublin into a paragraph before the narrative goes on to describe the year in Scandinavia; exposition can often be that reflective line that in essence says, “I didn’t know it at the time but later realised later that…”
Depending on how immersive the writer has made them, scenes in memoir can be very close to scenes in fiction, but what about exposition in fiction? In a novel or short story, the exposition takes place in the main character’s mind, whereas in a memoir the exposition is what you, Jane Doe, writing in 2025, are thinking about the story you are writing. This is where the narrator’s (your) voice is most evident: detached, wise, perhaps wry or humorous, perhaps sad, most of all reflecting on the past, commenting on the scenes, creating links between different moments in time, holding them up to the reader as examples of—well, of the tapestry, not of “the whole life” but of the life as you wish to present it. It is the narrative voice that weaves the whole thing together.
I have heard it said that the typical ratio of Scene to Exposition in a memoir should be 70% scene and 30% exposition. There is no rule on this, but the more explaining you need to do, then the more exposition there will be. Any nonfiction book on a specialised subject will push further into exposition. Any book that is closer to fiction (and memoir is, paradoxically, a close relation of fiction in that sense, with autofiction even closer, of course) will use more scenes.
Remember, though, not everything needs to be a scene, far from it. Refer back to your list of important scenes for guidance, and start writing there.
(c) David McLoghlin
See here for details of a new course offered by David, to commence 16th April 2026.
(he /him)
• Award-winning poet • Translator • Editor • Nonfiction Writer • Teacher of Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Expressive Writing
David McLoghlin is a writing coach and a facilitator of creative writing classes in memoir and poetry. His three books are Crash Centre (2024), Santiago Sketches (2017) and Waiting for Saint Brendan and Other Poems (2012), all with Salmon Poetry.
