Tucker Max's Advice on Writing a Memoir: Honesty, Structure, and the King of Confession

Tucker Max wrote I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which spent years on the New York Times bestseller list. His books have collectively sold over five million copies. He later co-founded Scribe Media (now Scribe), which has helped over 1,500 authors write and publish books. He also runs a memoir coaching program where he writes alongside his students.

"So many people had opinions about my books who didn't read them. But the people who read them - yeah, there's arrogance and nonsense, but there's also a lot of vulnerability. Places where I recognize I'm being destructive and I make a joke about it and then I'm like, well, whatever, I don't know what to do, so I'm going to keep going."

The Number One Rule: Tell the Truth

"Whenever the question comes, 'What do I say next?' the answer is always whatever the truth is."

"I wasn't that great of a writer in terms of technical fancy sentences. So I'm like, well, why would anyone want to read my stuff? Everyone wants to know the truth. If you tell the truth, people will stop and listen."

"Even though I was totally dissociated and totally messed up emotionally in so many ways, I told the truth about it the best I could in the moment."

The truth does not need to be the capital-T objective truth. It needs to be what you actually think, feel, and believe right now. Max has reread his early work. Some of it embarrasses him. "I get almost everything wrong in there if I look back at myself." But that sincerity is what readers respond to.

Write From Your Scars, Not Your Wounds

"Imagine you have a cut and it's bleeding. You can't really do much until you stop the bleeding. Then the appropriate treatment. Then let it heal. When it's scarred up, you go back to working out. But if you try to work out with a bleeding wound, it doesn't work."

If you write about trauma before processing the emotions, the result is "an emotional vomit of disconnected grief all over the reader. You don't want to read that."

The vomit draft is allowed. It is necessary. "Your vomit draft is for you. It's for no one else." The problem is not writing from your wounds. It is publishing from them.

"Through the process of editing is how I turn my deepest, most bloody wounds into scars."

Everyone Has a Memoir

A college janitor. "He seemed like just the most normal, down-to-earth average dude you could ever imagine." One night, two empathic girls started asking him questions. "He started telling us his life story. It's a top five craziest story I've ever heard in my life. And he didn't think it was crazy."

The story involved meeting his wife during the civil rights movement. They sat there for three hours.

"There is no life so small that it does not contain the entire human experience. Love, heartbreak, sadness, disappointment, joy, accomplishment - it's all there for everybody."

Max points to Downton Abbey. "Entire episodes where dudes are seriously upset about who the first footman and second footman is. You couldn't imagine lower stakes. But it's still riveting because those people really cared."

"If you're genuinely honest about your life, it's interesting. So few people are really honest."

The Three Options

Option one: write it and keep it for yourself. Option two: share it with a small circle - print 50 copies for your closest friends. Option three: publish it to the world.

"When I tell people they have three options, they have an absolute epiphany. They can't believe it."

"We always start with the assumption you don't have to publish it. You're not going to make a final decision until you're done with a manuscript."

Once people realize the sandbox is private, they unlock.

How to Structure a Memoir

Not your whole life. A slice. "You can take very thin slices of your life. You could write about your relationship with your mom and nothing else."

He wrote four memoirs that each dealt with only a small section of his life. People who met him were confused. "They'd be like, 'Why aren't you drunk under a table yelling at people?' I'm like, 'It's 11 a.m. on Thursday. I'm at Whole Foods.'"

You probably have three or four memoirs in you.

Once you pick a slice, structure usually answers itself. "People will start big, they'll realize it's too big, they'll pick a slice, they'll dive super deep into that, they'll realize everything they thought they wanted to cover is at least tangentially hit on in that slice."

Writing Emotions Without Trauma-Dumping

Start with the physical. "Colors, shapes, feelings in the body. My hands went numb. My legs were jittering. I felt butterflies in the stomach. I felt nauseous. Sweaty hands."

Then the micro-details of the environment. "When someone's feeling a high-intensity emotion, they get into tunneling. Everything becomes hyper-aware."

He describes the couch he is sitting on. "This is the kind of couch that a cat's claws would really get into." Not a fancy description. A four-year-old's observation. But it anchors you in the experience.

"So many people who try to be good writers think they're supposed to sound fancy instead of just sounding like themselves and being honest about what they're thinking and feeling."

Every great story "is three-second increments described completely, back to back. That's all a story is."

The Court Jester Theory of Humor

"Great humor is speaking the truths that everyone sees and feels but no one's willing to say."

"The jester is the only person who can tell the truth to the king without being killed." Oscar Wilde: "If you tell the truth, make them laugh, or they're going to kill you."

"I write until I say something that is true and I know people are going to get upset. Then I think, how do I make this funny?"

If everyone is laughing, you might not be saying anything bold enough. If everyone is mad, you might just be being cruel. The sweet spot is where some people laugh and some people get uncomfortable.

Start in the Middle

Redeployment by Phil Klay: "We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby." Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts: "It took me a long time and most of the world to know what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant while I was chained to a wall and being tortured."

"You don't ever stop reading if you feel like you're getting the truth."

"I was born a young boy on a ranch - no, no, no." Start with a scene that has stakes. Fill in the context later.

The Vomit Draft

"Give yourself permission to put out sentence fragments and nonsense and garbage. That's a lot of times what it feels like inside of you."

He shows his own vomit drafts to students. Not polished early versions. The real mess. One student in England looked at it and said: "This is right shit." Then: "I didn't believe you when you told me. Now I can see it. What you just wrote looks like what I write."

The distance between a vomit draft and a published book is editing.

For more on honest memoir writing, see Rob Henderson's advice on writing a memoir. And for the business side of getting published, read Jon Yaged on how to get published.

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