What to Do When You Think You Have Nothing Interesting to Write About

"My life isn't interesting enough for a memoir."

This is the most common reason people give for not writing their life story. And it's almost always wrong.

You weren't a celebrity. You didn't survive a disaster. You didn't climb Everest or escape a cult or invent something famous. You just... lived. Went to school. Got a job. Raised a family. Had some good times and some hard times.

Who would want to read about that?

More people than you think. And here's why your "ordinary" life might be exactly the story the world needs.

The Myth of the Extraordinary Life

We've been conditioned by bookstore shelves and bestseller lists to believe that memoirs require extraordinary circumstances. Surviving abuse. Overcoming addiction. Escaping war zones. Climbing out of poverty to become a billionaire.

These stories matter. But they've created a false impression that memoir is only for people who've lived at extremes.

The truth is, most of the memoirs that deeply resonate with readers are about recognizable human experiences—childhood, family, love, work, loss, aging—explored with honesty and depth.

What makes a memoir compelling isn't the remarkability of the events. It's the quality of the reflection.

Why "Ordinary" Stories Matter

Everyone's Life Is Ordinary to Them

Here's a secret about those "extraordinary" memoirs: to the people who lived them, their lives felt ordinary.

Tara Westover, who wrote Educated about growing up in a survivalist family without formal education, didn't think her childhood was unusual until she left it. It was just her life.

The woman who survived a refugee camp, the man who built a company from nothing, the person who overcame a rare illness—when they were living it, they were just getting through each day. The extraordinariness is only visible from the outside, or in retrospect.

Your life probably looks ordinary to you because you've lived every moment of it. That doesn't mean it looks ordinary to anyone else.

The Specific Is Universal

There's a paradox in writing: the more specific and personal you are, the more universal your story becomes.

When you write vaguely about "growing up in a small town," readers have nothing to hold onto. When you write about the specific smell of the paper mill that employed half the town, the way your father came home with pulp dust in his hair, the summer the mill closed and everything changed—readers are there with you.

They might not know anything about paper mills. But they know about the smell of their father coming home from work. They know about industries that defined towns. They know about the summer everything changed.

Your specific details unlock their specific memories. That's the magic of memoir.

Representation Matters

Not every life is represented in the memoirs that get published. If you're from a small town in a flyover state, a working-class family, an immigrant community, a particular profession, a specific era—your story might be one that rarely gets told.

The very ordinariness you're dismissing might be extraordinary to readers who've never encountered a life like yours. And it might be deeply affirming to readers who share your experience but have never seen it reflected in a book.

Future Generations Need Ordinary Stories

Your grandchildren won't need to read about celebrities. They'll want to know what daily life was like for their family—what you ate, how you celebrated holidays, what you worried about, how you fell in love.

The historical record is full of politicians and generals. It's lacking in ordinary people who can tell us what it actually felt like to live through a particular time and place.

Your "ordinary" story is primary source material for anyone who wants to understand this moment in history through the lens of one real life.

Reframing "Nothing Interesting"

When you say your life isn't interesting, what you usually mean is one of several things. Let's examine each.

"Nothing dramatic happened to me."

You're confusing drama with meaning. A life without major trauma is still a life full of meaning—and in some ways, harder to write because you can't rely on built-in narrative tension.

But meaning is everywhere:

• The relationship with your mother that shifted over decades

• The career you almost didn't choose and what it taught you

• The places that shaped you

• The small moments that, looking back, were turning points

• The things you learned about love, work, friendship, and loss

Drama isn't required. Reflection is.

"Other people have been through worse."

This isn't a competition. Someone else's suffering doesn't invalidate your experience.

And paradoxically, readers often connect more easily with moderate struggles than extreme ones. Not everyone can relate to escaping a war zone, but almost everyone can relate to disappointing a parent, struggling in a job, grieving a grandparent, or feeling lost in their twenties.

Your relatable struggles might help more readers than a story of extremity that feels too remote to apply to their own lives.

"My life is just like everyone else's."

No, it's not. The details are different. The specific combination of family, place, time, personality, and circumstance that makes up your life has never existed before and will never exist again.

Even if the outline looks similar to others'—grew up, went to school, got married, had kids—the interior experience was yours alone.

What did you notice that others missed? What did you feel that you never told anyone? What do you know now that you wish you'd known then? That's where the story is.

"I don't have any wisdom to share."

You don't need to have figured everything out. Some of the most powerful memoirs are written by people still in the middle of their questions.

And you probably have more wisdom than you realize. Decades of living teach you things, even if you've never articulated them. The act of writing helps you discover what you know.

Finding Your Story in an "Ordinary" Life

If you're convinced you have nothing to write about, try these approaches:

1. Look for Turning Points

Every life has moments where things shifted—even if the shift was subtle. Ask yourself:

• When did I stop being a child?

• When did I first feel like an adult?

• What moment changed how I saw my parents?

• When did I realize what I wanted to do with my life? (Or that I didn't know?)

• What loss changed me most?

• What was I most wrong about?

These turning points don't have to be dramatic. "The summer I got my first job and started to understand money" is a turning point. "The conversation with my grandmother three weeks before she died" is a turning point.

2. Follow the Emotion

Where is there still heat in your memories? What do you think about when you can't sleep? What memories make you laugh out loud? What do you still not understand?

Emotion is a signal. It tells you where the meaningful material is. If you feel something when you remember it, there's probably a story worth telling.

3. Examine Relationships

Every significant relationship in your life could be the spine of a memoir:

• Your relationship with a parent

• A friendship that shaped you

• A marriage or partnership

• A mentor or teacher

• A sibling

• Even a relationship with a place or an institution

What did you learn from this relationship? How did it change over time? What do you understand now that you didn't then?

4. Identify What You Learned

Every decade of life teaches something different. What did you learn in your:

• Childhood about family and security?

• Adolescence about identity and belonging?

• Twenties about work and love?

• Thirties about commitment and compromise?

• Forties about priorities and mortality?

• Later years about legacy and meaning?

You don't have to cover all of these. But each phase of life offers material.

5. Consider What's Disappeared

One of the most valuable things you can write about is a world that no longer exists:

• The way your childhood town used to be before it changed

• Jobs and industries that have vanished

• Technologies you grew up with that your grandchildren have never seen

• Social norms and customs that have shifted

• Prices, places, products that are gone

This isn't nostalgia—it's documentation. You witnessed a world that no longer exists. That's worth recording.

6. Ask "Why Did I Turn Out This Way?"

You are the person you are because of a specific chain of experiences, influences, and choices. What were they?

• Why do you value what you value?

• Why do you fear what you fear?

• Why did you choose your career, your partner, your beliefs?

• What almost didn't happen that would have changed everything?

Tracing your own formation is inherently interesting, because it's the story of how a specific human being came to exist.

The "Ordinary" Topics That Make Great Memoirs

Still not convinced? Here are topics from "ordinary" lives that have produced powerful memoirs:

Work: What did you do for a living? What did it teach you about people, systems, yourself? The daily reality of a job—any job—is fascinating to those who've never done it.

Place: Where did you grow up? What made it specific? The geography, the weather, the economy, the culture—these shaped you in ways you might not have articulated.

Era: What was it like to live through the times you lived through? The wars, the technologies, the social changes—you experienced them in a way no historian can fully capture.

Family: Every family is strange from the inside and mysterious from the outside. The dynamics, the traditions, the secrets, the love—these are endlessly interesting.

Food: What did you eat? Who cooked it? What memories are attached to meals? Food is a gateway to culture, family, and memory.

Objects: What did you own? What did you treasure? What did you lose? Objects anchor memories in the physical world.

Body: Your experience of your physical self—health, illness, aging, appearance, ability—is a story only you can tell.

Learning: What did you struggle to learn? What came easily? What did you teach? Education, formal and informal, shapes who we become.

An Exercise: The Inventory of Your Life

If you still think you have nothing to write about, try this:

Take a piece of paper and spend ten minutes listing:

• Every place you've lived

• Every job you've had

• Every significant relationship

• Every major loss

• Every time you were terrified

• Every time you were proudest

• Every big decision you made

• Every near-miss (the thing that almost happened but didn't)

• Every secret you've kept

• Every time you were completely wrong about something

Now look at your list. That's not nothing. That's a life.

Any item on that list could be explored for pages. Any combination of them could form a memoir.

Start Before You're Ready

The belief that your life isn't interesting enough is often a form of resistance—a way of avoiding the vulnerability of actually writing.

So start before you feel ready. Start before you're convinced you have something worth saying. Write the first memory that comes to mind. Then write another.

You'll discover, as all memoirists do, that the material is there. It's been there all along, waiting for you to pay attention to it.

The question isn't whether your life is interesting. The question is whether you're willing to look closely enough to find the story.

It's there. Trust me.

Digital Memoirs helps you discover the stories hiding in your everyday life. Our guided prompts across ten life themes help you uncover memories you didn't know were meaningful—start exploring your story today.