A memoir is not “everything that happened.” It is one life, shaped around a question the reader can feel. For you, that question is already sitting in the material: What does it take to leave home, make a career in real estate across the country, come back to Topeka, and still try to change the place you came from? The techniques below are how you turn videos, public comments, and memory into pages.
1. Pick the book, not the whole life
Biography tries to cover every year. Memoir covers a through-line.
Useful frames for yours:
- Leaving and returning — 1979 license, 1983 Macerich, the years away, the ~2000 homecoming.
- The dealmaker vs. the city — TIF/CID, public comment, campaigns.
- What you want the next generation to inherit — family, Shawnee County, the town you want someone to come home to.
Everything that does not serve that line goes in an appendix, a later volume, or a blog post. That cut is the first real writing decision.
2. Two voices on every page
Good memoir uses two selves at once:
- Then-you — the 22-year-old walking into Macerich, the guy getting fired from life insurance, the candidate at the mic.
- Now-you — the person who knows how the deal turned out and what it cost.
You drop the reader into 1983, then let 2026 comment without lecturing. That “looking back” voice is what makes a scene mean something.
Mary Karr’s version: the page has to sound like you from sentence one, and you have to be willing to look foolish. Confidence writes speeches. Doubt writes memoir.
3. Scene vs. summary (the technique that matters most)
Summary compresses: “I spent years in California working malls.”
Scene puts us there: the fluorescent leasing office, the smell of new carpet, the first time a tenant walked, the phone call that sent you home.
Aim roughly 70% scene, 30% reflection. Earn every “here’s what I learned” with a moment we can see.
A scene needs:
- Place and time
- Something that changes (a job, a vote, a daughter’s question, a deal that dies)
- Sensory junk that only you would notice
- Dialogue that sounds like the person, even if you reconstruct the wording
You will not remember every sentence. Reconstruct to emotional truth — the 80% rule: would that person have said it that way? If yes, write it. If you are guessing wildly, say so.
Weak: “City Hall frustrated me.”
Strong: You at the podium, the clock, the names on the dais, the sentence you actually said about the quarter-cent sales tax.
Your YouTube lives are already raw scenes. The book’s job is to select and slow down the ones that carry the through-line.
4. Structure that still feels like a story
Three acts work even when the facts are true:
| Act | Job | In your material |
|---|---|---|
| 1 — Before | Who you were and what you wanted | Topeka kid, first license after getting fired, leaving at 22 |
| 2 — The middle | Tests, travel, deals, pizza shop, coming home | Macerich years, other cities, MCRE, College Hill, watching the city from inside the deals |
| 3 — After | What changed, what didn’t | Campaigns, public comment, the question of whether one person can move a town |
You do not have to go year-by-year. You can open in the middle (a council comment, a property walk at 37th & Gage, a live from the studio) and flash back. Start with a scene that already contains the book’s question.
5. Voice: write like you talk when the camera is off
Your channel voice is already a draft: blunt, local, deal-minded, sometimes funny, sometimes scorched. On the page:
- Keep the cadence. Cut the “ums” and the live-stream repetition.
- One joke per page beats a speech.
- Don’t sand off the Kansas. Place names, dollar figures, and street corners are texture, not filler.
- Don’t write “literary.” Write clear.
Karr’s checklist, shortened: put bodies in rooms, set stakes, show how you survived more than how you suffered, and tell the reader when memory is shaky.
6. How to mine the videos without drowning
Treat the channel as an archive, not the manuscript.
- Make a timeline of dated events (license, Macerich, cities lived in, pizza pub dates, elections).
- Tag videos that are life, not just today’s live: 1979 story, leaving California, first studio, campaign, family, public comment that names a principle.
- Transcribe those. Pull one scene per video, not the whole hour.
- For each scene write three lines: what happened / what I thought then / what I think now.
- Talk a chapter instead of typing it. Fifteen to thirty minutes on one memory. Then we shape it. That is how a lot of spoken-life memoirs actually get written.
7. Truth rules that keep you out of trouble
- Facts that can be checked (dates, votes, dollar amounts, public meetings) should be checkable.
- Private conversations: reconstruct tone, don’t invent malice.
- Living people: write them as complicated, not as villains. Revenge is a lawyer’s job, not a chapter.
- If you compress two meetings into one scene, say in an author’s note that some chronology is tightened.
- Family gets a draft of anything that names them, if you want the relationship more than the zinger.
8. A working method for this book
Week rhythm that fits how you already work:
- One talking session: one memory (the firing, the first Macerich day, the drive back to Topeka, election night, a specific deal).
- I turn it into a scene + a short reflection.
- You mark what’s wrong: names, money, who was in the room.
- We do not write Chapter 12 until Chapter 1 has a pulse.
Opening options worth testing:
- 1979: fired from insurance, walking into a real-estate license.
- 1983: leaving Topeka at 22.
- A recent public comment, then the book explains how you got to that microphone.
- A property walk — empty building, mold remediated, “this used to be something” — then the life that taught you to see buildings that way.
The last one is very you: the city as inventory and as home at the same time.
If you want to put technique into practice next, pick one:
- A chapter map (10–12 chapters with the scene that opens each).
- A sample opening scene (you choose 1979, 1983, or a council night).
- A video-mining list — which titles to pull transcripts from first.
Tell me which, and we start pages instead of theory.
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