Oh dear.
I'm working on a memoir.
Chapters 1 & 2 (~8,500 words combined) are done and polished. I'm satisfied with them. I hope I have the endurance to reach that same level of satisfaction with the rest of my chapters.
But the rest of the book is a total mess at the moment (#fixitjesus). I have a good amount of material (~50,000 words). But it comes in various forms: notes, journaling, little vignettes, a couple/few longer scenes/pieces that might be able to stand as chapters but need polishing, random funny/witty/insightful one-liners, paragraphs, and anecdotes, etc.
I recently started using the Scrivener app and it has helped tremendously in organizing all this material I've hoarded. Hopefully it will help me convert it all into proper writing. I believe most memoirs are about 80k words, so I basically have most of the material and things I want to hit laid out. It's just a matter of arranging it, filling in gaps, and converting it into proper prose that flows.
Tentatively, I plan on starting the book with some recent events then going back in time to childhood and proceeding chronologically. My first two chapters are about recent events (getting involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital and my subsequent recovering, but without revealing the causes of my nadir) and I'm working on my third chapter which is about my earliest memories (my relatively "idyllic" childhood, at least in comparison to the aforementioned nadir). So that's where I'm at in terms of the story.
I'm hoping to have a rough, mostly-unpolished but complete first draft of the memoir/book in the coming months (3 months?). I used to write very slowly but very carefully, tacking on one polished sentence after another. But I've decided that I should just churn out a rough draft of the WHOLE story/book so that I have the whole plot laid out and sequenced, then I will go back and fine-tune/enhance/beautify the prose. I think I will have an outside editor assess this rough draft in order to get feedback on how I've arranged and sequenced the story and plot points.
I hope to finish this project completely before 2016. I would LOVE to finish it over the next 6 months, but I think ~12 is more realistic. I want it to be PERFECT and for me to be utterly satisfied with it—not just "finished." I might take some breaks from writing to read more memoirs in order to study them, which could delay things a bit.
Pray for me.