You remember the smell before you remember the year. Warm vinyl, sun cream, a wet swimsuit in a plastic bag. Childhood holidays lodge themselves in the body — in the nostrils, the palms, the backs of the knees — long after the dates and the names of the places have blurred into one long summer. That is precisely what makes them such generous material for memoir. They are vivid, sensory and loaded, and most of us have never properly written them down.

Why Childhood Holidays Are Such Rich Material

A holiday is a rupture from ordinary life. Rules loosen, routines dissolve and the family you thought you knew behaves slightly out of character. Everyone is tired, everyone is together and everyone is spending money they have been saving all year. That combination produces memory.

It also produces a useful complication: much of what you recall may be a photograph, or a story your mother has told so many times it has hardened into fact. Treat that as part of the material rather than a problem. If a memory feels borrowed, write about the borrowing. What you remember and what you were told are both true to you, and the gap between them is often where the story lives.

Start With the Packed Lunch

Begin here because it is small, physical and almost impossible to invent. Set a timer for ten minutes and write in the present tense. Present tense pulls you back inside the body rather than letting you narrate from a safe distance.

• What was in the sandwiches, and what was wrapped around them? Foil, greaseproof paper, a reused margarine tub?
• Was there a flask, and who carried it? What did the tea smell like when the lid came off?
• What did you want that someone else had? A can of pop, a packet of crisps, a chocolate bar that had gone soft in the heat.
• Where did you eat it — a windbreak, a bench, the boot of the car with your legs dangling over the bumper?
• Was there sand in it? Wasps? A wasp, specifically, and the way everyone reacted?

The fifth prompt is usually the one that opens something. Follow the wasp.

Rainy Afternoons and the Art of Being Bored

Rain is a gift to a memoirist, because when nothing is happening the drama must be internal. Write about the hours you were trapped indoors and let the boredom do the work.

• The board game with a missing piece, played by rules nobody remembered and everybody enforced.
• The rented flat, caravan or guesthouse: its carpet, its wallpaper, the smell of its airing cupboard.
• The television with a handful of channels, and the argument over which one.
• The adults' conversation in the next room — what did you hear, and what did you understand?
• The moment you noticed a parent was unhappy, frightened or simply far away in thought.

Write one scene rather than a summary. A single conversation at a kitchen table will tell your reader more about your family than a paragraph of explanation ever will.

The Seaside Arcade

Arcades are sensory overload, which makes them excellent for detail-hunting. Close your eyes and go back in.

• The sound: coins, buzzers, the clatter of a machine paying out, a tune that has been playing on a loop since 1985.
• The light: neon reflected in a sticky lino floor, the green glow of the change machine.
• The smell: hot electronics, sugar, wet coats.
• The money: who gave it to you, how much, and what it cost them to give it.
• The losing. What did you do when the last coin was gone?

Notice how quickly this becomes about character rather than place. Greed, hope, generosity, shame — all of it is sitting on that carpet, waiting to be collected.

Long Car Journeys

The car is where family hierarchies become visible, because nobody can leave the room. Write a journey from beginning to end and notice how much you can smell.

• Your exact position on the back seat, and what you had to fight for to keep it.
• Travel sweets, a warm bottle of squash, a bag of boiled sweets passed backwards.
• The map, the route, the wrong turning, the silence that followed it.
• The games, the songs, the arguments about who had crossed the imaginary line first.
• The service station stop — the noise of the door, the cold air, the particular joy of choosing something.
• The moment the sea appeared, or the mountains, and everyone went quiet at once.

Follow the Memory With the Strongest Charge

Once you have filled a few pages, you will have more material than you need. That is the point. Now make a list of twenty fragments, each in five words or fewer. Then read them back and find the three that make you flinch, laugh or ache.

Those three are your stories. The strongest emotional charge is the most reliable guide you have, because it tells you where the unresolved thing is — and unresolved things are what readers follow.

Then slow right down. Give that memory four times the space you think it deserves. Use concrete nouns: not "a nice time" but "a chipped mug", not "I was happy" but "I kept my hand on the rail as the water came in". Resist tidying the ending, and resist adding a moral. If a detail is uncertain, say so in the text — uncertainty is honest and it keeps you close to the truth rather than to a performance of it. Read it aloud when you finish. Somewhere in the reading you will hear what you have not yet said, and that is your next piece of writing.