The Sixteen Superpowers of Memoir Writers
Make These Decisions on the Front End, and All Will Go Well for You
It’s easy to write a memoir! All you need to do is write something with universal resonance that is true and comes from your life.
Let’s get real. To write a memoir, you need a basket of superpowers.
As a memoir writer with a forthcoming book (BOUNDLESS, coming December 2024 - order here at Bookshop | Barnes & Noble | Amazon and as a book coach/developmental editor who works with memoir writers, I’ve learned quite a lot about tapping into literary superpowers.
What’s enduring about memoir is that it is real, and it matters. A few decisions you make on the front end will determine whether it will go well.
In this post, I give you 16 decisions to install at the beginning of your journey. Make these pacts with yourself, stick to them and you’ll get there!
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1. Ditch chronology.
YOUR MANTRA: A memoir is not a parade of events.
Certainly, it would be easier to write if you could just sequence your life events into a pattern and stick them on the page, one after the other after the other.
Chronology is easy, but it’s boring. If someone wanted to be you and live your life at the pace of real life, they would have already time-traveled so they could come back and be reincarnated as you.
Readers want stories that make meaning. The parade of events is a collection of situations, and that’s not a story.
A spectacular craft book to help you make the distinction is The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick, who writes,
“Truth…is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.”
VIVIAN GORNICK
The superpower of a memoir writer is essentially this: the selection of events. All events are not equal. All events are not dramatic. Choose wisely, and you have a story.
A memoirist is skilled in identifying which life events can become scenes that show emotional change and propel the plot.
A fiction writer makes up the dramatic action, driven by characters who want something or don’t want something.
But the memoirist must see something else—something beyond ordinary daily life to moments of extraordinary revelation.
DECISION: Ditch chronology (to a point), and plot your memoir like fiction. Identify an inciting incident and the big moment. Your allegiance is to story, not a complete collection of events.
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2. Play the present against the past.
YOUR MANTRA: Have two timelines, not one.
What makes memoir dynamic is a dual timeline. You never have just one timeline in a memoir. The past is always pressing against the present, and that’s what makes meaning. That’s where the juice is. The present is asking questions about the past—hard questions that haven’t been asked before.
To do this you need a dual timeline, and two characters who press against the timeline: The Remembering Self (the now-You) and The Experiencing Self (the then-You).
The Remembering Self lives in the present and has a goal—to make sense of things. The Remembering Self needs a plot in the present moment so she can act it out and make sense of things. She’s doing something more than thinking about this alone in a room.
The Experiencing Self lives in the past and has a goal—to live through it. The Experiencing Self has a plot—maybe it’s a coming of age plot or it’s reinvention.
Both plots need trouble. Because that’s where the stories are. So pick two timelines—present and past—and give them both a dose of trouble.
(HINT: You probably already know the trouble of the past (Experiencing You) plot — that’s probably what got you started on the idea that you have a story to tell, so think through the trouble of the present (Remembering You) and get yourself a plot with trouble.)
DECISION: Identify one simple present-moment timeline and one past timeline that gets resolved because of the present timeline.
This is one of the most complicated pieces of crafting a memoir, and it’s one of the most rewarding when you pull it off. Writing teacher Phillip Lopate (The Art of the Personal Essay) calls it the double perspective. For more about this, come over to my Memoir Catalyst series of paid posts about The Remembering Self vs. The Experiencing Self: How to Plot the Dual Timeline in Memoir.
» Or book a call with me, and I’ll help make this make sense for you and your story »
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3. Read like a writer.
YOUR MANTRA: The instruction manual is on the page.
The how-to book you wish for is probably on your bookshelf. It’s in the library, where your true competition is. What you’re looking for is right here, word by word, sentence by sentence. Every page on your shelf is telling you exactly how to get there. Every page is another writer who has gone before you, holding a lantern to light the path.
Train yourself to read like a writer.
It’s way easier to get published if you do this. That’s because when you read like a writer—specifically concentrating on memoirs that break new ground and take bold chances—you’re writing from the leading edge of the genre, as opposed to imitating what you think memoir is.
Whatever you think it is, it’s not what you think.
Find out what the new frontier is with memoir, and you’ll find you have more in your toolbox than you ever believed.
DECISION: Choose three to four memoirs to read while you’re writing your memoir. Two of these should be “scripture” books. (More about that in my paid posts in The Memoir Catalyst series.)
See my list of recommended memoirs on my Bookshop wishlist here.
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4. Call time. Time-box your plot.
YOUR MANTRA: Time is on my side.
Time creates compression. Compression turns pages.
Use time in your favor. Decide on the front end to contain your plot to one present timeline. My memoir BOUNDLESS is one year in my life. From that year, I had the freedom to choose how to move back in time to the past and project into time to the possible future. This compression gave the plot urgency and momentum.
Remember, a memoir is not an autobiography. It’s not your whole life. Don’t tell us your whole life unless you are Barack Obama. And oh, he doesn’t do that. He has one memoir that’s about his early years in Honolulu and Chicago (Dreams of My Father) and another that is first of a planned two-volume set about his presidency (A Promised Land).
Serial memoirist Dani Shapiro is the master of time-boxing. Devotion is a year in her life that she calls a spiritual detective story. Inheritance is a year in her life after she learns the man who raised her was not her biological father.
Know that you probably have more great stories in you. Don’t dilute your great story by telling all the stories.
It’s the lens through which you view your life that makes it a story.
DECISION: Pick a time frame and call it a story.
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5. Start from where you are. (And where you are is: You are not Michelle Obama.)
YOUR MANTRA: I am not Michelle Obama.
Make peace with this on the front end, and all will go well for you. The book publishing world will tell you all kinds of discouraging things about publishing a memoir. Most of them will be about whether you have a platform that is big enough to get a literary agent and a six-figure deal.
Stop worrying about this. If you are writing a book, there are readers who want it, and there are publishers who will get your book to them.
Instead, make a list of 10 to 12 memoirs that are like yours and by people who are not mega-famous, people who are steadily working hard at their craft and building readers on the merits of their work. Map out their paths so you can see their trajectory to becoming a memoirist that you now have heard of. Go all the way back to the point in their lives before you ever heard of them. How did they get there?
DECISION: Believe, right now, that you are writing a book that matters and you’ll find a publisher.
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6. Stay present to your story.
YOUR MANTRA: Even though it’s unpleasant, I’m here and I’m bearing witness.
Commit to staying present to the experiences you’re rendering in the book—even if it hurts. The French writer Anais Nin said,
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
ANIAS NIN
If it hurt to live it, it’s probably going to hurt to write it. This is a good thing. That means you’re going to be successful in evoking emotions in the reader that make it a book worth talking about.
Stay present, even when you don’t want to remember—or cannot remember.
If you cannot remember events from your deep dark past so well, I have a handy guide for retrieving and reviving your past, drawing on my skill set as a journalist as well as a book coach and memoirist. It’s available to paid subscribers as part of my Memoir Catalyst series.
DECISION: Steady on and stay present. It’s OK if you need to microdose this “staying present” business and do it in small increments. Maybe you’re writing about grief or trauma. You don’t have to write it all in one sitting. More about that in a minute.
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7. Start close in. Think you’re close? Start even closer in.
YOUR MANTRA: Be immediate or go home.
Immediacy is where it’s at. Immediacy means it’s fresh, it’s palpable, it’s dynamic. The trap many memoirists fall into is relying on remembering to carry the story. Already can you feel that remembering is a little boring? It’s not active.
Your job is not that. Remembering is too many lengths removed. Immerse yourself into the experience like it’s fresh, like you’re feeling it for the first time and like you don’t know how you’re going to get out of it.
Recognize that the obstacle to immediacy is that you do know how you got out. You’ve reached some conclusions about what happened and what solved the problem. And you made them beliefs you lived by and haven’t questioned much over the years, until now, when you sat down to write a memoir.
To re-energize your story, you have to crawl back underneath it to the time when you didn’t know and you were figuring it out.
DECISION: Immerse yourself in your scene with all five senses. Place yourself back into the field of possibilities. Then write.
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8. Make peace with writing about yourself.
YOUR MANTRA: Self is the highway to story.
Personal narrative is a force for cultural progress. Why? Because the personal is political, as Gloria Steinem once said. Because the only way the culture changes is from the inside out. Because it starts with honoring your voice as one among all the voices. When you honor your voice, you create the path for others’ voices.
I say the self is the highway to story, and that writing about yourself is a generous and creative act. Bear in mind that others are suffering with your pain, and they don’t have a voice. You’re a writer, and you are opening up the empathy vein.
The self isn’t the story. It’s the way through the murk, as I write in “The Self As the Highway to Our Stories.”
Every so often someone will come out and disparage memoir as self-indulgent—yet the genre has exploded in the 21st century and the innovations in craft just keep coming.
Happiness guru Arthur C. Brooks is one of those recent naysayers, saying that talking about yourself all the time can’t be good for your mental state. I agree that one of the best ways to get perspective is to get out of the strange soup of your own mind.
But that’s not what a memoirist does. It may be what a lazy memoirist does. It may be what’s prevalent on social media. But social media is not literature. (It’s not journalism, either.) It’s people nattering on about themselves.
Here’s what you’re after: universal resonance.
And you don’t get that by nattering on. You don’t get it with the parade of events and the onslaught of opinions. You get that by treating literature as art and making some art.
For more on this, see Brooke Warner’s great Substack post, “Why You Maybe Should Write a Memoir,” in which she refutes Brooks.
Highlights?
There needs to be poetry and beauty there, says Raphael Kadushin, publisher of the University of Wisconsin Press, in this piece on TheWriter.org.
“What I’m really looking for now are beautifully written memoirs that have some universal resonance. That’s what I think is the problem with most memoirs – there is nothing universal there. It’s rather just the writer’s own story, which is ultimately boring. Unless there’s some poetry or beauty to a memoir, it’s really just another blog.”
RAPHAEL KADUSHIN
And you need to make people think, as David Brooks, author of How to Know a Person, writes:
“A writer could blast out her opinions but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think, but when they provide a context within which others can think.”
DAVID BROOKS
DECISION: Create poetry. Create beauty. Create a context in which people can think. Bring them into a conversation that they otherwise could not have entered, without the art of literature. Remember, you’re creating art, and as Frederick Buechner writes,
“Art is not difficult because it wants to be difficult, but because it wants to be art.”
FREDERICK BUECHNER
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9. Get a therapist.
YOUR MANTRA: Stuff will come up, and that’s OK.
Especially if you’re doing this right. If it hurt before, it will hurt again. If you’re staying present and writing with immediacy, you are letting yourself hurt twice so you can make art. It’s not a terrible thing if stuff comes up that makes you more confused about the meaning in the story you’re after—it’s actually a great thing! This means you’re seeing with new eyes and asking harder questions.
Don’t let yourself be daunted by this. Your aim is to create a catharsis for the reader.
But do get support. You’re going to want an extra person on your team to take care of you while you write.
Mary Karr is a huge proponent of therapy while writing a memoir.
“In terms of cathartic affect, memoir is like therapy, the difference being that in therapy, you pay them. The therapist is the mommy, and you’re the baby. In memoir, you’re the mommy, and the reader’s the baby. And—hopefully—they pay you.”
MARY KARR
As a book coach who works often with memoirists, I have observed that many writers arrive believing they have a beginning, middle and end for their books. This is why they feel ready to write -- the time is ripe. What often happens, when they invest the time and intention and energy into the writing, is that new challenges present themselves. For a while it seems to get harder, not easier.
All the new troubles are revelatory. They have a way of deepening the book. I have seen memoirists go deeper by scheduling a trip or setting up an interview that they hadn’t anticipated doing. Suddenly, they have not just a great book, but a masterpiece.
So, don’t go it alone.
DECISION: Find a therapist who really understands and supports you.
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10. Get a book coach.
YOUR MANTRA: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Coaching keeps you on track. It can feel like therapy because someone is listening to you and holding your story with you. (But it’s not therapy -- get a trained psychotherapist, too!)
A book coach can support you because she has navigated these waters before. You have decisions ahead of you that, if you make them with confidence and clarity, you’ll have a better book. And you’ll have it faster.
A book coach can significantly cut out “drawer time,” that part where you write a fantastic or not-so-fantastic first draft, then let it sit in a drawer for a few years.
Don’t self-reject. Don’t write something beautiful, then tell yourself it wasn’t beautiful.
Work with someone who believes in you—and knows how to get there. It takes a few steps.
DECISION: Go together.
» BOOK a call with me here so we can explore how to get going on your book.
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11. Your vision is your vision.
YOUR MANTRA: You can’t be wrong about your vision.
You can be wrong about your craft, but that’s a solvable problem.
What I mean by this is: Only you have the vision. Other people have the skills to help you achieve your vision. So get clear on your vision.
And then get clear on how to get there by working with how to get it on the page.
Here is where a book coach, writing teacher, developmental editor or skilled beta reader group can be vital to the process.
Engage someone, or a select set of someones, in the question about what your vision is and is not.
Remember that:
Theme + technique = effect
Here, theme is the vision: I’m writing a book about grief, and it’s saying that grief is ____________.
Here, technique is how you get it on the page.
When theme and technique get married, they produce an effect. The reader feels something. That feeling produces insight.
DECISION: Hold to your vision.
» BOOK a call with me here so we can dial in your vision.
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12. Not everyone gets it right away.
YOUR MANTRA: It’s neither good nor bad—it’s just feedback.
Accept that your First Reader may not get it right away, and that is information, too. You may sign on with a writing teacher, book coach or developmental editor, then feel baffled that this First Reader person, who is so skilled, is not quite getting it.
This is actually the best (well, second best…) outcome you can have. My First Reader, a writing teacher and developmental editor I had through The Lighthouse Book Project, mapped out about six possible visions and narrative structures for what I submitted to her.
While that sounds frustrating—why didn’t she get it?—she was magnificent, and I highly recommend her (Erika Krouse, author of Tell Me Everything and other books).
She didn’t get it because I didn’t have it on the page yet. Or I had some of it on the page, but the true through-line was diluted by all the other things that were on the page.
Some of the items on her menu of possible books I would write were future books I will write. She absolutely saw a future book in my print media career. But that was not the book I wanted to write at that moment. BOUNDLESS was pressing to come first.
Because she didn’t get it, I could see I needed to work harder, and I did. Second Reader got it because I dug down deep and did the work.
DECISION: It’s your job to make them get it—eventually. Make use of all feedback, positive and negative. Listen.
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13. Stay in the room.
YOUR MANTRA: Don’t get tossed away.
Know that your work ethic is your greatest asset. Great writers stay in the room. Don’t get tossed away.
Become the expert on your particular work skills. For instance, I’m great at inspiration and generating, generating, generating. For me, there is no such thing as writer’s block.
My other great work ethic: I can untangle things. I can iron out the wrinkles in a plot. I can turn a mess into polished work.
It’s some kind of magic potion of inspired action and stubborn refusal to be daunted by doing hard things. What’s your secret sauce?
As writing teacher Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) says, “Write until the atom bomb goes off. Keep writing until the radiation gets you.”
DECISION: Work hard for what you love, and enjoy the journey.
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14. Know thyself, and thy creative process.
YOUR MANTRA: Know your creative process better than anyone else.
Become the expert on when your writing flows (morning? midnight? On the commute to work?) and where it flows (what’s your space? What’s your place? Mine is Ireland). Do you need time in nature so you can think? Do you need meditation so your mind is clear and calm? Do you need collaborators?
Jennifer Haigh (Heat and Light and other books) says each time she writes a novel, she is teaching herself all over again how to write a novel. That’s because she’s a great writer who brings extraordinary imagination and creativity to her craft. Every novel calls on different craft techniques because different themes need different techniques. Her greatest asset is her curiosity about her own process.
DECISION: Be curious about your creative process. And keep refining it.
That means being endlessly curious about other writers’ process—but never adopting someone else’s process lock, stock and barrel. Take bits and bobs and make them work for you. Keep noticing.
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15. Master your dialogue with your Inner Critic.
YOUR MANTRA: Your Inner Critic is not invited.
This is your writing party, and you’ll write if you want to. Your real and imagined critics will most likely show up in your head, but you can quiet them. The goal is not to quit them, but quiet them.
In this post, I offer “Eleven Clever Ways to Quiet Your Inner Critic,” drawing on mindfulness meditation practices and a set of skills from Tara Mohr’s Playing Big, which helps people find their voice, their mission and their message.
DECISION: When the Inner Critic shows up, don’t engage. Instead, vow to become an expert on who this voice is, and how to quiet it.
Photo by Ethan Bodnar on Unsplash
16. Let your book unstitch you.
YOUR MANTRA: Art changes things.
The question I kept asking as I wrote BOUNDLESS was, “Why does this book unstitch me?” The more I asked, the better the story became. The more I understood why it took me to the brink, the more I understood why it needed to be written.
In the end, your book will have no loose threads, nothing to pull on that will make it unravel. That’s what a polished, published book looks like.
To get there, let yourself unravel for a while. Understand you’re putting it all back together.
If your book is changing you, then it’s likely to change other people. And this is a good thing.
Boundless is available for pre-order!
BOOKSHOP - proceeds go to Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque
Related posts
Boundless has a birthdate! Coming Dec. 21, 2024
Why Writing Your Book Will Change You As Much As It Will Change the World
From Lived Experience to a Book: The Path of My Memoir, Boundless
A worthy resource to keep at hand -- thank you, Carolyn.