When you’re driven to write a memoir, it usually means two things—you’ve experienced something that has fundamentally changed you and you feel called to share what you’ve learned from those experiences because others may benefit from the message. Deeply held, experiential knowledge has a tendency to nag at us, calling us to share it, especially when you’ve thought about it, rolled it around in your head, and have done the work of plumbing what it means. We frequently discuss in this blog the importance of having a clear key message. When you start the process, however, it becomes tricky to try to balance sharing that message you’ve learned without sounding like you’re putting yourself on a pulpit. After all, we want to share the message, not tell people who to be or how to live. For one, readers don’t like being preached at, and secondly, we don’t want to give the impression that we’re trying to claim that because we’ve gone through these experiences, we now have all the answers. That’s far from the truth, because memoirists still have lots to learn. Today we’re examining how to balance your story and your message to make sure you are never preachy, only on point.
Reading is essential to improving your writing skills, and reading like a writer means seeing past the glossy end-result into a book’s structure and the author’s choices about how the story is told. Learning to read like a writer doesn’t mean learning how to merely imitate but learning the craft by example. We’re excited to announce the launch of our Memoir Method Book Club! Your first session is free, so sign up to save your seat here.
Why is this hard?
Balancing your story and your message in a way that makes the message clear while keeping it away from that preachiness that we hate to read and would hate to have come across in our own writing is difficult on a technical level. On the paragraph and page level, it requires weaving together two different styles of writing with two different purposes. The first is narrative writing, as you show a scene that shares all the traditional markers of a fiction scene: setting, character, plot, and possibly dialogue. The other is more direct writing, speaking to the reader and discussing meaning. We may call these sections reflections, exposition, or even philosophizing, but it’s clear that they have a different goal than straight-forward story telling. When these sections go on too long, they can become unmoored and that feeling of being preached at sneaks into the experience.
While this happens at the paragraph and page level, avoiding preachiness actually starts in development. If you work through development with clear eyes on what your key message and core topic are and outline with that balance in mind, you are setting yourself up for success. Development is an underappreciated and often the most misunderstood stage of writing, which is why we make it such an important focus in our Memoir Method nine-month program. We often emphasize that writers can expect to spend several weeks to over a month in the development stage. If you have been trying to skip straight into writing and finding yourself stopping and starting and struggling to make consistent process, this program may be exactly what you need to break out of the stuck cycle. Sign up for a free, no-obligation consultation to see if this program may be right for you.
Define and narrow your story
The first step in development seems obvious but is actually deceptively tricky. Define exactly what your story is about. Often when discussing memoir with starting writers, we hear them start to describe their story with “All the…” which is a sure sign they need to work on narrowing. “All the trauma that formed me,” “All the things I went through to get…” “All the trials and obstacles of…”
We want to move away from “all.” There is no story where “all” or our whole life fits a single message. We’re too complex creatures for that, not to mention constantly growing and developing and changing. To define and narrow your story topic, think of your audience.
When we imagine our audience, we can trace the path they may take to find our book because we have taken that path, too. We rarely pick up books about people we’ve never met only because we want to know “all” of their life story. We pick it up because the particular topic of their life story was related to something that we are interested in. For example, we may not want “all” of Joanna Schmoe’s life story, but we may be intrigued by a they story of a nurse navigating one of largest urban hospitals. If you are in or interested in the medical field, that is what pulls you—not because it’s her life, but because the part of her life she’s talking about in that book is something that resonates with you.
Your specific topic helps narrow your focus in development, but it also helps clarify what’s going to make readers pick the book up in the first place. Message is hardly ever what makes people choose a book to read, but almost always your topic. That is part of why it’s so important to define the topic very clearly and narrowly, separately from the message you want to share through that topic.
Refining your message
Once you have your topic narrowed and clear, then (and only then) can you start refining that message. You want to be able to write down specifically what message you want your readers to walk away with. Now, this doesn’t mean that what you write down as your message will actually appear, word for word, in your book. It might—some authors are more explicit with their message than others—but it doesn’t have to be spelled out to be there. That is one of the beautiful things about storytelling. And though we are in the practice of development defining that message as singularly as we can, that doesn’t mean it will be the only take-away from your story. Other smaller elements of meaning will naturally crop up—and many of them will be different aspects of your key message, as you explore it through the story. Having that message defined for yourself is how you set your guideposts in the rest of development.
Intertwine message through turning points
Outlining is not done in order, chapters 1, 2, 3…, but rather through finding the major turning points and filling in accordingly. When we choose our major turning points, we are thinking about both our topic and our message. The turning points themselves are concrete, storytelling elements—things that the camera can see. But each of the turning points are chosen because they represent the kind of step we are taking in understanding that abstract message. This ensures that our message is deeply engrained in our story’s structure. When the message is baked-in to the major turning points, we don’t have to spend as much time pointing to it and explicating it, because it is deeply ingrained into the emotional experience of reading the story.
Focus on change
When writers have the most trouble interweaving their message and their story, its because they can see their story as a series of changes, but their message feels more static. Most of the time when people get too preachy, the reason is they don’t have a clear understanding of how their message, how their understanding of things changed over time. It is your understanding now after all the events and experiential learning. But your message also needs to grow and develop through your book, otherwise it becomes repetitive. That beating-a-dead-horse repetition, rehashing your message in similar ways in every chapter, is what turns an true, important, and deeply felt message into a dull, preachy, too-pat doctrine that turns off readers. In order for your readers to feel your message, as well as understand it, it needs to develop over the course of the book. This requires showing how your own understanding developed over time, alongside the major turning points of your plot. Good writing pulls the reader to understand through conflict and change, rather than spelling it out from the pulpit.
PS. Searching the internet for writing, publishing, and book marketing advice can be exhausting to say the least! If you’re ready for hands on, one-on-one support for your memoir, check out The Memoir Method. We’d love to welcome you into this nine-month group program specially designed for women writing their first memoirs. And don’t forget, if you’d like to chat with Amanda about the program (or any other services we offer), you can book a free consult any time!
