Between us, Amanda and I have spent years ghostwriting and coaching others through crafting their memoirs and non-fiction books. Recently, we spent a long weekend taking a bit of time for a writing retreat to focus on personal projects. (Professional writers also have to fight for the time to work on their personal writing.) In the video below, Amanda shares what she learned from applying the methods and processes we’ve developed for helping others through ghostwriting, one-on-one coaching, and our Memoir Method group program to tell her personal story of leaving the academy. Scroll on for a written version. Stay tuned next week for more on how to prepare for a writing retreat and how to make the best of your time!
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.
The Process and the Personal
In our Memoir Method program, we work through a clear, step-by-step process for developing, outlining, drafting and revising a personal memoir. We wanted to provide a clear path to follow because we understand how daunting it can be when you don’t have guidance or a workable plan. We also wanted to make sure it was not a hyper-prescriptive, paint-by-numbers system because we know your book is unique and extremely personal to you.
While this can make writing your memoir more approachable, it doesn’t necessarily make it easy. There are a lot of hard things to face that are unique to writing a memoir, as Amanda was reminded as she started the process for a new memoir project—her own. When you have a process to go through, however, it helps serve as guideposts to keep you on track and make those difficult decisions that memoir writers have to face.
Navigating Writing for Audience versus for Yourself
One of the difficulties in writing a memoir is balancing what you want to include for your audience’s expectations and reactions and what you need to include for yourself and to be true to your personal journey. It can feel like being constantly pulled in two different directions. We have written before about why it’s important to write for yourself and edit and publish for your audience, but of course that’s easier said than done. It’s not a decision you can make once and then forget, but you have to keep considering throughout the process. Keep in mind that you are never going to please everyone in your audience, so trying to ensure you’re pleasing everyone is a great way to make sure you never start. What we can be sure of is that we are both proud of our work from a craft perspective and because we stayed true to ourselves and our honest experience.
The reality that part of our audience may also include people we’re writing about puts a whole second layer of pressure on those decisions. (While I have written many outlines and given feedback on many others, Amanda’s was the first outline I’ve given feedback on where I was included as a character!) All memoirs and narratives need conflict, which usually means acknowledging and including negative experiences with others. If you try to bend backwards to not depict anyone in a negative way, you will struggle to tell your story honestly.
First Person
When we guide people through the outlining process, we strongly recommend writing the outline in third person. First, this is useful because it is a technique to create a bit of objective distance from your experiences so you can see the coherent structure. You want to be able to see the shape of the story on its own—separate from all the other events and influences of your life that may not be included. This is because the topic of your memoir needs to be more focused than telling the whole of your life story. Secondly, this is also useful because if you are pitching your memoir to traditional publishers, your outline will need to be in third person.
Often when working with Memoir Method or coaching clients, there are inevitably a few places in outlines where the first person slips out anyway. Usually, it’s in chapters where the memory is so vivid or the subject so personal, writing in third person seems out of reach, at least in a first draft. This is fine of course, because outlines are meant to be working documents. This happened with Amanda’s outline as well, and it’s a big signal to writers of what moments feel the closest and most personal in a story.
Flexibility in Outlining
When you’ve never written an outline before, it can be difficult to have a sense for how rigid the outline should be. I am particular to the comparison that an outline should feel like a comfortable plan for a international vacation. You want to have enough planning to know you want to be stressed and to waste time casting about for where to go next, but also enough freedom to make decisions in the moment.
As you outline, there will be some chapters that you sense are a bit thin, and others that you wonder if they may be too much to chew in a single chapter. This is not a sign that your outline is broken, because you can always make a some adjustments as you go, feeling things out as you draft. You might be surprised to find that the thin chapters are actually just right!
Structure and Message Guide Decisions
The process of writing a memoir is a series of decisions. Who to show, what events to include, where to start, where to end, how to move from point A to point B, and what to show and what to tell…there are so many things to decide along every single point in the process. One of the really tough things about writing is that for most of those decisions, there is no clear and cut right or wrong or even better or worse. At the end of the day, so many of those decisions are just up to you and what you feel will serve your book the best.
When you follow a clear process like the one we’ve developed for the Memoir Method, you do have some key tools to help you make those decisions: the structure and your message.
The structure of narrative is how conflict develops over the story, the major turns and changes that occur, pulling the story forward, and where it begins and ends. When you have a sense for what that structure needs to look like, you will have a guideline for what scenes and memories belong in your book, and which don’t. This is something we’ve worked with many authors on, and Amanda used this same technique when making decisions about what elements to include (and leave out) from her memoir.
Secondly, when you have a message that you want to share with your book, that is a North Star to help you form that structure and make those many choices. What best serves your message is a question you can ask yourself for each and every choice, and that will help you make your decisions that keeps you moving forward.
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!
