There is a vicious cycle which memoirists can get stuck in as they try in earnest to get going on their memoir. It’s not that they can’t write. Writers may have whole bodies of short or medium form work, blogs, essays, professional writing, but when they start on writing their memoir, it’s like they somehow forgot how to ride a bicycle. They start, stop, re-strategize, write, delete, feel frustrated. They just can’t get a foothold. If this sounds familiar, it’s not the writing itself is not the reason your memoir is stuck. There is a clear psychological reason why memoirists especially can get stuck in this cycle. Amanda expands on this issue in the video below, or you can continue scrolling to read on.
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It’s possible that you’re having trouble writing because you don’t have a clear plan, or you still need to learn about structure, finding your central message, or bringing your ideas together into a cohesive outline. But if you’ve been thinking about your book for some time and you’ve read and learned the fundamentals, or writing isn’t new to you, there is probably something else holding you back. Much of what you have to learn about writing has to be learned by doing, which means you at some point have to get genuinely started and make real, concrete progress. If you can’t seem to break into that step, the problem is probably not that you don’t know enough, but that your memoir is stuck because you are psychologically stuck.
Symptoms you may be psychologically stuck
In working with writers, we start to dig into where they are in their projects and why they feel like they aren’t making progress. Sometimes this lack of progress can be an illusion—the writing process is not just writing and adding words, but it’s also highly internal. There are long periods of making decisions, notes, and internally wrestling with the stories you want to tell and what they mean. If your book is coming into shape, even if you’re not making consistent daily word counts, then you may still be making actual progress on your book. However, if you’re feeling any of these symptoms as you struggle to write, it’s a sign that you may be psychologically stuck.
Decision paralysis
You can’t make decisions about your outline, don’t feel good about putting scenes or even making concrete notes, and every decision you make, you rethink the next day. Every time you make a step forward, you feel the urge to take it back.
Writing and deleting
Some days, you have a burst of energy, and you get some words on the page or screen. But then you look back at it, because often writers can’t resist this impulse, and you feel strongly that it’s not what you want it to be. In fact, you can’t even stand to let it lay like that in draft form. So, you delete it, determined to start over. Maybe from a different place, or with a different tone, or worse, some vague way that you just need it to be better.
The project is always new
New ideas should feel exciting, full of promise and possibility and discovery. However, if you’ve been working on your “new idea” for months or even years and it still feels like you’re just getting started. Amanda and I have both struggled with this cycle in personal projects. You come to the project and you start one strategy, and then you step back and decide a totally different approach, and then step back again. There are many approaches and tools and rituals that you might find yourself experimenting with, but every time you carve out time for the work, it’s like starting over. The project is new, barely started in any concrete way, but it’s definitely not fresh anymore. This can be so demoralizing and can make you question your ability as a writer. Even accomplished, seasoned writers can get stuck in this psychological loop and grow to doubt their abilities.
What all these symptoms have in common is a psychological resistance to moving from internal to external. What is happening is not a writing problem or lack of ability. It’s a processing problem.
Processing your experiences
Memoirists face this in a different way than other writers do, because the stories and materials you’re working from are your life experiences. Processing those experiences is the way we grow to understand them and fully understand their impact on us. A lot of this processing is private, in the form of thinking, journaling, or even dreaming. This is a helpful process, but it’s fully internal and self-guided. When we move towards the external, we have this instinct to pull it back into ourselves.
One of the reasons why therapy is so helpful for processing your experiences is that you have that immediate external feedback and support. Often, when we seek out a therapist’s advice, we know exactly what we are wrestling with, and we may even know what direction we need to head in, we just need that external support to nudge us in that direction. Having someone there to ask follow up questions is so helpful in the healing process. No matter how strong we are inside of ourselves, having someone else say that thing to us that we need to hear is just so helpful.
This is true of the writing process as well, but perhaps more so for memoir than any other genre. One thing that is so specific to memoir writing is that unlike prescriptive nonfiction, where what we want to say is from expertise. It’s also not like fiction, where we are free to shift the narrative or the characters to serve our purpose as we go. With memoir, we are bound by what really happened, but we are also pushed to show those events with vivid imagery and ground the narrative in truth, motivation, and inspiration. We have to balance both factual narrative and narrative meaning. What that means is that we are constantly moving between the internal of the processing piece and the external of the writing piece, back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth.
This constant back and forth can let in a lot of junk thinking and self-doubt. Your memoir is stuck not because you haven’t developed the writing skills, but because this shifting from internal to external processing is very hard. However, we can move forward when we remember that the act of writing a memoir can be a powerful tool for our minds.
The transformative power of writing a memoir
Psychologists have shown that the very process of writing a memoir has a powerful effect on our mental health, sense of well-being, and building resilience.
The act of writing gives a sense of focus, and when we can let go of that need for our external processing to be perfect as we produce it, it can give us enormous sense of peace. Writing is creating a container for your thoughts and emotions. Whether they are positive or negative, putting these down can give us a bit of distance and clarity on those thoughts. It can help us find meaning and value in our experiences.
The act of writing is a practice of self-love and self-acceptance. This second part becomes more difficult when we are creating something we will eventually want others to read. That external self-critique chimes in and pushes us back into the internal processing space. We can learn to push through this and keep making progress with some real support, encouragement, and accountability. Even a little external feedback and assurance can keep us moving forward.
The solution when your memoir is stuck
To see your memoir through to the end, it’s important to have not only the skills and know-how support of the actual writing, but also the encouragement and support of others who are going through the same emotional experience of processing their own personal history.
I would not trade my MFA for anything, but I am also one of the first to say you don’t need one to write a memoir. Masters of Fine Arts in writing programs are designed to produce career writers, editors, or writing educators. While you might declare Creative Non-Fiction as your primary focus, you will also be tasked with writing in other forms like fiction or poetry, learning the pedagogy of teaching writing, literature, and sometimes literacy, providing developmental feedback on peer’s work, editing for prose and practicing different styles, and the nitty gritting of proofing and formatting. While you can learn quite a lot from an MFA, if your primary goal is to write a memoir, then it will also be a lot of information and training that won’t apply and that you don’t need. That level of investment may not be what you need to get your memoir unstuck.
Having something a bit more tailored to you, the level of knowledge you need and a specific method for writing memoir can be just the right nudge to keep you moving forward. They can also provide guidance on when you need to internalize and think more and when you need to let go of perfection and start getting words on the page.
That’s why we developed the Memoir Method writing program, to provide a place specifically for writers who want to focus on bringing their one project to the page, revising it, and give it its best shot for publication, all in one focused program.
Whether you join us in MM or find a local support group of writers, finding that external feedback and support is essential to getting your story on the page. You story deserves to be told, and you deserve the support you need to tell it.
