When I was growing up in the 1980s, I couldn’t imagine that we’d someday hit the year 2000—yet here we are in 2024. Where has the time gone?
Your New Year’s resolutions list has probably included the idea to write your memoir for many years, but you still haven’t made any progress. Let’s discuss the two major reasons why it’s so difficult to keep this resolution.
The first reason is that writing your life story is a huge commitment. If you’re a first-time author, it’s normal to feel nervous and uncertain about the process of writing the big, nebulous story of your life.
The second reason it’s difficult to write a memoir is because you haven’t yet articulated the benefits of writing one. You’re committing months of your life to working on a book but without any clear sense of why.
I want to share some of the benefits that my clients have enjoyed from writing their memoirs. Keep these stories in mind and use them to drive yourself forward when the writing gets tough.
Writing your memoir will give you clarity about the meaning of your life.
When you revisit stories from your life, you start to notice patterns. There are things innate to who we are such as our personality, actions, decisions, and values. Writing our memoir helps us see both the constants and the changes.
Every time you find a constant, that’s a theme in your life. Every time you find a change, that’s a point at which you learned something new and significant about how life works. It’s only when we sit down and map our life story that we see how those changes happened, and what we learned from them.
Here’s an example. We worked with a woman who was an Olympian and had many amazing achievements throughout her life. One thing that sparked her to write her memoir was the Black Lives Matter movement.
She was a woman of color but hadn’t really identified herself as part of Black Lives Matter during earlier protest periods of 2014 to 2015. In 2020, she decided to dig a little further into her own history to find any points she could connect. She started to recognize the points at which the representation of Black women had mattered to her life. When she was a child, she and her brother would sit in front of the TV and watch some of the world’s greatest athletes, particularly Black women athletes, be successful. This made her reflect on what it meant for her to be one of those athletes. It’s magical, and it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t decided that now was the time to write.
You are going to feel proud of being an author.
It feels great to accomplish something that fewer than 1 percent of people will achieve in their lifetime. But for most of our authors, their biggest point of pride is hearing from the people they’ve inspired.
We worked with author Victor James Hill on his memoir The Ignorant Man’s Son, which he decided to write to inspire others. He was surprised by how many people reached out to tell him that it was him, not just his story, that inspired them.
Victor grew up in the housing projects at Lakeside Homes in Pontiac, Michigan, just outside of Detroit. He worked with children in his community to inspire them, give them educational opportunities, provide breakfast and lunch, and help them develop the necessary life skills to accomplish their goals.
He wanted his memoir to reach many people—whether they were in prison, transitioning back into the world, eager to become mentors for their neighborhood’s children, or social justice advocates and social workers. Many people contacted him to say, “I am so inspired that you published a book.”
The first week his book hit the market, he received a text from someone he hadn’t talked to in a very long time, saying, “I think you are the first person from our community to publish a book.” That had never even occurred to him. Because of Victor, this person was inspired to do all kinds of things in their own life.
He also received many letters from people who read his book in prison, saying, “I am so inspired to turn my life around and to get out so that I can really start helping the people that I care about in the same way that you did.” All of that happened because he became an author. His story inspired people to give back to their communities.
Every single author I’ve worked with has heard from people who are impressed and proud of them for writing and publishing their book. It’s important to remember that you are not only writing this memoir for yourself, but also to inspire others to step into their power and share their story with the world.
Your past relationships will shift and change throughout the writing process.
When you write your memoir and reflect on your life and lessons you learned, you will gain so much clarity on your past relationships. It will also strength many of them as well.
Here’s an example from one of my current coaching clients, Maggie. We were working on one of her chapters and talking about her grandfather. Growing up, she lived with her grandfather and her mom. There were some rivalry and toxic things happening with her mother. Because Maggie was young at the time, she didn’t have a way to look at her situation beyond what other people were telling her.
Her mother had framed her grandfather as someone who was strict, controlling, and wouldn’t listen. You had to go behind his back if you wanted to do anything for yourself. My client internalized that framing and went on with her life. When writing her memoir, she realized, “Oh my gosh, my grandfather was really just trying to do the best that he could.” Now, were there things he did that she still didn’t agree with him about? Yes, absolutely. But writing her memoir gave her a different perspective about this person and time in her life.
Unfortunately, Maggie’s grandfather had already passed, so there was no way to go back to him and make amends. However, I like to think that coming to terms with our past relationships still matters, even if we’re no longer able to reach out to that person.
I have also worked with clients whose memoirs have reconnected them with people from their past. One of our recent clients, Wendy Davis, went through her memoir to mark all the places where someone had impacted her story in order to reach out to them. Some people didn’t reply, and that’s okay, but she invited others to get coffee or chat over Zoom.
With each of these people, she went over the scenes in her memoir that involved them, exactly as she’d written, and asked them, “Do you remember this differently? Would you say this is a fair framing?” Not all of those conversations went well. Some people were leery about being in her memoir. But she was also able to reconnect with other people who played an influential role in her life.
Victor James Hill had a similar experience like Wendy Davis. Much of what Victor went through in life involved helping his sister, which included caring for and adopting her children. With time, she was able to lift herself from addiction and is now the best grandmother one could ask for.
Toward the end of his writing process, he reached out to his sister and said, “Here is the story I want to tell. What do you need to feel okay with it?” Together, they decided that she would join him on his book tour to give inspiring talks. He was able to bring along his sister so that she could share that amazing feeling with him, ultimately strengthening their relationship.
Writing your memoir gives you an opportunity to reframe, revisit, and reconnect with people from your past. That can be hard sometimes, but I promise it will give you so much clarity and comfort.
If you want people to read your memoir, make a plan to promote it.
Planning how you’ll promote your memoir gives you another reason to start writing it now. Many of the coaches and entrepreneurs that I work with put their book on Amazon and link to it on their website and social media, so that people keep purchasing the book. This can add up to a few hundred dollars every month, even thousands of dollars a year.
There are things you can do to drive book sales without quitting your day job. We talk about these in The Memoir Method Checklist program, but some of my favorites include pitching yourself for podcasts and giving talks to your local Chamber of Commerce, Kiwanis, or Rotary. Reach out to people you want to work with to provide coaching or consulting, even if it’s not full time. There are lots of ways to get the word out and move sales without breaking the bank.
The memoir writing process takes longer than you think.
This past weekend, I was talking with a group of entrepreneurs and mentioned that we’re preparing to launch the inaugural class of The Memoir Method group coaching program. People were surprised to learn that it’s a nine-month program. “Well, surely it can’t take that long,” they said.
To help you see why it’s so important to start now if you want to finish your book in 2024, let’s break down the timeline into different stages.
The first stage is development. This is when you come up with your book’s outline. Think about your message and what you want audiences to take away, as well as your overall contribution to the book. Development usually takes a minimum of one month, though I personally like to plan for two months since some things can take longer than expected.
Check out our Memoir Method Checklist, which includes a free course that walks you through the development stage.
Once development is complete, it takes about a week to write each chapter. Several of my coaching clients keep that pace for most of the program, but for more difficult or emotional chapters, you will probably need longer than a week. The average memoir is about twenty chapters long. If you’re writing a chapter a week, it will take you at least five months to draft a twenty-chapter book.
Let’s say that you’re working on your memoir and only have four chapters left to write, but something comes up and you don’t have as much time to work on it. By then, you’re at six or seven months, which is really eight months when you include the month you spent on development. Then we still have to go back and revise.
Revision is usually much quicker than drafting because you’re not starting from scratch. However, some scenes might require rewriting or reframing. The Memoir Method systematizes this process, but revisions will still take another month, and we’re already at nine.
Whether you’re in our program or on your own, plan for a minimum of nine months to get this draft done. If you start with us on February 1, you can probably finish by the end of 2024. That becomes less likely the longer you wait. If you end up finishing a little early, don’t worry—we have plenty of publishing and marketing resources for you in the Memoir Method container.
Once we reach the end of the year and the holidays arrive, it can be hard to continue making progress. Starting early in the year is the only way to contain your memoir writing project within that twelve-month span.
Why you shouldn’t write your memoir, even if you feel ready.
If there isn’t enough distance between now and the time in your life that you want to write about, don’t start your memoir yet.
When we write a memoir, we choose one chunk of our life to write about. There’s no hard and fast definition for how long that chunk can be, but we certainly aren’t going to cover everything from our birth to the present day. We want to narrow down the story we tell.
This is something we can help you with if you join the program or keep watching our YouTube videos. If you don’t have enough distance from the part of your life you want to write about, it’s going to be difficult to share your gained wisdom with your reader. You may need more time to reflect on it, or to speak with your therapist or support system.
A quick way to figure out whether you’re ready to tell your story is to draft a preliminary theme. We do this with everyone in The Memoir Method program, but you can also do this on your own.
Complete the following Mad Lib: I used to think X, but now I know Y. “X” is the misconception you had when you started your story, and “Y” is the truth that you discovered by going through all the hard things in your life. You used to think X, but now you know Y.
Put it together and send it over to us at books@pageandpodium.com. I’ve love to hear from you about your preliminary theme!
If you know it’s time to start writing your memoir, read more about our program and sign up now to save your seat. From there, you’ll have all the support and encouragement you need to finish your memoir and move it off your New Year’s resolutions list.
If your memoir feels like it’s on hold because you’re too busy diving down the Google rabbit hole to find the answers to your writing and publishing questions, then I have a free download just for you!
The Memoir Method Checklist will guide you through every stage of writing and sharing your memoir with the public. From developing and outlining to publishing and promoting, following this checklist will help you write a memoir that you are proud to publish. If you download it today, you’ll get a free bonus training video that dives deep into all the things you need to do to clarify your memoir’s theme, messages and intervention before you outline your book.
Happy writing!
