Putting your story out there is a scary process, especially for memoirists. Not only are you relating your life story, which requires vulnerability and honesty, but you’re also putting your writing ability on display. We often hear from writers that they don’t just want to tell their truth, they also want it to be good. More, they need it to be good. Sometimes they are reluctant to even start without assurance that it will be good because that means it will be worth writing. In part two of our four part-revision series, we are exploring the essential question: What exactly makes a memoir good?
Before we get into today’s post, we wanted to ask—do you have a plan for actually finishing your memoir? If not, we know you aren’t making the progress you hoped for. That’s why we developed The Memoir Method Checklist. This free guide (and video training!) will take you through every single step you need from idea to published marketable book. Grab it now at https://pageandpodium.com/checklist
Revision is when writing becomes good
If there is one thing that is essential for all beginning writers to understand, it is this: no one has ever simply sat down and written a “good book” first word to last. It doesn’t work that way; none of this works that way. The craft of making a good book, whether it’s a good memoir, novel, instructional non-fiction or any other genre of long-form writing, comes in stages. First there is development, then drafting, revision, editing, and—if publishing—production. Development and drafting take a long time, but revision is where a book really becomes good.
This makes the whole writing process so hard for two reasons. First, there’s going to be a long period of time when you’re working consistently on the book, but it’s not meeting your standards yet. That’s really rough on the ego. Second, as you are putting in that consistent work, you will become a better writer, inevitably raising your own standards for yourself even as you continue to not quite reach them. Writers go through this, not just with their first book, but with every book. When you start out a long process, and you need the final project to be good, it’s rough when that bar for good keeps going up.
No wonder so many books go unfinished.
Good writing is also often quite subjective—people have different tastes and preferences. Still, there are some essential ways writing needs to be good in order to reach an audience and feel like a complete and polished product that readers will find worthy of dedicating several hours of their life to. Those essentials are not as mysterious and unattainable as you might imagine, but they do all take some significant work to accomplish. Revision is where we engage with each of these essentials and try to make sure our book meets these standards—not on a line-level, but as a whole.
In part one of our revision series, we reviewed five types of rough draft and how to get started on tackling revisions depending on the type of draft you have. The goal behind each of these strategies is to focus on these four essential elements of good writing.
Good writing has a cohesive point
Memoir writers will often confuse the purpose or point of a book with the subject matter of the book. The events of your life that made you feel compelled to write the story and share with others is the subject or what we often call the “core topic” of your memoir. But your core topic is not the same as a key message. In our Memoir Method program, we help writers see the purpose of their projects more clearly by distinguishing the core topic from the key message. The key message is not the plot—or the events in your life you’re focusing on—but rather the truth and lesson you learned by going through it. That’s the real reason why you feel compelled to write this book—because that lesson is so true and so necessary that you want to share it with others, whether that’s others with similar challenges or those who would never have to face the same hurdles.
It’s important to have this point clear in your mind as you revise, because this is your guiding light for what is needed in the book and what might not be. If a specific story or reflective piece helps your readers come to fully understand your message, then it works as part of a cohesive whole.
This doesn’t mean you should be preachy with your book, stating your key message baldly and directly like a thesis in an academic paper. In fact, when we as readers feel “preached” at, the book is not a pleasure to read, which makes delivering that message less effective and readers less likely to keep reading. The pleasure of reading stems from the joy of discovery. As we read, we don’t want to be told the truth, we want to discover it. And that brings us to the second essential of a good memoir.
Good writing engages the reader’s curiosity
Good memoirs are memoirs that people finish and when they’re done, they tell their friends about it. So consider what makes you keep reading or keep listening: you want to know what’s going to happen next.
Many readers of memoir will share that they want a memoir that reads like fiction. Not only is this is one commonality of (non-celebrity) memoirs that makes memoirs popular (and sell well) but it also is what makes memoirs so special and effective for readers, because you are learning something real in a way that’s pleasurable and engaging. To be honest, fiction writers have this part so much easier than memoirists. When you are making up the plot, there are a thousand tricks you can play to make people keep turning the page. But when you’re writing a true story about your life—what happened is what happened. You can’t add drama by making it up—no one wants more James Frey books out there.
There are two elements of memoir that drive readers’ curiosity in similar ways to fiction, but those ways are not how exciting or dramatic the scenes themselves are. Instead, the first way good memoirs drive curiosity in the pairing of the specificity of your story and the universal message you are using your story to share. This is why we say that truth is more important than fact in memoir. Not because you should feel free to make up events to make your memoir more exciting, but because readers want to know how other people live and how, even though we may have very different experiences, there are commonalities to the human experience that bring us together.
The second element that drives readers’ curiosity in similar ways to fiction is by structuring the book as a whole using narrative structure, which brings us to our third essential for good memoir writing.
Good writing keeps the pace moving forward through conflict and change
Conflict and change are the bones and connective tissue of narrative structure. Narratives hinge on how characters are challenged and how facing those challenges changes them. It may be strange and difficult to think about the people in your memoir as “characters” given they are real and living people. But in terms of your narrative structure, you are the protagonist of the story, one of the characters. In our post a few weeks ago about working with an editor, (an important step in making sure a your memoir is good), we emphasized the importance of remembering that your book is not you. You are not capturing all the ways you have changed or been challenged, but the ways you’ve grown through the challenges that have led you to that key message of your book.
Structurally, this focus on conflict and change is how we make sure our pace keeps the reader moving forward. We don’t start by preaching the message baldly, nor do we start with the beginning of your life. We start with the first challenge that started you towards your message, and each structural benchmark along the way is focused on showing how these challenges have changed the way you make decisions. These decisions often bring about their own, different sets of conflicts, which again prompt us to change and grow.
Good writing is clear and consistent
Often writers get overly focused on the surface, line-level writing. We will often have an idea in our minds of what kind of voice is a “writerly” one. It may be flowery with complex metaphors and figurative language in every line. Or it may be more direct and personable, like chatting with a friend over coffee. Or it may be raw and brutally honest, pulling no punches and showing tons of personality. All of these ideas about what “good writing” means are right,even though they are so contradictory that no piece of writing could accomplish all of them.
Sometimes, the memoirists who worry most about whether their line-level writing is “good enough” are those who don’t read books with complex, dense, or musically poetic writing. Rather they are among the millions of readers who prefer relatable, casual writing in the books they read. When you don’t read books with that kind of writing, the idea of trying to produce it yourself feels overwhelming. If this feels like you, remember the desire to make sure your book is good is connected to wanting your book to find its audience.
Also, when we think about “good writing,” we are often reverse engineering what we’re looking for from the edited, polished and published books that move us. So in essense we are comparing a published book with our working draft–and of course there’s going to be a disparity there. That’s because the published book has already been revised and edited, usually by multiple people.
If your memoir is clear with consistent writing, then there will be nothing standing between it and finding its audience.
PS. This is part two of our revision series, and you can read part one here. In our group program, the Memoir Method, we can give you with hands on, one-on-one support for your memoir, whether you’re starting from scratch or have a lot of writing that isn’t yet meeting your standards. 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!
