The Secret to Writing Captivating Memoir
Hint: It’s not just about you
When I first began writing about my childhood trauma, I was still angry and afraid of my mother, and religion made me feel guilty about it. Every piece I wrote had a disclaimer about how unforgiving I was. I told my mysterious reader that my mother had meant well, that she’d had a good side, and that I knew she loved me.
I wrote it almost as an apology to my mother. This still makes me cringe! Clearly, I hadn’t yet worked my way out of the pain and appeasement.
I began reading every memoir I could find, especially the trauma memoirs. Maybe I could write a book about what happened to me? But everything I wrote about my mother ended up as an odd list of fragments. It wasn’t yet a story.
So I applied to an MFA program.
ASIDE: I’m not interested in the discussion about whether or not anyone needs an MFA to be a good writer. I needed it. It improved my writing exponentially.
Each semester, I worked one-on-one with professors who critiqued my writing based on a 25-page monthly submission, and at residencies, I submitted 17 pages to each workshop attendee who gave valuable feedback based on my fragmented pieces. By and large, everyone said to quit letting my mother off the hook. And to push harder on religion.
“But how do I put it all into a whole book?” I asked my professors and fellow students.
“Just keep writing,” they said.
My professors were excellent, my peers insightful. My writing improved. Perhaps most importantly, I gained a treasured literary community.
But I didn’t even begin learning how to put together a book until the last half of my thesis semester. By then it was a little late. My thesis ended up as an extensive chronology of my childhood trauma from age three to age twenty—a scattered narrative crisscrossed with loosely-related rabbit trails.
At best, it was a rough draft. In reality, it wasn’t even that.
A couple of years after I graduated, my friend,
, told me she’d signed with Author Accelerator to become a certified book coach. She encouraged me to check it out. I had never heard of book coaching. It sounded like a scam. Besides I was too busy limping along with my own writing. How could I possibly help someone else?That same year, my husband and I sold our house and spent the Maine winter in a tiny cottage on an island off the coast. I was unmoored, isolated, and frustrated with my writing progress. Four days after Christmas, with a couple thousand extra dollars from the sale of the house, I enrolled in the book coaching program while recovering from Covid.
You guys. I finally learned how to create a book.
You’d think it would be easy for someone who has read thousands and thousands of books, so many of them, memoir. But I learned from
, CEO of Author Accelerator, that nearly all memoir writers struggle to put their lived experience into a narrative arc.What a relief—it wasn’t just me.
To become a coach, I had to learn to teach other writers how to do that, which means I had to learn how to do it for my own writing. Through a sometimes grueling course load and testing process, I learned how to locate my deep-level passion that was spurring me to write my own book. I learned how to map out the narrative arc, how to stay on track with plot, how to revise, how to polish, and how to pitch agents.
I learned that every book needs the right structure for its story, the right amount of tension, and a clear point, I learned the importance of nailing down a specific genre because agents and editors will want to know where the book will one day sit on a bookstore shelf. I learned how to identify one’s ideal reader, how to be critically careful with time in the story line, and how to create a game-changer of an outline that’s not the outline you learned in high school English.
But the most important lesson of all?
Memoir writers must write for others—for our ideal readers. We must make our stories universal and compelling. We must give our readers a main character they can relate to and root for. We need our readers to feel like they are part of the story, not just listening to us drone on.
In the end, the coaching program taught me how write my own book. In doing that, I learned how to coach others as they write theirs.
If you find that you are stuck, rather than going through the lengthy process of becoming a book coach, I can help you see what your book needs in a fraction of the time.
As the brilliant writers in my MFA program told me, if you want to be a better writer, definitely keep writing.
But if you want to write a narrative memoir or a novel, simply improving your writing isn’t going to get you there. You need to figure out who you’re writing for, what makes your personal experience interesting to them, AND how to keep them turning the pages.
If You’re in the Market…
For a book coach, you can find more information HERE.
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Thank you for reading…
Keep your chin up and eyes open.
xoxo
Thank you for including me!
Lovely piece, Paulla, and thank you so much for linking to my article on 'what's my stake in the future if I don't have kids'. That's so lovely of you.