How to Coach a Memoir Writer
Today’s blog post comes to us from Author Accelerator CEO Jennie Nash. If you enjoy today’s content, you can sign up for Jennie's weekly newsletter here.
I am so thrilled to announce that Author Accelerator is launching our long-awaited Book Coach Certification course in nonfiction. Cue the fireworks! This course teaches coaches how to help a writer prepare and pitch a nonfiction book proposal, which is a document used to land an agent to sell a book to traditional publishers before it is written. It also happens to be the perfect roadmap for writers who are seeking a hybrid or self-published option, because it forces you to answer every key question you need to answer to give yourself the best possible chance at success and to lay out the exact marketing plan you will follow to get the book into readers’ hands.
I *love* coaching nonfiction book proposals, because the writers who need them often have big ideas and the desire to make a big impact and it’s so fun helping them wrangle their ideas and pin them to the page in a way that brings those ideas to life.
I am especially proud of this nonfiction course because it was hard to pull together – there are a lot of moving parts to a book proposal, and a lot of ways to understand those parts on a surface level. Audience for the book? Check. Comp titles? Check. But I wanted to go DEEP – to teach coaches the underlying WHY of everything and how a book proposal can become a thing of beauty in and of itself. I believe we achieved that – with a huge assist from Laura Franzini, Terri LeBlanc, and Whitney Astbury from the Author Accelerator team.
But What About Memoir?
One big question that keeps coming up around the Book Coach Certification program is where should people who want to coach memoir go? Memoir is, after all, a true story told by the person who experienced it. It is fact – or as close to it as we can come with our fallible memories – and is therefore considered nonfiction. But many coaches who coach memoir already sit firmly on the fiction side and many writers come at it with a fictional mindset. So who is right? Should a coach who will be guiding memoir writers train on the fiction side or the nonfiction side?
I believe that memoir is one of the toughest genres to write, to sell, and to coach, because it demands skills and tools from both the fiction and the nonfiction side. I am speaking here about writing memoir with the hope of getting it published – which is to say, read and embraced by people who don’t know you. Writing memoir because you want to remember, or process, or make sense of your life, or share it, or leave a legacy for your family is a different endeavor that requires different demands. But if you are writing because you want other people to engage with your story, and learn from it, and become immersed in it, and inspired by it, you have to work with a different set of tools.
Beth Kephart’s book, Handling the Truth, is a magnificent book about writing memoir, and in it, she gives the perfect definition of the genre:
Memoir Is Not
Here are some of the things that memoir is not:
A chronological, thematically tone-deaf recitation of everything remembered. That’s autobiography, which should be left, in this twenty-first century, to politicians and celebrities. Oh, be honest: It should just be left.
A typeset version of a diary scrawl—unfiltered, unshaped. There are remarkable diaries; A Woman in Berlin (anonymous), for example, is artful, heartbreaking, essential. New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009 (Teresa Carpenter, editor) is a thrill. But the method of a diarist is to record events and thoughts as they are happening. A memoirist looks back.
Exhibitionism for exhibitionism’s sake. If nothing’s been learned from a life, is it worth sharing? Or, if nothing’s been learned yet, shouldn’t the story wait?
An accusation, a retaliation, a big take that! in type. Fights are waged in bedrooms and courthouses. A memoir is not a fight.
A lecture, a lesson, a stew of information and facts. Memoirs illuminate and reveal, as opposed to justify and record. They connote and suggest but never insist.
A self-administered therapy session. Memoirists speak to others and not just to themselves.
An exercise in self-glorification; an ability—or refusal—to accept one’s own culpability; a false allegiance to the idea that a life, any life, can be perfectly lived or faultlessly explained.
An unwillingness to recognize—either explicitly or implicitly—that memory is neither machine nor uncontestable. Memory—our own and others’—is a tricky, fallible business.
A trumped-up, fantastical idea of what an interesting life might have been, if only. A web of lies. A smudge. A mockery of reality. There is a separate (even equal) category for such things. It goes by the name of fiction.
The Fiction Side of Memoir
In the best memoirs, the writer has figured out a way to see herself as the protagonist of the story. They have managed to step outside of the events of their life – the facts of their life – to see the arc of change or transformation they have experienced, and they have captured that arc on the page.
Think of Cheryl Strayed in Wild, or Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love, or Kelly Corrigan in The Middle Place, or Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking or Andre Agassi in Open.
We think we know everything about those authors’ lives because we read the memoir they wrote, but we don’t know a thing about them, really: We only know what they chose to tell us, what they pulled from their lives to trace that arc of change. Scene by scene, using the tools of fiction, they made a character of themselves and let us into that character’s mind as the great novelists do.
Those tools include writing dialogue that gets at what is not being said as confidently as what is; learning how to show the scene instead of telling us about it; getting emotion on the page in a way we can experience it; and letting us inside the characters’ thoughts and fears, lies and motivations, hopes and desires.
This is what we teach in the book coaching course on fiction.
The danger with writing memoir using only the tools of fiction is that too often memoir writers only focus on the story – the plot, what really happened – and not on the point or the purpose of that story. Reading memoirs like this is akin to reading someone’s journal, and not usually at all engaging.
So the question the memoir writer needs to ask is: How will I make sure that my memoir isn’t self-serving? How will I use my story to illuminate a larger truth or universal point for an audience of readers who will care?
For that, the tools of nonfiction work best.
The Nonfiction Side of Memoir
When working with a nonfiction writer, a coach starts by digging into the overarching purpose or point of the memoir. Whereas in fiction, we put the spotlight on character and story, on the nonfiction side, we put it on purpose and structure.
A nonfiction book proposal is, at its root, an argument for why the book should exist and how it should exist. It’s a sales tool, and in my experience, the work of building this argument is enormously helpful to memoir writers.
After all, a memoir writer knows what happened and how it felt; they lived it. If you ask them to recite the events they are writing about – to slug them out on a timeline or in a bullet-point list – they can do that. And they can no doubt speak eloquently about what it all meant to them, and what emotions were present at any given moment. They have spent a lifetime watching that movie in their head. But they have likely done very little work on what it might mean to other people – on what readers might take away from their tale, and on the best way to shape the material to give the reader the desired experience.
When coaching a memoir writer from the nonfiction side, we ask these kinds of questions:
Who is the book for?
What does that audience want? Education, escape, entertainment, solace, understanding, an experience of a particular kind of emotion, such as love or grief or fear?
What other books are these readers already reading in this realm – fiction? How to?
What structure would best serve the story? This might include the question of whether or not a hybrid approach might work better, the way it did in Bird by Bird, a book that is part memoir, part manifesto, part how-to.
How, specifically, do you plan to get the book into readers’ hands? How can you best connect to people who will respond to the story you have to tell?
It’s Not Either/Or
The way I am presenting things here – the fiction approach to memoir, the nonfiction approach to memoir – is an artificial conceit. When coaching memoir, I use all these tools. And, in fact, when coaching in any genre, I use all these tools.
In a how-to book or a historical biography, the author also needs to know how to write a scene with a structure and dialogue that allows the reader to feel emotion. I was just working with an author who is working on a book on leadership that starts with a story from her own life. As written, it was very flat. We worked on how she can hold tension in the story by not giving away the conclusion too soon; on how she can give more context so that the emotional payoff is bigger; on how she can let the reader into her motivations and desires in the moment. If you had been listening in on our conversation, you would have thought this writer was working on a novel.
When writing a novel, the author also needs to know who her audience is and why they are coming to this work. She needs to know what else that reader is going to be reading on this topic, and what the best structure might be for containing the tale. I was just working with an author who is writing a middle-grade book about religious identity, among other things. We have been talking about what kids this age hear in the news every day during these very fraught times, what their parents are talking to them about at the dinner table every night, what the role adults have in either shielding them from ugly truths or educating them about them. If you had been listening in to this conversation, you would have thought this writer was working on nonfiction.
Becoming a good book coach (as well as a good writer) is about building your skillset. It’s about deep listening to what the writer is trying to say so you can hold a mirror up for them and help them recreate the vision in their heads on the page.
If you intend to coach memoir, you can start by taking our fiction Book Coach Certification track or our nonfiction Book Coach Certification track. You can get to where you need to go by either path. You can also bring in other methodologies you have studied, other certifications you have, other ideas you have gleaned from your reading, and your studying, and most importantly, from your living.
I was speaking the other day with a book coaching student who is switching careers from being a birth doula, and another who runs an anthropology consulting business, and another who has worked 30 years as a lawyer in corporate finance and banking, and another who has run a used bookstore, and another who is a copywriter and a single mom – and in all these conversations, I kept thinking, Imagine how lucky their writers are going to be.
I mean, what must a birth doula know about life and death? What must a lawyer know about telling tales? What must an anthropologist know about the ways people connect with each other?
The tools we teach in our Book Coach Certification program are just that – tools. Like a hammer, or a jigsaw, or a screwdriver, or a KitchenAid mixer, or a waffle maker. It’s the people using these tools who bring them to life and deploy them to help writers do their best work.
So if you are drawn to coaching memoir, go first down the path that feels best to you, confidently knowing you will find your way.
