“Write about what you know.” Even beginning writers know this golden rule, and what do we know more about than our own lives? So even if you haven’t taken a ton of writing classes, you can pen a successful memoir. You can also pen a memoir full of dry facts that captures no one’s interest but your own, one that will sink to the bottom of Amazon’s sales lists faster than you can wish you had spent all that effort doing something else. If you have a memoir in you that’s begging to come out, and you want to make sure it’s entertaining enough to draw readers and sell copies to people other than your own friends and family, keep in mind the following three tips.
1. Show, don’t tell.
This is another golden rule of writing, and it’s essential for memoirs. Most of our life’s events unfortunately are not intrinsically as interesting to other people as they are to ourselves—ever suffered through a slide show of someone else’s vacation photos?—and you have to figure out a way to make them interesting. Paint a picture. Draw readers in by setting a scene they feel compelled to care about. Which of the following passages would draw you in more?
A. I was born in San Francisco in 1969. My mother was a baker, and my father was a math teacher. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood by the park.
B. San Francisco in 1969, the year I was born, was a dazzling swirl of colorful characters, from starry-eyed flower children to strung-out musicians. My mother would surreptitiously hand out free pot brownies from the back of her Haight Street bakery to those who had more adventurousness than economic sense. She kept this mildly illicit activity under the radar of my father, a straight-shooting square who taught math to disinterested high school kids, and from most of our neighbors, who all seemed plucked from the same school, Disapproving U.
Get the picture?
2. Share stories.
Sure, life can be boiled down to a series of facts: We’re born, we live, and we die. It’s the story blossoming around those facts that grabs someone’s attention. Scintillating memoirs are similar to compelling fiction (as well as movies and TV shows) in that they have the five basic elements of a story: a setting, a plot, a cast of characters, a conflict (or many conflicts), and a resolution (or many resolutions).
If you’ve forgotten your language arts classes of yesteryear, here’s a quick refresher in conflict. There are generally four types: human versus human, human versus nature, human versus himself/herself, and human versus society. What compelling conflicts have you experienced? How did you resolve them? It’s also worth learning about exposition, rising action, the climax, and falling action, although your memoir may have several mini versions of these in different chapters instead of a single arc.
3. Know your audience.
Who, exactly, are you hoping will find your memoir scintillating? If you’re thinking “everyone,” go back to the drawing board and dig deeper. Young, single mothers on a fixed income typically don’t read the same kinds of books as elderly and rich businessmen, for example. You simply can’t appeal to everyone in the universe in one book, and if you think you can, you should be writing a fantasy instead of memoir.
Figure out whom your memoir will most resonate with, and then base the style of your memoir on what kinds of books appeal to those people. Porn star Jenna Jameson dropped plenty of juicy stories and sex advice in her own memoir, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, because styling it along the lines of a how-to appealed to all the women dreaming about being as sexy as a porn star and all the men who wanted the inside scoop. Would it still have been a megahit if she had called it My Life and merely recounted the litany of events in her life? Not likely.
Is your memoir at its core a heartwarming tale of finding love against all odds that every singleton under 40 will celebrate? Is it a chronicle of dealing with a child’s disability or addiction that will leave parents hugging their own children extra hard? Is it a saga of growing up disadvantaged and becoming a multimillionaire entrepreneur that will captivate all those stuck in a job they hate?
While there’s some overlap, all demographic groups have their own styles of writing that appeal to them. For example, it’s well known that attention span in general has dwindled over the years (thank you, Internet), so if you’re aiming at a younger crowd, it behooves you to not use ten words when one will do, whereas those over 60 might appreciate more thoughtfully in-depth prose. Maybe your demographic likes flowery, romantic language or in-your-face locker room talk or fast-paced zingers. If you haven’t identified your readers and what appeals to them, you’re not writing for them—you’re writing for you. And in that case, you can save yourself all the effort and just go write in your diary.
Writing a memoir can be cathartic, emotionally fulfilling, and rewarding in so many other ways. If you want those ways to include favorable recognition and decent sales, keep these three tips in mind as you begin your memoir-writing journey. Good luck!
Elena Vega is a copy editor, proofreader, and writer who specializes in the areas of memoir, self-help, business, and other nonfiction topics as well as fiction.
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