Writing Bravely
The number one consideration of writing memoir for our day and age is that we need to be authentic and we need to be brave. You're writing a memoir because you have lived an interesting, unique, unlikely experience, some kind of experience that makes people sit up and take notice. And then you have also done the work to make something of that experience, to realize its lessons without preaching.
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transcript for writing bravely
Hello. My name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. This is about writing bravely for our memoir writers. Now, I do not fancy myself a Rene Brown at all. Her work is very relevant to a lot of our memoir writers who need to sort of espouse this idea of daring greatly. So by saying writing bravely, I am definitely not hopping onto a bandwagon. That being said, I think the number one consideration of writing memoir for our day and age and our memoir market, very competitive memoir market, by the way, is that we need to be authentic and we need to be brave as people and as writers. Now, the assumption with modern memoir is you're writing a memoir because you have lived an interesting experience, a unique experience, an unlikely experience, some kind of experience that makes people sit up and take notice. And then you have also done the work necessary within yourself to make something of that experience, meaning to realize its lessons without preaching, without, you know, overly explaining the point of what you've learned going through your life experience that there is something to be wrought from it. And the memoir is where you are doing the ringing. The rotting, no, that's not a good sounding word for that. But you know what I mean.
So, basically, one time I worked with a memoir client, and this person had written this story of kind of their misadventures in media, let's say, in a splashy magazine and kind of all of these things that they were doing when they were going off the rails. This person just couldn't get their act together. And it wasn't ever clear why. And the media environment is a fun one, you know, "Devil Wears Prada," all of that. But I basically got on the phone with this client and I said, "You know, without that kind of authentic sense of what you were going through, why you were going through this, and why you were struggling so much, I don't know if this has enough legs to really speak to a lot of people." And this writer, they broke down. They said, "Well, this entire time I was fighting for custody with my abusive ex and that was really what was going on, as sort of the context, the background for this story that I did tell." But then they expressed, you know, "I don't want to go there because I don't want to get this ex back on my tail." And all of these kind of very real-life considerations for why this writer had written this memoir that way.
That being said, it ended up being kind of a hollow story or kind of a superficial story wrapped around a hollow core because the writer was not letting us in to the thing that was happening, the heart story of that period of their lives. And we had this very difficult conversation of, "I know that you don't want to endanger yourself, or, heaven forbid, your child. But in this memoir that you've written, as you've written it, there wasn't even mention of a child. We had no idea." And so, it was like so much of the story had been left out for really valid self-protective instincts and reasons. But that connection between the reader, the person, and what the person was going through, like really going through, not just the events that they were having in their lives, but what they were going through was completely severed. And as a memoir, it did not connect to the reader because there was just so much held back and missing.
And so, one of the things that I counsel people when they express an interest in writing memoir is that you do have to go there. Whatever there is, whether it is childhood trauma, whether it is something learned through hard experience in adulthood, whether it's kind of just a combination of everything, something redemptive, something that you've overcome. Those are ingredients in modern memoir. Modern memoir is very, very competitive because if you think about it, everybody has a life story to tell. And a lot of people are sort of using writing as therapy, which is completely valid. Nothing wrong with that. But they're sort of getting to this place where they really want to like write their life story, they want to pass on what they've learned to others, to their families, and maybe even a wider audience.
We've had all of these pop memoirs like Elizabeth Gilbert, "Eat Pray Love," you know, "Wild." I'm not even going to try to remember her name. I'm terrible with names and titles off the top my head. You know, all these pop memoirs of, "I did this unlikely thing, I learned these lessons, I'm here being very authentic kind of bringing them to you, I'm opening up a vein, I am opening on my heart, I am being very honest, authentic, and vulnerable." And I think that is a key ingredient in modern memoir, especially if you consider the readership we have a lot of female readers, they are kind of in their second act in life, maybe they are getting over a first marriage, getting into a second career, their children have gone and they are sort of grappling with their identities. So, that identity piece of modern memoir is really, really important. And I don't think that you can authentically go there and explore identity if you're not willing to write bravely.
There are a lot of practical considerations. You know, you may not want to talk about people until they have passed on. You may not want to get in trouble. Your life may be in danger by sharing your story. You may want to use fake names. All of those considerations. I would say most of them are surmountable. Pen names are available. Kind of legal remedies are available. But if you're going to do it, do it. And that is something that I find where my work sort of approximates a therapist work the most is when I'm talking to my memoir clients and I'm just saying, "You know, if you're going to tell this story, if you're going to tell it now, if you're going to tell it within these parameters of what really happened to you, that authenticity piece needs to be there because it is such a requirement in today's memoir market." So writing bravely is not available to everybody for a number of reasons in memoir, but I would say it is the number one ingredient of modern memoir and it should be front of mind if you choose to write your life story for today's market. My name is Mary Kole. This is Good Story Company and here's to a good life story.
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