Episode 80: The Key Element Missing From Your Memoir

Does your memoir have the structure it needs to effectively connect with readers? In this episode, Elizabeth shares with you one of the key details you need to make sure your memoir hits the mark. This gives you insight into what you'll dive into when you join the Memoir Master Plan Cohort, a 6-week program designed to help you have the plan you need to write your story. You'll learn how to find the thread that weaves through your story of transformation to bring your story to the world. You're unique and only you can tell your story. It's time to invest in yourself and your writer dream! 

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Transcript

Elizabeth: 0:03

Welcome to the Inspired Writer Collective podcast. If you've ever felt the pull to write your truth, to shape the chaos of real life into something meaningful and to share your journey with the world, you're in the right place. We're your hosts, Elizabeth and Stephanie, writers, coaches, and entrepreneurs who believe in you and know how important it is to find a writing community to guide you on your path to self-publishing. We believe your voice holds power. Telling your story isn't just a personal act of healing or reflection. It's a gift to the world. Pulling the skeletons out of the closet is challenging unless you're writing a memoir. Then it's called chapter one. Okay. Each week we explore the art, heart, and craft of connecting personal narrative to your writing, whether that be memoir or fiction. Whether you're drafting your first chapter, wrestling with a messy middle, or searching for the courage to hit publish, we are honored to be your companions on the journey the world needs Your voice. Memoir is the art of pulling out old skeletons and realizing they were just unspoken chapters of your story. This season on the podcast, we're really digging into the concept of personal narratives and how they influence the stories we write, whether those are fiction stories or memoir. And today I wanna spend a little bit of time talking about the difference between memoir and autobiography. For one, that those two categories of writing get really confused by a lot of people and. It makes sense. There are a lot of similarities and a lot of overlaps, and nowadays you see a lot of celebrities referring to their autobiography as a memoir when it actually doesn't meet those qualifications. It's just sexier or sell better to call it a memoir. So that's one of the reasons why those categories have gotten a little bit muddied. But the thing with an autobiography is they're largely limited to. People who have had some major events in their life that make them really interesting in the sense that people are interested in the person specifically, not in their journey or what they learned, which is more the space of memoir of the, the everyday man or woman struggles. But, oh, you were the first person to go to space. Let me hear about that. Um, you were a celebrity movie star in Hollywood. Let me read about that. Uh, you won some amazing, um, medal or trophy because of your athletic feats, or you're an ultra marathon runner who completed the fastest time on a particular trail. Those are the things of autobiographies, right? Where. The adventure of the story itself is what makes the reader want to come to it. But the thing that makes memoir stand out, the thing that sets memoir apart from autobiography, well, there's a number of things. For one, it's not your entire life. When you sit down to write memoir, you should not be starting from, I was born to this person and this person on this day on a hot summer day. None of that. What memoir does is it takes our, our individual moments and stories and strings them together in a narrative arc that shows a transition or a change over the course of the timeframe encompassed in the memoir. And what I'm referring to here is it all links back to what I call a core message. Now, in writing books, a lot of times, um, authors use the word theme. For me, theme just feels too general. So the word that I use, um, is core message. This is sort of a distillation of concepts that I came up with. Maybe it's written down somewhere else, but it's certainly not something I've ever seen in a book. But I call it the core message, and that's what I help people who want to write memoir focus on, because often that is the biggest missing piece. Of the memoir, and when I meet with writers who are feeling stuck about their memoir, oftentimes what we find is not that they don't know how to write their story or they don't know what stories to necessarily include, but oftentimes they haven't properly defined their core message. So that's why I wanted to talk about this topic today. We're gonna really dig into what the core message is and how to define that for your writing. Now, core message is essential for memoir. But I also wanna make sure I point out that having an underlying theme of growth, change, or transition is also really helpful in creating depth in your fiction writing as well. So some of these same concepts can be used in fiction writing, and what you'll see is a lot of the really powerful, impactful bestselling books in any of those fiction genres. Have an underlying message or current to them that would be equivalent to a core message. So it's not just about in say a rom-com. It's not just about these two characters coming together and falling in love. There are some deeper things that they as individuals are being challenged with. That is the same essence as the core message in memoir. So what is core message? Core message is the theme that links all of your stories together. So this is why it's so essential in writing memoir because if you don't understand what message you are trying to portray to the reader, then you won't be super clear on what stories are necessary to tell, because it really could be. Just a small little moment that really emphasizes the core message. And if you're only looking at your life and looking at those big events, you are probably missing out on some really relatable stories that your reader will be able to relive with you and put themselves into and experience what you experienced. So some of the ways that I guide memoir writers to dig into what their core message could be is we look at what areas of their lives, what time periods, what events and experiences they've Dave had that required them to go through some sort of massive transition or change. This is a universal concept, this idea of transition and change. We all experience this. You may experience it with aging, you may experience it, um, with getting a new job or a move or, um, as you reach parenthood or various milestones, marriage, any of that. There's so many different ways in which you can view transition and change. So first we might actually start by brainstorming all the ways in which you've gone through transition and changes, and then looking for those places in your life where they had such an impact that there's a story there to share. And one of the ways that I, as a guide for memoir writers. Help someone hone down that big list is I'm looking at where did someone have a misbelief about themselves or their world that they then overcame because that misbelief is such a powerful anchor for your narrative story. So this is something that you as a past version of yourself, if you're writing about yourself in memoir or if you're writing in fiction, the main character, something that they falsely believed about themselves or about their world. So in my memoir, personally, what this misbelief is, is that in order to be accepted, I needed to. Mold and shape myself into what others expected of me. There was this misbelief I had that I couldn't show up authentically or I would be rejected. So there was all these ways in which I altered myself, downplayed myself, things like people pleasing, using alcohol in social situations. Um, and just the way that, that I kept myself small. In order to feel like I was fitting in, but constantly running against the struggle of knowing that I wasn't truly being accepted because I wasn't showing up as myself. So this is where the story begins. You start with that misbelief. You paint the picture for your reader of what that misbelief was, why you felt validated in that misbelief. You know, you may do some back backstory to show some of the origin of that misbelief and you're, and you're showing the reader why you started there. And ideally this is going to be. A struggle that your reader has as well. Either they are currently in some level of that misbelief in their own world, or they have also gone through that journey of updating that misbelief to a more real, true belief about themselves. So as you travel along in your memoir, as you're choosing what stories to include. You're looking for things that validate, that misbelief, things that encouraged you to double down on that misbelief. Maybe some times that you were brave enough to test that misbelief and those things either went well or didn't go well, and that altered or affected your strength in those beliefs about yourself or your world, and ultimately what you show throughout the journey of your memoir. Is your struggle and your realizations of how you dismantled that misbelief and how you came to know something more true and more real about your world. And so in that way, you are guiding the reader to show them how those changes and how those transitions affected you, what kind of decisions you made around them, and. That gives some baseline for reflections and takeaways that they can apply to their own lived experiences, especially those that are similar to what you are describing through the stories you include in your memoir. And the thing about updating a misbelief is that you want to provide solutions to the reader that are internal. Meaning the things that you change about your, the way that you view the world, the way that you view yourself, such that your solution that you present is universally approachable. So I made the mistake of not doing this in the first draft of my memoir. I started as a blend of memoir and self-help. And in that I was. Originally centering around the idea of finding community and the how tos of moving to a small town and how to find that tribe and those people again. But the thing is, my reader is not gonna be in the same town as me. My reader is not gonna have the same resources in their town. So really, those external solutions are not helpful to them in the same way that. Helping the reader see how much increasing your self value and your self love can make an impact anywhere that you are. So that's what I mean when I say make sure that your solution, that the way that you come about to update that misbelief is something that everyone can tap into. The thing about a core message is that the reader doesn't have to relate to every single event that you encounter. They simply have to relate to that theme, right? So it doesn't matter that in the way that you dealt with showing up for yourself, that you went through these specific. Experiences. It doesn't matter if the reader didn't have those same experiences, not even a one, right? If they shared in that struggle, what they are gonna relate to is the emotions and the way in which you went through that transition and change. So say for example, you're writing a memoir about addiction, it doesn't matter if they never woke up under a bridge. It doesn't matter if they didn't go to a detox center three times before it took. It doesn't matter if it's not the same experiences. What matters is that, did they go on the same emotional journey through transition and change, or are they hoping to go through a similar journey? That's where you get to connect with your reader, and that's also the reason why you don't have to worry about. Whether your core message is the same as someone else's. I, I read a quote recently that, um, said to say that we don't need another memoir about addiction is the same as saying we don't need another song about love. There's so many different ways that we can present these topics and your experiences are unique to you, meaning you are the only one that can write that memoir. And there's the beauty and the universality of your message because of that core message, that theme that runs through. And that is what your reader will relate to. And it's simply those experiences that create the framework or the template, the palette if you will, for you to put those emotions onto. And it is those emotions. And that process of going through those changes and transitions that your reader is gonna resonate with. Unfortunately, so many memoir writers breeze past this work of digging into their core message. Sometimes you start with something too broad. That's certainly what I did. There's a lot of fear, I think when you first start writing that. If I make it too narrow, there's no way I'll write, you know, 85,000 words on this. The reality is if you really pick a strong core message where you've wrestled with that misbelief, where you've had experiences, where you've questioned it, where you've doubled down, where you've turned around and done some U-turns, there's going to be plenty of fodder there. They just may be the smaller stories that don't naturally come to mind, they may seem insignificant to you. When you're looking at a timeline of your life and you see all these big moments, they might be in the day to day, they might have been just a conversation you had in the checkout line one day at the grocery store, and so oftentimes if you have a core message, it tends to be too broad. The other thing that I see over and over again is that. Writers are a bit scared to dig into the core message. It's a little bit easier to just want to write about the big stories somehow link it in just a, a timeline, um, and not really dig into the emotionality of those pieces to not do the reflection. Of how those things impacted you and to take a lighter way through your story, but then in that case, your reader can't really connect with you. One of the really popular books written by a celebrity within the past few years that got a lot of publicity and. I think it was was a bestseller, is Jeanette McCurdy's. I'm glad my mom died and I gotta tell you, listener, I was excited to read this quote unquote memoir, although I would argue that it misses all of these pieces we've talked about, about what separates a memoir from an autobiography. I would argue that it's actually an autobiography. Because the selling point is that it's someone famous who did something in Hollywood, and yes, she's chronicling events that you could reflect on and that she could have dug into and provided a more broader way for her readership to relate to. But the thing is, she didn't write the book that way. She wrote the book in present Tense, so we as the reader are there with her at age seven. We're there with her at age 13, and by the time we get to the end of the book where she finally says in a therapy session that she's glad her mom died, we don't get any reflection on. How she feels as an adult about these things that she experienced as a child. There was zero looking back, there was zero insight into how these things really impacted her and changed her. Mentally and emotionally. Sure we can make assumptions and we can see some causality about some of the trauma she experienced and the eating disorders and what the root of that might be, but she never reflects back for us what her own takeaways were from that since she chose to write it in the first person. Present tense. We only experience as the readers those moments as she lived them. And the what she took from it in that moment, but no reflection to go back to say how it impacts her now or how she views it now. You know, she, she so often talks about, in all these different stories about how she didn't think that anything was super off or a little weird, or her mom was a bit unconventional, but this was also Hollywood and she also really believed that. You know, she was living out her mom's dreams and we never get an update on that. So I was quite disappointed in that book and it's probably one of my least favorites. And I, I don't, I don't believe it deserves the memoir label as a genre. It's much more autobiographical because there is no reflection, because we don't get to see any sort of change or transition of her beliefs about her world or herself. We see why she may have had certain beliefs in the beginning, but we never get to see an update. We never get to go on a journey with her. In a sense, you just kind of get traumatized with her because she puts you right there into those stories and we never get a way out. There was nothing I read in her book that I was able to really apply to my own life. There were moments when I could relate to some of the emotion that she was experiencing or some of the hypervigilance that she describes, but then she never did anything with it. So I didn't gain any insights. I didn't have any takeaways as a reader from that book. But having a strong core message, that is how you craft your takeaways for your reader. It is in those reflections that relate back to that core message that you share, wisdom that you have gained with your reader. That's the thing about Core Message is it's the message within the narrative. It is your perspective, your point of view, the wisdom that you earned along that journey, and then the topics that are of concern to you. And that's why every memoir is unique. That's why everyone can write a memoir. And it's also why you can write multiple memoirs because you are only sharing the stories that relate back to that core message. So you could even write about the same period of time in your life in a separate memoir with a different theme, and you would have different stories to share. Because they're all related back to that core message. So I hope that helps you have a little bit of added clarity about the difference between memoir and autobiography, and also how to start tapping into that core message. There's a lot of different journaling prompts that you can do. I'll be including those within our writer experience, our weekly emails that we send out, this is a deep dive into these conversations that you get directly to your inbox. These are not things we always talk about on the podcast, but this is an added bonus for anyone who joins the email list. It's there that I provide things like writing prompts to dig into the core message. Um, more discussion around the, the details of crafting the core message and allowing it to guide your narrative arc. And also if you're ready to write your memoir, if you're ready to dig into that, or if you've started and you feel stuck. I have my memoir master plan cohort. That enrollment is already open, and we'll be starting in September and October. We meet for six weeks. There's reading, there's journaling exercises. You will dig into your core message with us as a small group, because having someone outside of you, outside of your story to share your ideas with and reflect back to you, that's so powerful because we are extra close to our stories as memoir writers. So this small group program allows you to. Get those ideas out to see what resonates to work through those journaling exercises and land on a strong core message. And then crafted the outline, a very detailed outline that's going to capture the character development and also help you figure out which stories are the right ones to include in this memoir. So often writers, including myself, find themselves writing the wrong stories if, if you, if you go too long without defining this core message and really sitting down to see what fits in the narrative arc. Or even attributing the proper pacing to your storyline that the reader is going to be expecting, then you may end up spending time writing stories that don't belong that just end up being cut. But one of my intentions with this program is to really set women up on the right path in writing their memoir, having a strong, clear core message that they can root all of their stories into. And then walking away with a detailed outline that you feel tingles about all over your body. When you think about, you're eager to get started and put those words on the paper, and then as you find time to sit down, whether that's 30 minutes before you pick up the kids from school, or that's late in the evening after everyone's in bed, or those early morning hours with a cup of coffee. You know exactly what story you're putting on the page. You know exactly what points you need to hit. You know what emotionality you need to bring to the moment. We even talk about things like how to control the emotions, the raising of the stakes, the humor in order to lighten the mood before a heavy moment, or to lighten the mood again after a heavy moment. How to take the reader on a journey. That is all encompassed in the memoir master plan cohort, and I would love if you wanted to join us. There are links in the show notes to enroll to get more information or to have a conversation with me and see if it's a good fit. Either way, I hope that you take some time to dig into your core message, that you take a look back at your life at the transitions and changes you've gone through. At the ways that you've updated your beliefs about yourself or your world, and really think about what journey you wanna take your reader on, because that's where the magic happens. That's what makes a great memoir. That's what makes a page turner a bestseller. The kind of book that everyone's gonna be talking about.

Stephanie: 27:35

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