4 Most Common Memoir Mistakes for First Time Writers

When you're writing your first book, you don't know what you don't know. Now really, that's true of any field or any industry or any really big project you're undertaking for the first time. But there's something about writing a book that can just feel so daunting. Add to that, if you're writing a story about your own life, it can be impossible to break through the self-doubt. Well, one of the best ways to push through is to be aware of the most common mistakes that other people like you tend to make. That way you can avoid the big four and really get to your end destination, a beautiful book that tells the story of what you've lived through with the minimum amount of stress, anxiety, and procrastination. I'm Dr. Amanda Nell Edgar, the Managing Editor and CEO of Page and Podium Press. I'm so excited to bring you today's video, The Top Four Mistakes That Memoir Writers Make. So as the Managing Editor of Page and Podium Press, I have spoken with hundreds of authors. I've looked at dozens and dozens of memoirs, and I picked my brain to really look through and think about what were the most common mistakes that first-time memoir writers make. I have come up with four things, and I promise you, if you can avoid all four of these, you're going to be made in the shade. That memoir is practically going to write itself. Well, maybe not. But at least you'll know what to look out for just to make sure you don't fall into these really common traps. All right. So the first one is a big one. And I'll tell you, I see this around YouTube, and I see this on the internet. So I don't think this will be a new piece of advice, but it is really common. So it's worth saying here. Don't start your memoir at birth. Now, autobiographies, they do start from birth, right? In an autobiography or a biography, what you're looking for is to trace either the author or another person trace their whole entire life. And this makes sense for a lot of the people that we read autobiographies and biographies of, right? Because in a lot of cases, these are really, really important, major historical figures. And a lot of times we do kind of want to know where they came from and how did they go to school? How did they learn to be so great? But let's be honest. Most of us are not that. You know, most of us are not Martin Luther King, Jr. Or George Washington, or some of these people that, oh, yeah, it would be so interesting to know their whole entire life story. It's valuable for the reader. It's valuable for history. It's just valuable. Here's what I want to ask you. What do you want the value of your story to be? Do you want it to help people who are going through something that you survived, that you really struggled with, and now you want to pay it forward? You want to share what you went through and make sure that they can come out unscathed or relatively unscathed at the other end of that really arduous, challenging thing they're going through. That's an amazing purpose. You're going to change so many lives with that purpose. Or are you recording a part of your life that is going to be something that you're going to share with your family? What is your purpose? Here's why I ask that. Your purpose is going to tell you whether your birth matters. Just is. So, for example, if we think about that middle example I gave, you're trying to document your story for your family, your kids, and your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren, and so on down the line. A book is an amazing way to do that. In fact, we just wrote a book called Oilman that has come out now a couple of months ago at the point this video is out. It's a good book, but it was mostly written for the family. In fact, the author, Walter Deckett, unfortunately passed away before the book actually came out. I'll tell you, his family was so grateful to have those stories. Now, with him, we didn't start at birth. I think there would have been an argument for doing that. But we did start when he was a teenager. The reason for that is that the purpose was to record his legacy. Well, if you think about it, I am so jealous, actually, of the family. I didn't really know my grandparents well. None of my grandparents were living by the time I was an adult. I wish that I had their stories. I wish that I could see where they come from, where they excelled, where they messed up. That would be so valuable to me. And in that case, I'm going to read it. You know, I want to know. So if there's something that that person wants to share from their childhood, I'm all in. I want the whole shebang, right? What if we take the first example that I gave, where you are trying to help somebody through something really, really tough? Let's say you escaped an abusive relationship. And it's really hard to do that. We know it's really hard to do that. And women who do that are the most vulnerable to being quite literally murdered by their partners. Once you leave, your risk of being killed goes sky high. So maybe you want to talk about what it was like to live through that. And more importantly, how you got out safely. What an amazing book that could be. How many women and men and non-binary folks, how many people could you help escape from that situation that you already escaped from? Amazing. Well, if that's the story that you're telling, I really question whether including your birth and your young childhood years are really going to add to that story. Now, maybe they do. Maybe you grew up in a household where there was abuse. That's really common. So you were sort of primed to be looking for these abusive relationships. That happens a lot, right? Kids who are abused don't really understand or don't have a way of seeing what kinds of healthy relationships are out there and what those look like. Well, in that case, I probably wouldn't start at your birth. But you may want to weave in some memories from childhood just to kind of give that context. I think that makes perfect sense. But if you had, you know, a fine childhood, maybe some bumps along the way, but everything was mostly fine. And then you found yourself in an abusive situation as an adult. I don't know that your birth or your childhood is necessarily going to feed that story. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. But here's the thing. If you just start by default, I was born in Georgia, December 3, 1954. We don't really get a sense as a reader that you have thought about that. That feels like a very standard opening that you just decided that was a fine place to get started. We as readers want to see that you are a thoughtful storyteller. If there are things included in that book, we want to know that they're valuable to our learning about your story. We want to see that you're thinking about us from the very beginning. And as readers, we probably didn't buy a book because we adore you so much. I mean, I mean, no harm by that, right? That's okay. But what we do value is this story, this experience that you've overcome. In that case, does your childhood matter? Do your teenage years matter? Do your young adult life matter? Maybe not. Or maybe they do. Be thoughtful, though. Don't just automatically start at birth. That is a cliche, and it's something you really, really want to avoid. All right, number two. Number two is one that I find a lot, particularly a lot of men, will come to me with the concern that there is going to be too much fluff. Now, you might be surprised at what I'm going to say here, because a lot of times people have heard this advice on the internet that you need to cut ruthlessly. Every extra word you can find, cut. So when that happens then sometimes, as I'm coaching them or as we're ghostwriting their story, they'll have a lot of concerns that some of the things we encourage them to include are, is that just fluff? Maybe, but maybe not. So what I want to do here is I want to use a particular book that we are releasing next month in October on the 24th to illustrate the point that I want to make here, because this is a fine line, but it's really, really important that you grasp this if you want your memoir to be enjoyable and readable for others besides you and your family. Okay, so I want to start by reading an excerpt from Victor Hill's book, The Ignorant Man's Son. Again, that will be out in October. You can pre-order it now on Amazon.com or wherever you buy your books. You're going to want to read this book. It's really amazing, moving, touching, sweet. It has amazing themes of social justice, making a better world for the kids in your neighborhood, and some Christian themes. You're going to want to check this out. But I want to read just a short passage from the very first chapter of this book, and then I'm going to present the fluff-free version. Granddaddy was a man I really looked up to, a man with a towering stature. The way he carried himself screamed integrity and honor. I always saw him coming and going with purpose, whether in work clothes or nicely dressed. He was a hardworking family man. I remember his smell so clearly, of bright, acidic aftershave and clean clothes dried on the line. He wore a hat like so many men of that time, with the brim turned down in front. He walked with so much confidence. People just moved out of his way when he came down the street. Maybe it wasn't just his confidence. Maybe it was the snub-nosed .38 pistol he carried. That gun was like a badge of honor where I come from. But most of all, Granddaddy was a family man. So that's just a very, very brief excerpt, just a few paragraphs on the page there. Let me tell you what the alternative writing of this would be. You could just say, I love my granddaddy. He was real confident, stood tall, hard worker. Does that have the same visceral draw as when we get some of those sensory details? What did it smell like? What did it feel like? What did it look like? What are some of the kind of funny, quirky things, right? There's no point. Spoiler alert. There's no point in this story where that .38 pistol is used. But it doesn't tell us a lot about who Granddaddy is. It tells us so much, right? But if what we were doing was saying there can be no fluff, all it needs to be is event, event, event, event. It's not going to be very enjoyable for the reader. Particularly in memoir, folks want to really have time to get in your story and think about it. What we're really doing is putting ourselves in your shoes. If we don't know what things sounded like, what things looked like, what things smelled like, we really can't do that. You're really robbing your reader of that visceral connection, that quality that we almost think of exclusively as fiction, but that can make a read so much more intriguing and engrossing and engaging. So the second thing I want to make sure you do not do, second most common mistake, don't cut all the fluff. Don't cut all the fluff. I don't even know that I'd call that stuff fluff, but I hear that sometimes folks do. Your reader needs time to process. Now, don't sacrifice your pacing. You need to make sure that you are moving through the story at a reasonable rate. But don't go too far the other way, where you're cutting all of the detail, all of the little touches that make us humans. What is a memoir about? It's about being human, right? Well, unfortunately, my third most common error I see among memoir writers is also deeply related to our humanity. And that is, friends, when you set out to write your memoir, make sure you're past the point of wanting to name names. I mean a very specific thing by that. I don't just simply mean, you know, don't include the names of your friends and family in your memoir. That's terrible advice. And in fact, as I've talked a lot about on LinkedIn and my other social channels, when we think we're just going to give pseudonyms to the people in our memoir, and that protects us legally somehow, that is just not the case. It's actually much, much more complicated than that. What I mean when I say make sure you aren't just looking to name names is I mean, make sure you're not set out to get revenge through this book. Right? If you're writing about anything that was tough to live through, anything where you really, really struggled and fought, and people were holding you down or not helping you, or people you thought would be there to have your back just vanished. Oh, it's awful, right? And writing can be such an amazing way to process some of those things. I am an avid journaler, and I suggest if you want to write a memoir, you start journaling too. It's going to help you find the meaning and the important bits that you can really learn from. Journaling is not the same as a memoir, though. And if you set out to write a memoir where your main concern is naming names, is calling out publicly all of these people that wronged you, you are in for a heap of trouble. Not only are you very likely, truly to face some kind of a repercussion, whether that's a legal repercussion, whether that's some kind of a community repercussion where people are really upset at you, or honestly, it may be your own repercussion. You really might not finish your book. And in fact, that's what I see most frequently when people are at that naming name stage of their trauma, is it's just too much. They just cannot make progress on their book because all of those negative emotions and the anger, maybe it's justified. I have no doubt it is. But it's probably not time to write your memoir yet if you're still processing that stuff. Give yourself time. And in fact, last week's video, I talked about the five things you need to make sure you do before you write your memoir. You know what one of them was? You got to get in with a therapist. So if there's any part of you that really is wanting to take this book and just show them all, it's so understandable. It's so relatable. It's so human. It's such a bad idea. I am begging you, process all of that grief and that anger and that trauma well before you sit down at your keyboard. You're gonna be really, really glad you did. And I'll tell you what, once you get through that processing part, here's what you're gonna realize. None of that, none of that was about you. All of the terrible things they did, they did that for them. What matters to your reader, what matters to me, what should matter to you is that those things made you who you are. Did they make you stronger? Did they make you more savvy? Maybe they made you more scared. That's okay. It's not about them. It's about you. As long as you can get past this idea of revenge, your memoir is gonna be so much stronger, so much better. So please wait until you're done feeling like you've got to name names. All right. And last but not least, the fourth mistake that I see so frequently when I am speaking with new memoirists or new people who are working on their memoir, is that they want to put in something for everybody. So I want to use as an example, a client we worked with some time ago, and his book was for his family largely, but it was an amazing story. They had lived all over the world and they had experienced amazing things. His father was a really powerful, really popular leader in one of the countries they lived in. His mother had really done amazing things in terms of like teaching herself all these languages and helping children in their community get access to school in a place where that really wasn't common. It just, it was an amazing story. I loved working on it. Early in that process, I remember, you know, really we were trying to hammer out who's the market, something I talk about a lot. Who's the market? Who's going to read this? When we think of what the market is, he said, I think everybody would love this. Okay, we'll talk more about that, but that's fine for now. And when I asked what the purpose was, he said, I think the purpose depends on who the reader is. That makes so much sense. I completely understand how he came to that, right? We're in this world of mass communication. It's been like that for over a century where we are all listening to the same things or we are all exposed to the same kinds of images and stories. Everybody, right? Doesn't it seem like everybody is watching Ted Lasso or whatever the show of the day is. It's easy to think my books for everybody. Of course, that's going to get me the best sales numbers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, I got to tell you, that is a real mistake. Let's talk about how we think of market. So part of when we're thinking about the market, one thing that is really helpful is to think what other types of books do people read who would be good candidates for reading your book. We can often call this comps or comparative titles or we can think about it in terms of genre. So with this author, I kind of asked him, how do you see this playing out? I'll tell you what we landed on was an international family saga. It's a pretty particular type of book that it has had its moments here and there over the years, but it's a really particular type of reader that wants to learn about other parts of the world and they want to learn about family dynamics and they want all of it to be within a kind of an adventure. When I asked him what the genre was though, he said, well, I think there's parts of romance. I think there are parts of, there are thriller parts. He acknowledged that there was kind of a family component and he even thought that it kind of bordered up with nonfiction prescriptive books on like how to raise a family. Those are four different readers, right? If you try to reach all of them, you're not going to make them all happy. What you're going to do is disappoint them all. So romance readers, romance readers want, you know, romance readers, or if you are one, you know, there is a very particular type of book that a romance reader wants. The structure is so clear. Of course, there are tweaks and tropes you can change out, but romance is a very, very clear genre. When we talk about family nonfiction, nonfiction that's meant to help us raise our families, we want takeaways and tips. Sometimes we want worksheets. We want activities we can do with our kids, right? That's not romance. Those are not the same book. So when we're thinking about who the book is for, it's not for everybody. That's okay. That's actually better. You know exactly who the book's for. You can probably find them, right? If your book's for everybody, where do you even start? If you try to put all those markets, all those ideas in, you are going to end up with something that is so overwhelming to your reader and really that lacks any clear focus. So think about the books that you have read recently or the films or the television shows that you really enjoyed. I bet if you were describing that piece of media to somebody that you wanted to recommend it to, I bet you could give a sentence or two, right? Oh, it's about these people that move into a new house and the house starts falling apart. Or it's about this family of lions where the father dies and the son has to go out alone and come back and rule the whole kingdom. Those are so clear, right? I don't know if you like the same kind of movies I do. There's a little nostalgia in there. But I bet you could tell from those quick descriptions what movies I was talking about. The same should be true for your book. Your book needs to be about one thing. It's going to help your word-of-mouth marketing spread so much faster. It's going to help you identify your market and it's going to help make sure that that book is tight and clean and that it does what you want it to do because you picked one thing you want it to do and everything is focused toward that goal. All right, I know these are not little mistakes, right? They're not mistakes like, you know, authors forget to run spell check or authors forget to make sure all their tab indents are the same. Those would be great. But the biggest issues that I see new memoirists make tend to actually be much larger and they tend to be about the way we think about our book before we start writing our book. And that's the reason I want to share with you an additional resource that as you're working through these four tips and just really making sure your book idea doesn't fall into any of these traps, I want to give you a tool that is going to help you make sure you have hit all your bases and that is the pre-memoir checklist. So we have the pre-memoir checklist available at pageandpodium.com slash checklist. It's pageandpodium.com slash checklist. You can download that. It is just a quick list of things that are going to help make sure that you've covered all your bases that you are truly ready to write. So I'm so excited to hear about what your story is about, how you overcome some of these pitfalls. And I would just really love to hear about your book. So please reach out. I want to know how it's going, how your writing's coming along. And if you need some support, we are here at Page and Podium. Happy writing.