How to Plot Your Memoir Like a Novel | Reedsy Live

And I believe we're live. Hello, and welcome everyone to another Readsy Live. Readsy's ongoing series of webinars where we bring on professionals from the world of publishing to show you how to write and publish better books. My name is Martin. I'm part of the team here at Readsy. I'm based in London. If you're unfamiliar with Readsy, we're a marketplace where you can find and work with some of the world's finest book editors, book designers, marketers, translators, and ghostwriters. Today we have with us one of our great ghostwriters, Amanda Edgar is going to come on and talk to us about the art of writing a memoir, or writing a memoir that reads like a novel. It's a great hook, I couldn't resist. It should be a good one, so I'm really glad everyone can join us today. If you're here, if you're on YouTube, hit up the comments, let me know where you are right now, city and country. We have Abby wishing everyone a happy and romantic Valentine's Day. Wonderful. Pieces from Switzerland. We have Francie from Marblehead, Massachusetts. Stephanie from Madison, New Jersey. I hear it's pretty cold on the East Coast right now, so hoping everyone over there is staying safe and warm. Going back further up, we have Annie from Brownsville, Oregon. Margie from Oglala, South Dakota. Great name. Joey from Cape Town. Fantastic. We're just going to sort of sit here and enjoy each other's company for a minute or two while we have everyone rolling in from places all around the world. Great. If you have not been to a Readsy Live before, it's just going to be a live stream here. Our guest is going to come in and give a talk about writing memoirs. She's going to be sharing a resource with you, which, yeah, if you stick around and sign up to, if you sign up through Eventbrite, we'll send you a link to that later. But also if you wish to catch this presentation at any time afterwards you can always come back to this link on YouTube and have a look through the slides. So we won't be handing out the slide deck because we could just come back and pause the presentation as often as you like. Hello to Don from Vancouver. We have Sharon. Hello Sharon. A familiar name. Jerry from Minneapolis and Mel from Oh, multiple Swiss residents. I hope, yeah, I don't think it's particularly cold there this year. I know some folks, I think, who went skiing in the Alps and have not been having a particularly great time, but hopefully it is fine for you there right now. Hello to Stephanie from New Jersey. Okay, I'm noticing that it is just after eight o'clock where I am, which means it's 3pm on the East Coast, about noon on the West Coast, that'd be about 7am in Sydney and about 4am Hong Kong, China, Singapore. Singapore. So. Let's get this thing started. I'd like to bring our guest. She's an award-winning author and ghostwriter here with Reedsy. She will tell you a little bit more about herself, but please welcome Amanda Edgar. Amanda, how are you? Hello, I'm doing great. I'm so excited to be here chatting with you all. Really exciting. Fantastic. Where do we find you today? I am just about an hour west of Kansas City, right in the middle of the U.S. Okay. Are you in the Kansas side or the Missouri side? That was very astute of you. I am on the Kansas side. I am a native Kansan, although I did do my doctorate at University of Missouri. So I've been on both sides of that very tense border. Oh, yeah, for sure. That means, I don't know, if you commit some sort of plagiarism at that university and go back, is it some sort of recidivist felony or I don't know. Probably. Who knows? Cool. Great. So really glad you can join us. Have you always been working out of Kansas? No, I actually, I started with Reedsy. I lived in Memphis at that point, I believe. And that was where I founded my publishing company, did a lot of work helping authors with memoirs. And we just counted recently, we're at 48 authors that we've worked with on their memoirs. So I'm really excited to share all of the growth and all the things we've picked up along that journey. Oh, great. Well, we've got a healthy number of folks from all around the world. Margaret has just tuned in from Sydney, Australia. Good morning. Good morning, Margaret. I'm Sally J. Gaffney says, congrats to the KC Chiefs. going I guess, was it, I guess sport and football is a big thing in your city? to turn Oh, it is. Oh, my gosh. The fireworks. I, you know, I'm actually not a football person, it down but I knew that they'd won because the fireworks woke me up. a We have, oh, McCready Hill Productions from Wichita, Kansas. little Hey. I did my undergrad at Friends, so I lived in Wichita for a long time. bit. Nice. It's where the only thing I know about it is it's where pizza comes from and the Glen Campbell song. That's right. Yeah. Great. Well, we're just a few minutes in. Folks are still rolling in, but let's get a start. I've got a presentation that you've shared with me. Let me know if you need anything, but I'll be just in the background and I'll see you at the end of the Q&A. Beautiful. Thanks, Martin. All right, y'all. Well, I am so excited to be joining you today. As I mentioned in the intro, I am a ghostwriter. I've been a ghostwriter since 2009. I also own a small publishing company that focuses on memoir and particularly a type of memoir called the hybrid memoir. That's how we're going to be focusing in today's talk. And a hybrid memoir is essentially a memoir that is also trying to teach a lesson, some kind of wisdom or expertise that your story is going to allow you to share in a way that people are going to be so excited to read it. So with that, I want to dive right in and talk about how you're going to think about the plot to make sure that your memoir, the story is going to carry that message and the message is going to carry that story. Your readers will thank you and it'll be a lot better process for you. So let's start by talking about this very elite group, the top 0.6%. Now, what I want to talk about when we're talking about the 0.6%, that is the number of people who actually rise to the level of writing a book, finishing a book, and actually having it published, holding that finished book in their hands. And sometimes when I share that it's only 0.6%, people are kind of surprised about that. I'm not surprised as someone who has been working with authors for a long long time this makes total sense and it's something that I like to call the leaky pipeline. You might have heard about this idea of the leaky pipeline from STEM fields a lot of times it's talked about in terms of marginalized folks women but I want to share if we think about this path of a pipe right it's carrying water from one direction to the other instead of water it's carrying your story So what we know. Is that when we start out, when we just ask everybody in the world, do you think that you have a book? Do you, do you feel like you could write a book? It would be interesting. People would want to read it. We know that about. 81, 82% of people do believe that they have something that they could share in a book. They know that they should be writing, right? So we have that represented over here. All these folks, all of them want to write a book. Now, what we know is that as that pipeline moves from the idea, the inspiration, motivation, As it moves through. Even just to getting started, we know that the vast majority of people are going to fall out of that pipeline. They're going to, there's a hole there, you'll leak out of it. And that 15%, what I love actually is that I think probably everybody on this call is either in the 15% already, or you are very, very close to it and you can do it. We're going to do it together, right? But the problem and the reason that I want to talk about plotting your memoir, making it very readable, is not only because of your readers, but also because having a plot is going to help you not help you avoid falling out of that pipeline. What happens is we know that as we move through the writing process we only end up with about three percent of people who finish the manuscript. Only three percent. So I bet some of you have actually experienced what happens here and I've seen it in so many authors. What happens is a lot of times when we set out to write, especially a memoir, you have rehearsed those first chapters in your head over and over, right? I heard this just literally from a client this morning. She was like, oh my gosh, I did not know it was going to get so hard. Those first chapters, I knew exactly what I wanted to say before I even sat down. But as you get through, you know, chapter two, that's maybe a little harder. Usually people are okay. When we get to chapter three and four, this is really when I see that people start to struggle. And what's happening usually, it's what we're talking about today, is that folks don't have a plan, right? But there's another reason that you really need a plan. You really need a structure. And that is because even if you finish. Such a small portion of authors actually get to the publication stage. Now, of course, we now in today's world, we have so much more access to publishing than we did, you know, even when I started because we have things like self-publishing, we have hybrid publishers, small indie presses, but this number, this 0.6%, that still stands. And what happens is we have, as we're moving through this pipeline, people are leaking out. So what I want to suggest to you is that you can avoid leaking out, not only of that 15% that gets started and folks fall out, they don't get done with their manuscript, but you can also avoid falling out once it comes to the publishing. If you are able to make a plan, follow this very, very simple set of instructions that I have for you today, you are going to be so much more likely To actually get the attention of whoever it is that you're wanting to work with, whether that is an agent, whether that is an indie publisher, a hybrid publisher, or frankly, just your readers. But what we've got to do is we have to zoom out before we jump into the plan. We've got to think about what the whole book is. If we could do the whole thing like that first chapter where you know what's coming, you know what you've got to accomplish, you know what you're trying to do, you are going to move so seamlessly through that pipeline. You will not leak out. And I'm so excited to share with you how that is going to work. But it is a cliche for a reason. When we fail to plan we plan to fail. So let's not plan to fail. Let's plan to be in the 0.6%. Now what I want to talk to you about is outlining. And I know there's a lot of hesitation from folks about doing an outline. I think this comes from all kinds of places. A lot of times folks are like you know I just it's going to be organic. I want to just kind of get it on the page. I'll see what I've got and then you know I'll revise. I'm certainly not arguing against revising. But what I will argue against is trying to go through this whole process without figuring out where you're going. And one of the reasons is you're going to move a lot faster. If you have a plan, you're going to speed through this manuscript, you're going to know where you're going. The reason that I think people hesitate is that, of course, when we slow down to make this outline, it can feel a little bit like we're stalling, right? It feels a little bit like we're not making the progress we want to. Sometimes I hear people, you know, I want to write two, three thousand words a week. You're probably not going to do that without a plan, right? So once you have an outline, you are going to get that very fast progress, that very rewarding, exciting pacing because you know where you're going. The second thing you're going to get, I think this is probably why a lot of y'all tuned in, is that you are going to get so much more meaningful storytelling. I mentioned at the beginning of this webinar that my company works specifically with people who have a memoir and they want their memoir to help people. So what that usually looks like is that they are telling their story and along with just, you know, detailing what happened to them, what they experienced, the thing they really want to get across is all of the things that they learned, right? All the things that as you fought through, all the things that you had to go through, all of the hardships, all the victories, you were picking up all of these little nuggets of wisdom. When you have an outline, you are not waiting just to see if the fates are going to drop those messages in for you, right? When you have an outline, we can make very, very certain that your audience is going to go along with you, pick up all the pieces, all the components of that message as they're reading their story. So like I always love to say, like I said at the beginning of this, your story is going to feed your message and your message is going to feed your story. But you cannot do that if you are just writing on the fly. It's not possible. It's not going to happen. And then the third thing that you are going to get as you make an outline, as you work from this outline, this very clear, purposeful, intentional structure is you're going to get happier readers, right? So I'm a reader. I'm sure y'all are too. There is nothing better than when I, you know, I like to read in bed at the end of the night. There's nothing better than settling in with my book and seeing, oh my gosh, I only have like 20% left. I only got a handful of pages. I just want to finish it. I want to know what happens, right? But have you ever gotten to that point in a book and it just pulled a rug and you're like, oh my, I'm just going to go to bed. Maybe I'll finish this. Maybe I won't, right? When you have an outline, you can be so intentional about your pacing. You know that by the time you get to that last 20, 25%, you're going to move, right? You're going to help your readers get what they need, get the final kind of theme of that message, the final idea you want to communicate. And it's going to feel so seamless to them that they will not be able to wait to go refer your book to their friends or if it's an agent, if it's a publisher, they are going to email you immediately to let you know what they thought. And that's what we want to do. We don't want to let that happen by chance. We want to make sure we have a plan for that so that you can move as quickly as I know you want to getting this outline done. Okay, so now we've got our outline. We know why we're going to do this. You might be thinking, well, okay, if it were that easy, I would have done that a long time ago, right? It can be a challenge, certainly, to figure out. How are you going to lay this out? What are you going to do? How are you going to make this work? What is this plan going to be? And I think a lot of times that is why folks try to kind of ad lib it and just kind of see if they can just figure it out as they go, because we don't know how to plan. But one thing that we have done in my company is that we have worked with so many memoirists that we have figured out a lot of the things that trip people up. And the number one thing I see tripping people up is that they're not sure how to structure their book. So let me talk about some of the ways that folks try to do this that don't necessarily work for them. One of the most common I see is folks say, I am going to use the hero's journey. Now I have a current client who did use the hero's journey to map out her memoir. It is working beautifully for her. That is amazing. But if you've ever looked into the hero's journey, you know that there is You have 13 steps. It's supposed to be a circle. There's always all these infographics. It is so hard to put your real life story into those moments, right? Because our lives don't always play out the way the hero's journey is, right? And we don't, it feels really icky to kind of manipulate your story so it fits into the hero's journey. It's just really, it's not really made for a memoir. The same is true if you've heard of or if you've used Save the Cat. I love Save the Cat, actually. Just doesn't really work for memoir, right? When we get, especially you get to the end in Save the Cat, it's got all those steps you're supposed to be taking. It's really, really hard to fit your real life true story into a structure that is so constricting, that has so much detail to it. So a lot of times folks will go the other direction and rather than have these very, very, very detailed structures, they'll say, you know what? I think I'm gonna do three act structure. If you have played around with three-act structure, you will know that it is so far the other direction. With three-act structure, you have really just got three acts. And there is a reason that agents and publishers and writing coaches and writers talk about the three-act structure as having a saggy center. Because if you've looked at the three-act structure, you know that the middle half of your book is just rising complications. Well, our whole book is rising complications, right? So that is not a super helpful way to think about how we're going to break up our outline. In fact, it gives way too much freedom where the hero's journey, story grid, some of these other ways of approaching your memoir give so much structure. So what we have done at my company is through working with authors, we have found a really simple way that you can approach planning your memoir, outlining it, and getting it onto the page. So Martin, if we can, there we go. Awesome. Thank you. So we have got these three steps. First of all, we're going to bracket. Second of all, we're going to segment. And third of all, we're going to outline. What this is going to do is give you a very clear instruction on what you are needing to do at each stage in this planning process so that we can make it as quick and painless as possible. All right, so let's dive into these steps. We're going to use the rest of these of the time that I've got here to go through these three steps. I'm going to give you an example that I hope will be very relatable and then I'll have some time for questions as well so that you can ask about this general approach. We aren't really going to have time to get into kind of your specific memoir on this call, but if there are aspects that are not super clear you'll have a chance to drop those into the chat. And if you'd really like a one-on-one session, you can always reach out to me on Reedsy. I've got the link at the end of the slideshow. Contact me. We can even do a one-off session there, really talk through how to do this. Okay, so what do we mean when we talk about bracketing? If you think about your life, the story you want to tell across a whole span from your birth to now. That's a huge amount of stuff, right? And I think most folks know that we aren't going to tell that whole entire story in most memoirs. The exception might be if you're writing a legacy memoir, it's kind of just for your family, in which case I love a legacy memoir. Go for it. But if we're writing a memoir that we want readers to pick up, that we want readers to talk about, we want agents to be really excited about, we have got to be able to share in one sentence what that memoir is about. And that's where we have our bracketing come in. So to start with bracketing, you're going to need to ask yourself, what is my core topic? Now, your topic is different than the message, which we're going to get into in a second. Your topic is just simply what your memoir was about. So let me give you an example. Let's say that you want to write a memoir about this experience of you got a job. Your boss was really toxic and intense and awful, really bad for your mental health. You kind of had to figure out how to escape. You probably had to find your self-worth back. There were lots of stages in that journey. So what I will hear from authors sometimes is they'll share something like that. They'll say, oh, this is what my memoir is about. If I pause, what I find is that a lot of people are so tempted to add in, oh, and this, oh, and this, oh, and this. So that might sound like, oh, yeah, I had this job. I had to escape from it. It was terrible. But also, my parents got divorced when I was little. And when I was, you know, when I was a teenager, I fell off a horse and I had this really bad injury. And it will end up being kind of a list of all of the really hard things they've been through. Now, those things are all important. Those things all shaped who you are. They're all key to, you know, the messages that you want to get out into the world in general, but they are not part of your core topic. When we're writing a memoir, we want to pick just one slice, one core topic. This should be able to be articulated in just one sentence. I got a terrible job. It was awful for my mental health. I had to figure out who I was so I could escape. That is one thing, right? We know what the cover is probably going to look like. We know what the title is going to be. Makes it very, very clear. Then once you've got that topic, now here's where the bracketing comes in. If you remember, we have this whole timeline of your life. We are going to bracket. We're going to put brackets on either side of just the topic. So in that example, I was giving a second ago, this toxic workplace example, right? We are going to bracket at the point that that job comes on your horizon, right? Now, sure, maybe you were in college before, high school before, and you were figuring out, you know, what you wanted to do, and maybe that led you to this job, but that is not part of your core topic. Your core topic is one thing, right? One sentence. So we're going to draw a bracket right at the point that you came into this job. Maybe when you applied, maybe on your first day, but it's going to be somewhere around there. It's not going to be your childhood when, you know, your dad was really nervous about losing his job and he didn't know where the money was going to come from. That might be something that shaped how you're going to view the situation you're talking about. But that is not the beginning of the story. The beginning of the story is right at the point that you encounter that core topic for the first time. Now we've got our beginning. We've got to figure out where did this journey end? And here's another place where it can get kind of hairy because what I find is that a lot of times folks are like, I'm still learning. I'm still growing. I love that. I love personal development. I love to hear about growth, but that is not part of this journey, right? That's probably your next journey. Sounds like another amazing memoir that you can write. But as we're bracketing, we want to stop right at the end of the journey. So that is probably, in this example, the point at which you left that job, right? It's probably the point at which you freed yourself, you reestablished who you were, and you felt like you had really, you know, started to heal. That's our brackets. It's going to end up being a pretty narrow slice. Sometimes it's a year, sometimes it's even less than that. But if we start going too big, we lose sight of the core topic. So as you work through on your own memoir these three steps, keep going back to that core topic. Is everything I'm saying going straight to the core topic or do I have things that are outside of the brackets I drew around that journey? Okay, so an example. We want an example, right? And I hope y'all know The Lion King. I hear that kids are still watching this. I, you know, I grew up when it came out. It was, I was maybe 13. So hopefully you're kind of familiar with this story. If you're not, it is essentially the same plot as Hamlet. So feel free to sub that in if you would rather. But this can be a really helpful way to think about how you're going to bracket. Now, in Simba's life, we do have him kind of coming from birth, right? But there's a really good reason for that. The reason that his journey begins at his birth is that his core topic, the core topic of the Lion King, is about figuring out where you belong, right? So we might say the core topic is that Simba, this tiny little lion, He grew up knowing that he needed to take his father, get in his father's footsteps. He had to go through a lot of stuff along the way, but eventually he found his place in the kingdom, right? One thing, probably other stuff happened to him, right? But we have one topic and that's how we are going to sell and market and discuss our book. When we know that, we know that the journey has to begin at the point that his place in that community, at the place in his kingdom started. Well, that's exactly what we have on the cover of our poster, right? Is we have Rafiki, this is such an iconic scene, right? Holding Simba up, giving him to the community, giving him to the kingdom. So this is an excellent way then to think about the start of this journey to community, to ruling, to being in charge and responsible for this whole entire Pride Rock. The journey ends at the point that he is so incorporated into this world that his own son is being offered up, right? Now, could we go on and see like, oh, what's he like as a father? I kind of want to know, right? But. We bracketed. We are not going to go on to these other stories that go on after. They're their own stories. We are going to stop right at the point that he has learned that lesson, he's gotten into community, and we can resolve this one journey, this one core topic. So I teased the next piece a little bit. When we get into our next section, we're going to segment. So we already bracketed. We already have cut that whole timeline of your life into a really concentrated topic. One thing you experienced. But now, remember I talked about, we want to make sure we've got the message in there. We want that powerful storytelling purpose. So now we've got to do is figure out what is your core message. And we've been getting at this already. It's really deeply intertwined with the topic. So our core message, I would argue, is going to be something to do with what you learned. And the easiest way to figure out what your real core message is, is to ask yourself just that. What did I learn? So in our toxic workplace situation scenario, what I would see that story as is the core message is that that person really learned that they needed to value themselves, that they needed to assert who they were, they needed to be confident, they needed to really understand their self-worth and their self-value. Did they learn other things? Undoubtedly, right? You maybe learned that you really need allies when you're in a tough spot. You maybe learned, you know, not to take home the stresses of the workplace to your family. You probably learned things about, you know, the particular profession or the field you were working in. That is not your core message though. Our core message is the one thing that we learned and that we want the readers to learn. They go together so naturally that this is going to be really helpful as you're going through the segmenting process. But as you no doubt know, if you're going to learn things, first, you got to fail at it, right? All of us are going to try things to learn in our life when we're going to mess up. We're going to make really dumb choices, or we're really just going to be kind of misguided before we can figure out what's going on. We have three different steps, three different types of movements toward learning at the end of that bracket, right? The first thing I want you to do is divide that bracket in half. We're going to call that our midpoint. If you've read anything about, you know, writing, I know probably a lot of y'all have, you know, this midpoint, right? Comes at 50%. And it's typically the point at which our hero, you, is going to take the agency and the power back, right? This is the point at which they know something's got to change. They're usually not very good at it, right? So the midpoint, what we're going to ask ourselves is when did I fail, but I was really trying, right? In other words, we might call this the misguided step. What was the thing that I was taking right in the middle, right in the middle of those brackets? What's the thing that I did where I was really deeply misguided? So, this might be in our toxic workplace situation, this might be that you just totally checked out. I've seen this a lot in folks that I have worked with is, you know, if they're feeling, they felt like they were in this, this toxic situation, they just withdrew, they just did not even want to be around it. Well, is withdrawing going to really help you learn that lesson you learned? No, it's misguided, but it's agency, right? It's misguided, but it's a choice I made. It's something that I needed to do to get to the end. So that's our misguided. That's going to be our mid midpoint. Then now we've got two halves of our story between those brackets, right? So let's take the first half. We're going to divide it in half again. And this around this point, you're going to look for the moment in your life that's about halfway from the start, halfway from that first bracket to the midpoint. And usually what we find is that there's some kind of a desperation that happens. This is the point where stuff gets so real and you just really were not ready for it. So often if we're thinking of this workplace story, right, this might be like the very first time that your boss really laid into you. It might be a time that, you know, you heard a rumor about yourself and you knew that someone you must have trusted must have spread this around, right? And you're going to take action. So this is usually the first kind of sense of failure or sense of not, you know, knowing what to do. And we call this the desperate step. So this is the step where you have to do something, right? You don't know what it is. You don't even really have time to think. Usually this is kind of sprung on us. But what we have to do is figure out how we're going to move forward. Usually it's pretty desperate. It's pretty kind of panicky. It's pretty easy to identify this one, right? About halfway between your bracket and your midpoint. Then we need to split the second half of our story up. So draw a line right down the middle between the bracket and your midpoint. And here is where you come to the point of learning that lesson. And you'll see this now when you're watching movies, when you're reading about 75% of the way through the story, there's often a point where something clicks. So in our toxic workplace situation, my guess is That this is something that happens that makes our hero, makes you realize that they have been thinking about things all wrong, and if they don't get their life kind of back in a different direction, they're going to be lost forever, right? That is what we're going to call our epiphany. So in our workplace, right there, they're realizing, oh, my God, I need to embrace my self-worth. I need to recognize my value. That's the epiphany, right? We want to take our readers along for the ride of really realizing what's going on and figuring that out. All right, let's do the Lion King here. So our core message, it's this message of community, right? Belonging, family, knowing, you know, what is our home? Where do we live? This is our core message is you've got to really embrace who you are. You've got to step into, you know, step into the light, step into your rightful place at the, as the ruler of this kingdom. But Simba failed a lot, right? And Simba, the great thing about Lion King is that it's so dramatic. So Simba's failures are really, really obvious, undoubtedly more obvious than yours were. But let's start by cutting that bracket in half, right? We've got when Simba is presented to Pride Rock, and we've got when Simba is home in his own family. When we divide that right in half, This is the point at which we have Hakuna Matata. So if you remember The Lion King, you know that there is a point in the story where we kind of don't think Simba's going to go back. It seems like what Simba has got his pig friend and his, I can't remember, is it the other friend of Pumbaa? I'm sure you all tell me. But he's got his two friends. He's dancing through the jungle. He has figured out a place that he belongs. But it's not really the place he belongs, right? So we can really identify that as our misguided step. This is the step where Simba took agency, right? He decided to do something. And it seems like he might be happy. But when we really step back, we know that's not really what he was supposed to be doing. It's good for him. He claimed the agency. It's not what he was really designed to do. So let's plot that. That's in the midpoint, right? Cut those brackets right in half and put that misguided step right there in the middle. So now, let's go to the front half, right? Front half, if we divide that in half for Simba, this is where he's running away. So, again, a very, very dramatic moment in this story. This is where he sees his father die, and he panics. He thinks it's his fault. Desperate, right? I mean, you can feel the desperation in that sweet little kitten's face. He's so scared. He doesn't know what to do. He just does something. It's desperate. It's a really bad idea, but it's something that he did, right? It's something he had to do to move forward to learning about his community. First, he had to leave it so that he could find how valuable it was. So now we know that's going to be 25% right in the middle of our first bracket and our midpoint. Now we can take the midpoint to the end. We'll slice it in half again. And here is his epiphany. So you may remember. Around 75% through of this movie, there is a point at which Simba's kind of visited. He kind of gets a vision of his father. And this is the point at which he realizes that he's not going to be free. He's not going to be able to go live this happy life with Simba and Pumbaa. He is going to have to go back to Pride Rock. And that's the message, right? You have got to go home, you have to embrace your community, and you have to really know who you are, and you have to do the things that align you with who you are. All of us can learn from that, right? And the fact that we get to see him have that epiphany, it's powerful, it sticks with you, right? That's your epiphany. That's what's happening at this point in the movie. And now, from here on out, everything is going to be so, so simple. At this point, all we are doing is filling in the gaps. You know where your story starts. You know what the midpoint is. You know where it ends. And you've got a little marker that's a dramatic scene, but a little bit less dramatic than your midpoint at your 25% and at your 75%. Now all we've got to do is ask ourselves, which of the other moments in my life, which of the things I experienced along the way helped me get from the beginning, from that first bracket to 25%, from 25% to the midpoint, midpoint to 75, and then finally to that last bracket. All you're doing now is plugging in chapters. So this is a little bit of a cheat code, but I'll share it with y'all. If you know that you want your memoir to be, say, 60,000 words, it's about a 200-page book, pretty common, you know that you're probably going to have around 20 chapters. It's typically how it works out, at least in my experience. So now we know, we know what chapter one is. It's the beginning of that bracket, right? We know what chapter five is because that is your desperate step. We know what the midpoint is. That's going to be around chapter 10 because we identified what that was in our segment section. We know what 75% is and we know where the story ends. Now all you have to do is figure out what the chapters in between are going to be. And the way you need to ask it is thinking about your core topic and your core message. So first of all, which are the moments that move that topic forward? In our toxic workplace example, this may be, you know, conversations you had with coworkers and maybe it probably will be exchanges that you had with your boss that were pretty terrible. There may be moments, you know, where you took your work home and you were, you know, really unpleasant with your family. We can plug those in because we know we're limited, right? You can't put everything in there. You're really picking, you know, three or four. for each of those segments we created earlier. And then you're going to go back in and you're going to look for where the message is. What are some of the events, what are the things you experienced that really make it so clear that you were either on the wrong track or you were on the right track when it came to learning, getting through failing, getting back up, continuing to work at learning this thing you needed to So, in The Lion King, we've got all these examples, right? Every musical number, that's, which, who doesn't love a musical number, right? We've got musical numbers, we have got other kinds of encounters that Simba has. Of course, this is not a memoir, so we also have scenes that happen, you know, when Simba's not there, but all those things really serve that core topic. The journey from being, from him, you know, being kind of welcomed into the kingdom to leaving, running away, mourning his father and coming back, and all of those scenes are going to support our core message as well, so that we know as we're moving through the Lion King, we are continually learning about community, about family, purpose, belonging, identity, all these things that are part of that core message that this story communicates. Okay, so once you have outlined, once you have laid all of this out, here's what I suggest. Write out your outline for yourself. This is going to be an internal outline. It can be bullet points, it can be scratches on a piece of paper, whatever works for you. But then, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go back to it, and I want you to write the external version. You've got your internal, you did it just for you. I want you to write out now. A couple sentences, maybe a paragraph for each of those chapters so that you know what's going to happen in every individual chapter, one through 20 or however many you have. And what that's going to allow you to do is be so, so purposeful. So remember in the beginning, I was describing such a common experience, which is we sit down to write our memoir. We know what that first chapter is. flies onto the page. It feels so good, right? It's nothing more rewarding than feeling like, oh my God, I've nailed it. But now with your outline in hand, with all this thought work and all this development work you've already done, now you can have that with every single chapter. Here's what I'm not promising. I'm not promising it's going to be easy. For most of us, that desperate step, the misguided step, even the epiphany actually, can be really, really painful. There is a lot of personal growth and healing that happens as we're getting those parts of our story onto the page. But you will know when they're coming, right? So the client I mentioned earlier who had just said this to me like, ah, chapter one was so easy. The reason she mentioned that is that we were talking about her chapter 10, which is what she had been working on, working on it for a couple weeks, because it's the chapter where her dad died really unexpectedly. They were very, very close. It's a really, really hard chapter. But you know what? She knew what needed to go in there because we'd already done that work a long time ago. She was able to knock it out. Now, did she feel insecure about it? Yes, and I find that that is very, very common when you're writing those super, super hard scenes. But she knew how to do it. She got it knocked out. I was so proud of her. Way to go, Maggie. You are going to be able then to set up your plan from your outline. If you want to try to do a chapter a week, in my experience, that's pretty fast. If you're, you know, kind of a novice writer, maybe you can, but you know that, right? You know how long it's going to take. You know how long you need to reserve. You should be able to move quickly forward with that without having to stress so much in the middle. Okay, so this is how we're going to get to 0.6%. We're going to bracket. We're going to segment. We're going to outline. This is going to take you some time, but we're going to slow down so we can speed up. Then you're going to write that outline out and you're going to make your external outline, your outline you can share with others. This is a great time to get somebody from Reedsy, find an editor, get some feedback on that outline. It's going to save you so much, first of all, money, but also time. If you get feedback on the outline before you write the whole book, you can move things around and it is so much easier to do that when you're just talking about an outline versus a whole manuscript. And then third, we're going to create a really realistic timeline. Like I said, a lot of people want to do a chapter a week. My experience is you can probably do a chapter a week three quarters of the time. So we want to give ourselves some cushion, some padding, but we're going to make a timeline. We're going to sit down and figure out when we're going to write. And when we sit down to write, we know what we need to cover. Okay, and then you're going to write the thing. So I am so excited to hear from you all. I know that there's going to be a chance for a Q&A, but I did want to just mention, if you are in the market, if you're wanting some resources, I put together some resources just very specifically for you all. I knew you'd be here today. So you can find those if you head over to pageandpodium.com slash memoir. You'll be able to download the slides from this presentation. We also have a quiz Give you a little bit of sense of kind of what type of memoir you're trying to make, how you can really effectively move forward with that. that you can take And you can also download our memoir method checklist. So it's going to talk through a lot of the stuff I talked about today, that will give you as well as all the publishing steps that are going to come up for you over the next, a chance to ask you know, year or so, probably, as you are moving from where you are now, the top 15%, all the way up to the top 0.6. a question. Okay. All right. What questions do we have? All right. Yeah. If you have any questions for Amanda, do put them in the comments. We'll get to them as soon as they come in. That link again that Amanda shared, if you refresh this video, you'll find the link to it in the description below. Just click on that and there's a bunch of resources that Amanda has prepped for you. Okay. Yeah. Betsy, we have to refresh the page and all the description will be in the show notes here. Terrence has a question. What do you think of memoir in third person? Oh, you know what? Let me say really quick. I was so excited for this because I knew we would get questions like this. This is such a clever question. A memoir in the third person perspective. So here, one thing about me, I am not somebody that's going to tell you how to write your book if you have a really different idea of how it's going to work for you. I do not know that I have ever worked on a memoir in third person perspective. What I would want to know is if you have a really good reason you're doing that, and I want to know that the reason is about your reader. If you are doing something that's going to serve that topic and that message, try it, go for it. Abbey, you also have a question. It's something I think people have been talking about in the comments quite a bit. Do you have to be famous to have a memoir, or has everyone just been wasting their time for the last 40 minutes? You do not have to be famous to write a memoir. So here's how I like to think about it. There are different types of memoirs. And I mentioned earlier, my specialty is hybrid memoirs, message-based memoir. Celebrity memoir usually is not in that camp. Celebrity memoir is usually really all about the story. And the reason is pretty obvious, right? Like, we want to know what happened to Britney Spears in the 90s. I wanted to know. I could not wait to find out, right? That's its own thing. And those folks aren't really in competition with you, right? Those people are their own people. They've got all kinds of resources. We're going to kind of forget about them, right? Hybrid memoir, general memoir, legacy memoir, all of these are types that ordinary people do all the time. So I'll share my very favorite memoir is by Sarah Smarsh. It's called Heartland because she, shout out again to Wichita, she's from Wichita, but it is an excellent memoir and she did have a growing platform. She's a journalist, so she did have a growing platform before she wrote the memoir. But she also grew the platform through the memoir, which I think is what people forget. So one of the things that, and I want to just make sure I mention this, it's because I think it's a really helpful reframe. A lot of times people will say, well, who am I to tell my story? Like who will care about my story? And the thing that I always say back is people don't care about it because they don't know it. We know Britney Spears' story, right? We know Michelle Obama's story. Who knows if people will care about your story? You haven't really, you don't have any data on that. So my answer is go for it. I hope that it will sell. And I wanted to give you some tips on making it, you know, really powerful and really strong in this webinar. But the other thing I will say is you are going to get a lot more out of writing a memoir than just publishing it. The process is transformative. I have seen it with every single client I've worked with. When you dig into your experiences, what they meant, what you learned, it is just profound. You'll come away a different person. You'll relate to people in different ways. Anyway, I cannot say that enough. Memoirs are such a powerful experience. Please, please write it, even if you're not a celebrity. Book Ninja here has a question. Can you have a memoir without a conflict? Oh, that's interesting. It would be really hard. It's hard. One thing that really does keep readers engaged is conflict. I don't believe, and the system that I shared, Memoir Method, with you, it certainly does not rely on you having constant conflict. There are times we come together, we go apart. That's how humans work, right? But I would be curious. So, I'm going to turn it over to you, Chris. My guess is if you don't have a conflict, it's probably more of a legacy memoir, meaning that it's probably more for your family. So valuable. I will tell you, we published a memoir last year and the author passed away, sadly, between the time that we acquired it and we're working on it. And when it came out and that family was so grateful to have that book, I also happen to think it's a really good book, but a legacy memoir. I will never discourage anybody from that. So go for it. Fantastic. We have a question here from Kate Manley. Does memoir need to be in chronological order? Will the memoir police come after you if you start spattering the timeline? Oh, the memoir police are the worst, right? So a memoir does not need to be in chronological order. This is all about serving the story. So this is a little, we do this, it's a little bit more advanced thing that we do when we work with folks. But one thing that we really often do is take flashbacks, essentially. So let's, you know, let me continue the toxic workplace thing, because I kind of hinted at this, right? You start when you come into the workplace, you end when you're gone. But remember I mentioned like, well what if your dad really struggled with work? What if you have all kinds of money hang-ups and you like, you know, it's so scary to you to lose that job? That is actually relevant, right? It's relevant to the topic and it's relevant to the message. We don't want to start in childhood because people are not going to go through your whole, you know, development with you. They'll just probably give up. But what if we take that piece and figure out a place it can fit later? Slot that into your outline. That can be very, very effective. I will plug Wendy Davis's memoir, which is coming out in March, because I worked with her on this platform, actually. It's an excellent memoir. And she's a politician. It's about a campaign. And she has all kinds of bits that she slots into that memoir where she's doing flashbacks of times that she was learning about politics and investing in her country and her state. Absolutely, you can plug those in. It does not need to be, you know, it does not need to be, well, because that thing that happened when I was a kid was important, I've got to start when I was a kid. Start with the core topic, and then absolutely you can slot that stuff in. It just takes a little transitioning and kind of getting used to it. All right. Thank you, Kate, for that question. Oh, sorry, we've got a couple ones lined up here. Cricket Roman says, do I need to be accurate? I find I'm forgetting a lot of my past. Oh, such a good question. The thing that I always say is that the truth is more important than facts. Often we can't even recover the facts, right? Who even knows what you texted that person 20 years ago or, you know, whatever. It needs to ring true. So you should not be, you know, making stuff up. I would not ever like add a scene that, you know, didn't happen. but a lot of times so let me give for an example a lot of times it might be you know one of the ways you learned this core message the things you learned was that you had a friend who met with you a lot throughout the this time period that you're writing about through your bracket it may be that you had so many lunches and coffee dates you they all kind of run together I don't personally see any issue at all with kind of amalgamating those and saying like, it is true that she helped me in this way. It is true that this is what it looked like. Are the facts of the dialogue exactly accurate? Undoubtedly not. But that's true for any memoir. Nobody remembers everything they said, you know. So truth, more important than facts. We don't want to lie. But if it rings true, that's really what memoir is, right? It's reflection. Do you find that in... memoir or the ones you write, is there a lot of direct dialogue or is there more of the story told through narration? That just depends really on the author's style and what they like. So I do find that there are a lot of authors and a lot of readers where it makes a lot of sense to really almost write it just like a novel. And then there also are folks who, and I think Wendy was like this as well, who are just a little bit more hesitant. Like they don't necessarily feel like Like they want to put all this dialogue unless they do really. I feel like they clearly remember what happened. But that's really up to you. And then, you know, you'll get feedback from your readers. You'll see what they think. And you can revise if you need to. We have a question here from Damsel to Divine. How do we avoid lawsuits slash defamation if we are writing about an abusive spouse other than obviously changing identifying information? Is it fairly common for a lot of people within memoirs to be anonymized, even if it isn't as, you know, extreme as abuse? Yes, this is. So first of all, applause for escaping that. I am also a survivor, so it touches my heart. Here's the thing. I'm not a lawyer, so I cannot give you legal advice here. But this question comes up all the time. The main thing that I will say is don't imagine that you can just change the name and call it good. There is. Clear legal precedent with memoir from, you know, at least in the U.S. in history that people, you know, change just a name. But if it is clear enough who you're talking about, they can still you can be sued for it's essentially violation of privacy that you're sharing things that weren't really in public. And that can get really, really hairy. So be really, really careful about that for sure. I know there are lawyers that specifically focus on this kind of thing. And I would say just please just be very safe legally and also like physically. Yeah, I don't want to discourage you, but I do want to make sure that, you know, be careful. Thanks for asking that question. Damsel to Divine, we've got a question here from Sylvia Smaller. If the message spans decades, i.e. is about repeated response to tragedy, how do you narrow it? Do you just pick one of those tragedies? But the point is that they are repeated. That's what I would do. I think that sounds great. I would play around with that bracket segment outline and kind of just see where you wind up. It may be that you want to, I don't know how many times it's repeated, but I could certainly see something where you do, you know, four. And if your response happened to be kind of different at the end of each of them, that might work. But yeah, the easiest would certainly be to just pick one. We have time for, I think, a couple more. Here's one that I don't fully understand myself, but hopefully you might. Phyllis Smith asks, what are your thoughts on the braided memoir structure? First of all, what does this mean? Yeah, so this is, I will say, this is not an expert area for me. But my understanding is when you're, it's weaving different stories together and different things together. So we have done that for folks before, like with a family memoir, where it was, you know, different people doing different things. Thanks Anytime you're doing any kind of, somebody asked about third person earlier, anytime you're doing anything that's experimental, it's experimental. And I would say braided memoir is still not for standard enough that I would take it out of that experimental category. having So you're experimenting. Thank you so much for your time. I think that's great, actually. And if you enjoy, if you enjoy that work, if you enjoy kind of playing around with the structure, go for it. Know that you don't need me. a really complicated structure to tell a really powerful story. It is OK to say, you know what, I'm going to do the four quadrants and we're going to call it good. But it sounds kind of cool. I'm glad you're being ambitious. I love it. Great. All right. I think that might be it. We've got some great feedback. Nolene says, Amanda, you're wonderful. This has been magnificent. Thank you. Denise has found this process transformative. She recently published and has been a lovely journey of personal growth and healing. Thank you for this. The Rev Bob W says, thank you so much for sharing all this experience you've had. You presented really well and I enjoyed the session but now I have to go, so yeah. As I mentioned before, if you refresh this video, if you're watching it a little bit later, there's a link to the resources that Amanda is sharing in the description. Also, if you signed up through Eventbrite, we'll be in touch over the next few days with the transcript of this presentation along with those links as well. Yeah, before we sign off, Amanda, do you have any sort of passing thoughts or sentiments for the folks watching at home? Yeah, writing a memoir is really, really hard. So if you are struggling, I want to validate that. It is worth it. I have worked with multiple people who, you know, started a memoir 10 years ago and picked it up and put it back down. Keep at it. I promise the time that it is meant to fall into place, it's going to fall into place. And if you need help, really, truly, all of the books you admire, they were all a team effort, every single one of them. So Reedsy has such a great group of professionals. When you get a publisher, you're going to have a team in your corner. Do not feel like you have to be... You know, that lone author in a dark room with your typewriter, it is okay to get help. It actually will make your memoir better, and it doesn't take anything away from your skills and experience as a writer. And if you're looking for a ghostwriter, Amanda's one of the best. Reedsy.com slash Amanda dash Edgar. Head out, there's the link, I think, in this as well. Check out her profile and send her a request. Thank you so much, Amanda, for your time. Uh, yeah. Yeah, everyone, we're going to have another presentation, I believe, next week. We'll talk about crowdfunding. We have the head of publishing from Kickstarter is joining us. So tune in if you want to find out what's new in the world of crowdfunding. Thank you so much, Amanda. I hope to see you soon. Catch you all later. Bye-bye.