Transcription
Hi my friend. So many aspiring authors come to me for advice on writing memoir. Telling your story, telling about a particularly difficult time in your life, telling about your childhood, whatever it might be. We are called as human beings to share our stories with others. And I wanted to talk to you about what the best memoirs of all time all have in common, because I think it's something that's invisible if you haven't actually been an editor of books and you haven't worked on memoir, which I have. So I also want to tell you about a few of my favorite memoirs. So that's what this video is going to be about.
My name is Kelly Note Aras. I have been a book editor for 20 years. I've worked at some of the biggest publishing companies in the United States. And now my goal is to help you get the book you were born to write into the world. Subscribe to this YouTube channel. I leave videos here all the time. You can also visit me on the web at kn literary dot com.
All right, what are the elements that the best memoirs of all time have in common? Well, the truth is, there are two of them. The first one is that those memoirs are character driven, and the second one is that they are written in scenes. So these are two things that I think are invisible to people who don't really understand how books are put together. Many of us think, well, I'm gonna write my story. I'm gonna start at the beginning. Maybe it's the beginning of our life, but maybe it's just the beginning of the period of time that I want to write about. And they're like, I want to start at the beginning and I'm gonna tell you what happened first and second and third, and what I noticed when I look back in hindsight that I didn't notice at the time that now I see. And it's a chronicle that is really different than a memoir.
A chronicle is actually sometimes very important. It's very useful and valid. It's something that you might write for yourself, you might write it for your family, you might write it for the people that know you, you might write it for people who have a specific interest in whatever was happening during that time in your life. So let's say you had you overcame cancer and someone has their commune of a similar rare form of cancer to you and they are looking for some story that explains what happened to someone else and how they overcame it. In that case, a chronicle is totally fine. That book will unlikely find a publisher that it publishes for a general trade audience, meaning a big audience of people who are not friends of yours, who don't know you and don't actually understand or don't really have a personal connection with whatever the thing is that you went through. Right? The books that stand the crowd for a general audience, the kind that your mom reads and your sister reads and your dad reads and everyone loves because they are just so amazing and wonderful, those are stories that are crafted like a novel. They are not written chronologically in a lot of cases, directly chronologically. They are theirs interjections, there's lots of discussion of life, there's lots of understanding of a bigger picture of what's going on and an articulation of that. But specifically though, the thing that's the most important in those books is that they are character driven and scene driven, just like a novel. Okay?
When I say character driven, what do I mean by that? I mean that we have to grow to love you as the protagonist of your memoir. You, we can't assume that the person reading it is automatically going to just be on your side, understand who you are, get you and one aside with you. You have to win them over. How do you do that? You do that in a variety of different ways. One way is which you are really vulnerable and revealed about who you are. You maybe start off not looking like a princess for some reason. We don't actually connect to other people who are just perfect all the time, right? If you think about old stories that you've read, novels, mythology, etc., the perfect person usually gets their comeuppance at some point, right? Because none of us are perfect. We are all flawed. And so the thing that's at the core of those really, those best memoirs is our own flaws and foibles. We are revealing ourselves. Maybe we're talking about our cancer journey, but we tell you a lot about who we are were before that. We explained, we we don't tell you, in fact, we show you. We show you. That's where we get into the scene question. We show you through this through different very carefully tailored chosen scenes from our life who we were before. We don't tell you, well, this is what I was like before. That's more of a chronicle. That's more of a just said here's what happened. When we're writing a memoir that we want to have a really wide audience, we need to show what happened scene by scene.
It's very, very important to start with an outline when you're writing it. A novel that you want, or sorry, a memorable novel to see slip at the time when you're writing a memoir that you want to read like a novel, it needs to actually have elements of the hero's journey in it. We need to have the universal elements of storytelling. They must be to starting with who you were before. Show us, don't tell us. Show us through scenes. Show us the moment where you got the diagnosis of the cancer, not by telling us this is what happened and then this is what happened and that this is what happened. We live through it with you. It is a scene. You start off the scene. I'm driving down the road and maybe there's something has nothing to do with cancer that gets involved and you know, so and so called. I was really mad and I said something really mean. And then all of a sudden, oh my gosh, the other call came and you're you're telling us, but you're bringing us into the story by giving us details that you wouldn't otherwise think are relevant. It's those irrelevant details about who we are and about the scenes that we are walking through on this journey that bring the whole story to life in a way that makes it page turning. We can't put it down. It's a very different way of writing.
So you start off, do some character development. Really journal a lot about you. Who are you? What do you care about? What did you care about at the beginning before the the event that you want to write about happened? What were you thinking about most of the time? What were you doing? If we've been following you around with a video camera at that time, what would we have seen you doing? Who would you have been talking to? What kinds of thoughts were running through your mind at that time? Then bring us into the scene, the moment when it happened. Show us what happened. Don't tell us. Let us understand who you are. Do some character development around the people that were close to you at the time. You might want to do ask yourself those same character development questions about the people who were there. What was your husband like? What kinds of things were going through his mind? What would we have seen him doing if we were following him around with a video camera? You're doing this writing that may never make it into the book, but you need to get it down on the page to really understand who you were, who he was, who the other players were in your life. What was your life like? Write about the house you lived in. Write about the office where you worked. Write about the yard that you played in as a child. You you're going to have to do a lot of this developmental writing if you want to really be able to flesh out the book in a way that comes to life for the reader. Okay, so that's the character development.
Then I want you to plot the scenes. Plot them out as if they were scenes in a movie. Movies are actually a great to learn about scene progression. How does the beginning of a movie fit with the middle of the movie fit with the end of the movie? There's lots of books out there that you can read about that that will give you the insider information. They'll tell you what looks invisible to you if you're not somebody who writes screenplays. And then use those principles as you plot the scenes for your book. And I say plot the scenes because I want you to plot them in advance. You will not be able to include every single important moment of your life. You must carve it out. Think of yourself as Michelangelo carving the David out of a large block of marble. There was lots of beautiful marble that ended up on the floor of his studio, but what we got out of it was something that touched everyone's hearts just with this immediacy that was undeniable. And that's what I want to have happen when someone reads your book.
And I want to talk to you about some of my favorite books so you can actually go see what I'm talking about. One of my absolute favorite memoirs, Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. She's one of my favorite writers and this is my favorite book she's ever written. It's the story of who she was as she became of age. There she talks about scenes. She has scenes in there from her Travis. She has scenes from her adulthood. It talks about her sobriety. It talks about her relationship with her father. There it's it covers a lot of territory, but it is a gorgeous, gorgeous example of how to craft beautiful scenes. This book is one of my absolute favorite books. I've talked about it before in videos. It's called Caravan of No Despair by Mira by Star Muir. As a friend of mine, this book is one of my favorite memoirs. And what she had to do, what she had to leave on the cutting room floor is a lot, and it was really hard for her to get as spare as she needed to be to create this book. But now it is an example of a fairly told but extremely emotionally intense memoir. I love it so much. Caravan of No Despair.
So The Afterlife of Billy Fingers is a memoir that I really love. It's kind of a kooky memoir by Annie Kagan. And you may or may not agree with, you know, her what would happen to her, but she basically had a relationship with her brother after he died, like he came to her and started speaking to her and she wrote it down. But what I love about this book is that it is mostly chronological, although not entirely. She does have flashbacks, but mostly chronological. But she tells the scenes in such a lively and funny way that I think it's worth you reading to understand how you can tell a chronology in scenes. She's really good at setting every single scene. It's scene after scene after scene, and you'll really understand it, I think, if you read this book. And then two more books that I absolutely love: Sumanth Kid, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, and Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World. Both extremely scene driven books and beautiful, beautiful memoirs.
So I hope that some of these memoirs will help you understand, you know, some of the greatest memoirs of all time. Angela's Ashes, Educated by Tara Westover, that just came out, The Glass Castle. These are books that if you go back and look at them now with the eye to how our characters characters developed and how are these books seen driven, you will see what the best memoirs of all time have in common. I hope this has been very helpful to you. I would love to help you more on your journey. You can find out much more at Kay and literary dot com. You can sign up for a call with an actual real live book editor, totally free, no obligation, at our website. In the meantime, I wish you happy writing. The book you were born to write needs to be in the world. Let me know if there's any way we can help.