Updated: Jan 8, 2021
UPDATED 1/8/21
A memoir is about something you know after something you’ve been through. The theme of a memoir answers the question “What’s it about?” Before you start to write, sum up your memoir in one sentence that answers this question. One sentence.
This paragraph is a combination of three crucial points I make in the Introduction to Memoir PowerPoint presentation I give locally. The definition of memoir— it’s about something you know after something you’ve been through—comes as a surprise to everyone in the audience at these presentations.
Why?
First, because most people think that memoirs and autobiographies are the same. They are not. A memoir is more like a novel than an autobiography. I discuss this in greater detail in my blog post With Creative Nonfiction, Reality Meets Storytelling. Second, because most people don’t understand the difference between theme and plot.
Do you?
A sample memoir theme is,
It’s about how my mother’s death from lung cancer at a young age caused me to quit smoking and become an anti-tobacco advocate.
The plot explains what happened. What actually happened. The facts. The details. The names, the dates, the places. But that is not the theme. The theme is how the author was changed by her mother’s death from lung cancer; a change that included quitting smoking and becoming an advocate for the anti-tobacco movement. The why of the story—the death of a loved one left you saddened but ultimately wiser and stronger, determined to make a change.
If I’ve already written (a bit) about this, why am I addressing it again? Because I specialize in teaching and editing memoir. I love the genre and I’m determined to help people understand that memoir isn’t autobiography. It’s way cooler and more interesting. But, as I’ve already said, I tell folks, before you start to write, sum up your memoir in one sentence that answers the question what’s it about?
Our Brains are Hardwired for Story Lessons
What has brought me back to this subject is, I’m reading Wired For Story by Lisa Cron. The subtitle is, The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence. This isn’t your average creative writing guide. The main contention of the book is that our human brains have evolved to tell stories to share information and experiences and to want to read or listen to these stories to learn about experiences we have not yet had ourselves. When an early Homo Sapien created a cave painting of a bull goring a man with his horns, it was meant to teach the next guy who moved in a life-saving lesson.
In the first two chapters, Cron works hard to make sure we understand the key concept of storytelling: our brains have evolved to want stories that teach us something. We don’t like chaos or confusion in our minds when we read. We want a problem posed and a problem solved. Even in fiction, our brains crave lessons. What problem is the protagonist facing? How will this problem be resolved? What lessons will the protagonist learn along the way? And, as Cron makes clear, this is not the plot—it is the theme.
Theme in Storytelling is Paramount
The theme, clearly defined and addressed, is more important than the minutia of the plot. Readers want a dilemma presented and triumphed over, because our brains still like to learn something from everything we read. A story that fails to do that will only leave readers frustrated and disappointed. Says Cron,
Since theme is the underlying point the narrative makes about the human experience, it’s also where the universal lies. The universal is a feeling, emotion, or truth that resonates with us all.
I have many pages to go in Wired For Story. But I’ve already learned a valuable lesson as an editor (see, Cron is right): as I do with teaching memoir, a client who is a writer of fiction must be able to answer the question “What’s it about?” with an understanding that I don’t want to hear the plot. I want to know the theme—what the protagonist will know after what the writer puts them through. If a writer can’t answer that question, they are not ready to begin writing.
[UPDATE 8/20/19: I feel the need to clarify Lisa Cron's point about theme vs. plot. She says in a later chapter that theme is not more important than plot; they are equal in importance, but not to be confused. An author should not write a story that uses the theme as the plot. Says Cron, "...your theme begets the story's tone, which begets the mood the reader feels.... Because as crucial as theme is, it is never stated outright; it always implied."]
Updated: May 6, 2020
Recently, I was giving my PowerPoint presentation on memoir writing to a small audience of residents at a retirement community. When I said that memoir is a form of creative nonfiction, gentle laughter trickled around the room. “What?” I said. “Creative nonfiction? Does that sound weird?” Some thought I’d made up the term. One woman said what the others were thinking—creative nonfiction sounds like an oxymoron. How can writing be creative and nonfiction simultaneously?
Poor misunderstood creative nonfiction. Let’s explore this genre further.
Creative + Nonfiction
Everyone knows the distinction between the two major categories of writing: fiction and nonfiction. In regard to writing, creative typically means that people, places, and events in the prose have been invented. Therefore, fiction comprises imaginary events and imaginary people in an invented story. Creative writing requires using one’s imagination to craft every aspect of the story and its characters.
Nonfiction is writing based on facts, real events, and real people. Nonfiction itself has two main categories: informative nonfiction and literary nonfiction. When most people think of nonfiction, they think of informative nonfiction books or articles: self-help, how-to, academic, scientific, technical, and more. Creative nonfiction is literary nonfiction.
What do you get when you merge the mechanics of creative writing with factuality of literary nonfiction? Creative nonfiction, or CNF. Here are a few of the CNF categories:
Personal essays
Memoir
Journals and diaries
Literary journalism
Lyric essays
Nature, city, and travel writing
In its simplest terms, CNF involves the application of the elements of creative writing—plot, conflict and resolution, character development, setting, voice, dialogue, and point of view—with the telling of true events featuring real people and places.
Personal Essay
The two most closely related of these CNF categories are the personal essay and memoir.
Personal essays are usually written in the first person, as are memoir. But the focus of a personal essay is a topic (or subject) pertinent to the author and, unlike memoir, that topic is current or recent. The subject matter of a personal essay is typically a single contemporary issue as opposed to the recounting of a life event or series of related events that constitutes a memoir.
Memoir
This category of CNF is often referred to interchangeably with autobiography. Memoir and autobiography are not the same. The simplest distinction I can offer is this:
An autobiography is the story of a life.
A memoir is a story from a life.
Autobiographies explore the details of a person’s life in chronological order. You would read an autobiography to learn about the person. Autobiography is not a form of creative nonfiction.
Memoir, while a story from a person’s life, is constructed in the same way fictional prose is. But the plot (or story) is factual, the main character is the author, the other characters are real people from the author’s life, as is the setting (the locations where the story take place). The purpose of a memoir is to reveal what a person has learned after what they have been through.
With a personal essay and a memoir, the author’s challenges, struggles, and failures are laid bare. It’s one thing to create a fictional character who makes mistakes and suffers pain and loss. But with these two forms of CNF, the author must have the courage to expose their good and bad times.
Literary Journalism
While journalism is about being objective and factual, literary journalism takes the position that people cannot be objective because anything they have seen, heard, or experienced has been changed through their personal, subjective filters. For this reason, literary journalism uses the techniques of journalism (observation, interviews, and reviews) to look beyond the straightforward facts to probe meaning outside of the facts.
Lyric Essay
The lyric essay is much like the personal essay; it deals with a topic that has affected the author. As the word lyrical means musical, melodic, or poetic, this type of writing relies heavily on descriptive imagery to tell the story.
Other Categories
Journals and diaries are written to document the day-to-day events of a person’s life. But, as you know if you have kept a journal or diary, feelings are a vital component of these, and observation and reflection are welcomed.
Nature, city, and travel writing are popular forms of CNF. Again, the author describes the facts of the environment, but must make the reader share the experience of the places. Reality mingles with subjectivity and the result entertains and informs.
Merging Boundaries
What distinguishes a piece as creative nonfiction is writing that merges the real (the facts) with the mechanics of storytelling; real people, places, and events told in the style of fiction, employing character development, setting, voice, and tone.
If the author writes a piece of CNF, which deals with something and someone real, they have the freedom to take the storytelling in any direction they please.
CNF as a Career
Have you written creative nonfiction? Are you hoping to be published as an author of one of these CNF categories? Personally, I specialize is memoir, teaching memoir writing to residents of senior living communities. Please share your experiences with me.
Till next time. keep it creatively real. #creativenonfiction #personalessay #memoir
In addition to my business, Strike The Write Tone, I am an editor, book coach, and ghostwriter for The Cheerful Word, a memoir publisher in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
Updated: Apr 1, 2022
Few issues in the world of publishing are more controversial right now than that of sensitivity readers. On the off chance you are not familiar with what a sensitivity reader (SR) does, this is a person hired by a writer, editor, or publisher to review a manuscript to make certain there is no language, character portrayals, and situations that are offensive to any group or population.
Dhonielle Clayton is the chief operating officer of We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit founded in 2014 to support writers from marginalized groups and to advocate for more diversity in publishing. The way she sees it, the job of a sensitivity reader is first and foremost to improve the literary quality of a book by steering the author away from one-dimensional portraits and clichés.
Think of an SR as a type of fact checker. Instead of fact checking numbers, quotes, foreign language words, geographic descriptions, and so on, SRs are fact checking race, religion, gender, culture, disease, or mental illness. On the surface, this sounds good for everyone, right? No author wants to offend a reader or worse, yet, an entire category of readers. Then why is the use of sensitivity readers such a sore spot for so many writers and an ongoing stumbling block for publishing houses?
Writers vs. Editors
I conducted my own survey of sorts about people’s perception of the use of SRs and it’s as unscientific as a survey can be. I asked the members of a particular closed group of writers on social media their opinion of the use of SRs and I asked the same question of the members of a closed group of editors on social media. (See, I told you it was unscientific.)
Overwhelmingly, the writers (many of whom have little or no professional writing experience) were vehemently opposed to the use of SRs. Since it was the first time some of them had ever even heard of an SR, they were appalled at the thought of their work being “censored.” Again, noting that many who responded to my question are young and/or unpublished, their attitude was “no one’s gonna tell me what I can and can’t write.”
Ah, I love the smell of naiveté in the morning.
Conversely, those in the professional editors’ group were unanimously supportive of the use of SRs. I attribute this to two factors. First, these folks all understood the validity of using SRs and some had already worked on projects that employed them. Second, as editors, they are dedicated to the highest quality of writing possible, especially if they are identified with it in a professional capacity.
Is This Really Censorship?
The reaction of so many of the newbie writers in that Facebook group is indicative of the larger public relations problem sensitivity readers have.
The work they do has become synonymous with censorship in its most unsophisticated form—a knee-jerk reaction to any word, expression, or characterization that is insulting to the one person who is reading as a representative of an entire group or type of people.
In December 2017, the New York Times ran an article titled “In an Era of Online Outrage, Do Sensitivity Readers Result in Better Books, or Censorship?” The author, Alex Alter, highlighted a few of the most egregious examples of publishers scuttling books following concerns expressed by sensitivity readers, making it appear as though SRs have a stranglehold on publishers.
Censorship, which takes many forms, means the suppression or prohibition of something. So, let’s be clear, sensitivity readers have no power to censor.
No SR has the ability to say, “You are not allowed to describe a bi-sexual woman this way, so change it.” Or “A man of this race would never say this, so delete it.” Ultimately, the choice to leave the prose as is, delete it, or edit it is left to authors, editors, and publishers.
Diverse Authors
But Dhonielle Clayton and others in the publishing world have rightly pinpointed the real problem at the heart of this argument—the lack of diversity among authors and works chosen by publishers. As Clayton points out, “Publishing has a diversity problem.” According to Madison Schultz in her article “What Is a Sensitivity Reader, and Why Do You Need One?”
…31 percent of children’s books published in 2017 were about non-White characters, but only 7 percent of the children’s books published in 2017 were written by Black, Latinx, or Native American authors.
Publishers know that the general public, especially where the children’s market is concerned, is clamoring for books that feature diverse characters and storylines. But those same publishers either can’t find diverse authors or are reluctant to offer publishing deals to diverse authors.
This is not to say that a writer should never write outside his or her areas of personal experience. No one is saying that, including SRs. But trained sensitivity readers—and yes, there are academic programs for sensitivity reading—help authors create believable, deep characters and genuine storylines that make for better books. While SRs are a step in the right direction, finding, promoting, and supporting diverse authors should be a priority of the traditional publishing houses.
In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.
