P.O.W.E.R.: My Formula for Writing about Tough Stuff

P.O.W.E.R.

To guide writers into the ofttimes difficult job of creating a memoir, I have developed a formula. But to keep the suspense high, here is what this formula is not: As an editor, I’m all about syntax (word arrangement), grammar, spelling, word choice, and all those necessary components of quality writing. As a coach, I’m all about helping the writer identify their audience (who they are writing for), settle on their theme (point or argument), and improve in the art of dialogue, description, and scene creation. My formula isn’t about any of this. Keep reading.

I’m Not a Doctor, I Just Play One

Forgive me, it’s just some old-school humor. No, my college degree is in English, not Psychology. But my years of experience leading support groups and teaching classes for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) have given me extra insight into understanding the effects of trauma, grief, loss, as well as reflection on joyful or happier times gone by. Any time we take a walk through our memories, we never know what emotions we might stir up. I found my NAMI experience to be surprisingly helpful in working with people as they write their memoirs; an unexpected bonus, of sorts.

P.O.W.E.R.

My formula is not about grammar and syntax, or dialogue and scene creation. It is a guide for writing while exercising self-care and self-kindness. It’s P.O.W.E.R.

Pace yourself.

Own your feelings.

Write when you feel like it.

Ease into the tough stuff.

Reflect as you remember.

You see, there is no writing instruction here. It’s strictly about protecting your psyche as you delve into memories that at times might sting. Let me discuss each point of P.O.W.E.R.

P: Pace yourself

Let me congratulate you on deciding to write a book, be it a memoir or another genre. It takes courage to start a project this expansive. And it will take courage to finish it. Many first-time writers settle on a self-imposed deadline for their book; they set a date, usually completely arbitrary, by which they want their book published. Then the pressure’s on! They must produce a certain number of words each day to keep up with the schedule. Author Stephen King notoriously recommends writing 2,000 words each day, for a total of 180,000 words in three months. Folks, that’s Stephen King’s output, not mine or anyone else I know! Plus—spoiler alert—don’t write a 180,000-word anything as a first-time author, especially a memoir. Creating an outline for your book is an excellent idea and I highly recommend it. And if you are a very disciplined person, you can come up a timeline that corresponds to the sections of that outline, which can result in a projected date range to wrap up the writing and move into the next phase. But, first and foremost, the process of writing a book should be fun, or at least as much fun as you can garner from it. Self-imposed deadlines are a great way to rob yourself of whatever joy creating your book could offer.

O: Own your feelings

A memoir is not an academic treatise. If you hope to write your memoir without exploring your innermost thoughts and feelings, I suggest that you are not ready to write. Within your family, among your friends, maybe at work, you might gloss over pain or mistakes or abuse or anger. You might be so accustomed to sugar-coating your life’s experiences, you’ve forgotten how to be honest with others—and with yourself. I will ask my clients over and over, “But how did you feel?” If you have a story worth sharing—one that will offer a life lesson to your readers—you will have to dig deeply into your memories, your heart, your spirit, your soul. Grab onto what you find there and bring it into the light. The time for hiding is past.

W: Write when you feel like it

This point works in concert with the P, Pace yourself. If you inflict a self-imposed deadline on your project, you sacrifice giving yourself permission to create when and how it best suits you. There will be days when you write good stuff for hours—you’re in the zone, you’re firing on all cylinders, and other clichés. Then there will be days where you’re lucky to finish a page. You write a scene that consists of four paragraphs, read it, hate it, delete it. An hour later, you do it all over again. Writing is hard, but it shouldn’t feel like torture. If your writing is strained or forced, it shows and you know it. Give yourself a break.

E: Ease into the tough stuff

I know from working with new memoirists that writing a memoir can be emotionally exhausting. I have seen writers get anxious just thinking about the part of the memoir they’re going to be working on next. This is tough stuff. Books have been written about it, one of the best being Melanie Brooks’s Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma. I suggest two ways to come at this. One, just write the bare-bones version of a scene or incident. Report it like a news story. Write the facts and only the facts. During this first round, avoid emotional language to whatever degree the situation allows. Don’t reflect yet (the R in P.O.W.E.R.). Two, this method might work for you: make a few simple notes as a placeholder in the story, then leave it; return a day or two later and add a few more notes. Take baby steps. Do this until you have recounted the entire scene.

R: Reflect as you remember

A quality of memoir that sets it apart from every other genre is reflection. A memoir without reflection is like a murder mystery novel that ends without solving the mystery. By reflection I mean, don’t just recall a memory but analyze it. Merriam-Webster defines reflection as a thought, idea, or opinion formed or a remark made as a result of meditation. What emotion does the memory conjure? You know what happened (it’s your memory), but why did it happen? How did it happen? How did you feel at the time? How do you feel now? If your feelings or impressions changed over time, why did they? How does the scene play into setting up what else is coming in the book? Reflection in the now helps you put your past in perspective. Here’s where you figure out how what happened shaped you into who you are now for the purpose of this memoir.

Exercise P.O.W.E.R. as a Writer

Writing a book is not for the faint of heart. There are so many moving parts: theme, structure, grammar, supporting your argument, adding creative elements, what to put in, what to leave out. . . it can be the challenge of a lifetime. For my website’s blog, I have written several articles to help improve your writing:

Write with a Purpose Using Indexing

Best Writing and Editing Resources

How to Write Good Dialogue

Writing Sensory Description, Part 1 and Writing Sensory Description, Part 2

But P.O.W.E.R. is about you, as a person, tackling a big job. Don’t let the writing dominate you. Don’t let it drag you into your past and leave you there. This is your book and you are in control now—of the people, of the words, of the scenes. You decide who enters, what they do, and when they leave. They can’t stay longer than you want them to. They can’t say anything you don’t want them to say. Exercise your P.O.W.E.R.

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.

Memoir is a Journey Story

A memoir is a gift to your readers.

A memoir without a thought-provoking takeaway for the reader (a resolution, in writing terminology) is like a movie that ends with a cliff-hanger or a mystery novel that remains unsolved in the final chapter. What is the point? To think that a memoir doesn’t need a point is to miss the unique characteristic of memoir entirely.

Memoirists as Teachers

Memoirists are—or should be—teachers. I don’t mean teachers in the traditional sense of someone who stands before an assembled group in a classroom to offer instruction in a subject area, like geometry or chemistry or English composition. A memoirist teaches a lesson they have learned from the experiences of their life. A personal lesson but with a universal connection—that’s the key!

A memoir is not the recounting of stuff that happened to you. Stuff happens to everybody. A proper memoir must contain reflection; time and distance between the events told in the memoir and the time of the writing are required to allow for the author’s insightful recounting as to the meaning of those events and the transcendence they created in the author’s life. No meaning, no memoir. No transcendence, no memoir. No takeaway for the reader, no memoir.

What Lesson Will You Share?

In my opinion, there is an element of altruism to memoir writing. At least, that’s how I explain it. A focus on something other than yourself. This is the subtlety of memoir that so many writers fail to comprehend. A quote I have included in at least three other blog articles I’ve written, the words of memoir expert Marion Roach Smith, is the basis for this opinion:

Memoir is not about you. It’s about something and you are its illustration.

Think about this. Your memoir is not about you! Does this conflict with what you think a memoir is?

Are You Ready to Write a Memoir?

In another blog article I wrote titled Is It Time to Write Your Memoir? I stress the importance of allowing yourself time to process your life experiences and see them as objectively as possible; reflect (that word again) and honestly decide if you have learned anything from what you’ve been through. If you can only feel pain or anger or regret, and you can’t articulate whether you have gone through a transcendence (that word again) and come out the other side enlightened, I contend you are not ready to write a memoir.

Keeping a journal to work through feelings and analyze how and why things happened as they did and the effect it had on you is a wise first step in visualizing how you have learned, changed, and grown from your experiences. I talk more about this in another of my articles, Writing About Trauma. Until you have an a-ha moment—a moment of sudden insight, comprehension, or discovery—it will be enormously difficult to write a memoir with a clear theme, the lesson you will share with your reader.

If done properly, the writing of a memoir is a gift the author offers to their audience—the people the author most wants to read their book—because those are the people the writer most wants to help and guide through a personal storm. As the author has emerged from the turbulence of abuse, divorce, grief, or addiction, for example, they have chosen to share their journey and explore the path that brought them to a place of peace, triumph, happiness, or even just acceptance of their reality.

Are you ready to create such a gift?

Memoir Theme vs. Memoir Plot

Let the light shine on your memoir!

I’m going to say something controversial, so stick with me. Here goes.

Many of the problems that first-time memoir writers struggle with are the result of a simple truth—they don’t fully understand what memoir is!

There. I said it.

Many people writing memoir don’t actually understand what a memoir is supposed to be or do. The formula for writing a good memoir is relatively simple, but most novice memoirists make it more complicated than it needs to be.

I am a writing coach and editor who specializes in memoir. I chose memoir as my specialty because I had read that it is an oft-misunderstood subgenre of an oft-misunderstood genre, creative nonfiction. I took that as a challenge!

Through my years of learning what memoir is and isn’t (it’s not autobiography, for one thing), understanding its intricacies, and mastering the art of its structure, I always begin by asking a potential client the same simple-sounding question:

What is your memoir about?

But the question is at once simple and complex. The correct way to answer this question is the concept that trips up most of my memoir clients. Why? Because people always answer this question by telling me their plot, not their theme.

“Huh? Plot. Theme. What’s the difference?”

Understanding the difference is essential to writing a good memoir with minimal anguish and maximum success. I talked about this in my post Thinking About Writing a Memoir? Read This First.

Memoir Theme and Plot are Different

Get ready. This will be on the test.

Theme is what a memoir is about.

Plot is how the theme is conveyed.

Clear as mud? It must be, because despite many books and articles being written about the distinction, it is a confusion that persists among memoir writers and, I’m sorry to say, even many memoir editors.

So here is another explanation of theme in a nutshell.

What is the theme of your memoir? It is your argument.

In writing, an argument is the claim you make that you then have to support. (In academic writing, it’s called a thesis.) An argument is a line of reasoning, backed by evidence, that proves a point.

Knowing where to begin your memoir and where to end it is easy-peasy to decide if you know what argument you will present in your memoir and include only the stories that illustrate that argument.

Any clearer? I hope you’re nodding your head vigorously.

Why does having a theme matter in a memoir? Why can’t you just write about your life and talk about whatever is weighing on you, or gnawing at you, or that you want to brag about? You absolutely can! But then it’s not a memoir.

If what you want (or need) to write about is some aspect of your life that has caused you trauma, pain, or grief, or brought you happiness, joy, a clearer sense of self, success, or true love, then, by all means, do it. Write it. But what you are writing is likely more of a therapeutic journal or a series of interconnected personal essays.

If you really want to write a memoir that people will read all the way through, there must be a point to the story you’re telling.

Your personal story must impart a universal lesson that others can relate to, and reveal something you learned that you share with readers to enlighten, soothe, or benefit them.

The Definition of Memoir

Here’s a great time to restate, for the umpteenth time, the ultimate definition of memoir, according to Marion Roach Smith:

Your memoir is not about you. It’s about something and you are its illustration.

My blog post How to Choose a Memoir Theme states this clearly, and I’ve repeated it in one or two (or three) other blog posts. And yet, I feel the need to say it again, because it is the single most important aspect of writing a cohesive, enjoyable memoir.

Common Memoir Stumbling Blocks

When I begin to coach a memoir client, these are the comments I hear most often:

• I don’t know how to start. When (or how) should I start my story?

• I can’t decide which stories to include. How much of my life should I write about?

• I don’t know how to end the book. When (or how) should I finish my story?

These questions are easy to answer when you understand the purpose of a memoir and have a clearly defined theme.

When I’ve been hired to edit a memoir manuscript, these are the two questions my clients most often ask:

• Is it too long?

• Is it too short?

These, too, are easily answered questions when you have a clearly defined theme.

Writer: Is my memoir too short?

Me: Did you share all the stories that illustrate the theme of your memoir? Did you start by setting up the memoir and showing the reader what’s at stake for you to deal with? And then tell the stories that explore this thoroughly? And conclude by bringing the journey to a resolution?

If you answer no to these questions, your memoir is incomplete. If you can answer yes to these questions, then your memoir is (probably) just right!

Writer: Is my memoir too long?

Me: Did you share stories that have nothing to do with your theme? Did you include stories that start long before the genesis of your theme? Did you include stories that go beyond the point of the resolution of your theme?

If you answer yes to these questions, then the memoir is too long. If you answer no to these questions, then your memoir is (probably) just right!

It’s Not About Memoir Word Length

You see, too short or too long is not about word count. It’s about exploring your theme by including stories that show your struggle, failures, successes, and growth, and ending by showing the reader that you will be OK. Maybe your problem isn’t actually fixed—your marriage still ends, despite your efforts you can’t help a loved one deal with their mental illness, because of your health you will have to close your business after all. But your resolution demonstrates that you have accepted your situation and you can move forward, stronger, wiser, and with a clear purpose.

Are you ready to write your memoir? Let me help you make that happen.

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.