
The woman whose memoir writing advice I most admire, Marion Roach Smith, recently discussed a technique for self-editing your writing that I love: indexing. Now, this is not the process of creating an alphabetical listing of important words and phrases and the pages you will find them on that appears in the back of an academic or instructional nonfiction book. No, the way Marion describes her form of indexing is this: to read each paragraph of your writing and make a little note or symbol next to it that tells you what the paragraph does, i.e., what purpose it serves in the manuscript.
Does this sound overwhelming to you? Or does it thoroughly confuse you? Or both?
I’m going to try to offer more insight on this technique, but be warned—this process is for those who really want to improve their writing by acknowledging whether each paragraph has a clear purpose. If you can stick it out through an entire manuscript, it will make your writing tight, precise, and far more enjoyable to read.
Most Common Writing Mistake
I edit a lot of manuscripts, some by accomplished authors, most by novice writers. But both groups often make the same mistakes, especially when they are trying to make a point—they overdescribe, overexplain and repeat, repeat, repeat. (See what I did there?) This is an issue with all forms of nonfiction I’ve worked with—political science, economics, business—but it is most often the case with memoir.
Because the memoirs I edit are nine out of ten times written by first-time writers, they want to make darn sure you understand their reason for writing the memoir: trauma, grief, redemption, new insight, physical or mental health challenges, and so on. So, they say the same thing, more or less, repeatedly throughout their writing. If your reader finds themselves thinking, “Yes, I know, I get it, you told me already!” too many times, they won’t bother to finish the book. Or recommend it.
Once you have made a point, assuming you’ve made it clearly, that’s great. Now more on. There is no need to bludgeon your reader with the same point in passage after passage.
Indexing—Analyze Purpose
As I said, if you really want to streamline your work, indexing is one way to do it. With good writing, every paragraph should perform a purpose. Here are the thirteen most important paragraph purposes, taken from an article by the Jackson School Writing Center at the University of Washington:
1. Stating: Making an assertion.
2. Supporting: Providing evidence for an assertion.
3. Concurring: Agreeing with another author's assertion.
4. Qualifying: Restricting the meaning of an assertion already made.
5. Negating: Offering reasoning or evidence to demonstrate the falsehood of an assertion.
6. Expanding: Stating more comprehensively an idea or assertion already expressed.
7. Analyzing: Breaking an assertion down into its constituent parts in order to clarify or evaluate it.
8. Describing: Naming one or more features of an object or concept, to help the reader imagine it precisely or understand it fully.
9. Comparing and contrasting: Examining objects alongside each other for the purpose of clarifying their features, evaluating them or noting differences and similarities.
10. Evaluating: Making judgment about something discussed previously
11. Synthesizing: Combining elements of previous paragraphs into a coherent whole; often this includes presenting a new perspective on the subject.
12. Summarizing: Restating the principal idea of an argument or point already introduced.
13. Transitioning: Moving from one aspect of the argument to another by connecting the points for the reader.
Wow, right? The point here is,
every paragraph you write should serve one of these purposes.
After a paragraph serves the #1 purpose (stating, making an assertion, e.g., the allure of underage alcohol drinking entices 20 percent of girls aged 12–13), you then move on to write paragraphs that serve one or more of the other purposes (e.g., supporting, concurring, or expanding). Yes, this can be an exhaustive and time-consuming process. If you have written a statement paragraph and you write another paragraph that simply repeats the statement, or if you can’t identify the paragraph as clearly serving any of the other twelve purposes, delete it or rewrite it to serve a clear purpose.
Is this process easy? It is not. Will it make you a better writer? Yes. Is it worth the time and effort? That is totally up to you.
Write with Purpose
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT. Marion Roach Smith’s sister, published author Margaret Roach, calls a first draft the vomit draft. (I warned you!) That’s some harsh imagery. But the point is, of course, all first drafts stink, no matter who you are. Write, write, write. Get it all out. Throw in everything including the proverbial kitchen sink. But then, edit. Edit as furiously as you wrote, maybe more so. Keep two things in mind as you self-edit and rewrite: your purpose and your ideal reader. My business motto is Every word of every sentence matters. Please feel free to adopt it as your own!
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.
Updated: Dec 29, 2020

By mingling on social media with potential memoirists, I often hear it said that they need to get their stories out to the world; they’ve been through pain, trauma, and loss and they want to share their journeys. Things have been difficult. Life has sucked. Time to write a memoir.
But I want you to ask yourself, why? Why do you want to share your story? If this question seems flippant or insulting, I apologize. Let me explain.
The main point of this article is to help you determine if you are ready—mentally and emotionally—to write a memoir. I have touched on this briefly in two of my blog posts, Writing About Trauma: What Memoir Is and Isn’t and Heal and Grow: The Power of Journaling.
As I said in Writing About Trauma, memoir gets a bad rap as the Trauma Olympics. Death and grief. Physical or sexual abuse. Addiction. Mental illness. Incarceration. These are topics commonly identified as memoir themes. The publishing market is saturated with these kinds of memoir and publishers don’t want anymore.
Every adult has experienced some kind of loss, pain, grief, heartache, or disease. I personally can put a check mark in front of each of these. Having had pain or trauma in your life does not automatically demand that you produce a memoir about it.
Memoir is about transcendence. It’s not about what you went through but what you learned as a result of what you went through.
I can't emphasize this enough! If you are still in the midst of a traumatic experience (an ugly divorce, child custody battle, rehab, disease treatment) or if you are still processing and coming to terms with what you experienced, I contend you are not ready to write this story. Good memoir requires time and distance so you can be as objective and honest as possible about yourself and what you experienced.
I will repeat this quote from my article Writing About Trauma:
The now perspective is what makes memoir different from fiction; you explain how the story shaped you by weaving together the then and now. ~~Cindi Michael, December 2016, Writer’s Digest. Cindi is the author of The Sportscaster’s Daughter: A Memoir.
Memoir writing is not therapy. A memoir is not a therapeutic journal. If you can’t produce a “then and now” perspective, if you are not at a point from which you can reflect on your experience and impart a lesson of growth and revelation for your readers, it’s not time for a memoir. Your readers deserve a payoff—they should read your story and come away with a moral, lesson, revelation, answers to questions, a strategy for them to mirror. If not, what was the point?
Continue to write because writing is a fantastically healing endeavor. Journal. Blog. See a therapist who employs writing as part of the healing regimen. Join a support group and share your writings with group members.
But a memoir? Only when you have your aha moment—a moment of sudden realization, inspiration, insight, recognition, or comprehension—are you finally ready.
Updated: Dec 29, 2020

I want to begin this post with a heartfelt congratulations to anyone who is not a writer by training or profession but who is attempting to write a book—any kind of book. Writing is hard. That’s not an original thought; it is a well-known fact that writing is a difficult process, even for those who have an education that focused on writing or who have written throughout their career. Simply being comfortable with good grammar and having excelled in school with book reports and the infamous five-paragraph essay are just the most basic building blocks for creating book-length prose.
Fortunately, I had a knack for stringing together interesting sentences and compelling paragraphs at a relatively young age. Math and science? Meh. My university majors of Mass Communications and English were the only two tracks that made any sense to me, at least at that time.
But for the last three months or so, I have been tasked with ghostwriting a memoir for a man with whom I have nothing in common; a middle-aged man of color, a retired Army veteran with twenty-one years of service, three deployments to Iraq, a traumatic brain injury and severe PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). I cannot personally relate to any aspect of who he is or what he’s been through. But I’m determined to do his service and sacrifice justice, tell his story with empathy, and let his experiences produce a survival guide for others in similar circumstances. That is my promise to him and to myself.
I have a habit of starting my blog posts with a personal story that in my mind is connected to the true topic of the post. I’m doing it here again. I am struggling with this ghostwriting in a way I’m unfamiliar with. I spend an hour at a time staring at pages of notes I’ve transcribed from this man’s audio recordings, trying to make sense of his war experiences, timelines, injuries, and challenges in retirement so I can organize them in a way that will make an inspiring read.
Recently, I asked a social media memoir-writing group why it has taken some of them years to write their memoirs. I will add, the way in which I worded the question put some of them on the defensive, because they felt I was implying that a memoir is something they should be able to crank out in a few months. Even though it was a misreading of my intent, I apologized. But I do believe that if all aspects of the writing process are perfectly in place, they could produce a good first draft in a matter of months, not years. In other words, in a perfect world, they could. But few of them are writing in a perfect world.
My post garnered about eighty original comments plus comments about comments. From these, I identified four issues at play for those who say they have been writing their memoirs for anywhere from two to ten years. These are the recurring obstacles:
The writers are creating book-length prose for the first time and have no formal training or career experience with extensive writing projects, so they are learning how to write as they go. And the struggle is taking time.
The memoir is dealing with traumatic events in their lives, such as disease, abuse (physical and sexual), addiction, suicide attempts, and mental illness, causing the writer to unpack this baggage slowly and painfully.
Other aspects of life are interfering with their writing: full-time jobs, children, school, or family issues such as caring for elderly parents.
They have no support or are facing active resistance (including threats) from ex-partners, spouses, family members, or others who might appear in the memoir.
The other issue that emerged is that some of them are frustrated and unhappy about how long it’s taking to finish, while others don’t care and have an “it takes as long as it takes” attitude. I’m trying to formulate a process that will help the ones who really want to get their memoirs finished, either because they just want to be done with it or because, more importantly I think, they have a story to tell that they know will be helpful to others in similar situations. They desire to “do good” for others with their memoirs. I want to produce a formula that will guide those who are already writing as well as those who are still thinking about it.
Looking at the list of challenges for these folks, I plan to write a series of blog articles that will address each one, with the hope of helping writers make progress and get off the fence about starting their personal stories. My agenda looks like this:
Resources to provide training and guidance with writing skills. I can’t teach talent, but a collection of books, websites, and online courses to improve your writing are achievable tasks.
Determining if you are ready to write your memoir. This might sound contrary to helping someone produce a memoir, but I feel strongly that the writer must be able to determine if they are truly ready to write about trauma. Or if it’s just too soon.
Learning to manage your time to make writing a habit in your life. Many authors have documented their techniques for making the writing process part of their daily routine. I’ll share them.
Dealing with the ramifications of resistance to your writing. I cannot fix personal problems and I will not disregard your fears, but I’ll collect some personal and basic legal advice that might give you comfort.
Like many of you, I will write these blog articles as I can after my work and personal obligations are complete. Let’s see how I do.