Writing Memoir To Fit This New Time

For thirty-five years, I have helped writers of all skill levels achieve their goals of putting together stories about their lives, ranging from magazine-like travelogues, to family portraits bordering on biography, to thinly veiled fictional accounts, to book length memoirs of childhood and mid-life adventures.

My work now has transitioned from those forms of personal storytelling to a more probing exploration of The Big Questions and how we make sense of our lives via story.

This growth has been spurred by multiple losses, but also by this dark time we are entering, as a culture and a nation. I find harder questions more compelling, like: What do stories mean? What effect do they have on our lives? How can we use them to shape reality?

Narrowly threaded manuscripts of reminiscences about life events and pastimes do not meet the time.

I find myself interested in mucking around in the gray areas of life. So little black and white, really.

So much that can’t be known, so much demanding compassion, an honest look at human choice, and a layered understanding of how the stories we tell can be used to make readers think beyond the surface spin of our social media culture.

As we move into 2025, I send out this missive to announce that my work now revolves around making stories that are more complex than the standard coming-of-age tale, the A-to-B travelogue, or the autobiographical victory lap. Memoir that includes deep thinking will catch my attention, but lesser works will not.

We expect a literary novel to take us down to our human core by making us think and feel about all that which is inexplicable. I want memoir of that sophistication. I seek writers who are serious and searching, and I challenge all you who read this to move your writing, and your thinking, from the I-went-here-and-did-this approach to the more difficult task of raising the tent of your story on the messy questions of why we are the way we are.

In addition to serious book-length projects, I welcome dedicated creators of shorter forms of personal storytelling—from YouTube videos to Substack articles to anything in between—who want to develop ideas explored in those shorter forms into longer literary projects, whether that be memoir, a fictionalized account of personal experience, or some hybrid invention.

Now is the time to go deep. Serious times require serious artists who are willing to ask difficult questions about human behavior and speak plainly the thorny answers.

Only in this way will our stories be of great enough weight to meet the needs of this time that is fast upon us.