If you’re writing a memoir this year, you will—at some point—confront the question of whether your story should read like a novel. The answer to that question is as individual as your writing style and the story you have to tell.

Maybe you naturally share stories of your life as if they were great tales unspooling, one action leading to another, characters as vivid as peacocks, and minimal ruminating about the meaning of it all. The novel approach is a great shape for you then.

But what if you are a writer who approaches personal experience differently—in a more meditative mode, like a journal writer reflecting on events, weighing the context, considering the effects other choices might have made, sifting through the complexities of fate and opportunity? The novel form may not be the right approach for you.

Yet, either way is okay. Both creative drives can yield a wonderful story. It’s your voice at play here, your life. You get to make your memoir be whatever you need it to be.

As for the marketplace and what might get picked up by an agent and actually make it into print, some in writing circles will counsel you to pursue only the breakneck excitement of a contemporary adventure novel—but can you write like that? Do you want to? Does that story telling form fit the kind of story you have to tell?

Selling a memoir and writing a memoir are two different things, and while agents who might take on memoir projects, might think the market best accepts the novelesque approach in memoir, the next big bestseller could run one-hundred and eighty degrees counter to that assumption. You can’t second guess what will sell, or what the buying public will fall in love with.

And because of that, it’s just best to tell the story you need to tell, the one in your heart, the way it comes out of you and onto the page. Then get some feedback from a professional editor, or from astute reading friends, to determine how you might improve your manuscript.

How ever you do it, it is true, a memoir does have to have a shape. It has to be contained in some kind of form, but the story telling approach of the contemporary American novel is only one kind of form, or shape. Maybe your memoir is best told as podcasts—as a spoken story—with no end yet in sight. Maybe you need to make a couple of YouTube videos that capture best the story you are remembering. Maybe it is a book but it’s a combination of journal entries and running commentary, or a collection of free-standing chapters each one about a single family member and how he or she shaped your journey. Or maybe it consists entirely of letters, emails, and texts written between you and a loved one that capture the essence of love and trust, betrayal and forgiveness. I don’t know, and neither does that person out there whispering in your ear that your memoir needs to have the shape of a novel.

Writing a memoir is deeply personal, and you have to follow your writing strengths and the cues the story gives you.

It is essential, though, that you also educate yourself about the difference between writing a memoir, and selling a memoir. So, in this new year, commit to writing that memoir you’ve been thinking about for so long, but also commit to learning about the industry of publishing. That way your story will have a better chance of finding the path it deserves.

Happy New Year of writing.

We live in a time of intense political debate. Siloed in our separate value and belief systems we find it hard to talk with strangers because we do not know what they believe, so we side-step controversy and avoid topics that might upset them.

But should it be that way in a memoir? Should we skirt the issues of the day, or dive right in?

This itself may be a topic that sets readers’ teeth gnashing.

However, I wade right in.

I believe that memoir is one of the last bastions of artistic endeavor where you have the opportunity to speak truth—about your life, feelings, ideas, opinions, and wishes for the world—via personal experience. The art of memoir is learning to do that with grace. And yes, I know that even with grace you can (inadvertently) stomp on toes. You simply can’t please everyone, nor should you try.

Again, memoir is a place to find your truth and to trumpet it with as much honesty, balance, and compassion as you can muster.

So, my take on this thorny issue is: Speak up. Explain yourself. Own your heart and beliefs, but be able and willing to explore the complexity of the issues you include in your story. That means doing deep thinking and research. Arm yourself with facts to accompany your story of personal experience.

Perhaps you are writing about income inequality based on a series of jobs you have held that barely allow you to make ends meet; don’t just rail against those you believe are guilty of making your life the way it is, but back your experience with information about how economic conditions get to be the way they are. (For an example, see the now classic Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich.)

Or, if your experience is one of the immigrant, and you are feeling frightened in these current times, and you want to detail your journey, then do that. And spend time looking into the complicated processes that lead countries and cultures to become the way they are—the country you have left and the country that is your new home. Paint your experiences, but educate people, too.

A memoir that pivots on a topic and weaves personal experience with facts is stronger than one that does not, and frankly, bridges into a cousin form of writing that can command more attention in the marketplace than memoir can, which is narrative nonfiction, a form in which you use personal experience to build the arc of your story, but you use research to compose a deeper tale that illuminates the facts of the issue at the heart of your story.

And, contrary to a lot of press these days, there are actually verifiable facts. Learning how to find them and use them adds weight to your story of personal experience in the cauldron of the today’s fiery social issues.

Concerns about hurting family and friends are some of the most worrisome for memoirists. My advice? Quit obsessing about it and get on with the writing. Plenty of would-be memoirists have stopped themselves before even getting started, due to such concerns, and many who have made it past the starting line, never finish their memoir because they freak out part of the way through and quit.

Worrying about the impact of your memoir on family and friends before you even have a manuscript written is the most sophisticated procrastination technique writers of personal stories have ever come up with. It’s the magic ticket to inaction.

Now before you think I’m a heartless jerk for saying so, stop and think about it: if you can spend all your creative energy worrying about your words, you don’t have to actually write! Focusing on the possibility of how your theoretical assessments might affect others, keeps you from: 1) doing the demanding personal work of excavating those assessments (the truth of your life); and 2) doing the demanding work of learning how to write a memoir.

Instead, you can spend the rest of your days in the land of I’m-Thinking-About-Writing-A-Memoir, and many hopeful writers do just that. Or, you may go the route of sugarcoating everything, ensuring (you think) everyone’s feelings and hiding your own. Why even write a memoir then?

The fact is, people feel the way they choose to feel. You can’t do much about that. Even when writers do their darnedest to couch everything pleasantly—to paint Great Aunt Minnie as a world-class philanthropist (when she is actually a miserly elder)—your loved ones aren’t going to like your characterizations. They will find something to get their backs up about. This is the way people behave when they find themselves revealed in stories. Period.

You simply have to tell your story, remembering with each step of the process the art of balance—that technique of moderating strong emotions with a generous view of people and events—and let the future fall as it does.

As an editor, it’s the “Oh.” syndrome when I see writers of memoir place more importance on the feelings of family and friends than on the transformative process of digging in and getting to the meaning of their experiences, and finding compassionate ways to tell their truths—which is the real work of memoir.

Any kind of writing is hard work, and good writing is extremely hard work, which involves both art and craft. The writer’s focus should be on learning both, and for the memoirist also on the mining of meaning behind human experience and emotion, not on worrying about others’ unpredictable behavior.

Remember, if you are in the process of writing a memoir, or you haven’t even begun, and you are obsessing over the possible reactions of your family and friends, you are most likely:
1) procrastinating about the work of writing;
2) failing to understand the form of memoir and the craft involved;
3) ceding respect for yourself to the illusory power of controlling other people.

Don’t do it. Just dive in and write!