I’ve had these words in my head for the past few days, this need to be transparent with you. This is where I get vulnerable and talk to you about the writing I’m doing behind the scenes - the real writing, as if this writing doesn’t count. So, here goes.
The other day, I ripped up my memoir draft.
OK, I didn’t rip it up, it’s in a file on my computer - but I ripped up the concept.
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“I’ve written books before!”, I thought to myself 6 weeks ago, recalling the Completely Useless Programming Textbook published in 2012 that hasn’t sold a single copy in a decade, and the Slightly Popular Science Book of 2018 that’s still selling at least 1,000 copies a year. It’s been 6 years again; it’s time for the next one. So I did what I’d done the two previous times I wrote a book that got published: I rolled up my sleeves and made an outline. It took all of about an hour, and at the end of the hour I had them - all the section headings of my non-binary memoir, neatly nested within bigger themes. All I had to do was fill each content bucket with the words that explained the concepts in the headings. I gave myself 9 months, until Dec 31st 2024 - which felt like an absurdly long time - but I liked the sound of an end of year deadline and the awkward allusion to pregnancy.
As I neared the 1 month mark since I set out to do this and found myself some 30,000 words into the memoir, I started to unravel.
“Nothing happens in my memoir!” I panicked, and wrote about on Substack. Out of that whiny post came a helpful suggestion from
that I consult a guidebook1. Always eager for instructions to give me guardrails for my creativity, I immediately downloaded the book and started working through the steps towards a marketable memoir.“Too much happens in my memoir!” I whined, to myself this time2, as I realized that my draft had too many arcs. The outline, by this point, was unrecognizable; it turned out that to explain my gender identity, I had to give context, and to give context meant to talk about EVERYTHING.
As I desperately searched the internet for non-AI-generated articles on “how to write a memoir”, I actually came across this haphazard journey as a suggested strategy - write everything and hope that a story emerges but my memoir was starting to frighten me in its unwieldiness, its refusal to be tamed or contained. At the same time, the more I worked through the memoir guidebook - the more I tried to reduce my memoir into a pithy title or a single-sentence storyline - the more I despised it. At this point the manuscript started to fork into two versions: the real one, overflowing with emotion and tangents, and the one I imagined trying to sell - anemic, clichéd, boring. I tried to write a little preface; it sounded both pompous and childish at the same time.
Besides a change in genre, there are important differences between this memoir idea and my previous book projects. The first two books were accepted on proposal - no, let me be precise: they were solicited by publishers, who then made us go through the book proposal process anyway, but they were already interested and basically ready to speak on behalf of the book in front of whatever committees it had to pass to be acquired; we signed the contract, then we wrote it. We. That is another, really important difference between those books and my current book. The previous books involved collaboration, whereas this one I’m writing by myself.
By writing about 1,000 words a day for a month (I was aiming for a daily 500, but I got carried away), I’ve made a few discoveries:
memoir is not a textbook, nor is it a (slightly) popular science book
writing a book that hasn’t been acquired by a publisher yet feels pointless
writing a book completely on your own is lonely
So, now what? This is the part where you expect me to be brave and patient, and persevere into the uncharted waters of Actually Finishing the First Draft. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I am not your non-binary hero. The thing is, I have really low distress tolerance, and over the years I’ve learned not to push through things - it only ends up hurting the people around me. So, for the sake of my family - ha! - I decided to explode the memoir.
And then…it happened. When I stopped looking at what I’d created as a a single glob of bad writing and examined each section separately, something beautiful emerged: little buds of writing, some barely visible, others opening up, and some in bloom. When I stopped trying to tell one story, I found 30 of them waiting to be told - and I found that I had a vision for each one. I could suddenly see how developed each idea wanted to be - which ideas went together - and which ones stood alone. Thirty different essay seeds, some almost finished, others no more than a prompt.
What am I telling you - that there’s no memoir? I don’t know. Maybe there will be one, one day. Maybe I just can’t see the forest for the trees yet. Maybe one of the essays will become The Memoir, or maybe a bunch of them will become A Memoir in Essay Form. Maybe I don’t want to publish another book anyway, because, you know - publishing these days. There are so many possibilities - but right now I’m going to focus on enjoying the Spring energy I discovered in my writing.
If you’re reading this, chances are, you’ve tried to write something at some point in your life. Maybe you’re even writing now. What’s your vision? What keeps you going? Dear readers, it’s time to get vulnerable about your writing.
Blueprint for a Memoir: How to Write a Memoir for the Marketplace by Jenny Nash. I didn’t get through the whole thing yet, so I don’t know if I recommend it.
Who am I kidding - I’m sure my husband got to hear the whining, lucky thing.
I’ve been working on my novel, which began as a memoir in 2021. Lately I’ve been having doubts about it despite the positive feedback I’ve received from my writing coach. I also have a low distress tolerance and these doubts are distressing to me. But maybe it’s natural to have doubts? Maybe it’s part of the process?
Your problems sound so familiar. I feel like I should buy you a beer (or tea or cocoa or whatever). So anytime you're in the neighborhood...
Also, sometimes to get myself in a better place I imagine what others might say in reviewing my memoir. What witty turn of phrase would describe my prose? Would it be someone notable who reviews my work? How do I want to be described?