Blueprint for a Memoir: How to Write a Memoir for the Marketplace

By Jennie Nash

Top book coach Jennie Nash teaches you how to think about memoir in a whole new way.

"The surest thing a writer has, in a genre that's never that sure, is Jennie's hard won, no-stone-left-unturned Blueprint system. It's immensely helpful and constructive." -Monica Holloway, author of the memoir

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tree Farm Books
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781733251174

Jennie Nash

Jennie Nash is the author of The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming: And Other Lessons I Learned from Breast Cancer and Altared States. Her work has appeared in Child, Shape, HOME, Reader's Digest, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Working Mother, Glamour, GQ, Mademoiselle, US, and Cosmopolitan, among other publications. She lives in Torrance, California with her husband and her two daughters.

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PART 1

Book Fundamentals

The fundamental elements of a memoir are your intention, your story, and your audience. Writers eager to get their story on the page, get to the end, and get their book into the world often overlook these elements. Skipping them is dangerous and leads to manuscripts that never make it off the desktop, books that fall flat, and authors who don’t make the kind of impact they want to make. Like building a house with a solid foundation, spending time getting clear on the fundamental elements is the first—and most important—step in writing a memoir that strangers might want to read. In order to build a solid foundation, you have to stop looking at tile samples and paint chips and do some planning and engineering. You have to get your hands dirty.

A lot of writers really dislike this advice and, after more than 15 years as a book coach, I understand why. I am asking them to lean into the most uncomfortable parts of the creative process. Big questions about your intention put you face to face with your wild ambitions and your deep doubts. Big questions about your story make you realize that you may not actually understand how a story works, despite a lifetime of reading books, watching movies, and writing blog posts and poems and newsletters and reports and secret chapters of novels. Big questions about your audience are, perhaps, the hardest of all. They force you to think about your memoir as a product going into the marketplace where people will buy and sell it and then judge it in the most public ways. It’s much easier to just sit down and write and focus on how many words you’ve amassed.

But what I know for sure about writing a book is this: You’re not going to get away with not doing any of this hard work. By electing not to do it at the start of a project, you are simply pushing the work down the road—and making it harder for yourself. You are making a decision to do the work at the same time you are writing, which puts too many demands on the process and often leads to frustration, paralysis, and despair. Or you are making a decision to do the work after you have written a complete manuscript, which is incredibly inefficient.

When it comes to writing a memoir that other people want to read, you don’t get a gold star for filling up spreadsheets and grids and pages with memories and stories from your life. Doing too much of that at the start of a project is where a lot of memoir writers go wrong. They get buried in memories and get tempted by research. They start slipping into writing a whole draft of a book—a so-called shitty first draft, or vomit draft—without having figured out exactly what they’re writing. There are a lot of people who advise this as a good way to start a book—because, after all, it means you are writing—but I am not one of them. It takes so much work to sort out 50 or 100 or 250 pages of aimless writing and figure out what is there, and what is missing, and what to do with it all. What’s the path to doing that deciphering? Asking the Blueprint questions. And doing the Blueprint when you’ve already started writing, or have a full draft, often means throwing out most of what is on the page, or painstakingly snipping out the parts that work.

The Blueprint is a plea to slow down. It’s a plea to think before you write. If you take just a few weeks to work through these questions, you will be much closer to writing a book that stands a chance in the marketplace.

If you are coming to this book after having written the kinds of pages I was just talking about—ones that are aimless and confusing, even to you—don’t despair. You are not alone. So many writers do exactly the same thing and so many books you have loved probably started the same way. All is not lost! Take a big, deep breath and commit to getting clear about the foundational elements of your story through the Blueprint, and the way forward will become clear.

BLUEPRINT STEP #1

Why Write This Book?

If you never ask yourself why you are writing, you are far more likely to write in circles, fall into frustration and doubt, and come to believe that writing depends on some elusive muse or a series of special habits (e.g., write 1,500 words a day, write for an hour every day, write when the full moon is waning) rather than deep self-reflection, discipline, and persistence.

Identifying your why first has an enormous impact on your capacity to write a memoir that resonates with your desired reader. It’s often the difference between writing a book that people want to read and either a.) never finishing, or b.) finishing but writing something that is so watered down and wishy-washy or (the opposite) self-centered and indulgent, that it fails to find its place in the marketplace or make an impact.

Can you write your way to an answer? Absolutely. I have done it, and writers I know have done it, and we have all heard of famous writers who have done it. But the truth is, for most of us most of the time, it’s wildly inefficient, ineffective, painful, and unnecessary. That’s why the Blueprint starts with why.

In Step #13, I will teach you a tool that helps you develop every dimension of your story—in other words, the plot (or what you experienced externally), the meaning you made from those events (what you experienced internally), and the impact your story will have on the reader (the reason they will care about what happened to you). Your why also has both an internal why and an external component; they are like two atoms circling each other at the center of the cell that powers your work.

Your Internal Why

Let’s start with the internal reasons you are drawn to write and publish a memoir.

Often, the first thing memoir writers say in answer to this question has something to do with making meaning of their experiences. They’ll say, I want to share what I have learned or I don’t want other people to suffer like I did.

This is a common response because it is a human one. Humans make meaning of the things that happen to us, and stories are the tool we use to do that. It is how we learn, how we teach, how we grow. (For more on this idea, I suggest Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story, which I had the pleasure of coaching, and The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall.)

Writing a memoir that touches someone and helps them learn or grow or understand something about their life is a distinct and profound pleasure for the writer. Jennette McCurdy, whose memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, spent a long time on the New York Times bestseller list in 2022, had thousands of readers telling her that her story helped them see the abusive aspects of their own childhoods and take actionable steps toward healing. That’s a powerful impact to have on that number of people.

So if you experienced something—anything from a great loss to an epic journey to a dramatic recovery to a terrifying ordeal to a year where you only ate vegetables you grew with your own hands (Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life) to the time tennis saved your life (41-Love: On Addictions, Tennis, and Refusing to Grow Up by Scarlett Thomas)—and that experience was important to you, your natural inclination is to try to figure out what it all meant. How did you walk through it, what did you make of it while it was going on, what do you make of it now that it is over? Once you do that—and if you are a writer—your natural inclination is going to be to want to share it with other people as a way to educate them or warn them or comfort them or guide them. You want to help, to turn your experience into meaning for other people who are in the same boat. You figured something out and you want to share it. This makes total sense. But it may not be the whole answer to why you want to write, and I urge you to see if there is something else underneath your first why.

The deep-level internal why often comes from a place of obsession, rage, or injustice. It could be anger, jealousy, a deep-rooted sense of social injustice, or a different way of looking at things than the prevailing familial or cultural wisdom. Often people who have something they are burning to write about are burning because their story stands in opposition to something else—an idea or social movement or belief. Telling their story is the most powerful way of claiming their voice.

My favorite recent example of this deep-level why is the memoir This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something—Anything—Like Your Life Depends On It. One reason it’s my favorite is that the author, Tabitha Carvan, is quite literally telling us in the title that there is more to her story than meets the eye, and the book delivers that deeper experience for the reader.

On the surface, Carvan’s story is about an obsession with the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. It turns out there are legions of fans all over the world who are obsessed, and who call themselves Cumberbitches. Carvan delves into this subculture and gives us a fascinating tour, but we get the sense as we are reading that we are going deeper and deeper into the subject—and, sure enough, the book becomes an exploration of the way that our society tends to shame and dismiss the passions of girls and women as being silly and frivolous, while celebrating the passions of boys and men. Carvan is writing to reclaim her joy. She is standing up on a soapbox and shouting at the top of her lungs. Her book is a riveting story that left me gob-smacked with admiration and new awareness and conviction—and I barely even knew who Benedict Cumberbatch was when I started.

There is an equally powerful deep-level why to Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. Here is a world-renowned surgeon writing about his father dying and the difficult choices the family had to make. Gawande is telling us a story about hard personal choices at the end of life, but he is also railing against an industry and a culture that sweeps death under the rug. His book is a call to arms for the reader to defy the common practices of ignorance and silence, and plan for death by looking it straight in the eye. The deep-level why of his story is an argument to change an entire healthcare system.

In both of these examples, the Cumberbatch book and Being Mortal, the authors are using their stories to make a larger point. They are writing stories from their own life, but they are not writing for themselves. They are writing for us, the reader, about a larger issue. This is the big message of the Blueprint: To write something that strangers might want to read, you have to think of who those readers are and what they need and how to connect with them. You have to simultaneously think small about the details you are sharing (to remember them and capture them and describe them in a compelling way) and think big about the overall impact you are making by bringing them to life. And it all starts with why.

You may not know exactly what your deep-level why is when you are this early in the writing process, and that’s okay. In upcoming steps, you will be working on the point (or message or purpose) of your memoir and on the plot (what actually happened that you are writing about), and these steps will help you figure it out.

Your External Why

In addition to the internal why for writing a memoir, there are external reasons most people write—things you believe that writing the book will help you achieve. These are probably connected to receiving recognition and validation as a writer, to getting a return on the investment (ROI) of your time, energy, and money, and to your ability to make an impact by teaching your reader something or helping them more deeply understand something.

Recognition and Validation

At the top of most writers’ list is the desire to be seen and heard. Recognition and validation look different to each of us. Validation for you may be a positive book review in a prominent publication. It might be an invitation to speak on popular podcasts or stages. It might be that you hold a series of intimate readings in lovely bookstores that people line up to attend. The power of visualization is well-known: Knowing what recognition and validation look like for you is an important step toward getting it.

Money

Many people hope that writing a book will make them money—and it might. You could receive a $10,000 advance from a publisher or a $25,000 advance or a $250,000 advance, and then you will (likely) receive the standard 15 percent royalties on every book sold once that advance earns out.

Or you could work with a hybrid publisher (which would require an upfront investment) or decide to self publish (and pay all the costs of production and distribution) and make hundreds of thousands of dollars on the backend if you can figure out how to drive sales of a lot of