Nonfiction
Memoir is not the same thing as what happened
Everything in a memoir is true and most of it does not belong in the book. The hardest work in this genre is deciding which parts of a real life are load-bearing, and that decision is nearly impossible to make about your own life without someone outside it. That is most of what I do here.
Where memoir usually goes wrong
- The events are not the story, and separating the two is the whole job
- Chronology is almost never the right structure, and almost always the first draft's structure
- The people in your book are alive and will read it
- Distance from the material matters more than time since the events
The people who are still alive
Nearly every memoir stalls at the same place: a chapter the writer cannot make honest because of who will read it. We deal with that as a craft problem rather than a legal one, and usually the answer is not what to cut but whose interiority you are allowed to guess at. It is worth having that conversation early, because a manuscript written around a hole reads like one.
What I have edited in memoir
Memoir is over half the manuscripts I take. Eleven client memoirs have been published, four of them with traditional houses.
Every service, for memoir
From memoir clients
★★★★★
Developmental Edit“The edit letter told me my book started ninety pages in. I did not want that to be true. It was true, and the book sold eight months later.”
★★★★★
Line Editing“She told me my manuscript was not ready for a line edit and that taking my money for one would be wrong. I have never had a professional turn down work that cleanly.”
★★★★★
Ghostwriting“My family read it and said it sounded exactly like me telling a story at the table. That was the whole assignment.”
See the edit before you buy the edit
Send your first ten pages and I will edit them properly and send the notes back, free. Not a summary of what I would do, the actual marked-up pages. If those notes are not worth having, we both learned something cheaply and you owe me nothing.
Writing memoir?
Send the first ten pages. I will edit them properly and send the marked pages back within a week, free.