Book Coaching 101, Part 4: 5 Reasons Memoir is the Hardest Genre to Coach

An exploration of a genre

I am about a month away from launching a certification course in memoir – something I said I would never do.

I said I would never do it because I believe that to coach memoir well, you need to understand the narrative principles and structures of both fiction and nonfiction. 

A memoir is a story, so you need to understand what makes a good scene, how to get emotion on the page, how to let us into the head and the heart of characters, how to write dialogue with subtext and meaning, and how to build and hold tension in a story, among other things. These are the skills we draw upon to coach fiction.

But a memoir is also usually storytelling around a specific topic or idea, so you need the tools of nonfiction. You need  to understand the transformation journey that readers come to books for, and what they look for when they have a burning desire to learn about something (how to walk the Appalacian trail, what it’s like to be a black man in America, how to find God, how to die.) You need to understand the demands of the marketplace in a very specific way.

I used to believe that the reason I was an effective memoir coach was because I could pull from both the fiction and the nonfiction toolboxes to help my clients craft their books, so my answer to people who wanted to coach memoir was always, “Learn about both fiction and nonfiction and you’ll be set.” 

I Changed My Mind

In 2023, I wrote and published Blueprint for a Memoir: How to Write a Memoir for the Marketplace, which was the third of my Blueprint books. These books offer a method of inquiry around a book idea — they are not about the craft of writing but about intention, structure, and narrative design. They are meant for writers who want to lay a strong foundation for their books — or who need to rescue a book in danger of dying. 

The memoir Blueprint ended up being more than twice as long as the fiction Blueprint, and also significantly longer than the nonfiction one. Part of the reason for that is that I always suggest memoir writers develop a book proposal, so the memoir Blueprint includes information on developing a proposal and pitching it to agents. 

But the memoir Blueprint was longer because there are a lot of things memoir writers need to understand that fiction and nonfiction writers don’t — about the function of time in their story, their responsibility to the people they are writing about, and about how to make room in your story for the reader.

While writing the memoir Blueprint, I began to understand that coaching a writer through the development of a memoir was not only a matter of using the tools of fiction and nonfiction. It’s a unique process. What I hadn’t perceived before was exactly how many different kinds of decisions a memoir writer needs to make about the very nature of their book.

There are so many different things writers mean when they say they want to write a memoir, so you have to figure out what exactly they intend to write.

There are so many different crossroads that can make or break their book, and you have to guide them through those checkpoints.

The path to publishing is particularly fraught for memoir writers — and the pitfalls are darkand devastating — so you have to help them navigate that journey. Why do they want to do this? Are they prepared to do this? What is the best way for them to do this?

An effective book coach needs to be able to hold all the possibilities for their writers in their head and to artfully guide each of them toward the book they most want to write.

In the middle of 2023, I shut down the path to learning about memoir that I had patched together, and resolved to design and develop a book coach certification course that would be cohesive, comprehensive, elegant, and effective.

Coaching Memoir is Hard

As I write this, I am deep into the production on that course. I think I am going to make my deadline and I believe I am going to pull off what I set out to do (hope springs eternal!) and every day when I finish preparing another slide deck or filming another lesson, I think, Coaching memoir is really hard!

Whenever people ask me why this course is longer and more expensive than the others, I say some version of, “Coaching memoir is really hard!”

I thought I would share my thoughts as to why. Here are 5 reasons why I have come to that conclusion.

Are you interested in becoming a certified memoir coach? Author Accelerator has an Early Bird pricing special that is good through February 29th, 2024. If you want to sneak in a chance to speak with me about the course before February 29, email me at contact@authoraccelerator.com and I’ll send you a scheduling link. The course launches March 26th, 2024.

5 Reasons Why Memoir is the Hardest Genre to Coach

1 . Coaching Memoir Means Always Being Ready to Pivot

Coaching memoir is hard because memoir writers often don’t write what they start out thinking they are going to write. This is not as true for fiction and nonfiction writers.

When someone wants to write, say, a science fiction fantasy about a dystopian world, odds are good that they are not going to shift to writing a true crime thriller. When they set out to write YA, they might switch to middle grade (depending on the subject matter and the protagonist’s voice) but the main tenets of their story don’t change. Perhaps their romance will morph into a book that doesn’t have a happily-ever-after ending, but it’s still a novel about two people and their relationship. 

Similarly on the nonfiction side, if someone wants to write about, say, aging in America, they might contemplate focusing their book on different points or audiences, and they might try out different structures, but the fundamental concept —a book about aging in America — remains the same.

But with memoir, someone may think they are writing memoir, but could come to see they are writing fiction, and then their story could go in wildly different directions.

They may think they are writing memoir, but could realize their book would be enhanced by interviews, analysis, statistics, or cultural analysis, and so they might decide to shift to memoir + (also sometimes known as hybrid memoir.)

They may think they are writing memoir, but could decide that they want to write prescriptive nonfiction, and walk people through a framework or methodology for managing a situation or achieving some kind of transformation.

A book coach has to be able to ask the right questions right from the start to help a writer bring their vision to life. They have to be able to hold in their heads all the various possible outcomes. They have to be ready to help their writer pivot.

2. Coaching Memoir Means Confronting the Commercial Viability of Someone’s Lived Experience

A lot of people write memoir to make meaning from a difficult experience. There is proven therapeutic benefit to writing your story, and there are so many reasons to write that have nothing to do with publication.

But if a writer’s goal is to publish their memoir, the book coach has to help them determine if the story they are telling is commercially viable.

There is often a large gap between someone’s hopes for their memoir and the reality of what the market will bear, and a coach has to be honest about our opinion and the writer’s chances. 

No one has a crystal ball, but if I am working with a writer who is too emotionally close to their story, or who doesn’t (yet) have the writing chops to pull off what they want to pull off, or whose rage or desire for revenge is clouding their story judgement, I know that the book will not be commercially viable in its current form.

And I have to tell them that and then help them manage the uncomfortable decisions that follow.

3. Coaching Memoir Means Confronting the Slippery Nature of Memory and Truth

A memoir writer is making a contract with their readers. They are saying, “This story I am presenting to you is true to the best of my knowledge.” Readers hold memoir writers very tightly to this promise. Just as James Frey.

But what even is truth anymore? We have to question everything we see and everything we read — and many times, memoir writers question what they remember.

Or they remember things differently than other people who experienced the same thing did. Or they remember thing differently than they did a few years ago or yesterday.

Or maybe they are flat-out lying — to themselves? To you? Who’s to say.

Coaching memoir means getting up in someone’s brain and engaging with the very nature of truth and memory, and it can be a wild ride. You simply don’t have that element when coaching other genres.

4. Coaching Memoir Puts You Uncomfortably Close to Therapy

People write fiction and nonfiction about intense and personal topics, which presents challenges for the writer and book coach for sure, but when someone is writing memoir, they are processing the story of their life in a very direct and immediate way. There is nowhere to hide — because the whole point of memoir is to let us into your interior life, to take us to a place that is more raw and deep than we can get from a blog post or a soccer game sideline chat, and the memoir writer is intentionally doing that for public consumption. 

If I am asking a memoir writer, “But what did you feel in that moment?” in order to get a scene right, they are having to remember and re-live it.

I am now thinking of a devastating novel like Ian McEwan’s Atonement or Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. I am thinking about a client I worked with who was writing a scene involving rape and she herself was a rape survivor. These writers all surely had to remember and re-live, too. So why am I saying this is more difficult with a memoir writer?

If I ask a fiction writer the same question about a scene, they at least have the avatar of a character to process the feeling through. They can change physical details of the people and the places, they can change what people say (perhaps making the character who is based on them say something more pointed than they said in real life), and they can change the motivations of characters and the repercussions of how it all played out.

With memoir, the only way through is to go directly to the experience.

A book coach has to always be certain they are coaching the writer as a writer, and focusing only on the story itself, and not offering any advice or support that would be therapeutic in nature. 

Most of us are not trained as therapists. We are there to help the writer write a better book, not live a better life. It takes work to know the difference and to stay on the appropriate side of the line, and that work is everpresent when coaching memoir.

5. Coaching Memoir Means Helping a Writer Shape a Story They Are Still Living

It can be difficult to know where to end a memoir, because maybe three years ago is the right ending, or maybe tomorrow, or maybe next week or maybe three years from now. The story is still happening and the writer is still processing it.

Not knowing where to end the memoir means not being able to get the beginning right, or the point, or the arc of change of the protagonist (who is the writer). 

In order to pin down these critical elements of the story, the writer has to actively step into the shoes of the protagonist and step out of the shoes of the person who is still living the life. They have to process these two selves simultaneously. It’s a high-wire act and the book coach needs to be right up there on the wire with them.

Why Would Anyone Coach Memoir?

After reading this list, you may be asking why anyone would choose to coach memoir writers. Despite the difficulties of the genre, the answer to this question is easy.

It’s exhilerating to help someone solve an intellectual and creative puzzle.

It’s deeply satisfying to help them weave together a cohesive and compelling narrative.

Being invited into someone’s very personal creative process in order to bring their story to life is a great privilege.

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