Why Your Memoir Needs a Message
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“Does my memoir really need a message?”
I’m often asked this question by my book coaching and ghostwriting clients, and the answer is almost always “yes.”
In this article, I’ll explain why 99% of memoir writers should craft a clear and direct message about lessons learned from the life they’ve lived. But first, I’ll also touch on those rare instances where it would actually be best to avoid spelling out an obvious moral to your story.
When You Don’t Need a Message in Your Memoir
Let’s start with the biggest reason for steering clear of a message in your memoir: you’re already famous.
If you’re a celebrity and you’re reading this blog post, your memoir doesn’t need a message. Your fans will read what you write, no matter how inconsequential your life has been. Just dish the dirt. Spill the beans. Open up and be vulnerable (or just pretend to be vulnerable). That’s all we really want from celebrities. The public craves any peek behind the curtain of your celebrity life and no one expects you to help them solve any of their own problems. In fact, many of your fans like the possibility that your life is a train wreck. It makes the rest of us feel better about our own petty troubles. So, just tell your story and make it really juicy.
Another reason why your memoir might not require a message is if you’re writing a legacy project: recording the narrative of your life, or a specific part of it, for the sole purpose of informing current and future family members. It’s a keepsake for posterity. You want current and yet-to-be-born relatives to know something about you and — while they might already know snippets of your story as family lore — gain a deeper understanding of the bigger picture. This kind of memoir or biography should simply stick to the facts.
The final reason for penning a message-free narrative is that you have the ability to produce Pulitzer Prize–quality prose. Your life has not only been a torrid romance, Shakespearean tragedy, and epic adventure rolled into one, but you can actually tell your story with the kind of writing that equals some of the world’s bestselling books. In other words, you are a rare talent possessing three unique qualities: you have one heck of a story to tell, you can write as well as Stephen King, and you have enough distance from your own experience to treat yourself like a compelling character.
If none of these sound like you, read on…
When to Add a Message to Your Memoir
If you’re still reading this article, you have a rather intriguing story to share, decent writing skills, and (perhaps upon a bit of reflection) a life that seems to mean something. Most importantly, you’d really like lots of other people — folks who don’t know you at all, strangers scattered across the globe — to actually read your book when it’s finished. In other words, you want to write something that appeals to people enough to convince them to part with some of their hard-earned cash.
A memoir with a well-crafted message can help you do just that, and the first reason for this is relevance. Let’s begin by examining a recent, well-publicized case study in relevance:
Matthew Perry is famous for two reasons. First, he played Chandler Bing on Friends for ten years. Second, he was an addict through pretty much that entire decade. Perry started drinking when he was 14 and eventually got to the point where he was also popping as many as 55 pills a day. Although there is an explicit message in his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing — that addiction is a disease, not a choice — it doesn’t necessarily need one. That’s because he’s already relevant. His memoir matters because Perry starred in one of the most popular TV shows of all time — a show that will live on forever in reruns. His story is still relevant today because people are shocked at the depths of his addiction and curious about his recovery, simply because of who he is, and the fact that there’s a meaningful message included is a bonus. But the same principle doesn’t apply to your memoir.
I’m working with a client who, like Matthew Perry, battled the bottle. He finally managed to quit drinking when his life partner, also an alcoholic, died from liver failure. It’s a heartbreaking story. But simply telling my client’s tale of fighting and winning against an addiction is not enough to make the book relevant to others. The sad truth is many of us know someone who has struggled with addiction in some fashion. People can certainly relate to my client’s story. But relatability doesn’t sell books the way relevance does.
Relatability means you’re familiar with something, but relevance means it matters. In other words, relevance makes people care. My client has learned a lot from his own struggles — things that can inspire people without addictions as well. He wants to leverage those lessons to not only help others, but ultimately boost his book sales. Messaging delivered in a non-proselytizing manner (because this is still a memoir, not a self-help book) can make his story matter more and sell better.
This brings us to the second reason why your memoir needs a message: audience targeting. If your book solves a problem, you can target readers who are looking for solutions to that issue. People with the same problems congregate with each other, and they can easily be located online. I just searched “Facebook group for anxiety” and got 245 million hits. I’m sure there aren’t that many individual groups, but you get my point. When you find your target audience, there are myriad opportunities to spread the word about your nonfiction opus directly to them.
I’m often surprised by how little first-time authors think about marketing, especially when it comes to memoirs. There’s this compulsion to simply get the story on paper; it seems most memoirists consider who might eventually read their book only after it’s finally published. By then, it’s often too late to make impactful changes to appeal to a specific audience. The reality is that the burning desire to share your life in print does eventually run out of combustible fuel. You can be left with this “now what?” kind of feeling. The only thing that fills that void is the hope or (even better) reality that your book is actually being purchased and read because it’s inspiring or entertaining lots of people who don’t know you.
There is a fine line between writing a memoir with a message and crossing over into the self-help or how-to categories. In a future blog post I’ll touch on those crucial distinctions and we’ll include a link right here. For now, my goal is to open your mind to the reasons why a message can make a difference. So, let’s get to our third and possibly most compelling reason to inject a message into your memoir: meaning.
Some people write memoirs for a very small audience of their present and future family members. Others write their life story down for strangers: (hopefully) millions of anonymous readers who they will never meet. But, perhaps the most important beneficiary of writing your book is you. For most memoirists, this will be the only book they ever write. It will not sell millions of copies — maybe not even thousands. How you define success is entirely up to you, but it is something I talk about with all of my clients. It’s something you should think about, too. What is it that will make writing a book worth all the hard work?
If you step outside of the pure narrative style of traditional memoirs, you are confronted with a difficult question: What does my life mean? The scary part of asking this kind of question is fearing you can’t come up with a good answer. What if the whole thing means absolutely nothing? From my own personal experience as a book coach and ghostwriter, I have never worked with a client who was completely stumped on the meaning of their life. By the time their manuscript was finished, everyone had come to some pretty clear epiphanies about why things had happened and what lessons might be drawn from their experience. Sure, it can take some time. You need to ask the right questions to uncover the real message of your life, but if your quest to write a successful book helps you decipher the tea leaves of your own life, you’ve gained a truly wonderful benefit — before even a single copy is sold.
Most first-time authors should strongly consider adding a message to their memoir. It makes your book more relevant, helps you sell more books by targeting a specific audience, and gives your life added personal meaning. But the concept of “less is more” should guide your fingertips as they start flying across the keyboard. I’ve seen the floodgates of giving advice open when clients start embracing the benefits of messaging in their memoir. Suddenly, a deluge of wisdom begins flooding onto the pages as they realize that they’ve actually learned a lot about life through reflection on their journey.
It’s best to think of your message like the spice you add to cooking a fine meal. A little goes a long way and too much spoils the dish. Let your story do the heavy lifting: make it entertaining and engaging and then season it occasionally with sage musings on the meaning of all that you’ve experienced.
Steve Donahue is a bestselling author, book coach, ghostwriter and speaker. His books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been translated into multiple foreign editions. Steve is the founder of Storyglu.com, a book coaching and ghostwriting firm that helps nonfiction authors write books readers can’t put down.
