When you write a memoir to be sold, you’re providing a product to meet a demand in the marketplace. Your job as the writer is to give readers what they want. That’s basic economics. But what do memoir readers want?

Emotional connections

Although memoir is a true story, readers aren’t looking for the simple truth. Face it: simple truth is boring, and a boring book is guaranteed to be pitched into the bargain bin. Rather, memoir readers crave emotional truth. They want to feel a connection to your story—a connection to you.

Author Mary Karr once said that writing memoir is like punching yourself in the face. She was being kind.

Writing memoir—especially one arising out of trauma—is more akin to putting your head on an anvil, hitting it with a sledgehammer, dumping what remains in a blender, and hitting puree.

That requires revealing your internal self until there’s nothing left of you to put on the page.

Rocky beginnings

If any of us were to publish an early draft of our memoir, we’d doom ourselves to a flurry of one-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. And I’m not talking about memoirs from terrible writers—the ones who can’t tell a dangling modifier from a compound verb. I’m speaking of good writers who can weave a story full of drama, conflict, self-deprecating soliloquies, passable dialogue, intriguing monologues, exciting similes, and prose-worthy metaphors.

Even good writers can compose horrible memoirs.

A writer’s words are a form of speech, and none of us is born a natural public speaker. It takes practice, critique, and, yes, failure before anyone becomes a good writer—much less a great memoirist. We only have to look at early drafts to see that. Although the story might seem good, and the writing is impeccable, the book might fall flat.

Why? Our early drafts almost always lack an emotional connection. That comes from authentic writing that pulls the reader into the story. Many believe—incorrectly—that a great memoir depends on us finding typos, non sequiturs, inconsistencies, developmental issues, and incorrect word usage as we edit.

They’re wrong—well, partially wrong.

Peeling the emotional onion

While we can correct technical issues as we move from one draft to another, the most important editing is on a purely emotional level.

A podiatrist friend of mine once said, “Even the perfect foot can be surgically corrected.”

For years I thought the saying was self-aggrandizing—and maybe that was his intent. However, after helping memoir writers for the past few years, I realize that my friend’s saying applies equally to the craft of memoir. Even a “perfectly” written one—free of typos and other mechanical mistakes—can be corrected.

Underneath our perfect words, perfect sentences, and perfect paragraphs are layers of emotion waiting to break through to the surface.

Consider this first draft of a paragraph:

There’s not a lot of emotion there, right? Here’s the second draft:

A little better, but that onion still has layers. We peel another one in this third draft:

That one is a lot better. With each draft—each layer—we went a little deeper into the emotional loss this person experiernced. In the third draft, we get more information which makes the emotional loss that much greater.

Writing emotion isn’t just showing the readers sadness or anger. It’s giving them reasons for the emotion so they can relate to—and become part of—the writer’s story arc.

Not cause-and-effect

People mistakenly think emotion is cause = effect (our reaction). It’s not. It’s cause = internal thought = effect (our reaction). Without the internal thought, the effect has no context.

We never act without thinking—except when it comes to muscle memory such as driving. Likewise, we never react without thinking. If a writer I’m coaching tells me they did something without thinking, I call “bullshit.” They’re either intentionally misleading me, don’t remember, or are in denial. Regardless, they’re not giving the reader authenticity and truth—two things a consumer expects.

The emotional truth hurts

From one rough draft to another, you’ll add emotional context just as I did in the example paragraph above. You might not want to go there, which means you’ll resist anyone—such as critique partners—who tries to get it out of you.

When I’m coaching someone, and they try to cop-out by saying they don’t remember or they didn’t think anything, I’ll poke at them all day if necessary until the underlying truth comes out. They’ll often fight back, deny, and even despise me, but the emotional truth eventually makes itself known—in one form or another.

When it happens, that “emotional truth” makes memoir what it is.