Personal Memoir Ghostwriter | John Desimone

John DeSimone is a personal memoir ghostwriter who explains the characteristics of memoirs that achieve commercial success in today’s crowded memoir market. If you are thinking of writing a memoir it is possible to write one that a literary agent would want to represent, and a traditional publisher would be interested in purchasing. John DeSimone shows you how in this articles

Writing a memoir 

I talk to people every week who want to write a memoir. They know writing their personal story is difficult, so that’s why they reach out to me, a personal memoir ghostwriter. They want to know that if they hire someone like myself would they be able to get their work published. Publishing a personal story with a traditional publisher is challenging. But if your story is constructed and written to appeal to a broad audience it is possible to find success. The only people who don’t have problems selling their personal stories are celebrities. If you’re not writing a celebrity memoir then I’d like to give you a few ideas on what it takes to write a memoir that has a wide enough appeal to attract a royalty paying publisher.

As memoirs continue to increase in popularity, the publishing standards for personal stories have risen appreciably. In speaking with literary agents and editors who deal every day with selling and publishing memoirs, one comment stands out to me: Memoirs have to be a page-turner similar to the best fiction.

If there are a couple of good reasons for working with a personal memoir ghostwriter, the previous statement says it all.

Why does a memoir have to live up to the storytelling found in fiction, you’re wondering? Isn’t a memoir what actually happened to you and novels are made up stories? While you’re correct on both counts, contemporary fiction has defined the structure of the story that is seen today in both films and books. (Or it could be vice versa, film has refined a structure that’s become commonplace in novels). This story structure is embedded in our culture and our thinking and raises readers expectations concerning the stories they enjoy.

Memoir storytelling structure

The memoir is an exceedingly flexible storytelling form. It allows authors to shape their experiences into a narrative that fits their life. Today we have memoirs in so many different categories: coming of age, sickness, near death, school experiences, sexual experiences, spiritual experiences, career achievement, business, adventure, and politics are among the most popular. One thing they all have in common is that the author lives through a series of events that produced some type of transformation over time. Good or bad. Positive or negative.

Readers have expectations when it comes to the stories they read. They know something is not only going to happen, but they expect it to occur in certain patterns. They read for the excitement of some kind of transformation, of a victory, of romance, or a family relationship rekindled, of escape, a breakthrough, or a business success. Readers expectations have been nurtured and satisfied through a wide range of stories told by people from every conceivable walk of life. Those who can turn their lifetime experiences into a closely woven narrative that keeps readers turning the pages have a potential for a wider success among a wider audience of readers. Publishers call these stories that have a larger appeal commercial memoirs because they have a broad appeal. This allows publishers to promote them through the same channels they use to break out the best-selling fiction. So, I believe, the proper story structure is vital to the commercial success of your memoir.

Biographies versus Memoirs

Story structure is one of the main features that differentiates memoirs from biographies. Biographies are a comprehensive telling of a life story. A biography is an entire life story, rich in factual detail, plumbing the depths and details of the author’s achievements and dealings, with a fastidious attention to the correct chronology and timeline of the person’s life and events. They focus on the accurate details with little attention to emotion and theme.

Memoirs, in turn, are built around a definable arc that typically encompasses a particular time or event in a person’s life. They are a slice of a person’s life, focused as much on the writer’s emotional reaction to a situation as they are about the facts of the situation. They are selective and thematically driven. As much as any story is a journey, well-written memoirs are a chronicle of one’s emotional journey through a challenging, dangerous, destructive, or otherwise difficult period of their lives. The space traveled in the story can run through deep emotional territory, maybe even some dark and sinister lands, and out into freedom and safety. Or it can take a person down from a height and back up again. The journey can have a positive or negative trajectory that leaves the reader as well as the writer in a new emotional state at the end of the story. This journey is called the story arc. All commercial memoirs have them. All commercial novels, even those labeled literary, have them, and all the books I write have them.

Story arcs in memoirs

A successful memoir is not about a funny episode, or an exciting life, or even a tragic event. Rather, it’s about how you, the author, managed to survive and thrive emotionally as well as physically as the result of the adversities in your life. It’s about how you changed. It’s about how you became the person you are. It’s about the journey to a better life. That’s called the positive change arc. There are two other major story arcs: The negative change arc and the flat arc. But in this article, I’m dealing only with the positive change arc as the centerpiece of memoir storytelling.

Let’s take a look at a few stellar examples.

 

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Published in 2010, this book became an instant bestseller. Then the book became a movie. This wasn’t just the luck of the draw. There are several excellent reasons for its commercial success as both a book and a movie, but among them, is one fact that stands out as you read the title. Read the title again, slowly. What do you notice? You’re right, the arc of the story, the author’s emotional journey, is embedded in the title.

Elizabeth Gilbert took a memoir category that has been extensively written on to the point of audience exhaustion—recovery from divorce—and combined it with another category, the travel memoir, to create a story of how she journeyed from depression, through a spiritual awakening, and rose again emotionally to find genuine and lasting love. I just summarized the book for you. This title is a publishers and movie producers dream.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a production company purchased the film rights to this book about ten minutes after it was published. Hollywood loves stories with strong positive story arcs. I will go even further: Every commercially successful feature film has a strong positive story arc such as Eat, Pray, Love. Or a flat story arc such as The Da Vinci Code.

The positive change arc details the emotional territory of the central character: the transformation—from grief to growth, from denial to depression to self-discovery, from brokenness to healing, from that one brilliant idea to a fledgling business to near-disaster to ultimate victory. Yes, I included business memoirs in here because not only are business memoirs an important category but because all business people have emotions. And when they open up and take us inside the turmoil of growing a business we find that most successful business people have a rich emotional life. And that building a business can be as intimate as raising children.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike Inc., is one of the most well-written and compelling page-turning business memoirs of all time. While the title doesn’t give us a comprehensive story arc as the previous memoir, it does tell us the territory we are going to traverse on Mr. Knight’s journey of change while he builds a shoe empire. Shoe Dog stands out in its category of business memoirs for its emotional honesty in dealing with disaster. So many times he stood on the precipice of failure, but always found a way to manage his emotions and his business, and to grow as a person and businessman.

I’ll help you discover the arc of your story

As a memoir ghostwriter, when I take on a new client, I never ask them to make up events and details. No one I’ve ever talked to needed to do that. Rather, I help them walk through their memories so we can define the arc of their story. Maybe you’re surprised at that. Wouldn’t people know their own stories and what they mean? I doubt that. You know what happened to you, but you may not have a full grasp or are able to articulate exactly what those events mean. And that is the essence of a story arc—emotional truth. I help authors, as a memoir ghostwriter, to reach down and summon the emotional truth of their story. That’s what makes a compelling story, one people have to finish and pass along to their friends.

If you’d like to know more about realizing your dream of writing an outstanding memoir, contact me. I’d love to speak to you about your story. jrd@johndesimone.com