Top secrets of writing a memoir

Did you know that literary magazine Tin House receives 2,000 stories every month? Or that New York literary agents receive 10-12 queries per day? These are a few of the reality-check gems I picked up by watching the videotaped National Book Critics Circle panel “Secrets of Memoir” held recently at the NYU Bookstore.

The panel moderator, Susan Shapiro, is an NBCC board member and a knowledgeable, savvy and generous connector of people. Through her private classes and professorial teaching, she connects people who have no experience in publishing with those who have lots of it. This simple, slightly bolshy but effective formula has resulted in countless publication credits for her students, including book deals and now eight books of her own including the two memoirs Lighting Up and the forthcoming Unhooked. She moderates a “Secrets of Publishing” panel in addition to this one on the secrets of writing a memoir.

The panellists
The panel included Tin House editor Rob Spillman; Lindsay Harrison, author of Missing; Scribner’s editor Colin Harrison; Sheila McClear, author of The Last of the Live Nude Girls; WME literary agent Rebecca Oliver; literary agent Ryan Harbage (who represents Shapiro), and Publishers Weekly editor and author of Amore, Mark Rotella.

Their main points
For those who don’t have an hour and a half to spare, I have summarised the panel’s main points.

• In memoir, the authorial voice is everything. The panel members sounded like adjudicators at a vocal eisteddford, the way they kept going on about voice. Some comments: “Voice is what’s going to get the agent’s attention.” “Voice makes a huge difference, makes an ordinary story extraordinary.” “I’m looking for a voice that transports me, that elevates beyond the immediate experience.”
• Forget about trends in publishing or trying to tailor your memoir to a gimmick that seems to be in vogue. Lead times in book publishing are so slow, “by the time you see a trend, it’s over,” said one panellist.
• Memoir is a category that people in publishing love, and that agents love to represent.
• It’s increasingly difficult to sell a book based on a blog. In fact the majority of panellists agreed that giving content away for free online made them more skeptical about how they could sell any books resulting from the blog — a position that is tantamount to heresy in some social media circles.
• There was a lot of talk about the dreaded “platform”, which everyone seems to loathe but find impossible not to discuss. My conclusion was that aspiring memoirists do not necessarily need to spent years building an online following, that in fact it’s possible to develop a platform rather quickly (eg by getting a piece published in the “Modern Lives” column of the New York Times). So be alert but not alarmed.
• There is a lot of scope for what Colin Harrison described as the “repertorial memoir”, a first-person narrative in which we learn about or are introduced to a different world (whether it’s a place or an experience). “Memoir does not have to have a traumatic or familial arc,” he said.
• Try to get a chunk of your manuscript published as a stand-alone piece in a literary journal. Rob Spillman said that after every new issue of Tin House he fields calls from agents asking if authors featured in the issue have representation. He likened the small magazines to “sieves” that, even before agents, do a lot of filtering of unsolicited submissions.
• In terms of getting an agent, they work mostly on gut feeling and instinct.  It’s not fair, but it’s not going to change. Ryan Harbage said he usually knows by the end of the first page whether or not he wants to read more of your manuscript.
• One-page query emails are best. A short pitch that summarises the book, giving the reason why you have chosen to approach the agent, is best (such as an affinity with other authors the agent represents). Don’t send a query unless you have a proposal ready, and do your research to find the basic elements of a nonfiction book proposal.