✏️🛠️ 3 Essential Steps for Getting Started With Writing Your Memoir
If you’re committed to writing your life story but not sure how to approach it, here’s a mini guide to getting things off the ground.
If you loved Kern Carter’s moving memoir story that we sent out this past Saturday and it got you thinking about writing your own memoir, well… you’re in luck. Kern is back to teach one of our bestselling Narratively Academy classes later this month, Telling Your Story: The 90-Minute Seminar for Kickstarting Your Memoir. Kern was gracious enough to give us all this mini lesson covering three essential steps to keep in mind while writing your memoir. Whether or not you’re signed up for the class, Kern’s quick video below will help you get set on the path to starting (and finishing!) your memoir.
Inspired? You can still sign up for Kern’s seminar, The 90-Minute Seminar for Kickstarting Your Memoir, which takes place on Thursday, January 23. In this fun, fast-paced session, Kern will teach you how to find your voice, identify the parts of your life worth sharing and ensure that your memoir connects emotionally with readers. Head here to sign up.
This piece was originally published on February 6, 2024.
It feels rather futile to me to write a memoir because publishers tend only to be interested in publishing memoirs of well-known people.
I attended a nonfiction publishing presentation by a book agent who said that, although publishers, editors and agents generally deny that it is true, there's an unspoken "rule" that most publishers only will consider manuscripts by authors who have a minimum of 20,000 followers on any given social media platform. She said that this applies regardless of a person's writing ability, the value of their content or story, or their expertise. She suggested that before writing a memoir especially, any aspiring memoirist should focus first on building an online following, and she said that Instagram is the preferred platform for book publishers.
I found a community and a following of about 13,000 people on TikTok over the past year—and TikTok is going to be banned within five days, so there goes that.
While publishing is obviously a business with the goal of making profits, it's discouraging that the value of any author today is equivalent to their online celebrity status, and that online following generally has to be built on platforms owned by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom have weaponized their social media platforms against democratic values and against LGBT people.
Where does this leave LGBT voices?