How to Jumpstart Your Memoir the Low-Stakes Way, with Amity Reed & Paul Zakrzewski

01/17/24 • 22 min

Why would anyone want to jumpstart their memoir? For one thing, you’re tasked with plumbing your memory for sometimes difficult material. Added to that is the burden of turning out writing that often feels underwhelming—so much less than we know we can do. For recovering perfectionists, the combination can be daunting.

In today’s episode of The Book I Had to Write, UK-based author Amity Reed and I discuss strategies for starting a book that we picked up at a recent generative memoir bootcamp led by writing coach Katie Bannon.

(Learn more about Katie Bannon by reading her post, 5 Reasons To Write Your Taboo Stories, or her reported essay, “I couldn’t stop pulling my hair, What was wrong with me?” published recently in the Washington Post).

We talk about the importance of staying in drafting mode, letting go of perfectionist tendencies, the benefit of doing plenty of “scaffolding” before writing, and embracing a flexible approach to structure. We also discuss the value of accountability and finding a writing practice that works for your schedule and temperament.

Amity Reed is an author and midwife. Her first book was called Overdue. It’s part memoir and part manifesto—a look at her experiences in maternity care in the UK. She’s currently working on a second book, also a memoir. She lives on the south coast of England with her husband and two children.

Some of our biggest insights and takeaways

Keep focusing on lower the stakes: In an episode two weeks ago, described being a “recovering perfectionist.” I can cop to that label too. In my case, it meant spending more than my fair share of time over the years writing and rewriting beginnings and then running out of time; or else not really getting to the things I most wanted to.

How ‘slowing down and letting go’ helps with perfectionism: Amity talks about how, at one point, she felt the need to have a perfectly polished sections before moving forward. But she realized this approach hindered her progress. One big transformation happened when she embraced the idea that writing a memoir is a long-term commitment, and that it will take time.

Scaffolding exercises really help—even if you haven’t written a word of your book. Katie’s generative memoir bootcamp was filled with exercises to help participants better understand the building blocks of literary memoir. We came up with character traits, sketched out possible narrative arcs, and developed a potential list of key scenes, among others.

One big takeaway from the week is that doing some planning work even at the beginning stages of drafting can be incredibly helpful in both sharpening the focus and creating more of an arc from the outset.

Your book’s structure is going to evolve...if you let it. In our conversation, Amity describes how, initially, she tried to force her writing into a predetermined structure. But she soon realized that it was constraining her creativity. With guidance from Katie Bannon, Amity explored alternative structures, drawing inspiration from art, poetry, and philosophy. She learned that the structure doesn't have to be explicitly spelled out for the reader but can be an implicit guide for her writing process.

Build in some accountability through co-writing groups and some kind of writing schedule. Accountability is crucial for writers, especially when working on a long-term project like a memoir. Amity says found support and accountability through Zoom writing groups that provided her with a place to share progress, set goals, and hold each other accountable.

As for me, I recently signed up for a co-writing “container”—a Zoom co-writing group, led by author , that meets three times a week for two hours over 12 weeks. It’s still early days, but I’ve found that knowing I have to show up at least those hours every week has allowed me to produce many more super-rough pages than I would’ve otherwise during a very busy time.

Further reading/discussed on the show

Overdue: Birth, burnout and a blueprint for a better NHS, by Amity Reed Bookshop (UK) | Amazon (UK)

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Some of our biggest insights and takeaways

Further reading/discussed on the show

Overdue: Birth, burnout and a blueprint for a better NHS, by Amity Reed Bookshop (UK) | Amazon (UK)

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Previous Episode

Brutalities: Crafting truth thru braided essays with Margo Steines

In this week’s episode of The Book I Had to Write, I talk with Margo Steines, the author of Brutalities: A Love Story.

This memoir-in-essays documents her journey through a series of extreme experiences including her time as a pro dom, a welder on a high-rise crew, her addictions to exercise, her interest in MMA fighting, and more.

We talk about her journey to discovering the power of the braided essay—in her case, a combination of memoir, essay, research, and reporting—that allowed her to write about several difficult experiencees “in conversation with one another.”

We also discuss other key issues for anyone engaged in memoir: about her commitment to truth in her writing, the challenges of self-exposure, finding confidence in one's writing, and how to write about difficult material without retraumatizing yourself.

Some of my biggest takeaways:

How pain can reveal an authentic self: The concept of pain and its role in self-discovery is a central theme in Brutalities. Steines explores her own fascination with physical extremes, such as her enthusiasm with MMA fighting and her dedication (bordering on addiction) to intense physical exercise, even (most difficult for me) an early fascination with being hit in the face.

I admired Steines’s approach to truth-telling in her work. In an author's note at the beginning of Brutalities, Steines described the challenges of writing memoir and the limitations of memory.

Writing about violence and physical extremes is hard work... Steines says mining her own experiences was emotionally and psychologically challenging.

...yet it was the emotional intimacy of her current relationship that proved even harder to render: “The parts that were the hardest to write were actually the memoir, interstitial pieces about my partner... It felt like it broke me open in a certain way,” she says.

Writing can be both a means of self-exposure and self-acceptance: “Once I tell the truth on the page, I can't redact it to myself anymore,” she says.

Steines’s needed the unconventional form of the braided essay to get closer to her own truth. She describes the braided essay as a hybrid of memoir, essay, cultural criticism, and immersion journalism. This form allows her to bring together multiple strands of thought and experience, creating resonance between seemingly unrelated ideas.

Speaking of structure, finding the final form for her book also proved challenging. Steines had to navigate the balance between narrative storytelling and idea exploration, ensuring that each essay contributed to the overall theme of the book.

As a teacher, one of her jobs is helping writers find a sense of agency in their own writing. She tells me she believes that writers already possess the resources they need within themselves and that her role as a teacher is to provide hard skills and belief in their own convictions.

Writing about trauma without retraumatizing oneself is key for writers of difficult personal material. She’ll be broaching that subject at an AWP panel this February. She acknowledges the importance of self-care and (somatic experiencing) therapy in navigating the emotional challenges.

Check out more of Margo Steines’s work

Buy Brutalities: A Love Story via Amazon | Bookshop | W.W. Norton

“Run Home,” The Sun, August 2023

“A Very Brutal Game,” The Sun, November 2020

“Depredations,” Brevity magazine, January 17, 2020

Show Credits

This episode was compiled by Paul Zakrzewski and produced by Magpie Audio Productions. Theme music is "The Stone Mansion" by BlueDot Productions.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this ...

Next Episode

What is the future of literary journals? with Travis Kurowski

Last fall, administrators at Gettysburg College announced the shuttering of the prestigious Gettysburg Review. This just seemed like the latest in a long string of magazines and journals that have closed the past few years.

Curious about what’s going on, I called Travis Kurowski, a leading expert on literary magazines, to help me understand what was happening. Today’s podcast features the interview we recorded in the immediate aftermath of the news last October.

But, Kurowski, who has also appeared on CNN.com and elsewhere, was able to shed light on broader themes and trends. We discuss why an entire ecosphere of literary journals—supported for nearly 100 years by institutions of higher ed—may also be in deep trouble.

And we explore the ways in which recent tech has changed reading habits, and why that will continue to doom some journals, even as others are adapting themselves to stay relevant to 21st century literary culture.

This conversation is well worth listening to for anyone who wants to publish in—or is concerned about the well-being and future of—literary magazines and journals.

Some of my biggest takeaways from this interview

Outside prestige isn’t enough to save storied journals like The Gettysburg Review.

While many writers took to social media to point out that most of the world wouldn’t know about Gettysburg College if it wasn’t for the Review, that argument didn’t seem to matter much to administrators.

The problem was, rather, one of economics...and the readiness with which both college administrators and corporate interests are willing to cut arts funding.

As with pretty much every business in the world, the pandemic gutted operating revenues at Gettysburg; it has been running significant deficits recently—a $6.7 million deficit in 2021 alone.

When the college was looking for expense lines to cut, they focused on those (like the Review) which, they claimed, didn’tdirectly enhance student life.

That last argument is a highly dubious one, by the way. Plenty of students learned a ton about literary publishing thanks to helping to produce the Review over the years. But this is the story that the administrators told themselves and the rest of us.

The sustainability of literary journals—especially those connected with colleges and universities—feels more fragile than ever.

Literary journals have been associated with higher ed for almost a century. Often these journals were seen as prestige projects, aimed at enhancing the institutions beyond its walls—even as these journals were often subject to the vagaries of institutional budgets, priorities, and department allegiances.

"Literary journals have been on higher education campuses for...almost 100 years now...and sometimes they get cut from the budgets," Kurowski says.

The difference today? Higher ed is facing greater economic pressures than ever before. Bloated administrations and a major decrease in enrollments—what Kurowski calls “the cliff of 18-year-olds”—are shrinking budgets.

And with college and university budgets facing bleak prospects for the foreseeable future, the days of university-funded literary journals and similar prestige projects may be behind us.

Many literary journals haven’t adapted to the digital “literary economy”...and they’re getting left behind.

It won’t be news that the way we consume media has radically changed even in the span of a decade or two.

With the advent of the internet and mobile technology, readers have migrated, en masse, to the digital landscape.

And that has major implications for old-school print literary journals:

“You walk down any hallway, anywhere in your house, right? And we're just staring at their phones. We’re reading differently, we’re writing differently, we’re talking differently online. But our literary journals kind of look the same as they did 50 or 70 years ago,” Kurowski says.

By way of example, Kurowski points out that when he went to look at the Gettsyburg Review website to prep for our interview, he wasn’t able to click on any of the poems or short stories.

So it’s really necessary for journals to reassess how readers today (and beyond) are accessing their content.

Readers are no longer reading cover-to-cover...and journals need to embrace that change.

The problem goes beyond clickable websites. The very way we consume print magazines has profoundly shifted—something that publishing expertJane Friedmanhas...