Category: Memoir (Page 3 of 3)

When we think of events where an author presents a new book, most of us picture a celebrity saying a few words to fans, people who have come to buy said book and have it signed by this great person—a famous and successful author.

Thanks to the recent opening up of publishing to include self-publishing and hybrid publishing, lots of people living on Whidbey Island have published books. Most of us are not famous, and if we’re at all successful, it’s usually not in publishing. Still we give book signings—at a bookstore, a library, a church, the home of a friend… These can be delightful, celebrative events, introducing the book and giving the new author a sense of being, truly, launched.

There are, however, some common-sense ground rules involved in a book signing, and in recent years, I’ve attended several where one and sometimes all of these guidelines were ignored. It makes the book signing, which could have been fun for everyone, a less than salubrious occasion.

And it’s so simple, really. It’s a matter of remembering that, when we’re not famous, those who come to celebrate our life events are not the general public but our friends and cohorts, many of the very same people who helped us put together this book.

Here are my ground rules.

• If a bookstore or library offers to host a book signing for you, the first thing you need to do, as the author, is to invite your friends—all of your friends—and not just by posting something in the newspaper or (for Whidbey) on Drew’s List but by personally contacting them. I remember one woman, an editing client, who had written and self-published a truly lovely book that was featured in an event at a local library—and who told not one single soul about that event. Four people came, including the library branch manager and myself.
• Prepare a few remarks about the process of writing or publishing your book. Often these events are called book readings because it’s expected that the author will read a bit from the text of the book. It is not, however, expected that the author will begin by reading from the book. You’re launching this book; you want to give it a context. People have come to hear you speak about your book. Why you wrote Why you published it. What you’re hoping they’ll get from reading it. Something. I will say just a bit more about this part of it. Even if you’re an accomplished speaker, you must actually prepare these remarks.
• After you write this out, go over it with a friend. Don’t think you can wing this by speaking extemporaneously. There’s something that can happen to the mind when you stand in front of a group, even a group of family and friends—perhaps especially a group of family and friends. You need a plan, and it helps if you allow yourself to have a few notes with you when you get up to speak. You are not going to read those notes to the people gathered, but if you have some notes, you can glance down at them when your mind goes blank. These notes will remind you of what you wanted to say. Then you look back up at the people in front of you and say it.
• Plan how you will thank the people who helped you. Again, think about this, and think about it carefully. This is why most Academy Award winners go to the mic with a piece of paper in their hand: they are in horror of forgetting to thank someone who helped to make their moment of triumph possible. A book signing is a time to be gracious and inclusive: the person who brought the flowers, the groups of people who provided food, people in the audience who may have critiqued your book, the person who was your editor. OK, so, as a professional editor, perhaps I, particularly, notice this—but when it’s done well, it’s wonderful. One author I worked with recognized me by name and function when I tried to slip into the back of his book event a few minutes late. Another author, whose editor was a friend of mine, called her editor up to the front with the book’s designer, thanked them, and presented them each with a bottle of wine.

This is all hard, I know, because once you’ve written the book, you’d like to think that the pressure is off, that you’ve already done the most important part. For a few weeks after I’d completed my memoir manuscript, I balked at the idea of talking about what was in the book. If people wanted to know, they could read it!

But you must do a little to entice them to read it. And why not? There’s so much you couldn’t say in the book itself, so much for people to know about the process of transforming a spark of an idea into a bound volume that readers can take home with them. Think of it as sharing information and acknowledging support.

At the end of an hour-long memoir coaching session, a woman seeking help to tell her unique personal story asked if she could record our next conversation. “There were pearls in this,” she said. “I didn’t get them all.” I told her I would record them in this blog and send her a link.

There is some basic guidance I’ve discovered in a lifetime of writing, and this is what I like to share with anyone whose fingers are poised, motionless, over a keyboard or a blank piece of paper.

• When you aren’t sure what write about next, make a list. Ask yourself what topics matter most to you. List them. Or, if it’s a particular time frame you need to cover, make a list of the events—inner and outer—that come to mind. You may have major writer’s block, but you can always write a list. And once you have the list…
• Pick one item as a place to begin writing. It may be the first or the first in a chronology, it may be the most intriguing, or perhaps it’s the one you find most annoying… Whatever your criterion turns out to be, if one item on the list presents itself as the place to begin, that’s where you’re to begin writing.
• Close your eyes, bring that event (topic, issue, question) to mind, and ask yourself, Where should I begin? Whatever comes up, write it down. If it’s an image, describe it. If it’s a conversation, record it. If it’s a historical perspective, explain it.

In this first session, it’s often useful to write what I like to call a blurt. Webster’s definition for blurt is “to say something suddenly and without thinking about how people will react.” Express that verb as an exercise, and you have yourself writing for a length of time without thinking about what you’re writing. You do this by not stopping. You write down whatever comes up, and you don’t stop writing. I repeat, you do not stop writing.

It’s quite a discipline, this. In memoir writing classes, I have people write blurts for no longer than five minutes at a time. What comes up is almost always surprising and often glorious. Actually, this is what I call writing: listening to the font of creative inspiration coming up from inside yourself and capturing that—as best you can—in words.

• Accept the words that come. We all live with an inner critic, masquerading as the Voice of Reason within us. I think this inner critic has value at times, but what I’m certain of is that it has no value when you’re writing. You can listen to this Voice of Reason when you go over a piece later, after you’ve done the writing, but while you’re actually writing it, ignore any criticism that may come up—that will come up, if you’re like most people. Just blot out That’s a really stupid way of putting it… Nobody’s interested in this much detail… He’s going to be furious about this… and keep on writing.

Most first drafts sound stupid as you write them. Readers are interested in the details—especially when these are details that come up spontaneously from the deeper recesses of a writer’s mind. And you don’t need to be concerned about anyone’s reaction to what you’re writing now; no one else need ever see it.

Writing is not like speaking. Once you have given physical, auditory voice to a thought, it lasts forever. If someone has heard you say this thing, then it can live for an eternity in that person’s mind. But even as pure sound itself, the vibrations of that sound never truly die; they just keep on reverberating in the universe, moving ever outward. I think twice before saying something, anything.

But when you write something down, you can cross it out later. You can delete it. By then you will have had a chance to see where that thought led you, explore the terrain, and decide if it’s a direction you want to take. This is a great luxury, a boon to self-exploration. By all means, give it to yourself.