Nonfiction Authors Podcast
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Nonfiction Authors Podcast
Cristen Iris: An editors tips on writing a compelling memoir
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In this top replay from 2022, Stephanie Chandler talks with editor Cristen Iris who gives memoirists valuable advice on storytelling structure, outlining, scenes, and other essentials for creating a truly compelling memoir.
Hi everyone. And welcome to the Nonfiction Authors Podcast I'm Carla king, your host. And today we're featuring one of our top replays from the archives. And this episode from 2022, Stephanie Chandler talks with editor, Cristen Iris, on how to write your compelling memoir. Find the transcript show notes and links at nonfiction authors, association.com. Enjoy the conversation.
Stephanie ChandlerHi everyone, and welcome to our interview series for the non-fiction Authors Association. I'm excited about our event today with Cristen Iris. We're gonna be talking about how to write your compelling memoir. I am your host, Stephanie Chandler. Appreciate you spending your time with us today. Cristen Iris is an award-winning ghost writer and developmental editor. Her clients have earned more than 55 book and writing awards bestseller rankings, including New York Times Publishers Weekly and Amazon charts, and nationally recognized media placements, including one being listed by Parade Magazine as one of the 24 best memoirs to read in 2020. As a result s oriented publishing professional, Kristin specializes in working with ambitious authors. She loves helping first time authors find their voice craft commercially viable books, and find the literary agent or publishing partners that are right for them. You can learn more about her over at CristenIris.com. That's CristenIris.com. Hey Cristen, thanks for joining me today.
Cristen IrisHey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about one of my favorite topics.
Stephanie ChandlerI know this is definitely in your ideal wheelhouse and I'm so thrilled to talk to you about this. I wanted to start, cause I think a lot of people don't understand there's a difference between memoir and autobiography. Can you explain what that is?
Cristen IrisSure, yeah. It's confusing too because people use them interchangeably, even within the industry. But basically, I like to think about an autobiography as something that typically is going to cover someone's life from the time they were born until the time they're ending writing the book versus memoir, which typically is gonna cover a limited period of an author's life. So if you just think about it. To me, the scope is what tends to be the defining characteristic, one or the other.
Stephanie ChandlerI love that. And the way I think about it are like the memoir writers who've written multiple memoirs like you would think, why would you write multiple memoirs? Will you have different events in your life? And typically a memoir is built around an event or an experience, right? Yeah.
Cristen IrisAnd I also like to think about it, especially for people who are new to the industry as in typically celebrity. Memoir, that kind of thing. We call it celebrity memoir, but it's most often autobiography and we're, we are going to search for that because we are interested in that person. So we are searching for the author and reading the book because we want to learn more about their life. Where memoir is more that we are interested in the topic, not so much the author themselves. The author is really just the avatar for the reader in memoir is another way to think about it.
Stephanie ChandlerOoh. I love that description because I think a lot of writers think I've had this interesting life. Why wouldn't somebody wanna read it from beginning to end? And that may be true, but if you're not on your own reality show or not starring in television or movies or sports person. It just doesn't have that appeal, which is why you have to find a hook in the story of your memoir. So that's a good dovetail into my next question for you, which is, what are some elements of a well-written memoir?
Cristen IrisIt really has to have a clear, beginning, middle, and end, and a story that's defined by personal growth or change. So if we think about that, it's gonna have a positive story arc. So in the end, it's the reader that wins in the end. And the other thing that first time memoirs often miss, and I think it's not purposeful, it's just they have to find their groove is pacing and emotional vulnerability that keeps the reader engaged. That's really a critical component because it can be a story that's similar to other people's stories. So there might not be necessarily anything wowy about the topic, but if the emotional vulnerability is there and the pacing is really good, people will stay engaged.
Stephanie ChandlerThat is such a great perspective. I think back to Glennon Doyle's memoir Love Warrior, which was about her struggling to basically save her marriage. And when I read it, I felt like I was looking behind the curtains of a marriage, almost reading details that it were uncomfortable to read because they were so real. And I think to, to my perspective has always been that is what makes a memoir just consume you when you're getting the good, the bad, and the ugly. The stuff that she probably didn't wanna write, but she did it anyway.
Cristen IrisYes. It reading memoir is a bit. Voyeuristic in a way. But it makes us feel connected to the author because they're telling us things that we would probably never be able to admit out loud. So through the strength that they show and being vulnerable, it gives us strength and ideas for making decisions about our own lives.
Stephanie ChandlerI love that and it gives us a reason to wanna tell people about it. That book moved me. I really felt for the author, I felt for this story. I could relate to that in some way, that's the power of vulnerability.
Cristen IrisAnd I think one thing too that stands out is making sure that the author knows the difference between situation and story. So situation is the stuff that's happening around you, and then the story is what's happening in you. So the best memoirs have the compelling conflict on the outside and the compelling conflict that's going on inside the author.
Stephanie ChandlerWonderful, wonderful. Perspective. So what are some challenges that you see new writers struggling with and maybe some suggestions for overcoming those?
Cristen IrisSure. I think there's two main ones that, one is not knowing where to start their story and also not knowing where to end it. So I think this is really why most or many would be memoirists end up writing autobiographies because it's so much easier. To just start at the natural beginning and then just write it until you have no more room to write because you're sitting in the chair. And I think that the problem with this approach is it really makes for a long and boring book. The solution is to study storytelling from a novelist or screenwriter's perspective because the emphasis there is on structure, and I'm sure we'll talk about that later, but, The second thing then is, okay, if you figure out where you're gonna start and where you're gonna end, not knowing what to include and exclude between those points. So my rule of thumb is if you can't write it as a scene, you should leave it out because first time authors tend to default to talking about the situation or about what they were feeling and thinking. So if we think about it sometimes I'll say, okay, write a scene. And then if you handed that scene to a group of actors, would they be able to act that out in a way that the uninitiated audience would know what was going on in that moment? So that's a rule of thumb to keep in mind and that. It goes to structure. So some of this will make sense the further we get into the conversation, I'm sure.
Stephanie ChandlerNo, I love that. And I'm thinking about just, I've taken some courses as well. I have yet to complete a memoir, but from what I've learned I love to remind myself if it doesn't advance the story in some way, it doesn't belong there.
Cristen IrisAbsolutely.
Stephanie ChandlerAnd that's so tempting to throw in the whole kitchen sink and then we went to my grandma's house and then we did this, and then we did that. But if it doesn't relate to the story or the characters. Because your memoir has characters too. So these are all important details of you paying attention to.
Cristen IrisYeah. Sometimes I have to point something out to a client and say, You're moving me through time and space, but you're not telling me the story. So if it's just that you're filling the gaps because you feel like you have to walk the reader through everything, single step along the way, then you're missing you're missing the point of memoir. It's, the point is to pull out all that boring stuff and package it into a tighter story.
Stephanie ChandlerYeah. Less is more. So I am such a firm believer in an outline, no matter what kind of book you're writing, how do you recommend men coming up with an outline for a memoir?
Cristen IrisYeah. It's funny that you would say less is more because that's like the perfect segue. I'm with you. Structure is story as they say. So the very first thing that I do is define the scope. So always start with a word count limit. And I have just come to the arbitrary limit of 60,000 words. And then, so your final word count might be a little bit higher than that. It might be a little bit lower, but the point is that constraints foster creativity. So then the second thing I do is set a scene count limit. So this, I typically do between 40 and 50 scenes and readers, or sometimes memoirs aren't versed on like the way novelists talk about writing. So a scene is a mini story. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And again, I think I mentioned if you hand that to an actor, A group of actors, they should be able to act it out. So the third thing there, if you keep those things in mind, is start thinking about key events in your life that's related to the topic of your memoir. And then what I like to do is jot those things down on index cards or sticky notes. Just as an example, I'll use Clayton Moore's memoir that you and I of course, had the pleasure of working on last year that was published by authority. The what we did there was we knew, so that memoir is about his experience as a black police officer and about discrimination. So we knew that the critical moment of that story was when he got fired. So we started with that scene. So then of course, Thinking about, okay, if you get fired, you got hired for a job, right? So a scene had to be where he got hired as a police officer, but. He didn't aspire to be a police officer since he was a little kid, so we also added the scene where he learned about the job opening. So you can see if you start to recognize like, oh, there we go. We have the critical moment of that story when he got fired. And then we have what in other forms of storytelling is the inciting incident, which would be when he was presented with this opportunity to go and work for the police force. So then we were able to say, okay, what are some other critical moments in this story? High points in the career, low points, all of those things. And what you do is as you're writing these things down on index cards, sticky notes, you're starting to collect your scenes. And by choosing those pivotal moments, Those are gonna be moments where you're gonna capture the reader's attention if you've lost them a little bit. These are just pivotal moments. So then you can start, I like to do five to seven, but what happens is, as you're starting to write those, You'll realize, oh, if I have this one, I also have to set that up. So that's gonna need a companion scene over here. So you're gonna start to build your collection of scenes. And then I like to have a big space, like a floor or a wall. If you're doing sticky notes, a wall is great. Index cards on the floor, start to lay those cards out. In the order that they would be in the book. And just notice where those bigger moments are and you're gonna start to see the structure of the story. Kind of like when a house is built, you can see the structure of the house before the finish work. So those pivotal moments are like your load-bearing walls and then, You're going to see, oh wow, I have this big gap between this moment and this moment. And you're gonna start to fill that in. And by the time you're done with that process, you're gonna have, probably all of the scenes that you need and you can start to see, oh wow, I have 10 scenes in a row where basically I'm talking about the same thing. Or it's just like you said before, just plotting through life. Then you pull those, put 'em in the shredder, come up with other scenes, and I like that cause it's just, you have that nice package in the book and you can work it around without sitting at your computer.
Stephanie ChandlerI just got so excited over this because Cristen, I've been doing this publishing thing for a very long time and it's so rare that I hear something new that I've never heard anybody refer to the stories in your memoir as individual scenes. I think that is, Freaking brilliant. So that is really great.
Cristen IrisAnd I'll follow up with the last kind of thing that I do with that outline, which is really not so much about the outline, but it's just part of my process is then I look and count up how many scenes there are. And so let's just say that there were 44 scenes. Arbitrarily. All right. You've got 44 scenes in your story. You've already captured your word count limit at 60,000. Do a little bit of math, which I know writers don't like to do math, but it's easy. You divide your 60,000 words by your 44 scenes, and then, you just have 1,360 words approximately for each scene. And so that is, Something that is completely manageable and you know it, it puts you in control cuz you see the whole picture from start to finish. You know exactly what you need to do and it's not overwhelming. It's bite-size pieces.
Stephanie ChandlerThat's fantastic because 1300 words is like three tight pages. That's so doable. Yeah. That's It's nothing. Yeah. Yeah.
Cristen IrisAnd then you forget about what you said about your word count. Limit, right? Because some scenes are gonna be a little bit less, some scenes are gonna have more words. That's just your guideline, but that's gonna keep you in a word count. That is, that respects your reader's time and attention for the book and won't be overwhelming for you to write.
Stephanie ChandlerI'm also thinking that there's shorter memoirs, right? So maybe you only come up with 30 scenes. Is that appropriate?
Cristen IrisAbsolutely. I am a big fan of shorter books. Why should a reader spend so much time on our story if we can package it in the tightest, most entertaining and entertaining. Doesn't necessarily need to be happy, sunshine and rainbows kind of thing, but just engaging. Give them that in a really tight package and they will love you for it, and they will recommend it to friends because especially people who aren't readers, they're much more apt to read a shorter book than a longer book.
Stephanie ChandlerYeah, that's been an industry trend for a few years. Now shorter books. And the one thing I hate to see happen is filler, right? Yes. There's no need to repeat things or just feel like you need to expand it to reach some magical word account.
Cristen IrisOh, absolutely. That annoys me so much. That's when I walk away rant on that for a while. We could lot words,
Stephanie Chandleroh that's when I put the book down because I don't have the attention span for that kind of stuff.
Cristen IrisAnd it's insulting to your reader's intelligence. If you're telling me a good story and you're keeping me engaged, I'm smart enough to keep up, keep pace with you. You don't have to repeat yourself. Yes. And then I'm I'm just flashing on opening scene cuz you said at the beginning. That's for some people, it's just hard to know where to start. What are your suggestions for choosing your opening scene? I'm so glad you asked that. The best advice I've ever gotten is Michael Hague does six stage story structure. And he talks about opening the story with the status quo. So basically what that means is just open it with something that's a day in the life. So you're establishing like your normal things that are happening. And then. You're going to move into whatever that inciting incident was, whatever that critical moment was. So let's just say that just because books about cancer diagnosis are something that a lot of people talk about writing a memoir about, you would maybe just choose a scene of before you got the diagnosis just a regular everyday life. And that's an opportunity to introduce your readers to the people in your life that are important to you and that are gonna play another, a bigger role moving forward. So if that's a romantic partner or something like that, you could choose a scene where you were having some kind of a romantic connection. Just like a conversation or something like that, going on a vacation, a scene from a vacation, something like that. And then at some point after that, you get this diagnosis. So it establishes you in time and space and your. Your experience in life, your normal everyday experience, right before everything changes for you. And that's a way to just ease the reader into the book. It establishes some of the characters, some of the relationships, and then you can move on from there. And then you end the book in that new situation where you found your equilibrium on the other side of this experience that you're writing about.
Stephanie ChandlerAnd I just wanna clarify by that too, cuz scene to me a book should open with some sort of action. Yes. So it's not I love to sit at home and pet my dog and drink tea. So can you clarify what you mean by the opening scene?
Cristen IrisYeah. And that's where that, if you keep in mind that thing of, if I write this down and hand it to a group of actors, would they be able to act this out? And if the answer is no, it's not a scene. One example that people talk about is the Truman Show. That movie where the first scene is just him waking up, he's going through his normal routine to get ready. He his. Neighbor's dog jumps on him, he says Good morning to his neighbor, he goes to work. So it establishes a bunch of stuff about him. But it's action because there's movement and there's dialogue and those kinds of things, but it's not action as in, jumping and spinning and kicking. Is that helpful?
Stephanie ChandlerYeah, that, I think that's really helpful. The other challenge I think for a lot of writers is just getting the manuscript done right? Getting your butt in a chair and getting it written. What tips do you have for that?
Cristen IrisSure. I'm sure this is part of why you like an outline as well. If you have that good outline and if you notice like all of the things that I talked about in that process. Were things that are not in the chair. You're not having to sit in front of a computer looking at a blank screen. Once you have all that, you can just transfer it into your word or pages, whatever you're writing in. And a lot of the writing is almost done, right? So then you just fill in the scenes from there. I think the reason that authors have a hard time finishing is because they don't have the structure when they sit down, they don't know exactly what they need to accomplish for the day and what the, I get to check the box and say, I'm done for the day's task is. So if they follow that process, they're going to have that. And then I think the other thing is that maybe they're not sure that their book is something that's going to be important enough to spend all that time and energy on. And I, I actually think that's a really important thing to examine. The people who finish their books in my experience and get them out into the market are people who know. They have a very clear vision for what they want this book to do in the world, and they have a burning desire to serve a specific audience, and that audience is eager to hear what they have to say. So that might be a little discouraging for some reason, readers, but I think if they just go back and say, oh, okay. If I find the audience for the book first, then it's a lot. More fun to write to know that when you're gonna have this gift to give them that they're waiting to receive when you're done.
Stephanie ChandlerOh, I wish every writer would think about their audience before they do anything. Cuz it's never everybody. I just threw my pen. I got so excited. Yeah. It's never everybody, but it informs how you write. Yeah. How you set up all of your marketing and your copy and your, it's just dictates the whole process.
Cristen IrisAbsolutely. And that is critical in memoir, and I think most especially first time memoirs think that the story is about them and it actually isn't. It's about their reader.
Stephanie ChandlerOh, Cristen, I wanna talk to you all day. This is so interesting. The time goes so darn fast. Can you share with us, do you have any memoirs that you really love that you think are good examples of good memoirs?
Cristen IrisYeah, there are so many. I'm just going to talk about a couple that are in my interests. So one thing I would say is read books that read memoirs that are around your topic. So you can see what others have done. One of my favorites is called the Perfect Predator: A scientist races to stave her husband from a deadly superbug. So this is memoir, but it's also a medical thriller. So you can see how memoirs can do several different things. Forgive me for plugging one of the projects that I've worked on, but I think it's good if readers think about if they are interested in this book and then they can think about this conversation. And study the book, the structure. It's called Gone, A Memoir of Love, Body, and Taking Back my Life by a physician who became a triple amputee while she was doing her residency. It's about how that happened. She went through rehab and then went on to have a multi-decade career in medicine. And then of course we talked about good cop, black cop, guilty until proven innocent. This one is an interesting read for people who are weaving a memoir that also has some cultural commentary in it so that this one has more threads than many memoirs. And then on the Celebrity.
Stephanie ChandlerThat one by the way, is by Clayton Moore.
Cristen IrisSorry, I should have mentioned that. Celebrity memoir. I really like Brian Cranston's A Life In Parts and most people know him as the star of Breaking Bad. And if you look through this one, you can see how all of his scenes and sections are labeled as a different character. So he is in the structure of the book, it reflects his actor persona and the topic of the book. So I think it's just brilliant. And then you can start to see, oh, this is how other memoirs are doing it. And oh, what a great idea. How could I take this element that. In Brian Cranston's structure and morph that into mine to make my memoir stand out and have almost like a fingerprint. In, built into the structure. Does that make sense?
Stephanie ChandlerIt does. That's so cool. Great recommendations. Cristen, I, like I said, I wish I could talk to you all day. I think this is so fascinating. Tell our listeners about the services you offer and then we're how they can connect with you.
Cristen IrisSure. I'm a ghost writer and book collaborator and developmental editor. And the best way to learn more about what I do or to connect with me is really just through my website, and that's Cristen iris.com, spelled CristenIris.com.
Stephanie ChandlerAnd I'm biased because we worked together on many projects over the years, but I think you're amazing. And I'm also, I got to work with you on Clayton Moore's Good Cop, Black Cop one of my favorite book projects I've ever been part of. Bravo to you. Cristen. Thank you so much for being my guest today.
Cristen IrisThank you. It's always a pleasure to talk to you and work with you and, yeah, it's been so much fun. And thank you for letting me talk about one of my favorite topics.
Stephanie ChandlerTotally. This was great, and thank you to all of our listeners for joining us. I hope you have a marvelous day.
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