autobiography

From Life Story to Memoir: The Rewrite

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 8 Comments

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A year and a half ago, I had completed my client’s story. It had started out with aspirations to being a memoir, turned down the highway toward autobiography, and ended up as life story. He was satisfied. We had a publisher. Soon, I thought, the project would be over. Ha!

I’ve relayed this story several times. Here I reference it to address the topic of rewriting a book. Not just revising. Rewriting. And it occurred to me this morning that what I had spent these last 16 months doing to my manuscript bore much resemblance to grappling with an unfinished manuscript, or even with a work in the germination phase. You’ve got dozens of gripping anecdotes. You’ve got a unique and workable angle and a clear theme(s). You might even have whole scenes and chapters written out. But how to organize it all? How to get at the point of it all? How to set the story soaring?

A recent post on fellow blogger Lisa Reiter’s Sharing the Story provided the impetus for me to finally write this post. Close to having a completed manuscript, she still struggles with key questions:

. . . ‘purpose’ is the biggest issue I feel I am grappling with. What is the purpose of my book? Who is my intended reader? And therefore where am I trying to end up? Answering these questions would help me jettison anything that is just background noise because writing this sort of memoir – one where the story is never quite over so long as I’m still living – could mean the writer makes the mistake of including everything that happened since survival.

This point in the road is precisely the juncture at which I found myself in February 2015. Like Lisa, I had a big theme; where her story is one of surviving cancer, my client’s is one of surviving early adversities to make it in the high-stakes world of neurosurgery. The problem was—as Lisa suggests in that last sentence above—that in the original manuscript I had included everything that had happened to my client over more than sixty years. Sure it was a hell of a story, but one that appealed at best to a handful of readers who knew or knew of my client. The key events were there, but they commanded no more page space than much smaller events. And what was the purpose? Indeed, what was the genre? Immigrant story? A tale of rags to riches? A life in medicine?

From Life Story to Memoir

I had had an inkling of the problem at the outset when my good friend, author, and grammarian Kathy Papajohn posed the question to me: Who is going to read this book? There are circles she explained to me, from intimate friends and family to readers interested in autobiography and memoir to those who look for a good story across genres. What is this book? WHY is this book? Who is your target market?

I was ill equipped to answer those questions in the beginning. I thought they would take care of themselves once I had 80,000 words. Indeed, I thought I could worry about overall structure during the revision phase. I didn’t know how else to tell the story but to get it all down. Such an encompassing process proved to be invaluable, but it also greatly extended the time it has taken for my client to get his story told.

Which brings me to late 2014. I was doing last revisions on the existing manuscript, and working towards eliminating unnecessary scenes and lines—what Lisa referred to as “background noise.” (I blogged about this process on my old site, Memoir Crafter.)  Soon after, everything changed when my client and I began working with an established agent/editor named Claire Gerus. After encouraging us to “stop the presses” with the first publisher, Claire immediately honed in on certain elements of the manuscript. Great medical anecdotes, she said. Engaging formative episodes in his youth. Fascinating stuff on his German roots. But his time coaching his kids in soccer? Boring. His first day of high school? Who cares? Then she told me the kind of book she saw in the manuscript, one that she felt she could represent: a medical memoir with brief but telling flashbacks to those important formative events.

How to Attack a Rewrite

It was almost harder to rewrite the manuscript than it would have been to start afresh. For starters, how to identify the key scenes? How to decide on a new starting point? Claire provided me with a couple of helpful exercises.

  • THE FIRST was to review the story and identify the important events:
    • What were the turning points?
    • Where did the protagonist experience a revelation or epiphany?
    • What dramatic moments moved the story forward?
    • What scenes showed the protagonist working through the important themes?
    • Which ones included key characters that served as friends or adversaries?
  • Then, Claire told me to break this list down into two columns: one showing the positive events that had supported my client’s journey toward self realization, and one listing the negative events or moments that had blocked the attainment of his goals or wishes.
  • Equipped with this list, I was now to block out a timeline where I interspersed these high/low events. This would create drama and tension in the narrative.
  • THE SECOND EXERCISE took my existing table of contents as a starting point. Using the list of positive and negative events, rethink the table of contents. Build the TOC from the combined list of high/supporting events and low/obstructing events.
  • Finally, identify a new starting point, not at “the beginning” but with a significant event, a major surgery for example.
    • Move forward from that point, using flashback as needed to fill in the narrative gaps and reveal and/or reflect on the formative experiences.

The high/low exercise encouraged me. I can do this, I thought. Just identify the events, slot them into roughly chronological order, and insert sections of the original manuscript. Bingo. The rewrite.

Then I attempted the second TOC exercise. My efforts fell flat. I could not get away from my original chronological sequence. I ended up at least five or six chapter titles in before I got to a medical event, and that was only med school.

At the same time I was using Scrivener to rethink the structure and order of chapters. I moved the entire manuscript back into Scrivener, divided by chapter and scene. I experimented with moving the chapters around. I axed scenes I judged to be irrelevant. Most times I felt more muddled than ever. What I was doing was avoiding the real REWRITE. I hoped to slide by with a little shuffling and sleight of hand.

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Using Mary Carroll Moore’s “W” structure with the high low points of the story. The bottom diagram shows the chapters inserted into the “W.”

Book Proposal as Guide to the Rewrite

In February Claire suggested a new approach. I didn’t have to have a completed manuscript, she said. The story was solid. Hold off on rewriting the manuscript. We could sell the idea to a publisher with a book proposal. Focus on a few crucial things, Claire said:

  • Rework, yet again, that new TOC with compelling chapter titles;
  • Do a knock-out sample chapter that shows the doctor at the top of his game;
  • Come up with a succinct title and subtitle that will grab attention and signal what the book is about;
  • Create an overview of the book, snagging the editor with a description of a dramatic scene and summarizing the main events and themes;
  • Throughout, focus on the editor not the imagined reader. Make each sentence crystal clear. Use powerful language that reflects the book’s uniqueness and appeal (“high-stakes”; “groundbreaking”; “game changer”; “pioneering”) and which in turn signals the main theme(s).
    • Remember, Claire said, editors want to see hard-hitting specific content that readers can get excited about.

So, that was the beginning. Those first sections of a traditional book proposal—overview, TOC, and sample chapter—set me on a track that over an entire year led me to the skeleton of my rewrite.

I will expand on this topic in my next post: The Book Proposal: Pinpointing Purpose and Readership, and show how for me, the proposal pulled me up from pantsing mode to outline mode—and gave me the structure I needed to make real headway.

What about you? How have you dealt with the task of organizing your manuscript? Of deciding which elements to include and which to leave out? What tools have you used to gain more control over the process?

 

 

From Autobiography to Memoir

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 8 Comments

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So, what about that book you were ghostwriting?  I hear that a lot from friends I haven’t seen in a while. After all, it’s been three years. And it’s true that at times I feel like I’ve been sucked into a black, bottomless hole, or tossed upon some steep Sisyphean slope the peak of which I will never reach. Then again, what did I expect? It’s a book not a sandwich. A book doesn’t have a clear blueprint, or at least if it does (an outline), it is one that has the unnerving habit of morphing even while you are adhering to it fanatically.

The Decision to Jump the Genre Track

I punched out the first version of the book in a year. It was a straightforward life story beginning in childhood and ending with the author’s retirement and reflections on his life and career. I had, as William Zinsser put it in his acclaimed guide, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, imposed “narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events.” Several readers responded favorably, but these were mostly swayed by their fondness for either the author or myself. Then something happened to change our trajectory. (Long and complicated story there, one I wrote about in July.) Brakes were applied to the publishing schedule. Acting on the suggestions of a professional publicist and editor, my client and I pulled back to explore a more commercial version of the story in the form of a medical memoir.

Steps to a Genre Metamorphosis

At that time, I think I had some vague notion that I would be able to simply cut and paste my first autobiographical version into a cohesive new memoir. How wrong I was. What was needed was a complete overhaul. I would have to jettison parts of the book I (and more importantly my client) had loved, and if anecdotes or scenes did not support the memoir, out they would have to go. Following are the steps I have taken these last months in the process of transforming a life story to memoir.

  • Book-ending the narrative: A crucial distinction between an autobiography and a memoir is focus. According to Zinsser, a classic memoir recalls “a particular period and place in the writer’s life.” It is “a work of history, catching a distinctive moment in the life of both a person and a society.” Accordingly, I had to identify new starting and ending points to my story. This being a medical memoir, I would focus on the years my client worked at the top of his field, building the new narrative within strict bookends from the time his reputation took off to his retirement. While I didn’t want to completely abandon important events and key experiences that took place in his childhood or training, I had to find a way to incorporate them through flashback within the new truncated time frame.
  • Building a new chapter sequence: With a clear start and end point, I now went back to the original chapter sequence, pulling out the chapters that took place during this span, and using them to anchor the new narrative arc. Scrivener was helpful in this endeavor, allowing me to easily build the new structure by first importing all the chapters from the original manuscript into the binder of a new project, and then selecting from them to build a new sequence. However, since my client’s childhood and training had taken up nearly half the original book, I was left with only a dozen or so chapters that fit in the new time frame revolving around his career.
  • Identifying events in existing chapters from which to build new chapters: Now I had to explore the chapters that dealt with his career and identify material that I had given less importance to that could be the basis of complete new chapters. This has been tough but edifying . An author makes so many choices focusing on one anecdote here, eliminating another there. Guiding my search was of course the strictures of the medical theme. However, I had to be careful not to settle for “fluff,” minor episodes that did not have enough meat to expand into a real chapter but that I was tempted to use out of desperation to replace chapters I had dumped.
  • Integrating earlier key events through flashback:  A real challenge has been how to retain some really dramatic scenes that on the surface did not directly support the new focus. I could integrate key childhood experiences through flashbacks but only when they supported or related to something that was happening in the new present of the story. The flashback must also be triggered by something happening in the present; there had to be a reason the author reflected on his past when he did. While a number of acclaimed memoirs have served as a good model, I found myself dipping time and again into Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, to see how she accomplished such a seamless shift from the present (the hike on the Pacific Crest Trail) to various points in her past that pertained to and illuminated her struggle.
  • Identifying high and low points: This exercise was one of the first tasks the editor gave me, but it has turned out to be the cornerstone of my approach. Scanning the original manuscript (and working from memory) I created a table with two lists, one the high points/successes in my client’s life and the other the low points/failures/challenges. These I put in chronological order, then referred back to them as I built my new chapter sequence. Those that fit in the main narrative became, in many cases, the basis for a chapter. Those from earlier periods of his life could be included as flashbacks interspersed around the main action. The challenges in particular—and how the author dealt with them—reveal character and motivation, while the successes allow for a release from tension and provide variety and movement to the narration.

A Memoir Takes Form

This process has been slow and sometimes frustrating. Working with so much material (97,000 words in the original manuscript, as well as two dozen audio recordings) often feels like wading around in a flood grasping at flotsam as it floats by. And while I did get a good start on transforming the book into a memoir using the steps above, it was when my editor suggested I hold off on actually doing the rewrite and create a book proposal instead that the new book began to emerge in more clarity. I will be blogging about how creating a proposal expedites the actual writing of a book in an upcoming post.

 

 

The Ever-Extending Publishing Timeframe

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment

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The Book’s going to Be Published When?

It’s been nearly three years since I accepted the challenge of ghostwriting a life story for a client. Now, with numerous revisions and versions and one failed publication deal under my belt, I realize three grave mistakes that, had I avoided them, would have made my experience a little easier.

I wrote on my previous blog Memoir Crafter of an early difficulty I encountered in developing the structure of the story, that being the differing expectations of my client and his wife. My client simply wanted his “story to be heard.” His wife wanted a “legacy for the family.” So, what was this book going to be, autobiography or memoir?

With such a basic compass, by late 2013 I had produced a 97,000-word manuscript that my client was pleased with. It told his life story in a straightforward, chronological fashion, from postwar refugee to immigrant to renowned spinal neurosurgeon. I did a short (four months) agent search, got a dozen respectable rejections and one good bite from a New York agent, who also passed on it. All along, I kept hearing similar comments about the book’s genre being amorphous, and about the difficulty of publishing what was essentially an autobiography.

With a Little Help from My Friends (Sigh)

In stepped a good friend, a dear friend, a friend whose generosity knows no bounds. She suggested she push the book with the independent publisher for whom she edited mostly YA fiction, and with whom she had developed a close friendship. It wasn’t exactly the right kind of publisher, but it was one with a decent stable of authors. Time was passing. My client hungered for that physical manifestation of his story. On his approval, I relayed his acceptance of the publisher’s offer mid- 2014 and off we went. We were all set to hold book in hand by late 2014 or the spring of 2015.

While we were finalizing the contract and working with a designer on the cover of the book, the publisher recommended my client find a publicist. That was a ball out of left field, but I did a search and found what looked like a good one in New York. The publicist and I clicked over the phone. She read the entire manuscript (on her own time), provided suggestions for some broad edits, sketched out a proposal for a promotional campaign, and came to an agreement with my client. All that remained was to put the publicist in contact with whomever was going to handle promotion at the publisher. That, it turned out, would be my friend.

We’re Friends, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Things seemed to be moving along, but I was a little concerned. I had never even talked to the publisher, who, from the stories I had heard, seemed mercurial at times regarding her business. All I knew about her was that my friend had fallen into editing for her when my friend’s own book got picked up some years earlier. At various stages along the way my friend even seemed to be in a kind of mentoring relationship with this woman who was paying her to edit all submissions.

And, though she knew a great deal about “grassroots” efforts, promotion was not exactly a specialty of my friend’s. She had been feeding me guidelines for months on what to do for my client: set up readings at public libraries; contact local media and newspapers for interviews; hawk the book at book fairs, and a dozen other labor-intensive activities. But did she know how to work with a professional publicist? It was the publisher, after all, who recommended my client go that route. At any rate, I was relieved that my client was willing to invest in a publicist. The emails my friend was sending me about the process were so long they made my head spin.

At the end of the year,  I decided it was time to offload this piece of the project to the two parties concerned: the publicist and the publisher. I provided email addresses and phone numbers to all concerned: the publicist, the owner/publisher and my friend the editor.

Stop the Presses!

A few days later, I received a frantic voice mail from the publicist followed by an equally frantic email. Who was this publisher, she wanted to know. Who exactly was in charge of book promotion? She deemed the publisher a backwater start-up not far removed from a Print-On-Demand operation. She resented my poor friend’s suggestions, in the form of mammoth emails; she deemed them geared for do-it-yourself authors and entirely unsuitable for the professional she was . She felt my client’s book warranted something better. She could not work with this publisher. She highly recommended my client and I  back out of the contract.

Of course I had to relay this happy news to my client. And to my friend. My client was gracious about it, though he had to pay a fee for breaking the contract. My friend was gracious too, but had to deal with the disappointment of the publisher. The two of them eventually parted ways over it.

Silver Linings?

That took place at the end of 2014. It was a setback, but now we were free to move the whole process to a new, hopefully more commercial level. That began in earnest when the publicist recommended a professional editor to my client, who approved the next step.  I began to work with this editor in February.

So, where is the book at this point? In transition. That very first problem with genre never did go away. The editor sees an entirely different kind of book from the one I originally wrote. She wants to sell a straight medical memoir, not some hybrid of immigrant story cum medical memoir. The prospect of deconstructing the existing manuscript and, Frankenstein-like, creating a new creature from the necessary dismemberment, is both disheartening and galvanizing.

Stay tuned for notes and lessons learned from the major operation now underway!