In response to a Twitter discussion this morning, I thought I might try to jot down some of my ideas around writing a memoir proposal, partly because I wrote one that caught the attention of a publisher, and partly also because I then taught a course on it…  but mostly because I am venturing into this tricky subject again with a new book – and it doesn’t get any easier! So let’s start with this question: How do I whittle my personal narrative down to a USP – a unique selling point? This kind of encapsulates the stress of the whole procedure! But as I responded to a tweet this morning, it helps me to think about how my agent is going to pitch my memoir to an editor who knows nothing about me and has no real desire to know anything about me (unless I have 24K followers on insta), who then has to pitch my idea to a room full of people who have even less interest in me and simply just need to sell books to justify their salary.

Memoir is a bit of an anomaly in the publishing world because it is categorised as nonfiction, therefore generally sold on proposal. This is an approximate 50-page document, which will capture the idea – or concept, the central themes of the book, place it in its marketplace, demonstrate why this writer needs to be the person to write this book; and why this book needs to be published now! This will include an outline, a chapter breakdown and up to three sample chapters to show that this writer can write, and hopefully write well. This document relies very much on the narrative being concept-driven, with themes strong enough to ping off the page. Something that an editor can see having universal appeal. In other words, not just the story of somebody’s life. And yet many memoirs are written like novels, concerned with character, suspense, action and a narrative arc, and can be equally enigmatic. So how do we marry the two? And what if we haven’t yet pinned down the main drive of the story, let alone worked out how to bring that story upfront to compete for attention from the slush pile?

What makes it even more difficult is that editors and agents have likely read many hundreds or thousands of proposals in their time, so they are looking for something they haven’t seen before. Perhaps that’s an extremely niche subject matter, something topical, an unusual setting, a different form, or a distinctive voice. Whatever the “newness”, it has to be apparent in the proposal’s opening. Agents and editors will be making a decision on whether to read from the first couple of pages (maybe even the first couple of paragraphs and overall first impression), so getting to the action too late might mean it is not seen at all. My brother, who is an agent, encourages writers to upload everything – from the subject line of the email, to the email’s first paragraph, before they have even started on the proposal!

Here is a short extract from a blog post that was written by Fiona McCrae, editor at Graywolf, an interesting US press who publishes a lot of really good memoir (Carmen Maria Machado’s, In the Dream House among them). She’s talking about opening paragraphs of novels she reads on submission, but what she says here can easily be applied to a proposal:

‘Bad opening pages are all alike—that’s what makes them bad, after all—there is a sameness to them: too many adjectives, clunky sentences, and clichés combine to create insurmountable dullness. Great opening pages, however, are all unlike, and my favorite ones nearly always contain a surprise. The surprise often does not come from language that is forced and straining to impress, but can spring from quite simple phrasing, which nonetheless signals something quite dramatic. Think of Orwell’s clocks striking thirteen at the beginning of 1984, for example.’

The agent or editor will generally read the proposal before she reads your three chapters, so whatever is striking about those chapters, needs to be reflected in the first pages of the pitch – no one said this was going to be easy!

So how do I condense this big project I have been working on and sell it to the best of my ability in not so many words? This is all about first impressions – can we gather what the story is about, and get a sense of its tone from those first few paragraphs?

Memoir proposals come in all shapes and sizes. There is no one rule. The most successful proposal should have an element of its author’s personality threaded through it. It might have photographs – particularly nice if it’s a family memoir – it might start with a kind of introduction, or a prologue – or an overview of the story, its themes and the reasons why you are the right writer for the job, and why people might be interested in reading it. Think of this document as a way to not only sell your idea to an agent, but also as a way to give your agent the right information she needs to succinctly sell it to an editor, who will have to convince her team of editors and marketers that it is a sellable viable book. Those people then have to sell it to the bookshops, and so the more well thought through and pithy the paragraphs capturing what you are writing about – the better.

This is how I structured my proposal for Sins of My Father (due to be published by W&N 17^th March).

CONTENTS

• Overview
• Market Profile
• The Author
• Chapter Breakdown
• First Three Chapters and Prologue: The Scam; Hope; Adultery

My proposal was not a typical nonfiction proposal, partly because it is a literary memoir that is written more like a novel and therefore I found the prospect of writing a proposal quite daunting! The chapter breakdown section is brief because at the point of writing the proposal I hadn’t got beyond the three-chapter mark of my final draft. I had a sense of the story, but had not yet worked out the defining themes/subjects of each chapter. (Although I did in the end get away with quite brief summaries.) I did however concentrate on getting the first three chapters of the memoir as good as I was able, to compensate. So I suppose my proposal is more similar to a novel submission – which would be weighted more towards the writing itself rather than a strong nonfiction plot. It’s interesting to note here that with this proposal I landed an agent, and the interest of an editor at W&N. But Jenny Lord, who was to become my editor, then worked on the pitch of the book before it was taken to acquisitions, so together we came up with a pithier couple of paragraphs to sell the book to her team. The themes in the proposal were quite wide ranging, and she felt I hadn’t quite nailed the main drive of the story.

A little on structure:

Let’s backtrack a little with this question: ‘how do I structure my memoir?’ with the caveat that this is a very difficult question to answer. It’s a little like asking, ‘how do I determine the path of my life?’ You just can’t, and there is a certain element of abandonment involved in writing a memoir – you need to give in to the process a little more than you might if writing a novel.

Lisa Cooper Ellison writes in a recent blog post I read,

This is the more technical way of looking at it, but there are also plenty more enigmatic ways, too, as the writing of a memoir is still a bit of a mystery to me, and it’s giving in to this mysterious side which makes the writing process so exciting. I prefer the following definition:

“A good memoir requires two elements – one of art, the other of craft. The first element is integrity of intention. Memoir is the best search mechanism that writers are given. Memoir is how we try to make sense of who we are, who we once were, and what values and heritage shaped us. If a writer seriously embarks on that quest, readers will be nourished by the journey, bringing along many associations with quests of their own.

The other element is carpentry. Good memoirs are a careful act of construction. We think that an interesting life will simply fall into place on the page. It won’t. . . . . Memoir writers must manufacture a text, imposing a narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events. With that feat of manipulation they arrive at a truth that is theirs alone, not quite like that of anybody else who was present at the same events.”    – Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser

I would say that writing memoir is also about adding layers. The longer we stay with our material the deeper we can go; the deeper we go the more universal we become. Sound easy? It’s not!

I am going to leave you with these three questions to dwell on:

– What is at stake in this story? – Your story or someone else’s (if you are writing about someone else – ie, my memoir is about my father, but it’s still a memoir because it’s written very definitely through the lens of his daughter (me). So in my memoir, I had to come up with what was at stake in both our stories, and then find a way of weaving those narratives together). For my father, his sanity was at stake, actually his entire life, both threatened by his addiction. For me, my ability to live a normal life.

– Larger than life characters – have you painted yourself as richly as you might? What about other people in your story, friends, lovers, family members – do we see them in all their colour? Do you show both their good and their shadow sides?

– A strong dramatic question – what is this story about, and can you pin it to anything important that is happening in the world right now?

Good luck!