Your Readers Are Out There

We’ve all heard big talkers include every detail and ramble, making their listeners work too hard. And we’ve all heard good storytellers, who make you eager to hear the next word.

Writers feel the presence of their readers.

If you’re already an easy talker, you may find that it’s not as easy to write–but you’re still half-way there. You may need to talk into a tape recorder and pull out the best parts when you listen to your recording.

If you’re shy in person, you may find that speaking to invisible readers frees you up. It sometimes helps to imagine one particular reader–an author you admire, a high-school English teacher, a loved one who has passed away, or your own grandchild grown up.

When I kept a diary as a child, I was conscious that I was writing for my future self. I even wrote, “Someday you will be grownup reading this and know what you like when you were child.”

Today, I don’t think of my future self when I write. I think of various readers in my life, and I remember the voices of other writers.

Your readers are out there, if you can feel them. Feeling your readers doesn’t mean you expect your book to be a best-seller. It means you care about the act of reading. If someone reads your written words, she’ll hear that you imagined her.

You can tell when someone is talking to you–or talking to themselves. It’s not all that different.

Why Write a Memoir?

Why do people write memoirs?

For the same reasons we gossip, go to movies, read fiction and biographies and memoirs, attend the theater, follow the lives of celebrities or get wrapped up in soap operas. Because we’re sociable! And when it comes to our own lives, we feel clearer-headed and happier when events that affected us deeply are refined into a story that we can share.

You may think your life isn’t worthy of a memoir unless you did something that has already put your name in the newspapers.

But there are all kinds of memoirs, and you can choose your kind. Write about your childhood, like Frank McCourt did so movingly in Angela’s Ashes. Write about your travels, as Elizabeth Gilbert did in Eat, Pray, Love. Write about a connection with a strong personality, as Lorna Kelly did in The Camel Knows the Way, which tells the story of her time with Mother Teresa. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith traced a murder in Girls of Tender Age.

Many memoirs are about illness, or coping with the illness of others in your life. You can write about the importance of friendships or siblings or a marriage.

In fact, if you write about seemingly unremarkable events in your voice–distilling your honesty, humor, insight or compassion-your book can be as inspiring or touching as a story about high drama. You can bond with readers, who like you, have not lived through extraordinary events, but the ordinary events that make life extraordinary.

Writing a memoir is an act of believing in yourself and the value of your life for others.

Perhaps you are haunted by a mistake–writing a memoir may be a confession, and a way to give readers the benefit of your regret.

Perhaps you are happy about your role in events you couldn’t reveal until now.

Perhaps you are perplexed about the role someone else played in your life and need to tell the stories so you can see past blame or shame.

The challenge is coaxing the story out. As you write, you will hear yourself think. Eventually you will decide what is most important, to you. One person’s version of events can be completely different in meaning and tone than another’s. Your story is yours.

A clear story has a theme, though it may be subtle. You will choose to include some details and leave others out. Much of your story’s impact will come from your choice of words, pacing, and statements about the world, as well as the twists and turns of circumstance.

People are most often drawn to memoir and autobiography in older age, when we have time for reflection and may want to leave a story for our children and grandchildren to read. If you write down your stories, they are not lost. They are not lost in your memory–you can reread them as long as you are alive. And it is very likely that someone in your family will read your book and keep it close at hand when you are gone.

In my own family, my grandmother’s memoir became very important to us after she died, and helped us sort out mysteries about her past. My mother died before my nephew Ben met his fiance–so she never met his beloved New York grandmum. His fiance has read her autobiographical play as a way of getting to know her.

A good therapist can help you work on a memoir, if you are facing pain or confusion. A writing group or class can be inspiring and provide structure to keep you on a work schedule. A sympathetic, talented professional editor can copy-edit, line-edit, or critique, applying writing skills that bring out your meaning and perfect your language, so you can communicate powerfully and clearly even if writing is relatively new for you. Writing about yourself can bring up all kinds of self-doubts. After all, you probably haven’t spent your life writing–you’ve been living the stories you will tell!

Do you want to be a published author? You can self-publish, find an agent or publisher–or simply, gladly, write for yourself.

How Much Should I Pay An Editor?

I’m glad so many people write for the love of storytelling and language. Editors are essential to make a book publishable and worth reading, but they can’t guarantee you sales or a profit.

The truth –and I’m not sure it’s a “sad truth”–is that most writers will not ultimately make money on their books.

So when you pay an editor, you are investing in yourself and the glorious enterprise of literature. You can think of your books as an entrepreneurial venture, with high odds to overcome, and see editing as part of the cost.

But it may not make sense to weigh the cost against a possible sale or profit some day. You will learn a great deal simply by seeing how another trained intelligent reader responds to your words.

I’d compare the cost to the price of paying for a therapist, a decorator, a tutor, a personal trainer, or anyone else who makes your life better.

Think about what you want. Do you want a directional edit–someone to look over the whole book at a high level and work with you on structure, pacing, plot, character (or authority and thoroughness for a non-fiction work)? Do you want a line-edit: an editor who will help you sentence by sentence, looking for readability, awkward phrasing, and consistency? A copy-editor to polish your manuscript before sending it to agents or self-publishing? Each of these types of edits will have a very different price attached.

The standard page is 250 words. Depending on what you’re looking for and how much work you need done, an editor could charge anywhere from $2 to $10 a page.

Remember that your friends and family can give you their reactions, which may be invaluable, but they already know you and will read the sound of your spoken voice and personality into the words on the page. Sometimes they’ll be too “nice” and hold back on negative feedback, or they’ll have their own ideas about what you should do and be too pushy. A professional editor is more objective. She will tell you frankly and clearly what she thinks but won’t overwhelm you. If she’s editing your sentences, she understands that you may accept some changes and not others. The process will bring you the sense that you’ve given your work your best shot, and have been heard and respected.

Also remember that everyone, including brilliant scholars, top journalists, literature professors and novelists with many books behind them, need an editor. If you’re a good writer, you need a better editor. The best writers need the best editors. I will do my best to live up to your work!