How to Turn Your Blog Into a Published Memoir
Are you one of the 50 million bloggers who start or end each day by sharing a little piece of your life that’s then read by a loyal group of online followers? If you’ve been posting regularly for a year or longer, turning 300 words a day, there could very easily be enough material on your hard drive to create a 60 thousand word memoir. We’ve all heard about the savvy bloggers who have made this leap from blog to book. If taking your personal blog and turning it into a published memoir is a dream of yours, here are some concrete steps to help you realize it.
Choose a Topic of Interest to a Wide Readership
Every blog has a theme, and within that theme, there can be many different topics. Whatever your passion, the present readers of your blog undoubtedly share it. The question you then have to answer is how many other potential readers out there are there with the same burning interest. One way to find out is by consulting a search engine. Google Trends is a service that lets you search and compare how many people in the world are looking out a particular topic. Try putting in the key word for your theme and topic and seeing how many “hits” it gets. Obviously, more is better.
Choosing Blog Entries for Your Memoir
Some blogs that have become successful memoirs chronicled extraordinary experiences or achievements in a step by step, day by day manner. If you have hundreds—or thousands—of entries, what’s the best way to go about choosing? Any blog post that helps answer one of these questions should go on the file marked “yes” or “maybe.”
- Who were you before and how did this experience change you?
- What exactly happened?
- So what? This is where you reflect on the importance of your journey and lessons learned.
By answering these three questions you should arrive at the central storyline of your memoir. For example, a blogger who shared the story of a successful diet found her narrative through line in the emotional reserves—especially self-love—she had to uncover in order to meet her goal. One advantage bloggers have over memoir writers starting “from scratch” is the instant feedback provided by reader comments they’ve collected. Any blog entry that generated controversy and drew many comments must have resonated with readers for some particular reason. Think about what nerve you may have touched. It may lead you to a unique perspective on a common experience, or an aspect of character you can then highlight.
Flesh Out Characters
The engine that drives any story—fiction or nonfiction—is the driving motivation of its main character: in this case you. If you haven’t yet fully come to terms with what “drives you” this is another essential question to answer early in your memoir writing process. You may, for example, believe that your entire motivation in wanting to be a mother is that you’ve always loved children. But there may be a deeper drive at work. Perhaps you want to give your future child the love you never received growing up. If this is true, your memoir will be richer if you include childhood experiences that show how and why this need became part of you.
Getting Permissions
Telling a true life story, particularly when it involves family (as most do), can be a sensitive matter. You may make people unhappy by telling your version of the truth. To protect yourself and your relationships, you have a few options.
- Allow family members to read the completed draft of your book and ask them to sign a release form that permits you to use their names and incidents from their lives.
- If they object to certain things you’ve written, you can choose to change or delete the objectionable passages to keep peace and/or obtain a written release that permits you to use real peoples’ names and events from their lives.
- If you don’t want to make changes or ask for permissions, you can use pseudonyms and explain to readers that you are doing this to protect the privacy of those individuals in your life story.
Two people rarely remember events or conversations the same way. This is a fact of every memoirist’s life and work. Each writer has to wrestle with these issues in her own way.
Getting Published
A blogger with a measurable audience has a great advantage in the road to publishing. Nothing makes a publisher happier than hearing about the tens of thousands of unique users who visit an author’s blog daily, weekly or monthly. Beyond that leg up, you’re part of a large group of equally ambitious wannabe authors. Before you begin sending out your work, it’s highly valuable to join a writer’s group and trade manuscripts for feedback that will help you improve the finished product. Then, in order to get published, you’ll usually require having an agent. To get an agent’s attention, you’ll need to write your book of memoir, and then create a book proposal and a query letter to “sell it.”
Turning your blog into a memoir can be a rewarding and eye-opening experience. Good luck, and happy blogging!
by Victoria Costello, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Memoir
