You are the best person to tackle this project before handing it over to a professional editor.
If your memoir’s first draft is a mess, you’re doing something right. The “something” is that you’re getting it all down without worrying about the mechanics of good writing. You’re not thinking about punctuation and sentence structure and paragraph length. Of course, that means that when you finish that draft, you’ll have a lot of work ahead of you. But that’s true even if you’re careful to place commas properly and pay attention to the spellcheck cues. It’s called a first draft for a reason. It’s meant not to be published but to serve as a foundation for a well-written narrative.
When you complete it, you can do a quick read-through and hand over your manuscript to a professional editor. I don’t recommend it, not when your manuscript is still in its infancy. You won’t be happy, because the editor’s changes will be sweeping, and your writer’s voice will probably get “lost in translation.”
Try This Analogy
Think of a house remodel. You hire an interior designer who directs the work crew, room by room, to paint the walls, swap out the furniture, change the lighting, replace the flooring and update the appliances. You go to a hotel for a few weeks and return to find that the house may be more beautiful than ever, but it no longer feels like your home.
However, if you go through the house first and decide which wall colors, furniture, lights, appliances, rugs and tiling you want to change and how you want those changes to look, you’ll still be comfortable in the house for two reasons. First, you’re making the changes one at a time and not just seeing the shocking result. Second, of course, you’re the one making the big decisions.
You’ll still probably need a professional touch. So then you can have the decorator come in and add window treatments and wall art, reverse some of your less wise choices and suggest furniture placement to improve the flow of the house.
Substituting your memoir for your house, it’s best for you to decide on the early, major revisions. When the manuscript is in the best shape you can get it into, you can ask an editor to check for typical pitfalls and add that professional polish.
Go Through Your Memoir As a Reader Would
Your first post-completion read-through is probably the hardest one. Pick up your finished manuscript as if you’re a reader. You don’t know any back story, you have never visited the hometown described in the book, you have no idea how things will turn out.
Now that you’re not you, can you follow the book? Does it all make sense?
One of the most common mistakes I see memoir authors make is to forget that the reader knows nearly nothing. Authors jump around with a confusing time line, insert people without introducing who they are, reference obscure historical facts without explanation, or set the action against geography that they don’t fully describe. There are holes all over the place, and the book is too hard to follow for the reader to bother sticking with it.
Authors also make the opposite error and assume the reader is totally ignorant. Once you’ve identified Paul as your childhood friend or distinguished your sister Jane from your sister Judy by giving their ages, you can just call them by their names. You don’t have to remind readers every time you mention Paul by calling him your childhood friend Paul or always saying your older sister Jane or your younger sister Judy. If chapters have gone by since the initial identification, then one reminder is enough.
These are the types of big-picture mistakes that an editor can catch but not always correct. Only you have the knowledge to add a “how we got here” explanation that seems to be missing. Only you can spot a description of scenery that lacks the one thing that made you feel safe that day. Without it, the reader doesn’t pick up on your feeling of security. Only you can make a call to your mom’s brother to fill in the details of a pivotal day in her life that ended up impacting her instincts in mothering you.
As an ordinary reader, do you feel that you want to keep turning the pages? A funny thing happens when you read your own book as if you’re coming to the information for the first time. If the writing is good, it doesn’t matter that you know what comes next and how everything turns out. You still feel compelled to keep reading. Even if you’ve read that chapter six times, you want to keep reading it. So stay aware of whether you’re fully engaged throughout the book or you’re getting a little bored and your mind is wandering.
Picture Yourself After Your Memoir Is Published
Whether you’re writing only for friends and family or you want to see your book at the top of the best-seller list, read through it with your best interest in mind. Think about all of the information and personal emotions that you’re sharing. How will you feel when you’ve bared your heart, soul and brain and have to face the people who have read all of that?
Sometimes the writing process is cathartic, and that in itself is good enough. You may feel so much better that you just got it out. Maybe you don’t need the next step of having people read what you wrote. Before you wrote it out, perhaps you had strong feelings of revenge. You’ll tell what happened to you, and the people who harmed you in your life will be shamed. You’ll feel heard for the first time. But then after you write it, those vengeful feelings may subside. You may feel that you don’t want to relive those traumas anymore by having to talk about those sections of your book after it’s published. So you put it away without publishing; it was a writing exercise that helped you find closure.
Or you may want to keep each story intact while still deleting some of the details. That person who hurt you—does it benefit the reader’s experience to include so much background about the toxic person’s life? Instead of the five pages you’ve devoted, maybe you’ll decide to boil it down to a page. You want the reader to relate to you, and that will be less likely if you’re coming across as over-dramatic, whiny or vengeful.
How about all of those romantic details you shared? A romp down memory lane can be fun, but will you cringe when picturing other people reading this intimate information? How effectively do the details further the narrative or illustrate who you are? You might decide to omit some names or group several experiences into one description.
Memoir authors tend to worry that the people they write about will be angry at them. This is the time to really consider that. Do you want to keep those names in there or leave some out as unnamed characters? Or do you want to drop a story or two altogether?
And what about people who will be insulted that they weren’t named in your memoir? Even this is something to consider.
Be Disciplined and, if Necessary, Ruthless
Indulge, indulge, indulge. When you write, you can indulge yourself and write down your every thought, justify every feeling you’ve ever had. But once you put on the editor’s hat, “indulge” turns to “slash.” Just cross out a lot of that indulgence. You can sense it. You know in your heart that your book will be better without this story or that paragraph. Just be ruthless and cut it.
You don’t have to go into full-out destruction mode, though. You’re not in a 1940s movie, sitting at a typewriter and ripping out pages to tear them up and throw them all over the floor. You’re at a computer. Save your old drafts. It’s unlikely you’ll go back and reinsert passages you’ve deleted, but you never know. Writing is hard, and once you’ve done it you don’t want to have to do it over.
Now Go for the Small Things
As your own editor, you can take a turn at all of that punctuation and grammar stuff. Sentence fragments can be effective, but have you gone a little overboard on them? While true run-on sentences don’t belong in any published work, even if you make them grammatical by placing a conjunction like “and” or “but” after some comma, does that sentence really need to be five lines long? Chop it up.
Reading chapters at a time in one sitting and considering the book as a whole, you’ll notice things that you might not spot when you’re building the narrative at a rate of an hour or two a day. Maybe you’ll see that all of your sentences have the same structure and get tedious, or that you’ve used passive voice way too much, or that you have two descriptions, chapters apart, of the same location.
Or you fall back to using the same wording over and over. You’re always saying things are “irritating,” never “annoying,” “distracting” or “exasperating.” You end every quote with “said…” and never “remarked,” “commented,” “laughed” or “instructed.” Remember that you’re not a reporter; you’re a memoir author. Mix it up a little.
Make Your Second Draft the Best You Can
There may be many more drafts to come, but your second draft should take care of the big problems. If this is the draft you’ll give to a professional editor, make it as clean as possible. You don’t want your editor wasting time on typos.
You may have ten drafts before the manuscript takes the title of “final document.” Each draft should improve on its predecessor. Once you find that you’re making changes but not improvements, it’s time to pass it along to an editor or send it out to agents or create a pdf to self-publish. That’s a hard moment, but a really exciting one.