How to write about your life

How to write about your life Agents contact me on a regular basis to ask me if I want to do a book about my life. I say no. I say no because I have no idea how to do a book about my life. Im sure I have no idea because I already have had a six-figure book deal to write about my life that Im not delivering on, and the editor has dumped me. (Read: Phone calls to collect on the large advance Ive already spent.) So my qualifications to tell you advice about how to write about ones life are questionable. But whatever; I have never stood on ceremony over qualifications. Maybe the problem is that my life story needs a redemptive moment. This is what my agent-who-is-no-longer-my-agent tells me. And this is a warning to any agent who thinks they might want to be my agent: My past agent dumped me because (even though I did deliver on my first book deal) I am terrible at writing book proposals and I am terrible at following publishing industry rules. And her number one rule is that if you write about your life there must be a redemptive moment because people like that. Thats what sells, is my not-my-agents way of saying Thats what people like to read. So, okay. I try to see that. I mean, Ive read plenty of memoirs Girl, Interrupted, Smashed, Darkness Visibleall good books. All very redemptive at the end, for sure. But Ive also read Anna Karenina. Well, I havent, but Im able to spoil the ending for you right now anyway (skip to the next paragraph if you dont want the spoiler). She gets hit by a train. I think she kills herself. That seems redemptive to me. I mean, at least she doesnt have to wake up to her same problems every day. I have told this to my not-agent. She said that people do not want to read about my fascination with suicide. Its true. I am fascinated by suicide: Why dont more people kill themselves? Life is very hard. And there is no sane reason to believe it will, at some point, get easier. So why do we keep going? I dont know. This fascinates me. (Here is a great book of suicide letters. And heres a tidbit for all you productivity gurus: People in their 20s who kill themselves write suicide notes about how much they love the people who will be most hurt by the suicide: their parents, a boyfriend maybe. People in their 30s and 40s write suicide notes that are informational to-do lists: Where the cat food is, when the kids homework is due, how to find the keys to the safety deposit box. Both types of letters are great examples of how people have totally lost perspective when they kill themselves. This baffles me, since I also feel that we have totally lost our perspective by choosing to not kill ourselves.) Okay. So I told my not-my-agent that my proposal for a memoir is redemptive because the reader will see that I did not kill myself before I got to the date of the national book tour. That did not work for her. So I said my book is redemptive because I had an insane childhood and look, now Im not living on the street. My agent told me that my life is too precarious for my surviving childhood to be redemptive. She told me I could write about keeping my marriage together even though we both have Aspergers Syndrome, but before I could write the proposal (and convince my ex that this would be okay to write) we divorced. What about writing about the divorce? She said divorce is not redemptive. Im pretty sure thats when she told me to get a new agent. Okay. So back to me telling you how to write about yourself. I say, forget about redemption. Its false. I read The Glass Castle, and I think its nice Jeanette Wallis got out of her hell-hole family, but really, I want to know what her fights with her husband are like on her zillion-dollar Hamptons estate. I think you should write the truth. Be real. If you obsess about redemption instead of the truth, youll be like me, writing nothing, because life is not redemptive. Life isnt like that. Just write your own messy life, and let it spill out. But, wait. Heres the problem with that. Your life is boring. Im sorry to tell you this. But actually all our lives are boring. Which is another strike against obsessing over redemption: it doesnt make your life interesting, but good writing always makes life interesting. So you need to tell something true to make people want to read, but you need to be interesting doing it. Do you want to know what interesting is? How many articles and stories and blog posts have you read about getting fired? Six million, right? Everyone wants to tell their story. Most suck. But heres a great one: The CEO of Sun wrote a tweet to announce his resignation. Its interesting because of the media he chose, its interesting because of the timing, and its interesting because its a haiku: Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more The bar is high if you want to be interesting. What can you do? Heres what I do: 1. Assume you are not all that interesting. The reader does not want a peek into your life. Not enough people care. Do you know how I know? Because porn is boring. Sure, if youre using it for masturbation, its interesting, because then its giving you something. But if not, what are you doing watching? Who cares about someone elses sex life? And you can be sure that the peek into your life is never going to be as interesting as a porn movie. So forget writing a blog post merely to give someone a peek. 2. Cut fifteen percent of everything you write. Because no one is so interesting that they cant cut words. 3. Write to give the reader something they want. I try to focus on this with every post I write. But in fact, this is advice about how to do anything in your life: Help people as much as you can. Give people what they need, and if you focus on that, the rest will fall into place. This is true of how to network, how to parent, how to manage people and also how to write about your life. So really, the world is full of ways to give to each other, and were all just looking for the best way. And this, in the end, is probably why we dont kill ourselves.