Memoir authors are typically told they should center their story around one particular theme or time period. In response, they tend to write about subjects like divorce, abuse, health struggles, caregiving, or travel, all of which have been extensively written about already. Other writers ignore the advice and try to pack their whole life into a single narrative, sometimes shoehorning two or three unrelated books into one.

As a book editor and writing coach, I’m sometimes asked if I agree with this advice. My answer is: it depends on the author’s intentions. Some people are writing for the purpose of producing a sellable book. Others are writing mainly to preserve their life experiences for their friends and family. In this article, I’ll share my advice for both groups, and it’s quite different, depending on which category you’re in.

For those writing with the primary goal of selling books, there are typically two problems with writing about those common subjects I listed. First, as I said, many other people have written about those things, so unless there’s something that greatly distinguishes your story from all the rest, it will probably be ignored in the marketplace. Readers and agents both have an attitude of “been there, done that” when they see a memoir that looks at first glance like a retelling of other books.

So while the experiences you write about are unique to you, and were a new learning or new adventure for you personally, a lot of other folks have been through divorce, or been laid low by cancer, or visited Italy, etc. To the world at large, to readers at large, your book sounds like it’s probably not going to be that different, so they’re unlikely to invest their money in buying it.

That’s hard to hear, since it seems to trivialize the significance of your own experience. But writers mustn’t take it that way. Their experience may have been huge for their personal growth and identity. It’s just that “personally transformative” doesn’t necessarily translate to “sellable in the marketplace.”

The second problem with writing about such topics is that what is intended as memoir sometimes turns out to be personal journaling. That’s two different genres completely. Journaling is something you write for yourself; memoir is something you write for others. Much of journaling is a catharsis, an emotional release, to free ourselves of old, no-longer-useful feelings and attitudes. But that doesn’t work in a memoir, because no one wants to feel like someone else’s emotional dumping ground. Only after the dumping phase is over, are we in any position to write a memoir.

So what is a person to write about if not these sorts of topics? There’s nothing wrong with those subjects, but if your purpose is to sell books, yes, you may have a problem. On the other hand, if your motive is simply to chronicle your experiences for posterity, there’s no need to write with the marketplace in mind. Just tell your story as you want to tell it. Afterwards get an editor to polish the writing to a shine, so you leave behind something you can be proud of. Many of my memoir clients are of this persuasion.

Only if you plan to “really sell books” do you need to be concerned about overdone topics. In that case, look over your life and try to find something unique in your experience that others may not have written about. Or talk about a common topic in a brand-new way. For example, one of my editing clients, Monty Weatherall, experienced childhood sexual abuse and grew up to become a pastor and a counselor. He wrote a memoir about the abuse, focusing on his healing more than on his suffering. And he went further, sharing techniques he’d developed for healing based on all the years he’d spent in therapy. The result was a unique memoir indeed.

If you care more about pleasing family, friends, or yourself than selling books, don’t slavishly follow the rule that your story must focus on only one theme or timeline. It’s okay to include everything that has mattered to you in your life. From a literary and marketplace perspective, this doesn’t make for a successful memoir, but from a personal or family perspective, it may be exactly right for you.

So if a client tells me they want it “all to go into one book” and understands that this is not the way to write something sellable, I don’t press the point. I help them make the memoir (or autobiography as it usually turns out to be) a well-written chronicle for their loved ones.

It’s only a problem if the writer’s intention is sales and a wider readership. In that case, they need to understand the rules of the game. Their memoir must be organized around one theme, subject, or time period. They mustn’t confuse memoir with family history or with personal journaling or with autobiography. And they need to honestly admit when they’ve packed two or three different books into one draft and be willing to delete the interfering material to keep the manuscript’s focus.

People who purchase a memoir advertised as a firefighter’s exciting experiences, don’t want to find, mid-read, three chapters on how to grow beefsteak tomatoes. A commercial author would need to respect their readers enough to take that out. If there’s enough about the gardening to warrant it, they might write a different book about that topic someday. But in the meantime, they need to keep their memoir’s spotlight on their subject.

For lots more information on memoir writing, see my article “Writing a Memoir? Avoid These Seven Mistakes” that I published on Jane Friedman’s blog for writers. Her website is an excellent resource for any aspiring author, by the way. Jane founded Writer’s Digest, America’s foremost journal for writers, and is considered the world’s leading expert on self-publishing.

Jessi Rita Hoffman … book editing by an industry professional