Guest Blog and Writing Prompt by Jerramy Fine: It Takes a Tough Skin to Tell a Truthful Story

Post #20 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing Prompt – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler

If you’ve ever been plagued by nagging doubts that you’re old enough to write your memoir, we have an author this week who is guaranteed to belay your concerns. Jerramy Fine is in her early 30s and tells such a wonderful “slice of life” story in Someday My Prince Will Come: True Adventures of a Wannabe Princess that we can only hope she decides to chronicle the years to come with equal humor and candor.

Actually, as you’ll read in Jerramy’s guest blog below, she has some doubts about continuing with the memoir genre. In fact, she has her eye on fiction, with the hope that she can remove herself from the story, thereby avoiding the shrapnel of incoming, less-than-friendly fire (what we call reader mail).

Regardless the outrageous response of a relatively small segment of her reader audience, as she explains below, Jerramy has written a perfectly delightful memoir about her quest to find a real-life Prince Charming. In spite of a few personal attacks, the book has received good reviews both for its humor and writing craft. We think you’ll be struck by the single mindedness of Jerramy’s quest, and even more so by her life lesson: We can do anything we put our minds to.

Matilda and I look forward to this Friday’s discussion with Jerramy Fine. As always, you are welcome to listen in. More importantly, we invite you to participate by asking your questions in the Comments section. As always, we’ll be talking writing, marketing and publishing with an intent on giving you, our readers, greater insight into the memoir writing process. So read Jerramy’s blog below, then add a Comment/question (or two). Join us as we present your question to Jerramy, or catch the recording, which we’ll post next Monday. Here are the call-in details:

Date/Time: Friday, November 13, 2009, 1:30 p.m. EST (10:30 a.m. Pacific)

Phone Number: 712-432-0600 (access code: 998458#)

Before we turn this blog over to our guest, we want to share this link to Jerramy Fine’s website.

Novelists Don’t Know How Lucky They Have It

By Jerramy Fine

I’ve never been especially shy about the details of my childhood, my dating life, my career goals, my political opinions or my deepest emotions—and in the age of email, sharing these details with friends/family/co-workers at the click of a mouse seemed not only natural to me but entirely necessary. When I first moved to London, I emailed the trials and tribulations of being me into the world on an almost daily basis. My friends replied to my mini newsletters with equal measures of admiration and incredulity, but their positive feedback was nothing compared to the joy I received from the actual process of writing. I honestly didn’t care what anyone thought about me, or my crazy life, as long as I could write about it.

Or so I thought.

Sharing your life with dozens of friends through the safety of Outlook is one thing, sharing your life in a print run of 22,000 books across the country is quite another. And once my memoir hit the shelves, it suddenly dawned on me that I might be a bit shier than I ever realized. And this is what all those agents and editors never bother to prepare you for when writing a memoir: the simple fact that it’s not just the quality of your writing that will be judged by the masses; the quality of your life, your brain, your heart, and your soul will also be put forward to the public as an acceptable punching bag!

When reviews of my memoir came out, I had braced myself for the worst. I was ready for the merciless critics to ask how someone in her 20s could possibly have a clue about writing. But that’s not what happened. I got great editorial reviews. My writing style was commended by the critics. But no one warned me about how some of my readers might react, and it was this unexpected brutality that knocked the wind out of me. When someone is prompted to call you an “alcoholic slut” in a public forum (like Amazon or Goodreads) it’s kind of hard not to take it personally. Some readers even emailed me directly through my website to tell me what a bitch I was. One expressed her wish to see me hit by a double-decker bus. (If any of you have actually read my memoir, you’ll see how ridiculous all of this is because if my book isn’t wholesome Disney-esque material, I’m not sure what is.)

Still, enduring this type of personal attack is something that had never once occurred to me during the writing of my memoir (and like I said, no one in the industry advised me to be wary of it). As a result, I wrote with honest abandon. I may have been a touch naïve, but in my defence for the last decade I had lived in London, not in rural Arkansas. I had lived in a modern, cosmopolitan capital where Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’s Diary were the pop-culture norm amongst my peers. These celebrated heroines drank countless martinis and went on countless dates just as I did, and no one called them alcoholic sluts. No one could write an email to Carrie Bradshaw and tell her she was a promiscuous bitch with a drinking problem. But, as it turns out, they could write to me because I am real. Novelists don’t know how lucky they have it.

To be fair, the worst abuse stems from the Bible Belt and is only a minuscule fraction of the feedback I receive (most of my reviews are so encouragingly positive that I cry with happiness to learn I’ve inspired readers to such an extent). But as we all know, it’s easy to forget the good and focus on the bad, and I’ve had to diligently train myself to do the reverse. My thick skin is now firmly in place, and now I laugh every time I see a nasty review amidst a sea of humbling praise. But one thing is for sure: my next book will be fiction. (And my characters are going to drink and date to their hearts’ content.)

Writing prompt

I’ve always found the best way to write any scene in a memoir is to write it as if you are describing the event to your best friend in a causal email. Don’t think about your editor or your future readers. Just write as if you are recounting every detail to someone that knows you and loves you. Your true voice (and true essence) will come through on the page and you will actually be able to feel the emotion of the moment. You can always go back and add context or narrative details.

Try this now. Write a vignette—a brief story—as if you are telling it to a friend. This will give you an inviting, informal style. Then go back and add the context and detail, and finally give it a good copy edit.

Tagged as: Guest Blog, memoir publishing, memoir questions, Memoir Writing Prompt