It’s Day Four in my guest editing week at SheWrites, and it’s time to let you in on a little secret. The topics we cover today are the least favorites of my students. Nobody likes these, which suggests that these are the most important of all ten points on my Memoir Manifesto.

So let’s master them, shall we?

Pack Light

Writing is a form of packing, and you always want to be on the move, so packing light should be the ethic, no matter the length of the piece. And while this is hard to grasp, keep it in mind. Pack light. We’re not embarking on a cruise for a year, or even going on a weekend trip. A blog post, a personal essay, even a full-length memoir, is not about stuffing in as much as you can, but rather about illustrating something correctly. No matter how many words it is, the piece is just a day trip with someone listening in—the reader. You are not writing the history of the world, or even your world. Wanting to be heard, the temptation is to go big, and throw in everything we think we might need. But it’s a mistake. And so we must unpack, casting off all non-essentials, and along the way, learning what to leave out.

Ego being what it is, when given permission to write about ourselves, we all tend to spill all those things we’ve done, thoughts we’ve thought, and people we’ve known, since they all seem wildly important. And they are. To us, though not necessarily to them, those other people, the readers.

Appreciating the difference between the personal tale and its value, and universal tale and its appeal, is hard-won. It’s the same with your own tale. Of course it’s of value to you, but how are you going to make it of value to me, as well? Here’s how: Make it small. Make it rare. Make it a first for me as a reader, and I’ll remember it forever. Make it of value to someone else, even if—actually, no, especially if—those intended readers are your family. What could be more important than that? Or, as I’ve learned, more difficult? How to do this?

What is this about?

Ask yourself: What is this about? Read your piece and answer the question. The answer to this might be something as precise as “revenge.” That’s manageable. I would argue that something as small as a blog post or a personal essay can be reduced to one word. In all forms of commercial writing—from screenplays, fiction, non-fiction and journalism—this word will appear in what is called “the pitch,” the one sentence you use to sell the story to someone else. 

So pitch yourself, asking “What is this about?” Perhaps the answer will be “revenge,” “mercy,” or “betrayal.” Wow. I once thought that memoir was about me. It's not. Memoir is about something, and you are the illustration of that thing. That is, if you want anyone to read it.

Let me give you an example.

Here are the opening words of a book by Margaret Roach. The former editorial director of Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Margaret left that job, and wrote what is now known in the trade as a “dropout memoir.” Entitled, And I Shall Have Some Peace There, the paperback came out this month. Let’s see how she opens her book.

  She of nobody else’s bidding: That is who I am now—someone who has not done what anyone else said since July 2008, though not because I am either disobedient or a slacker. Hardly. Thirty-two years of corporate servitude are in my past, and there will be no more promotions or pay stubs, thrilling facts I celebrate with a long-overdue vigil for my self, a one- woman sit-in in the woods.

            Friends and colleagues warned that I would become depressed, isolated, perhaps worse when I walked away from my lucrative, esteem-laden career … on the last day of 2007, leaving the peak earning years in my wake and relocating to my longtime weekend home and garden in a New York State hamlet where dairy cows not so long ago outnumbered people. Many stories of retreat are tales instigated by a trauma, or depression. I was never depressed in my old life; I was just strangely and terribly lonely, isolated despite being surrounded by six hundred colleagues daily, more than a quarter of whom worked for me, and living in a city of millions.

             I was a big success, people told me, but the secret I never spoke in reply or anytime was my belief that I had long ago given up on me—the one whom others, in equations of family, love, and work, relied upon—choosing the easy route over a path toward things they don’t necessarily pay you or pat you on the back for.

            I remember when it happened: In my insecure early twenties, already a college dropout and wanting the absolution of proving I was no dummy, I took a job that placed a bet on my intellect over creativity. It was the surer horse but (as with many favorites) a comparative dullard to that sexy long shot of allowing one’s potential sufficient time to percolate. Could I write fiction, or be a photographer? We would never know; right then and there, I turned my back on possibility.             Promotions at the newspaper I signed on to at first came easily, and suddenly I had fallen into the  burning ring of fire (yes, bound by wild desire ); money talked. True, the tether to the old life was mostly a financial one, its other shiny-but-searing edge the attachment to ego-fueling professional esteem. 

            And it burns, burns, burns. 

             If I was so successful, I wanted to say back to my best friend and my accountant and the guy who cuts my hair and everyone else lovingly offering praise all those years, then why had I pushpinned a cryptic note to myself on the kitchen wall, a plaintive shorthand list called Tolerances, as in, how much can you tolerate of what for how long? Why were all my years-old diaries aching with phrases like the hit-by-car feelings of my workday and Where is my creativity? and that clincher, 

Who or what am I waiting for? 

            So from a role in The Devil Wears Mara (as in MaxMara; though I never asked one personal errand of an assistant in all my executive years, nor threw a coat or handbag at anybody), I finally walked away and shape-shifted to bumpkin-in-training in the mere flash of time it takes to drive 120 miles. Single, childless, and technically even pet free, I started up the road to start again in my garden in the woods.

             Right away, though, I began hearing the voice that would keep asking for an answer I did not have:  Who am I if I am not mroach@marthastewart dot com any longer?  As if that were not enough, the confrontational facet of Margaret manifested as that raspy voice broadened its inquisition: If I am neither working nor in a personal partnership, in service to some master or another, who am I? 

             I am nothing more than a work in progress, thank you—the truest answer I have ever given to that question. I am just me, which is (apologies to my old friend Martha) a good thing, even without the stripes and status that my onetime titles and W-2s and all the other “accomplishments” seemed to imply. This latest incarnation, which is at once a simpler and a harder one, began just as the formative childhood version had—in stretchy, shapeless clothing, with most waking hours spent either on the floor puzzling things out or parked safely in the one same seat, trying to learn to focus the gaze, a bit of a bobblehead all over again.

When I asked Margaret what her book is “about,” she wrote me this:

"When I sat down to write that, I thought I would be telling a dropout’s story about walking away from my fastlane city career to live in solitude in my rural garden. But when I sharpened it a bit, I realized it would be a story creating a new identity, and of breaking a very old habit of putting everything off because (as I used to say about a hundred times daily, between clenched teeth): “I don’t have time.”

You can read more from Margaret, as well as purchase her book, on her award-winning website.

Tomorrow: Memoir Manifesto, points seven and eight.