Writing Your Memoir?

Here are the 4 questions from family and friends that will make you change it to a novel

[At the outset, I want to apologize. This is my first article on Medium and I am having technical problems. When I cut and pasted my article, many of my edits slipped through. Please ignore the bracketed material. I appreciate your patience].

When the pandemic hit, I ran out of excuses not to write the memoir I’ve been [threatening] planning to write for years. Holed up in the house with a laptop, there seemed no better [way to avoid doing planks, sit-ups and squats, than to tell my family it was] time to start work on the Great American Novel.

In the past, friends told me “Oh, that’s such a [embarrassing] funny story, you should write a book.” So over the last three months, I did write the first draft of a memoir. [Let’s see how funny they think it is now!]

But as a result of some [harassment] pointed questions over the last few weeks from friends and family, I am [disappointed] very proud to report that my book will now be a novel, “loosely based on some biographical information.”

When I tell people that I wrote 2,000 words a day for the last three months, amounting to over 114,000 words, and 438 pages in 20 point font, here are the questions they ask me, usually in this order:

1. “What’s the title?”

This question seems to be a subtext for the following questions they really want to ask:

a) Are you bitter?

b) Can I tell by the title if I’m in it?

c) Is it self-serving, boring self-improvement stuff that I won’t read?

or;

d) Does it have a lot of sex and shameful secrets in it that I can’t wait to read?

2. “How far along are you?”

What really seems to interest the questioner is:

a) Can I stop this if I need to?

b) Can I add stuff to it if I want to?

c) When will [you/I] know you are done with it?

d) How hard is what you are doing?

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